(by Claire Lampen, gothamist, October 22, 2018)
I have always wondered what in the heck goes on inside Masonic lodges: The secrets of Freemasonry are not for women to know—not for anyone but Freemasons to know, really—which makes me inherently suspicious of the entire operation. What do men get up to in there, and why can’t they breathe a word of it to anyone outside the brotherhood? What is so incriminating, or so stigmatizing, or so singularly valuable that it warrants such a heavy cloak of silence?
Last week, Joseph Patzner, a librarian at the Chancellor Joseph R. Livingston Masonic Library, situated on the 14th floor of the Masonic Hall in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, agreed to sit down with me and discuss the mystery, along with a bit of the Hall’s history. This peek behind the curtain did not illuminate the full extent of the Masons’ cloistered activity, but…