A treasure house, the Morgan Library & Museum (225 Madison Avenue) is one of the greatest repositories of historic books, rare manuscripts, literary papers, and objets d’art anywhere. “It is for European and white American scholarship what the Schomburg Center is for Black culture,” says Harlem bibliophile Lana Turner.
As special as it is, looking quickly at the exterior, one might almost mistake the Morgan Library for one of the many local public libraries that its architects, McKim, Mead & White, also designed in New York.
It was built for the colossally rich international banker, J. Pierpont Morgan, Sr., in the garden, next to his house. Meant to store his remarkable collection, in steel vaults and display objects in opulent rooms, it is an example of “quiet luxury” that is not always entirely discernible on first glance. For example, the structure was made using a painstaking and costly Ancient Greek technique. Massive marble blocks were cut so exactingly that the masonry fits together, forming solid walls, without the necessity of mortar between them. The railings of the grounds are bronze and inside, most ceilings are frescoed or made of Tiffany glass.
All in all, at a time when even in Harlem was rapidly turning Black, there were no Black librarians or teachers, Morgan’s private museum, built for his own pleasure, is not the kind of place one expects to find an African American woman in charge of things! However, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was just that, among the most prominent and powerful librarians of any time in the entire world.
Michael Henry Adams photos
Greene, hard at work, at her desk, to the last, in this circa 1949 image 
A 1909 sketch of Greene, at her book-covered desk, on the wall behind it, from a suite of furniture custom-made for Greene’s West Room office 
Still chic, a mature Green photographed by Mattie Edwards Hewitt, in 1929 
Belle Green’s custom made card catalog 
Greene portrayed in 1912 by French portraitist, Paul Cèsar Helleu 
Throughput her 43-year career, Greene dressed in the height of fashion, wearing cloths by major Parisian couturiers, like Paul Poiret and Jacques Fath 
Images below were made on a March visit to the Morgan’s special exhibition “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” which which closed on May. The first shows McKim, Mead & White’s spectacular East Room in J. Pierpont Morgan’s magnificent library. It adjoined his lavish office, and that of his trusted librarian too.
As a part of her training, Greene worked in the Princeton Library for Junius Spencer Morgan. Shortly before completion of the Morgan Library in 1905, he recommended her to his uncle. Initially, she acted as the wily financier’s private archivist for $80 a month. Then, at a time when the New York City Health Commissioner only earned a little more than $5,000, Greene was paid $10,000. In 1913, at J.P. Morgan’s death, she was left a munificent bequest of $50,000, indicative of her employer’s esteem.
Continuing to organize and expand the collection for Morgan’s son and his wife, Greene was named the Pierpont Morgan Library’s (today’s Morgan Library & Museum) first director in 1924. Over the next 24 years, she effected the Morgan’s metamorphosis. What was once a stolid and exclusive fortress, where most illuminated manuscripts were safely kept locked away in the dark, became a welcoming center of erudition, brimming with intellectual enthusiasm. The dynamic program of exhibitions, lectures, and scholarly publications that Greene inaugurated form a tangible legacy extending even to today.
Born Belle Marion Greener, her father, Richard T. Greener was the first Black graduate of Harvard College, and both an eminent lawyer and educator, as well as a philandering diplomat, with a separate family abroad. The primary fundraiser for Grant’s Tomb, as a fervent civil rights activist, he liked to do his bit to enforce New York State’s equal rights law. Since white saloon-keepers showed contempt for Black customers, by smashing their glasses after they finished a drink, Greener took to entering with a dozen or more companions. Most were all thirsty enough to require at least a couple rounds.
Greene’s parents separated even before she went away to New England for school. Genevieve Greener changed her surname and that of her children to Greene. The middle name da Costa, denoting “Portuguese ancestry,” they said, explained their relatively dark completions, as ever afterward, they passed as white.
With her splendid, highly respected position, French gowns, jewels, and housing completely barred to Blacks, Belle da Costa Greene enjoyed eminent white admirers and lovers as well. One devotee was world-renowned art historian Bernard Berenson, a Lithuanian Jew worthy of Horatio Alger who became an Episcopalian and rich. Another was the notorious art and haute couture collector Emilie Grigsby, who started out as the teen-aged mistress of streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes, only to become, in time, an intimate of Her Royal Highness Princess Mary of Great Britain. Each celebrity succumbed to Greene’s keen intellect and considerable allure. On the whole, the painful and fraught practice of passing worked out well for Greene — except in one sorrowful incident, occurring late in her life.
Greene lavished great care on her handsome and promisingly bright nephew Robert, known as Bobbie, whom she adopted as her ward. What dreams and great expectations she entertained for Robert Mackenzie Leveridge, who was educated at the finest schools, including St. Paul’s and Harvard. Greene watched over him with tender devotion. Patiently groomed with good books, he saw every notable theater and concert performance. On edifying trips made together, he visited places like the Grand Canyon, and traveled to Venice and other citadels of beauty in continental Europe. Yet still, in the end, despite all her favorable adjacency to riches and privilege, nothing in Greene’s power could protect her beloved Bobbie from the insidious curse of white supremacy.
It’s not quite certain whether the young airman, who enlisted immediately after Pearl Harbor, was even aware of his family’s secret African American ancestry. However, after hiring a detective to investigate his daughter’s suitor, Nina Tess Taylor’s father was. “Would they live off the money of Morgan’s n—– whore?” he asked her, perpetuating the slur that Greene had been nothing more than an incompetent DEI hire. When Bobbie died from a self-inflicted gunshot, the Army informed Greene that he was killed in action.
A friend, entrusted with Taylor’s parting letter to her fiancée, said to Greene that actually, Taylor had killed him with it. One sees why by reading how professing to love him, she could say that discovering his mixed-race heritage prompted her both to break off their engagement and suggest he might kill himself.
Alternatively, at least he ought to be sterilized to resolve his predicament, she ventured. Sent on St. Valentine’s Day, replete with a coy arrow-pierced heart and a motto, “Be my Valentine,” her message was as lethal as it was gratuitously cruel. “If you ever marry anyone, you’ll have to do that, Darling, won’t you?” she wrote glibly. “As long as you continue to believe as I do that you have no right to have children . . . it would be a very wicked thing for you to have a child.”
After a rapid succession of losses, including her respected employer and her protective mother, Greene suffered a mild heart attack and never fully recovered from this most paradoxical blow.
It was biographer par excellence Jean Strouse, so adroitly chronicling J. P. Morgan, who famously revealed in 1999 that Belle da Costa Greene was actually Belle Marion Greener. How stunned we were to learn in the New Yorker that someone assumed to be an ancillary white assistant was actually the high finance wizard’s African American partner, in the realization of a library that is unequaled.
How did Strouse do it? Research had caused her to question just who this woman of mystery was; why had she destroyed her personal papers? She telephoned historian David Levering Lewis. “Overhearing our conversation,” relates Lewis, “my dear wife, Ruth Ann Stewart, asked to be put on. She said, ‘Jean, I will tell you exactly who Belle Greene was,’ and over dinner that night, she proceeded to do so!”
If you missed the Morgan’s magnificent retrospective exhibition outlining Greene’s life and work, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” which ended in May, no worries: You may still see the place where she labored and all the precious loot she helped acquire, document, curate, and organize. The volumes she obtained for Morgan for a fraction of what he expected to pay, because of her exceptional knowledge and the holy family she helped guide Morgan to, are all on view to be studied at leisure, along with her well-documented story.
Better still, for just $67 for two, one may both gain admission and relish a sumptuous teatime with Harney & Sons tea, exquisite tea sandwiches, scones, cookies, cake, and bits of fruit like grapes or berries.
The Morgan’s cafe is in a sun-dappled atrium with a wall of windows. It forms a bridge between J.P. Morgan’s brownstone city house and the marble library. The gift shop, in the onetime residence, occupies the Louis Quinze, walnut-paneled drawing room. Reservations for tea and other fare are not required, but are strongly recommended.
The Morgan Library & Museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. On Fridays, anyone may visit the Morgan free of charge, and Free Friday programs take place each week from 5–8 p.m. Reservations are required, but tickets are available as early as a week ahead. On the first Sunday of each month, university students are admitted free.
The Morgan is closed Mondays, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. It closes at 3 p.m. on July 4, 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and 5 p.m. on New Year’s Eve.
Admission
$25 Adults
$17 Seniors (65 and over)
$13 Students (with current ID)
Free to children 12 and under (must be accompanied by an adult)
Direct any questions to either tickets@themorgan.org or 212-685-0008, extension 560. For more info, visit themorgan.org.