The (Ugh) Upshot After Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson Shacks Up With Bruce Ratner?: The BPL Will Hold Gala On May 22nd Honoring The Ratner Barclays Center And Nets!

Do we think, under the circumstances of a certain `coupling,' that the BPL's "Ball For Brooklyn" Gala site where the library honors Bruce Ratner's arena is just a little cartoonish in its absurdity?  We took a try at making it more so.

Ugh, Ugh and double-ugh!  It’s ugly indeed! . . .

No, you can’t make this stuff up!: It’s really just days, barely a few weeks since we reported about how Bruce Ratner and Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson were shacking up (See: It Gets Personal, But This Gossip Is, In Fact, Real News About The Business of Selling Libraries- Two From That Constellation of Library-Selling Stars Hook Up As A Couple: Bruce Ratner and Brooklyn Library President Linda Johnson– Guess Where?).

When we passed on the news from the real estate industry reporting website The Real Deal we noted that the shacking-up shack was the view-impairing Pierhouse development in Brooklyn Bridge Park at 130 Furman Street. . .  

And that then let us go on to explicate with an extensive eight (count ‘em, eight) bullet points connecting all sorts of dots with respect to how the nesting together of these two real estate minded adversaries of our libraries related in so many ways to the selling off of our libraries and the abuse of our library system and public assets. . .

. . . It’s a real estate story, a library selling story, and it’s an Atlantic Yards (Pacific Park) story, and . . .

. . .  OMG, it didn’t take long, but we’ll now have to lengthen our dot-connecting bullet point list item with another significant connection!  Consider for yourself if this one is just too embarrassing to be believed?. . .

At Tuesday’s February 26th Brooklyn Public Library Trustees meeting as BPL president Linda Johnson smiled at her board, NYPL trustee Michael Liburd* told his assembled fellows that on Wednesday, May 22nd the BPL would hold its annual fund-raising gala at the Bruce Ratner developed Barclays Center and that “one of the reasons” for locating the gala at the Barclays Center “is that we are honoring the Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Nets.”  Liburd’s mention of the gala being held at the Barclays Center was greeted with some outbursts of delighted laughter.   Then someone at the table jumped in to call attention to the cleverness of how this library fundraiser was named the “Ball for Brooklyn” with the emphasis on the “Ball.” . . . Yes, indeed that’s exactly how the gala is being promoted–  Top of the list before and mention of cocktails or dinner is “Honoring: Barclays Center & Brooklyn Nets.”

Isn't that a nice gift for BPL prez Linda Johnson to be giving her boyfriend Bruce?

(* Liburd has pushed real estate development as head of Community Board 9's Land Use Committee.)

Joining the club to attend the “Gala” is apt to cause nose bleeds: With “limited Availability” the BPL is posting some pricey positions for attendees to opt into: “Lead Sponsorship” at $100,000, “Principal Sponsorship” at $500,000, “Visionary Sponsorship” at $25,000, “Contributor Sponsorship” at $10,000.  Liburd said that working with the CEO of the Barclays Center there was motivation for the Ratner/Prokhorov Center to make the event “even more financially successful than previously.”  And do contributors get special consideration if afterwards they want to “bid” on libraries that go up for sale?

Liburd waived a page of names distributed to the trustees asking them to hit up a bunch of monied so-and-sos for gala contributions.  The list included thirteen designated individuals targeted from the “Blackstone Charitable Foundation.”  Of course when it comes to libraries and turning them into real estate deals the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman’s “Blackstone” is already exceedingly familiar.    
Conferring Awards to Rewrite History -or- Rewriting History to Confer Awards– How Taking Over Certain Organizations Factors In (And Affect The Course of Future Events)

This is not the first BPL “partnering” to promote the Forest City Ratner brand, including the Nets and Barclays.  Our previously provided bullet point list already mentioned the BPL veering into such promotions for Ratner–  it was, in fact, one of the first things thought of when the BPL and Linda Johnson were thinking about as examples of the kind of private “partnering” the BPL could do.  The library, as the BPL trustees are aware, has a strong brand that somewhat automatically enlists public approval.  With partnering some of that approval can be expected to `rub off’. . . in both senses of that phrase.

As for “awards” and “honoring,” this is also not the first time that what should be a public commons asset like the library has been commandeered to lend the Ratner organization a faux burnishing of its reputation that it does not deserve.

In April of 2008, a problematically comprised and compromised Brooklyn Museum board of trustees taking Ratner money led straight to, as reported in Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report:

A protest organized by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn in response to the Brooklyn Museum's honoring of Bruce Ratner draws an angry (and creative) crowd, with chants of "Shame on you" and signs like "Dung Deal." Borough President Marty Markowitz's wife Jamie takes a few too many pieces of swag. Deputy Mayor Patricia Harris [who was also in change of the launch of the Bloomberg’s initiation of efforts to turn libraries into rel estate], a key advisor to Mayor Mike Bloomberg on charitable issues, is also present, a sign--as became clearer during the mayor's effort to override term limits--of the intertwining of charity and politics.

The Brooklyn Museum board acted to “honor” Ratner just as essential city approvals hung in the balance for Ratner’s huge Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly project of which the Barclays Center was a conspicuous part.  No doubt it was hoped that the “honoring” would help push the mega-project through over community objection (and even get it more taxpayer subsidy) despite what was then the increasingly bad reputation of the mega-project.   

One for instance of how badly regarded the Ratner megadevelopment was as it lumbered toward its eventual first groundbreaking was Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Arts Society, calling the development “the poster child for what goes wrong when process is ignored. . . a poorly designed project that has polarized the community and that squanders both opportunity and public trust.”
But criticism like that can be naturalized if you commandeer the criticizer.

As Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White wrote in Noticing New York

The Municipal Art Society was once thought of as representing the public and standing up to developers in the face of abusive development.  . . .   Not so long ago, MAS had scores of forums about development in the city invoking the name and principles of Jane Jacobs in which, while the moderators kept civil order, the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly was excoriated by expert panelists and attending public alike, for a zillion villainous transgressions against the public interest.
  
More recently, after an orchestrated reconstituting of the board, essentially, as it was disclosed to me, happening as something of a coup, MAS has reversed itself to the extent that many no longer regard it as representing the public.  This new version of MAS has given not one, but two, awards the to the Atlantic Yards mega-development, essentially praising Forest City Ratner for the kind of neighborhood destruction that was previously decried, an absurdity that’s siren for satire, essentially an award for “preserving a swath of Prospect Heights by tearing it down to build the Ratner Prokhorov Barclays arena while letting the rest of the destroyed neighborhood acreage lie fallow for a few decades.”   (See: Monday, June 16, 2014, Ratner, Gilmartin & the MAS Onassis Medal: selective memory, glitzy gala, and enduring dismay.)

(See: Is Forest City Ratner, As Victor, Writing Our History?- WNYC's Press Release on Appointing Forest City Ratner's MaryAnne Gilmartin to Its Board of Trustees, November 16, 2014,)

White, wrote there about how MAS events now reportedly can degenerate to “almost unbelievably depressing pro-development spectacle.”  Indeed, more recently, in another Noticing New York article, White wrote about MAS gathering unsuspecting listeners to hear Linda Johnson extol her vision of turning libraries into real estate deals in a supportive, noncritical environment.  See:  Municipal Art Society, Once Venerable, Becomes Platform For Disseminating Misinformation Promoting Development, In this Case Backing Library Sales and Shrinkage, June 15, 2015.
   
Norman Oder, who has written voluminously and extensively focusing on Atlantic Yards (renamed Pacific Park as a probable ruse to escape its history of criticism) has, after assiduous study, boiled things down to a synthesis that Atlantic Yards has always relied upon a “culture of cheating.”   One of the supreme cheats the cheater can employ is to rewrite history. 

At the 2008 demonstration outside the Brooklyn Museum when the Museum was “honoring” Bruce Ratner, protesters were sharing and Michael D. D. White was reading “quotes through the ages about `honor’” such as Thomas Jefferson’s “Nobody can acquire honor by doing what is wrong.”  Real “honor” certainly cannot be acquired that way, but the wind that blows against that quote are the many variations of quotes about how “history is written by the victors,” which means that the verisimilitude of honor can be acquired that way, or to use a quote often attributed to Napoleon, “history is a pack of lies agreed upon” that can confer such verisimilitude.
  
Winston Churchill (“Winnie” to a Brit we know who remembers him from living through the WWII era), albeit, definitely had his commendable achievements. However, Churchill said that “history will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”  Indeed, because he actually did write it (with very appreciable help from the British taxpayers), and in the process his ruthless past apparently got quite forgotten.

When White was writing about the about face of the Atlantic Yards critique that occurred when the MAS board was taken over partly for that purpose, he was also writing about how radio station WNYC issued a history-falsifying press release when appointing Forest City Ratner  Chief Executive Officer MaryAnne Gilmartin to its board of trustees.  It was an inappropriate thing for WNYC to do. WNYC is another public commons and public trust that should be serving the public.

The Brooklyn Museum, The Municipal Art Society, The WNYC Public Radio Station, The Brooklyn Public Library: These are all organizations that are supposed to be serving the public with the goal of being a conduit of information free of their own manufactured bias.  We think of our libraries of repositories where we safely entrust with all our history.  Whatever the reason, personal relationship between BPL president Linda Johnson and Bruce Ratner, or not, it is frightening when the library is an organization enlisted to rewrite history.  Furthermore, the BPL’s obsession with being in the thrall of huge private contributions from those with conflicts of interest is likewise scary in a compounding way.

The effect of rewriting history?  “Whoever controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell in “1984.”  It’s similar to another quote that’s various attributed to ancient the ancient and wise: “Those who tell the stories also rule the society.”  Or, if we adapt the words of George Santayana: Those who are able to rewrite history so that we forget the past can condemn us to suffer the repetition of their misdeeds.

As for those who would like a crack at repeating their misdeeds, the urgency of seizing the pen to rewrite history is directly related to how unflattering a truthful telling of history is.  As the BPL seeks to confer its `honors,’ there is, another story, a very different narrative to be related.  The so-called `success’ of the Barclays Center is highly disputable as far the arena itself is concerned, and Atlantic Yards (aka “Pacific Park”) of which that arena is an integral part is also a continuing embarrassment in multiple ways.

Intimately familiar with its myriad details, journalist Neil deMause has, with reasons he lays out, called the arena “an epic train wreck.”  The bonds issued to finance the Barclays Center (even after a refinancing to reduce financial stress) are not doing well becoming “nearly junk”: The rating agencies have been threatening to lower their ratings (“just barely within `investment grade’ and above junk, but with a negative outlook, indicating that the rating was unstable.)  The original overall project presentations touted a ten-year course to completion in 2003, but quite recently it’s been admitted that it may take till 2035 to complete it even while questions are being deflected about whether it will take even longer than that.  In 2009 and Marisa Lago, then head of the state’s ESDC agency overseeing the project indicated it could take “decades” or 40 years to complete.

Meanwhile, the mega-monopoly mega-project has suffered extremely embarrassing and delaying cost overruns getting it into litigation.  The promise of the so-called affordable units has turned out to be deceptive and those units will be extra long in coming.  Another of the highly touted reasons for giving the project to Ratner was to close the gash and knit the neighborhood streets back together by building over the open pit rail yards at that location– But addressing that goal, which should have been a priority, will now be postponed until the tail end to be done only when the project is finally reaching its finish line.  For this mess of pottage other recently developed buildings and what was more truly affordable existing housing (not over the rail yard) were torn down and developers competing with Ratner were chased away and shut out. 

Simultaneously At The NYPL “Billionaire Graffiti.”

While the BPL is lending its we-are-a-library halo to supply a good reputation to Linda Johnson’s boyfriend’s project, the NYPL is similarly willing to invert things and put its own we-are-a-library halo to work to improve the reputation of two of the main people, trustees on its board, Stephen A. Shwarzman and Marshall Rose, associated with the library-shrinking, library-selling, book-eliminating Central Library Plan.   The NYPL had to officially abandon the reviled plan, but the latest set of alterations at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library involve putting the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman, the piratical plutocrat on the library building in yet one more place.  This is the man who, aside from driving library plundering plans ahead has said the poor should pay more taxes and the loopholes that allow him to pay especially low taxes compared to the rest of us need to be protected.  Along with this, an outdoor plaza will suffer an ostentatious bedecking with the name of real estate mogul Marshall Rose.  People are calling it “Billionaire Graffiti.”

Entrusting Our History And Narratives To The Current Library Administration Officials And Boards

Other things happened at the BPL trustees meeting.  It was announced that rather than just be repository of books and content, the BPL is going into content production; it will start creating its own podcasts (“Borrowed”).   What stories will ultimately be told as the content is generated by administrators and trustees eager to “honor” Mr. Ratner?  At a recent NYPL meeting the NYPL trustees were told that they too would be going into content production by partnering with HBO.
               
Ms. Johnson made it a point to mention and promote to the trustees Eric Klinenberg’s recent book “Palaces for the People,” which according to the acknowledgments in Mr. Klinenberg was created by him after he was approached by the Revson Foundation which has funded all sorts of initiatives in connection with promoting the sale of libraries.  And the Revson Foundation works closely with those at the library like Ms. Johnson so one could think of this as another example of the BPL getting involved with content production. Ms. Johnson advised the trustees that the first chapter of Klinenberg’s book was about the New Lots Avenue Library (665 New Lots Ave. at Barbey St), which she advised them was being targeted for a `complete branch renovation’ because it is in the “worst shape” of any library in the system needing one.  We will have to be alert for what is in store for the library.

The BPL trustees are also, it turns out, working at their level on directing people about what they should read.  Coming back to our collection of connect-the-dots bullet points when we first found out that Linda Johnson and Bruce Ratner were shacking up together, BPL trustee Hank Gutman was at the meeting.  Gutman, like Johnson and Ratner also (under somewhat scandalous circumstances) also has an apartment in the view-impairing Pierhouse development in Brooklyn Bridge Park at 130 Furman Street.  Gutman is the head of the BPL’s new “Digital Strategy Committee.”  (It includes members besides the trustees.)  Gutman said that one of the things the committee was working on in terms of new digital technology was to refer library users to books “they should be reading” (including “books they are perhaps unaware of”), but he said it would be done in by “privacy respecting, non-intrusive means.”  Gutman said that almost the entirety of the committee’s last meeting was spent talking about “the nudge” project, which he said was directed to encouraging people in a more friendly way to return books to the library.

Do we want a man like Gutman working on digital technology that steers what gets read when people come into their libraries?  Part of the connect-the-dots the dots bullet points is that Gutman not only lives in the same Brooklyn Bridge Park building as Ratner and Johnson, but that he is also on the board of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation and that there is a weird amount of overlap between the BPL board and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation board.  Thus Gutman winds up pushing development by selling off libraries by being on the BPL board as well as pushing development in Brooklyn Bridge Park by being on that board.

Tuesday morning, the day of trustees meeting, was also the day of a ribbon cutting for one of the housing developments in Brooklyn Bridge Park.  Before the meeting Gutman, with a certain amount of haughty disdain, carefully explained to one of the BPL employees why the community should not have been opposing development in the park.  He said that his Brooklyn Heights neighbors were opposing the development in Brooklyn Bridge Park because it involved “low income” units and that his neighbors didn’t want to live with such people of a different class.  It was probably true that, if you searched, you might have been able to find some upper class Brooklyn Heights residents who didn’t want to see lower income subsidized units in the neighborhood, but Gutman’s was hardly, we believe, an accurate overall representation of why more development in the park has been widely opposed by the community.  Gutman’s tended explanation is probably better thought of as another eager try at rewriting of history.  Should we trust Mr. Gutman to steer library users to the books they “should read”?

Gutman favored the sale of the BPL’s Business, Career and Education Library, a central destination and federal depository library in Brooklyn’s downtown center that was the BPL’s second biggest library, newly renovated, expanded and completely upgraded.  It was a shrink-and-sink deal, jettisoning books and eliminating most of the library’s previous functions.  The luxury tower at the site replacing the library is now taller than all the neighboring buildings.  (It’s tall enough to be seen now from the Grand Army Plaza central library where the trustees were meeting.) Linda Johnson told her board of the trustees that they were still working on* the design for the much smaller, more underground, much more bookless library that is to be in the luxury tower.  She said that as they did so they also wanted to please those who had an “old time version” of what a library should be.

 A new, very big investment for the BPL, a $650,000 media buy to “change the way that people think about BPL.” _picture we took of the presentation at the meeting,

More about how people should think of libraries?–  also big news from the meeting: In a new initiative, the BPL will be launching a $650,000 high profile media buy to sell the BPL brand with the number one purpose to “change the way that people think about BPL.”

(* The question has always been how much of an afterthought to the developer’s plans the “replacement” library will be.  The library space is already configured as an awkward horseshoe shape around space the developer is preemptively devoting to the luxury tower’s use. Another library space in a luxury tower that is turning out to be very much an afterthought about what is supposed to go into a luxury tower is the library space along with “arts space” that is supposed to go into the Walentas, Two Trees development Ashland Place tower “Southside project” near the Brooklyn Academy of Music where the space is not being delivered because the city– and the library– don’t know what the deal is that they cut with the building’s developer when it acquired the land and the developer got special exemptions and approvals to build bigger based on providing library and cultural space within the building.  The whole thing was already a scandal because the developer when “bidding” was actually supposed to be getting from the Bloomberg administration the ability to build a parking garage, not a luxury tower.  That changed and then, further along the way a deal was altered again for a bigger building with more luxury apartments if 15,000 square feet was provided for libraries. More recently, BPL spokesperson David Walloch said there was only going to be 1,500 square feet of library space.  What is not stalled?: The Whole Foods and the Apple Store have already opened in the building.

At the trustees meeting the problems with the non-delivery of space were mentioned and the trustees were told that the BPL would “just wait around till that gets resolved.”  BPL trustee Jordan Barowitz from the Durst Development organization who heads the capital projects committee in charge of the BPL’s real estate development said the project was “on hold” while the city and the developer “resolved their differences.”  He said he didn’t know “exactly what the differences were,” but “it was not surprising” there was a difference between the city and developer.  Any guesses whether the Walentases will come to the May 22nd the "Brooklyn Ball" gala honoring the Ratner arena?)

(Addendum: What to know what the previous BPL Trustees meeting in December was like?– It too taunted ironic response in a spectacular way.  See: Atop Empty Bookshelves of The Flatbush Library, Brooklyn Public Library Trustees Meet Displaying Holiday Spirit As They Fuss Over Expensively Tiny Library Space.)