Driven By Boredom is written by Nate Smith, an employee of The Internet Archive who captured these images of the Donnell Library on 53rd Street on one of its last days before being converted to a luxury hotel. I wrote about how sad I was about the library’s closing and how the area will be so different without a branch of the NYPL there in full view (the Donnell Library will return to the same location in the future, but will reside as an afterthought in the basement of the new hotel).

It’s certainly weird to see the colored walls of the Donnell Library without any shelves or books around. It looks like they really did a good job of gutting the place down to nothing but drywall and miscellaneous scrap.