Hunter College Opens Latest Addition of High-Tech Library

It’s a triumph inside — and out!

More than 150 Hunter College students, alumni, and staff recently celebrated the grand opening of two floors of its state-of-the-art Cooperman Library.

The college’s nearly $45 million campaign brought new classroom and academic resource space to the library’s fifth floor as well as an eighth floor outdoor terrace with views of Midtown Manhattan’s skyline. The new fifth floor features a large open space for study and collaboration, flexible classroom space, private alcoves for job interviews and phone calls, and a faculty resource center.

In short, it checks all the boxes the Hunter students and faculty have been clamoring for.

“They asked us for a place with the best technology, the best light, the best place to study and interact with other students,’” Hunter College President Jennifer Raab said. “This is that place.”

Within minutes of the ribbon cutting, the library was abuzz with activity, with students quickly filling just about every available seat. For some of them, it was their first time back at the library after two years of remote learning during the pandemic.

Senior Yostina Girgis, vice president of Hunter College Undergraduate Student Government, found a space that was quiet, but provided enough ambient sounds to help her get her work done — but she was most excited about the new terrace.

“Outdoor spaces are highly underrated” Girgis said.

None of the renovations could have happened without the help of benefactors like Joan and Bill Grabe, whose $2 million donation helped refurbish the fifth floor, Ronald Spurga, whose $1 million gift on behalf of his wife Marie Colwell ’75, helped spruce up the outdoor terrace, and, of course, Leon and Toby Cooperman ’64, whose record-setting $25 million contribution kicked off the library campaign.

The next phase of the library’s overhaul includes a new learning center for Manhattan Hunter Science High School students as well as a new student career-services center.

Since 2013, Hunter College has updated the library’s third floor to include a new circulation desk, computer resource center, and cafe. Four years later, the college fixed up its sixth and seventh floors, adding an education library, a screening room, and establishing the Silverstein Student Success Center — with offices for advising students interested in prestigious post-graduate scholarships — thanks to a grant by Larry SIlverstein and his wife, Klara ’54 MA ’56.

The high-tech library has come a long way since Hunter alumna Joan Grabe ’60 worked in its previous version in Thomas Hunter Hall 66 years ago. Back then, she was stationed in the stacks awaiting book requests to arrive from the circulation desk through an antiquated retrieval system.

“I was alone in the semi-dark and there was a pulley assistant who would write the request on a slip of paper, put it on a paper clip, and send it on a pulley,” Grabe said. “Then I had to run through the Dewey Decimal System and get the right book.”

But she never had to go through the trouble of putting books back — which was a job for someone else.

“That was a higher pay rate,” she said.

Grabe, whose $2 million gift helped refurbish the fifth floor, recalled the beginnings of the campaign, when a librarian told her Hunter needed a 21st century library “where you could plug in your computers.”

“He was so persuasive, and the board at the time said, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ but we had no idea what that meant,” she said. “Now, seeing the finished product, we know.”