PHOTO & VIDEO GALLERY: September 25, 2013 Rally Outside NYPL Trustees Meeting At the Countee Cullen and Schomburg Center Libraries In Harlem, 515 Malcolm X Blvd

Citizens Defending Libraries and the Committee to Save The New York Public Librari invited the public to come to the NYPL trustees meeting and let library and public officials know the public is watching as they plan to spend taxpayer money on their wasteful, destructive plan.  Everyone was the invited to come to the rally afterwards in front of the Countee Cullen Library 104 West 136th.  Electeds and candidates for office will speak.  Music provided by the Raging Grannies and members of the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.
                           
Libraries around the New York City are being sold off in real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public.  The NYPL’s Central Library Plan (CLP) is an example: At enormous cost to New York City and its taxpayers, it would gut 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 place, and send millions of books to central New Jersey. At the same time it would reduce library space drastically selling off the Mid-Manhattan Library (at 40th and 5th Avenue) and SIBL (Science, Industry, and Business Library, at 34th and Madison), which will both be closed and sold off..  That’s just one example of what’s happening.
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Reverend Billy

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Citizens Defending Libraries September 25, 2013 Rally Outside NYPL Trustees Meeting At the Countee Cullen and Schomburg Center Libraries In Harlem
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CDL's Michael D. D. White

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Assemblyman Micah Kellner

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Randy Credico

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CDL's Carolyn McIntyre

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NYPL trustee Gayfryd Steinberg, widow of corporate raider Saul Steinberg, stops to talk with CDL’s Carolyn McIntyre assuring that the public should not e concerned about the sale and shrinkage of New York City’s public libraries.  Her husband bought their 740 Park Avenue triplex apartment from the estate of John D. Rockefeller Jr.'s second wife (John D. Jr. himself was formerly the owner)— and sold it to NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone group the world's largest real estate investment firm, who is pushing for the NYPL's plans to sell and shrink libraries.  The land for the Donnell Library, the first library the NYPL sold for shrinkage (for a pittance) came from John D. Rockefeller Jr.  She did not acknowledge knowing that plans to sell NYC libraries were largely secret for years while the Bloomberg administration was reducing funding to them.

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Library administration officials beginning to depart meeting

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NYPL COO David Offensend among the departing

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NYPL President Anthony W. Marx departing