Pelham Parkway-Van Nest Library

The Pelham Parkway-Van Nest branch of The New York Public Library is a modern building with a distinctive facade. It is located around the corner from the busy shopping district on Lydig Avenue. This one-story facility houses adult, teen, and children's collections, as well as extensive World Languages collections, featuring books in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and many other languages. Programs and classes for people of all ages are offered daily in the glass-enclosed community room.

The history of the branch goes back to 1912, when it was first established as a station of NYPL's Travelling Libraries program, bringing library books to neighborhoods that didn't yet have branches. The Van Nest sub-branch opened in 1917, and occupied a series of small, but progressively larger storefront locations around the neighborhood, until it moved to its current location in 1968. Since then, it has been known variously as the Van Nest-Pelham, the Van Nest, and, since 2014, as the Pelham Parkway-Van Nest Library.