UPDATE: Please sign our petition for longer hours here!
Saving NYPL costs money. Please donate.*
Five years ago, we saved the great book stacks holding up the Rose Reading Room in the 42nd St. Research Library from being gutted and blocked the sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library (now under renovation).
In July and August 2019, we delayed NYPL leadership’s attempt to dismantle part of the building’s landmarked façade for the convenience of catering trucks with this letter from our counsel.
And in September 2019 we stopped NYPL leadership from renting space in the grand 42nd St. building to the violent dictator of Saudi Arabia.
Today we fight on — to keep the library open for working New Yorkers and students as well as visitors from out of state, to bring the books back to the stacks, to preserve the library’s historic interiors, and to ensure research services are state-of-the-art.
Help us win.
Please make a tax-deductible donation at:
*All donations advance the mission of SaveNYPL, in particular, the cost of mounting legal challenges. We are an all-volunteer organization of scholars, architects, preservationists, writers, translators, and programmers.
Voices of Support for SaveNYPL's Previous Campaigns
The humans of New York seem to be rousing themselves to a collective understanding: that the great public institutions they boast of and rely upon can’t be entrusted to the stewardship of real-estate developers, corporate synergists, media barons, and other ostensibly well-intentioned, deal-drunk one-percenters. Instead we need to tend our own commons, large and small -
individual libraries, and the city itself.
As a longtime, devoted user of the NYPL—I’ve researched my own books there, borrowed books and books on tape, taught workshops for the Office of Adult Services—I am against any plan to decimate what has been a way in and up for generations of New Yorkers. Please add my LOUD voice to this protest!
For some time, a hypothesis that dared not speak its name has reigned over the NYPL debate: that the sale of the seven-story Mid-Manhattan Circulating Library and its air rights on Fifth Avenue at 40th is a developer’s dream, as was the greatly regretted sale of the Donnell Library across from MOMA.
