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| BPL President Linda Johnson there at the shrunken sunken library opening to greet the public |
Today at exactly 1:00 PM the Brooklyn Public Library opened the shrunken, sunken library that at the site of what was once the downtown Brooklyn Heights Library. The Brooklyn Heights Library, centrally located in Brooklyn’s downtown business district was Brooklyn second biggest and most important library.
The library that opened today will not be a Business Library, a Career Library, and Education Library, or a federal depository library, all of which the former library with many more books was. The new library’s most toutable feature is that it has some very high ceilings. These high ceiling serves to boost the luxury apartments in the tower above it up high above the homes of neighbors. It’s a symbol and a message that some folk should be boosted up over others in the community. That goes along with the reason that in this shrink-and-sink deal the library’s publicly owned real estate assets were sold off to create the luxury tower.
The air conditioning in the new library also works. That’s something people will appreciate. They refused to fix the air conditioning in the former library as an excuse to sell it.
When the old library was sold, the public was told a new library would “replace” it in three years. The former library shut down back in July of 2016. You could actually say that it was subject to a long slow gradual shutdown that started way before that, long before books were being removed by the truckload in June 2016. The trees were removed from outside the closed library in February 2017. Today’s date is June 8, 2022. So how long a wait did it actually take to open this one? That’s notwithstanding that the luxury tower in which the library is housed didn’t stop construction during Covid under the pretext that the luxury tower should be considered affordable housing according to the shutdown rules.
The public’s 1:00 PM admission to the library was after a 12:00 Noon Ribbon Cutting ceremony. That Ribbon Cutting ceremony was private and just fro the invited.
When we asked developer David Kramer (picture below) if Bruce [Ratner] was there, he said, “Of course” and then went on to say that Ratner had not actually benefitted financially from the sale of the library as he said that Citizens Defending Libraries reported. Ratner’s company owned the adjacent real estate, which had to participate in a combining of zoning lots that allowed the Saint Ann’s School to get a financial windfall selling its air rights for building of the new luxury tower. We guess that what Mr. Kramer meant is that Mr. Ratner and his companies did a favor for the real estate industry here with no direct, discernible, and traceable quid pro quo.
We heard that the button to operate the front door for exiting handicapped people was observed to be not working. Oh, my,- . . . maybe they will have to sell this library and downgrade to a smaller library to pay to have electronics for working buttons?
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| When we asked developer David Kramer (picture above) if Bruce [Ratner]
was at the private ribbon cutting, he said, “Of course” and then went on to say that Ratner had not
actually benefitted financially from the sale of the library as he said
that Citizens Defending Libraries reported. Ratner’s company owned the
adjacent real estate, which had to participate in a combining of zoning
lots that allowed the Saint Ann’s School to get a financial windfall
selling its air rights for building of the new luxury tower. We guess
that what Mr. Kramer meant is that Mr. Ratner and his companies did a
favor for the real estate industry here with no direct, discernible, and
traceable quid pro quo. |
