The Vandals Are Inside the NYPL | Call Your Candidates & Officials | Weekly Candidate Forum

The greatest publicly accessible research library in the world is being converted into a tourist trap by day and a party venue by night.

Despite the pandemic, despite the battered economy, despite concerns among some trustees that the throngs of tourists interfere with library services, NYPL leadership is spending millions of dollars to supersize the gift shop and to reconfigure the 42nd Street Library with a new loading dock and two elevators to meet the needs of caterers.

Under cloak of Covid, and with scant mention of a capital project at 42nd Street at www.nypl.org, the leadership has been busy knocking out a window between Gottesman Hall and the South Court to drive foot traffic to their gift shop. In a recent meeting of NYPL’s Capital Planning subcommittee that we called in to, officials can be heard delighting in the speed with which construction is being done — in the absence of the public.

NYPL leaders continue to commercialize and privatize the central research library, desecrating and dumbing down the “people’s university“.

Where the 42nd Street Library was open 80+ hours per week in its first sixty years, before the pandemic it was only open 56 hours, closing before 6pm on most work nights, opening for only four hours on Sundays, and closing entirely on Sundays in summer. By day, tourists distract and drive out New Yorkers. By night, security rushes out students and researchers, so that the palace of culture can be decorated for yet another cocktail party or wedding.

Meanwhile, the endowment is at a record of more than $1.5 billion and the combined net worth of the trustees, some $37 billion, could fund the entire NYPL system — three research libraries and 88 lending libraries — for the next 100 years. As the late trustee Lewis B. Cullman said, “you can’t take it with you”.

When the pandemic ends, New Yorkers will need their civic spaces to repair the tattered social fabric of our city. Perhaps the greatest of these is the 42nd Street Library. Carved into the stone of this building are the words: “The City of New York has erected this building for the free use of all the people.”

Should NYPL leadership be wasting millions on a gift shop and catering elevators, or investing in longer hours for New Yorkers and usable, climate-controlled book stacks (which have sat empty for years)?

Should NYPL leadership be wasting millions on an e-reader that nobody uses, or fixing the long broken catalog?

Should NYPL leadership be carving up a city-owned landmark out of public sight?

Should the name of Trump loyalist Stephen Schwarzman be carved yet another time into the marble walls of the 42nd Street Library?

We encourage you to:

• Write to NYPL President Tony Marx (president@nypl.org). Tell him to invest in longer hours and usable books stacks at the 42nd Street Library, not gift shops and catering elevators.

• Contact elected officials and candidates. The mayor, the comptroller, and the speaker each appoint a representative to the NYPL board. Ask them what they will do to protect what Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer has called “one of our greatest civic assets”. The 42nd Street Library belongs to the City of New York. It was created for the “free use of all the people”.

• Forward this email, contact your friends, and post to Twitter & FB.

• And tune in to SaveNYPL counsel Michael Hiller’s weekly forum with candidates.

As Councilmember Ben Kallos, running for Manhattan Borough President, put it: the 42nd Street Library should again be open 80 hours per week.