I got my real education from the New York Public Library. I spent my broke youth curled amidst the stacks of Mid-Manhattan. It was a paradise where you could learn anything. To me, this is what the NYPL is — the place where the aspiring but not particularly monied can study Latin and apply for jobs, borrow video games and discover their ambitions and loves. Every library closure is a wound on the city.

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.

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!

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.