Leafleting at 42nd St Library; Rally May 8

Take action to stop the Central Library Plan and save the 42nd Street Library!  Please join us for a week of leafleting at the 42nd Street Library culminating in a rally on Wednesday, May 8th, during the meeting of the New York Public Library Trustees at the 42nd Street Library.

We will leaflet from Noon to 1PM on Wednesday (May 1), Thursday (May 2), Friday (May 3), Saturday (May 4), Monday (May 6) and Tuesday (May 7).  Come join us in front of the 42nd Street Library on 5th Avenue at any of these times!  We will have plenty of flyers, and also have signs to hold.

Then, come to the rally on Wednesday, May 8th, at 3:30 PM sharp in front of the 42nd Street Library facing 5th Avenue.  The rally will start promptly, so please be on time!  We want to have a strong presence as the Trustees enter the building for their meeting.  If you can’t make it at 3:30, join us after work at 5pm to greet the Trustees on their way out.

The Central Library Plan (CLP), at enormous cost to New York City and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library – one of the world’s great reference libraries and a historic landmark. The CLP would demolish the library’s historic book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would be a reduced-size replacement for the Mid-Manhattan Library (at 40th and 5th Avenue) and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library, at 34th and Madison), which would both be sold off.

For more information about the Central Library Plan and its negative impacts on both the 42nd Street Library and the circulating libraries it would replace, see “The Truth About the Central Library Plan”

It has become increasingly apparent that the CLP is part of a larger effort by New York City’s public library systems to shrink their capacity and sell off valuable real estate, which started with the controversial sale in 2008 of the beloved Donnell Library to real estate developers.  The leafleting and rally are being cosponsored by our friends at Citizens Defending Libraries.