Vigil at 42nd Street Library Monday, June 3rd

On 27 May, 2013
By Committee

Please join us for a vigil on Monday, June 3rd, during the New York Public Library’s Spring fundraising gala at the 42nd Street Library. We want to thank the NYPL’s donors for supporting the library, but also alert them to the NYPL’s wasteful plans to gut the 42nd Street Library and sell off the Mid-Manhattan.

The vigil will start at 6:00 PM in front of the 5th Avenue entrance to the 42nd Street building (at 5th Avenue and 41st Street) and end at 7:30. We will have plenty of signs and flyers. This event is cosponsored by Citizens Defending Libraries, and will feature an appearance by Reverend Billy.

The vigil will take place rain or shine! Please bring an umbrella. In case of bad weather there is a covered area protected from the rain that we can make use of.

The Central Library Plan, 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 also calls for the sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library at 40th and Fifth Avenue, the most heavily used library in the entire country.

The NYPL plans to demolish the 42nd Street Library’s historic seven-story book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would replace the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry and Business Library (at 34th and Madison), despite being less than one-third the size of the two existing libraries.

This plan was created through a closed process with no public input, and has been condemned by leading architecture critics such as Ada Louise Huxtable in the Wall Street Journal and Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times.

It has become increasingly apparent that this plan 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.

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”.