April 8, 2014
Dear Mayor de Blasio:
We are writing to urge you to save the New York Public Library from its trustees’ misguided plan to sell the Mid-Manhattan and Science, Industry and Business Libraries, demolish the 42nd Street Library research stacks, and shoehorn the operations of the two circulating libraries into the space that until recently housed the research collection.
As Public Advocate, you joined library advocates last summer on the steps of the 42nd Street Library to speak out against this plan, which carries a price tag of $350 million, with $150 million coming from taxpayers. “These plans seemed to have been made without any forethought to the building’s historical and cultural integrity,” you said then. “Before NYPL goes about demolishing stacks and consolidating libraries, they need to ensure that the people they serve aren’t being shortchanged and being disregarded for the bottom line.”
An impressive list of eminent scholars, writers, and artists – including Mario Vargas Llosa, Salman Rushdie, and E.L. Doctorow – have already spoken forcefully against this plan and its effect on research and scholarship. As acclaimed author Lydia Davis wrote this month, the plan “would take the very heart out of one of New York City’s finest institutions.” Leading architects and architectural critics have decried what the plan would do to the landmark 42nd Street building; Michael Kimmelman, writing in the New York Times, described the redesign as “awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.”
We share these concerns, but we also want to underscore the many ways this plan will hurt ordinary New Yorkers, who rely on the city’s library systems for everything from books to computer access to literacy classes to job-search assistance and more. This plan closes and drastically shrinks two of the most heavily used branch libraries in the city, selling off the desirable Midtown parcels they sit on to luxury real estate developers. It subsidizes this real estate deal with $150 million in taxpayer money – funds that could be far better spent repairing and upgrading branch libraries throughout the city.
The city’s branch libraries are wildly popular, desperately needed, and drastically underfunded: City Limits recently reported that the shelves of many branches stand half-empty of books, because demand for materials keeps growing while budgets decline. Many branch libraries urgently need repairs.
Taking money away from branch libraries to subsidize NYPL’s real estate plans will hurt students, seniors, immigrants, job-seekers: the millions of New Yorkers from all walks of life who rely on this public commons. Consolidating three libraries into one will diminish library services and cost jobs. As scholar Matthew Pratt Guterl recently put it, “The rich get a sweet venue for their philanthropic dinner parties, and the poor and the middling get less and less and less. If there is a better metaphor for the widening canyon between those who are thriving and those who are hurting, I don’t know it.”
Signed,
Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, President, The Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan NY
Luis Garden Acosta, President, El Puente
Barbara Bowen, President, PSC-CUNY
Dan Cantor, Executive Director, Working Families Party
Hector Figueroa, President, 32BJ SEIU
George Gresham, President, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah
Ruth Messinger
Ana Oliveira
Susan Sarandon
Rev. Donna Schaper, Senior Minister, Judson Memorial Church
Rev. Al Sharpton
Gloria Steinem
Javier Valdes, Co-Executive Director, Make The Road New York
This letter is a joint project of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library and the Library Lovers League.