Atop Empty Bookshelves of The Flatbush Library, Brooklyn Public Library Trustees Meet Displaying Holiday Spirit As They Fuss Over Expensively Tiny Library Space

“Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic”: That’s a certain snide metaphor most of us are familiar with– 

The quip doesn’t have exact application to the December 11, 2018 meeting of the Brooklyn Public Library trustees, but what the trustees did at their close-of-the-year, seasonal holiday meeting does stand as a very apt, stark and not altogether different metaphor for things wrong at the BPL.  They devoted their time to a presentation about rearranging furniture in shrunken library spaces like the one they were in.  Their meeting occurred atop a library of empty library shelves, and, although the Trustees were theoretically in charge, nobody in the meeting seemed to notice or care that the library book shelves in the building below them were empty. 

Blithely, the trustees were in happy holiday spirit.  And the holiday gifting that was going on?: To put the final ribboned bow of symbolism on this event, each library trustee was given a copy of a book about the neglectful destruction of libraries.       

At their close-of-the-year, December 11, 2018 trustees meeting the board of Brooklyn Public Library treated themselves to a special showcasing of what we have refereed to as their “Murphy Library” concept, the idea that if spaces in libraries are flexible enough in the ways certain people are conceiving, that libraries don’t need to be large at all; they can be tiny.  In other words, the size of a library is virtually just a state of mind— To quote Hamlet: “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”* And there is a corollary concept that the BPL trustees and their cohorts advance along with the concept that with sufficient flexibility, space of almost any size can be enough library space: That corollary is that just about any space, any time, can be library space.

(* On the other hand, Hamlet experiences the entirety of Denmark to be a prison, knowing what he knows of the crimes afoot and knowing that “the time is out of joint.”  NYPL librarians were told to discard "extra" copies of Hamlet, even if there might be demand for them, in order to keep their shelves half empty.)

An Overview of The Fussing Over Library Space

Before, we get to the details of the December 11th “Making Space” presentation to the trustees, which we will in a moment, it is worthwhile to consider an overview.

The fussy energy that library administration officials and others are putting into their “Making Space” initiatives could, at first blush, be regarded as a valiant effort to squeeze the most out of library resources, communicating to onlookers that library spaces are intensely valued by these people . . .  That’s until you realize that these same people, the same coalition of economic forces (the Revson Foundation, The Center For an Urban Future, the BPL trustees themselves) are at the same time working hard to justify the selling off of libraries, turning them into real estate deals like the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library sale (creating, as a priority, a luxury tower where you can now go for $1,500 ice cream sundaes) and the similar -shrink-and-sink sale of the Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library with the concurrent elimination of books and librarians. . . (We are eliminating the city’s largest science museum!)  When that is considered these perky “Making Space” optimisms look much more like an effort to justify the shrinking of libraries by proving that there is no need or benefit fulfilled when libraries spaces are larger.

The zest for `flexibility’ that these “Making Space” initiatives show may seem to demonstrate commendable creativity and inventiveness in envisioning how library spaces can be used. . .  But that is until you realize that these same people are the ones that over and over again suggest that existing libraries must be rushed into the hand of real state developers who will tear them down because, the vision and insight of library administrators failing them, they just don’t see how the spaces of those, often larger, libraries can still be flexibly or valuably used by the public.  This same lack of competence, creativity and this propensity to abject despair also crops up when these people can’t believe how libraries they want to give to real estate developers could ever be kept in good repair.

The presentation of the “Making Space” initiatives involve an almost absurd delectation of, a preoccupation with, the value of repeatedly reconfiguring the arrangement of space, as if the arrangement and configuration of space matters.  Indeed, as just noted, these same library administration officials will argue that they want to sell libraries because of their poor configurations as with NYPL COO (and Senator Schumer wife) Iris Weinshall in 2017 stressing that a reason to sell the Inwood library was so that it could be reconfigured or BPL president Linda Johnson saying the same things about the central destination, downtown Brooklyn Heights Library she wanted to shrink.  But then, at the developer meetings where these libraries are being sold off, the developers are told that the development proposals they submit will not get extra credit for good configuration of “replacement” library space.  In the case of the redevelopment of the former Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library, the horse-shoe shape of the smaller, more underground  “replacement” library was clearly just an afterthought to the developer being able to first cream off the top what was most valuable to him.

In the case of the Inwood Library and Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library, the library spaces being jettisoned were recently accomplished expansions that were praised.  Likewise, the city’s largest science library, SIBL (the Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th street) that is being done away with is a recent expansion of space, configured with modern needs in mind, and was also praised even as the public invested heavily to produce it.

All these things considered, what might be the theoretically praiseworthy aspirations of the “Making Space” initiative look a lot more like just one more overturned walnut shell being pushed around the table in a much larger shell game of distractions.

Then there is the question how the “Making Space” initiatives focus cleverly to such a significant extent on re-imagining what has clearly been library space with broader and broader redefinitions where, particularly at the outer edges, the relationship of such uses to the essential mission of libraries becomes quite vague: Case in point?– making library space into karaoke space.

There is a desperate need for public spaces and public services of all sorts.  That need is felt all the more acutely as the world around us is privatized and government services contract.  There is nothing wrong and everything right with wanting more theater space and, for instance, museum space.  Furthermore, the tradition of libraries also providing community and public assembly space already goes back.  But throwing everything in the same pot creates an opportunity for muddling and can even create destructive competition where instead of being properly augmented, public resources that have already been made scarce get divided up into ever smaller fractions.

And that muddling can work against, instead of in favor of, those other groups getting thrown into the same pot with the libraries.  For instance, in a consolidating shrinkage, the BPL is giving up its Brower Park Library space.  Although that library, the “smallest library” in the BPL system, desperately needed to be enlarged (and could have been enlarged) the “replacement” library will be no bigger, perhaps smaller, and will take over and shrink space in the Brooklyn Children’s Museum that not long ago needed to be enlarged at public expense.

When what is “library” space keeps getting redefined to include other increasingly broad alternative uses, it draws in other constituencies to claim the space.  One experiment, of the BPL and NYPL officials in this regard was to privatize and shrink library space by turning library space over to the private Spaceworks corporation (actually set up for that purpose), which would then charge for artists to use the space.  Thus the BPL gave away the second floor on top of its Williamsburg Library and was marching next toward a similar substantial shrinkage of the Red Hook Library. Spaceworks proclaimed that one of it's central purposes was to take over library space because it was “underutilized.”

At the same time, this kind of muddling is potentially a distraction and deflection from the loss of books and core library services.  Plus, finally, somewhere along the line, the constituency for defending libraries is likely to get confusingly diffuse.

If you are going to dismantle libraries it is a useful start to first dismantle the concept of what “a library” is: If any space of any size used for virtually anything can be “a library,” and if virtually any space anywhere, anytime can be considered “a library,” then it is almost as if, nothing in particular is a library and everything is a library.  In other words there is nothing that is not “a library.”  If you are confused enough about what a library actually is, how do you defend them?

Probably those of us who are not entranced and excited by “Making Space” initiatives presentations are supposed to be viewed as old, behind-the-times fuddy-duddies unwilling to pay homage to the marvelous future that’s unfolding. . .

. . .  That’s as if we are not supposed to notice that as the BPL trustees were in exuberant holiday spirit enjoying this presentation they were sitting atop a library full of empty bookshelves.

The “Making Space” Initiatives Presentation

The “Brooklyn Public Library’s Making Space” initiative is a “Featured Project” of The Revson Foundation, a “pilot” project to deal with the “major challenge,” of library administration officials “finding spaces that can accommodate the diverse variety of programs.”  The presentation to the trustees on december 11th was by David Giles.  Mr. Giles came to the BPL as staff after working for the Center For an Urban Future (CUF) doing work funded by the Revson Foundation, where he advocated for sales that turned libraries into real estate deals. That included writing op-eds CUF got published in newspapers favoring library sales.  Giles is on the BPL’s strategy staff.  “Strategy” is the rubric under which library administration officials generally put their libraries-as-real-estate venture activities.

Giles explained that his presentation was a version of the presentation given for the AIA, American Institute of Architects, earlier in the year.  It reflects the design work of SITU Studio, an Architectural Design and furniture fabrication company which is lucky enough to be located in the subsidized Brooklyn Navy Yards.  SITU Studio has branded its “Re-Envisioning Branch Libraries” as “L+.”  The “+” branding is a nice PR touch, an example of what has become the fairly standard Owellian tactic these days of reverse naming things: It counters the fact that the project focuses on making use of inadequate, small and insufficient spaces.  Making certain the “+” branding doesn’t go unnoticed or unremarked upon SITU Studio’s used the “+” design as a motif for door handles and sprinkled it around liberally for other of its furniture design accents.

Giles explained to the trustees that the project:

was meant to sort of re-envision The library community room as a more dynamic education and collaboration space.  And it was meant to address the gap between the types of services and programs that we put on as a 21st century library, uhm and the various buildings that we’ve inherited over the last 120 years or so. [i.e. “old.”]

Giles said these old `inherited' buildings included approximately 18 Carnegie era libraries buildings built at the beginning of the last century (the BPL previously caused the Brooklyn Paper to carry an article about how they ought to be sold), about 15 mid-century buildings, and about 20 so-called “Lindsay box buildings” from the 1960s and 70s.  He described the Carnegie era libraries as being “highly controlled spaces” from the “prime shush period” with lots of space for private work.  (The Flatbush Library in which the presentation was occurring is `Carnegie era,’ the sixth Carnegie, which opened in Brooklyn in 1905,)

The mid-century libraries were “fairly large, two stories” with “lots of spaces for shelving and seating, even, and in some instances, auditoriums and stages for public events.”  The Lindsay Boxes were referred to as stripped down to “a kind of franchise model” avoiding “accouterments” to “spaces” that “are sort of devoted mainly to shelving.”

In January of 2013 Mr. Giles authored a report issued by the Center For and Urban Future with figures we quickly picked up on because those figures argued well against the sell off of libraries and the elimination of books: “[Libraries] have experienced a 40 percent spike in the number of people attending programs and a 59 percent increase in circulation over the past decade.”  Mr. Giles didn’t offer a new figure to replace their previously cited “59 percent increase in circulation” figure that we used against them when we disagreed about whether libraries should be sold, but in saying that program attendance was now putting “an incredible strain on our buildings” Giles had a now boosted figure for program attendance saying that “in just the last five years” there was another 20% increase, making program attendance “more like a 59%, 60% increase” over the previous 18 years. . . . If those numbers don’t quite jibe (and they don’t seem to), it could be because some of those figures are for New York City libraries generally, while others may be for just the BPL’s Brooklyn libraries.

Giles explained that the BPL library programs were hosting cultural celebrations and cultural programs: theatrical performances; and townhall type discussions, media classes, and programs for teens and adults, tell-a-stories and televisits.  And he said that, doing an audit, the BPL decided it was hosting 70,000 or so public programs during the year throughout all its libraries.

Giles explained (starting to refer, as he talked, to what was in the community room where the trustees sat):

As a part of this project, Situ studios, along with our librarians, and strategy office did a complete audit of the 70,000 or so public programs that are happening in the library across the year.  And they categorized these in terms of program types, and took a sort of deep dive in terms of the functional requirements and spatial demands they made, uhm, and sort of systematized these programs, not only in terms of theme and program type, but in terms of furniture requirements and functions. . . .

And then they started developing what they are calling `building blocks' to support these various program demands.  And, two things they wanted to do here, they wanted to create furniture pieces that were incredibly movable, easily rearranged into new constellations, and fairly cheap to produce and manufacture.  So you can see here these quite sturdy metal frames can be used, uhm and, you know, produced in different ways to support different purposes.  Here we have a mobile media cabinet, which has, actually, outlets installed inside.  It holds a game console and television, but that same frame can be repurposed, not by the library staff, but by the manufacturers as a sort of hanging coat hanging unit.  We have different storage units, different sizes. The storage units can double as seats.  All of the services are writable, so people can write on these, use them as white boards.  We have mobile walls that serve as whiteboards, And also pin up boards on the other side.  They help divide up the room as well. 

Here are some other mobile walls and signs. . . .

So, translating, if you will, the idea of all this “fairly cheap” rolling box furniture, is that it is sort of like a theater set, where black clad figures that the audience is supposed to ignore swoop in during scene changes effecting rearrangements that when the audience and actors assist with their imagination suggest entirely different places, indoors, outdoors, maybe even on different continents, palaces or hovels . . .

. . . Will the BPL be engaging black clad stage assistants to swoop in between the library space users?  We imagined turnover time when all the “mobile walls” that have served so ingeniously “as whiteboards” have to be wiped down (make sure you get all the sides) so the next group of users have a clean slate for how they will `conjure’ the room.  We were tempted to try out these BPL whiteboards by writing, “Don’t sell or shrink our libraries” on them and see how fast the trustees would react, but nowhere in the room were there any whiteboard writing implements to be seen.

It's "curtains" for the old fashioned library user of days past!

Giles explained how the room could also be divided (as if into more than one room) for “two different programs simultaneously.” Pointing to the ceiling Giles explained that heavy curtains hung on tracks there could pulled around as enveloping privacy walls.  BPL president Linda Johnson delightedly told the trustees that curtains hanging almost to the floor were designed to be “soundproof” (indeed, like the “Get Smart” television series “cone of silence”?).  And if you don’t like hanging curtain walls evocative of Ninotchka’s satirical vision of Soviet era Russian poverty, there were also rolling walls.

Giles said “You can hang a lot of different things from the ceiling grid: you can hang theater lights, speakers, projectors, and furniture, OK?”

Looking a little bit like a vacuum cleaner nozzle, an electric cord dangling above our heads ready to be dragged down for use by a right-height individual

Included among the things “hanging” from the ceiling grid were dangling electrical cords looking a little like vacuum cleaner nozzles for right-height human beings to reach up and grab

Giles explained:

Uhm, One big need was power.  This room had two outlets.  And with the conduit’s and the ceiling grid we were able to add 24 that’s in here for different programs.  You can see the extendable cords hanging from the ceiling for maker programs.

Wow!  Gosh golly.  Library administration officials and the other library sale promoting organizations they have been working with have cited the lack of electrical outlets of as one of their favorite capital infrastructure shortcomings when describing libraries, but running electric lines or cords is one of the easiest, cheapest things to do, especially when you don’t bury them in the walls when prioritizing aesthetic goals.

One of those electrical nozzles when it's a little closer to nose height

Giles explained that he and his designers had hopes of somehow arranging the constellation of furniture to “create a natural stage” for karaoke and talent shows at the library (part of the
“very different public service model and . .  diverse variety of programs” Giles was telling the trustees could be so ingeniously handled by strained resources with such flexible repurposing of library space).  Giles said that while “it was a nice idea” they had “backed off” of it “because of insurance.”

Then Giles demonstrated the room’s addressable LED “smart lights” and if you want to know when he became most gleeful it was probably as he was talking about “value engineering” and showing off how the lights that hung like children’s party balloons between the grid for hanging curtains, electric cords and furniture (or other lights) could change colors or be multiple colors at the same time.  The lighting was going to be good for karaoke and talent shows.

We have a short little video that captured the moment (click through to Youtube for best viewing): 


Giles said that at first he worried that spending on the lights would be an excessively expensive part of the project, but if you are following these things, you probably know that, along with other computer type things, LEDs tricked up with integrated computer features are getting pretty cheap these days.  What did you put on you Chanucha bush this year?  Giles said the LED lights were “aspirational.”

Fun fact about lighting: One of the defining characteristics of Film Noir is its lighting emphasized dramatic areas of dark shadow contrasted with bright light shining on key objects.  Yes it was partly inherited from early German Expressionist cinema, but one reason it was adopted as part of the look of the genre was that the films of Film Noir tended to be B films and the use of the bare minimum of lighting (already costing virtually nothing), was a way to stretch low budgets to get dramatic effects without investing anything for sets. . . Just saying.

Giles put up slide after slide to show all the “configurations” into which a flexible room could theoretically be rearranged: typical classroom configuration, team cooking classes, job readiness classes, English as a Second Language classes, citizenship test classes, classes on for health insurance enrollment assistance, homework assistance, “maker space” configurations, storytime configuration, movie nights, and of course karaoke and talent shows.

At one point, Giles stopped to admire an image of the divided community room with people filling it and exclaimed that the image was “sort of like a Renaissance painting; I love this picture.”

David Gile's "Renaissance painting," (a Rembrandt?)

At the outset, the trustees were told that the guinea pig libraries for the program experimentation were the Flatbush Library they were in and the smaller Clinton Hill Library’s space.  The Clinton Hill Library has been talked about in connection with a future library sale, but now probably only in conjunction with an upzoning of the area like with the Inwood Library.

At the conclusion of the presentation, Linda Johnson said the community room they were in was “a prototype, the kind of thing we would like to do with other libraries throughout the system.”

Situ Studio partner Brad Samuels said in another "Making Space" presentation video you can watch on video*

That mass production is essentially what Situ Studio partner Brad Samuels said in another presentation video you can watch on video*, that the approach representing a “paradigm shift” is designed to be “replicable” and “implemented anywhere in the city.”  In fact, Mr. Samuels, saying that future of the libraries was “not monumental” and that the future of the libraries “is distributed,” talked in that presentation about how the same approach was also intended to convert other than existing library space into such flexible `L+ library space’ by throwing these L+ “kits of parts” into “community retail space” such as “persistently vacant store fronts.”  Samuels cited, for example how a “cooking class could benefit” if it took place in abandoned restaurant space that still had working sinks.

(* We have our own video of an event we did with Rev. Billy where at about 10:36 we reviewed, with some parody, the L+ ideas for using tiny library spaces.) 

These thoughts about minimal investment library “outposts” that pop up into existence easily by, say, taking over a closed restaurant or another space a landlord is finding hard to rent out, are thoughts that are interesting to sit with a bit, if you consider that the people paying the piper with NYC public library money are people now tending to think of libraries as pieces on a real estate chess board.  These are people who also seem to have no compunction about popping them back out of existence when disappearing acts would convenience a deal being put together– “Outpost libraries” could be rent paying placeholders as time is bided.

This idea that `poof,’ an unused restaurant now becomes `library space,’ that library space can be anywhere, anytime, is based partly on the notion that library space can be anything.  It is also based, as Mr. Samuels referred to in his presentation, on the idea that libraries don’t need to have books on the premises when there is instead a “floating collection” of books theoretically (not at the libraries  themselves). That “floating collection” qualifies every space to be a library.  Mr. Samuels credited Christian Zabriski and Lauren Comito of Urban Librarians Unite (who have argued for all the library real estate sale deals proposed so far) with helping him construct his vision for the libraries.  Mr. Samuels said that the existing space now in libraries needed to “catch up” with this vision.

The Empty Shelves of the Flatbush Library

The BPL trustees were happy with Mr. Giles’ presentation.  Not one of them seemed aware or commented that they had noticed that the bookshelves in the library downstairs below them were, as they met, largely empty.  You could actually see this looking through the atrium windows of the community room in which they sat.  And we have close up photographs that show the situation.  (Would this be a good time to mention that only a few weeks ago we posted information about how to recognize someone who can be the diagnosed as a "communal narcissist"?)

From this vantage you can see through the windows the BPL trustees having an executive discussion meeting at their December 11th meeting, and at the same time empty bookshelves below.

When we went to the mezzanine to take photographs, some arriving library users were just ahead got upstairs seconds before us and we heard them immediately exclaim about the empty shelves we were about to witness ourselves: “They ain’t got jack!”

The goal of these disappointed book seekers was apparently books related to education and to study for college preparation. . .

The Flatbush Library serves a largely Caribbean community.  It seems like the Caribbean is rich in history and culture.  Are there no books and materials about it?  If there are, they are not filing this library.

Some of the same bookshelves could also be seen to be empty in the summer of 2017 when the Brooklyner ran an article (with photos) that the BPL had “announced a drastic cut in their summer hours” for the Flatbush Library “due to a broken air conditioning system.”

The Brooklyner article noted:

Some commenters expressed concern that this reduced schedule signaled the beginning of the end, citing the demolished Brooklyn Heights Branch.

“They did the same thing at the Brooklyn Heights branch a couple of years ago, before they sold it to a developer,” writes another commenter. “The air conditioner can be repaired, the city just doesn’t want to pay for it.”

Who knows what was going on in 2017 (we also don’t have a date for when the community room work was gearing up), but, as Citizens Defending Libraries has frequently written and testified, air conditioning in city libraries seems to suspiciously break and balk at being repaired over and over again when library administrators want to sell or shrink libraries: The Donnell Library, the Brooklyn Heights Library, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the Red Hook Library, the Sunset Park Library, the Pacific Branch Library, etc. 

Feeling Good About Themselves BPL Trustees Give Themselves a Popular Book About Library Destruction

Putting a ribbon and bow on it: The ribbon and bow wrapped red books in front of each of the BPL trustees as a holiday present is a critically acclaimed current bestseller about library destruction.

And that book about the neglectful destruction of libraries that each of the BPL library trustees was given as a holiday season present?  It’s “The Library Book,” a critically acclaimed current bestseller by Susan Orlean about the hugely destructive fire in the Los Angeles Library in 1986 when more than a million books were lost or destroyed.  It happened because of the neglect by those officially in charge.  The LA Public Library was rife with fire safety violations and many experts had warned of the worst before the fire happened.

Ed D’Angelo, a recently retired BPL librarian, who has written his own book about what is destroying our libraries generally (based in part on what he personally saw first hand and reacted to) wrote us that the Susan Orlean book is “an enjoyable read” by “a great writer” who “knows how to tell a good story” and did a lot of research.  But he complains that the book is a “`feel good’ book about public libraries.” He says that the book “lacks a critical edge,” and that Orlean “doesn't take the next step and subject all the information she's gathered to critical analysis,” that she “doesn't step back and question” what she has described.

D’Angelo said “You're supposed to walk away from reading the book feel warm and fuzzy about public libraries. . .  But critical analysis doesn't sell books or make library bureaucrats feel warm and fuzzy.”

D’Angelo said that the conclusion that Orlean could have drawn, but failed to was that those in charge in Los Angeles were a “a poor custodian of books” and that “the fire merely dramatized their negligence.” D’Angelo opined that the fact that all the trustees of the BPL were given a copy of The Library Book as a holiday gift this year “doesn't reflect well on the book!!”

 

Michael Kimmelman’s Unfortunate Suggestion That Amazon Invest In NYC’s Public libraries (per Eric Klinenberg)- See: “Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?”

There are a lot of people alarmed and/or already woeful about the announcement of the imminent arrival of an Amazon headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, even people who have not fully thought through everything there may be to get alarmed about in connection with the book industry-disrupting and imagination-defying growth of Amazon.*  One of those people quickest out of the starting gate with such opinions, is New York Times architect critic Michael Kimmelman.  See: Amazon’s HQ2 Will Benefit From New York City. But What Does New York Get?

(* See: National Notice- Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . . )

The arrival of Amazon is a huge topic so people will have to do a lot of thinking about it and it is too much to expect that everyone is going to get all their best thoughts together quickly.  This time, Kimmelman, who has done some good work in the past, has some worthwhile observations, but he also falters somewhat unfortunately with respect to his key recommendation.
                               
On the perspicacious side, Kimmelman wonders how well a huge tech company like Amazon will fit in in New York City:

    . . .  the tech industry isn’t culturally urban. Its insularity, secrecy, its bedrock libertarianism and algorithmic notions about progress, land use and corporate independence have never easily meshed with the slow, open-society, regulatory-heavy, greater-good mission that defines city living. Disruption is a virtue and instrument of efficiency in tech circles. But it isn’t repetitiously welcome where protections and a focus on collective welfare remain abiding democratic ideals.

As the title of Kimmelman’s essay implies and as he, in his essay, then directly states, for Kimmelman the, “The question for city residents is what these companies give back.”

That’s hardly the only question, but Kimmelman presents one particularly unfortunate suggested answer.  He suggests that Amazon make “self-interested” investments in NYC public libraries per the thinking of “Eric Klinenberg”:

In turn, Amazon, which dominates the book market, could, up front, make self-interested commitments in local school programs and, as Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, advocates, in public libraries, our most vibrant, multipurpose community hubs.

In other words, Kimmelman clearly sounds as if he is dangerously suggesting that Amazon engage in exactly the kind of public/private partnerships that library administration officials repetitiously crow that they are eager to promote now-a-days, projects that unfortunately commercialize the libraries and are all the more and especially dangerous when the private corporation `partners’ in them are acting `self-interestedly’ . .

Where do we start?  Do we start by saying Amazon, the great disruptor, has already been “partnering” with NYC library administration officials to promote more reading of digital books (in the subways)?  Do we wonder at the fact that Kimmelman, bypassing others (for instance John E. Buschman and Ed D'Angelo), is constituting Eric Klinenberg, “a sociologist at New York University,” as the new automatic go-to expert on what is desirable with respect to public investment in libraries after Klinenberg’s just publishing a book that he just recently put together in short order as the result of his being approached for a “collaborative project” on NYC libraries by the Revson Foundation?—  While Mr. Klinenberg describes the Revson Foundation as a “fierce champion of public libraries,” the foundation can probably more accurately be described as deeply involved in promoting (with behind-the-scenes funding) the current notion of selling libraries and turning them into shrink-and-sink real estate deals, their book collections drastically reduced, the talents and contributions of librarians dramatically deemphasized.

Do we point out that what the Revson Foundation promotes as the new libraries of the 21st Century future is all tied in with the neo-liberal, capitalist, private-market orthodoxy that promotes public/private partnerships between libraries and benefactors like Amazon?  Do we point out how Amazon’s ethos of, and roots in, data collection and its ties to the military, going back and forward, is gratingly at odds with the tradition of libraries as the havens of privacy as free speech requires?  That's what's makes their acting `self-interestedly’ far more scary if they partner on library investments.*

(* Next we are bound to hear that Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who oversees libraries- and their sell-offs- and who has made himself initially visible opposing Amazon's arrival, will fold his opposition to Amazon when Amazon promises such library investments because Van Bramer doesn't believe that concerns about Booz Allen or surveillance in the libraries is real enough to worry about.)

Kimmelman once wrote a very important column of his own lambasting the NYPL's Central Library Plan following in the footsteps of Ada Louise Huxtable’s very last column, published just weeks before her death (Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, December 3, 2012), in which she railed against what they were doing to Manhattan’s central libraries and the elimination of books.  Mr. Kimmelman (New York Times: Critic’s Notebook- In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, January 29, 2013) likewise scorned how the “potential Alamo of engineering, architecture and finance would be irresponsible,” the result of “a not-uncommon phenomenon among cultural boards, a form of architectural Stockholm syndrome.”   We think he also got caught up with the fact that what was happening to the libraries, with its real estate deal underpinnings, was something very different from what was being touted.

When it comes to Amazon, however, Kimmelman seems to have some more catching up to do. . .

. . .  By the way, not too long ago, Forbes ran an op-ed arguing that Amazon should simply replace libraries with Amazon retail outlets–  “Amazon Should Replace Local Libraries to Save Taxpayers Money” (out of embarrassment Forbes quickly took the piece down): At least Kimmelman is not going so far as to make that exact same argument.

Authors Anand Giridharadas, Eric Klinenberg, Kristen Ghodsee, and Activist Blair Imani, On Panel at Brooklyn Book Festival Discuss, `How To Change The World’ (With Libraries and Social Infrastructure!) Plus Who NOT To Trust— When In Jumps Untrustworthy, Library-Selling Councilman Brad Lander!!

Brooklyn Book Festival "How Do We Change the World?" panel. Left to right, after moderator (and fellow author) Jessica Bruder: panelist authors Kristen Ghodsee, Eric Klinenberg, Blair Imani, and Anand Giridharadas

Sure you want to charge out and get started `changing the world’: You’re revved up because it sure seems the world could use a lot of changing these days!  But it is amazing how twisted things can get right at the outset and how insanely easy it is to trip up in trying to choose your allies. . .

Starting off the morning Sunday (it was the 16th) at the Brooklyn Book Festival was a panel of authors (two of whom we have written about already, Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World) and Eric Klinenberg (Palaces for the People: How To Build a More Equal and United Society*) and two of whom we have not yet written about, gender and communism scholar Kristen Ghodsee, (Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence) and activist Blair Imani (Modern HERstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History).

(* Mr. Klinenberg has both a British title for his book for U.K. release, “Palaces for the People: How To Build a More Equal and United Society,” and a United States Title, “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.”)

The panel's topic was: "How Do We Change the World?"

We wrote about Mr. Klinenberg because he wrote an op-ed derived from his new book about the importance of libraries as an example of how critically libraries represent the need for us to conserve and build our social infrastructure.  His op-ed sounded extraordinarily like it was cribbed directly from the web pages of Citizens Defending Libraries, including his assertion that one reason libraries are besieged these days is because those in power see them as “out of sync with the market logic that dominates our world” plus his rallying cry that libraries need “defending” because they are ties to our freedom and equality.

See: Eric Klinenberg in NY Times Op-ed calls for Defending Libraries Promoing His New Book- "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life"

We wrote about Mr. Giridharadas because of his warning about who not to trust and more specifically his book’s admonitions that when the wealthy, all the “new philanthropists” who come out (to once again use Mr. Klinenberg’s phrase) infected by their “market logic that dominates our world” we should, indeed, stop to look their gift horses in the mouth— because the gifts they are presenting are likely to be more harmful than beneficial.

See: There’s Much You Should Not Trust When The Wealthy Give- Anand Giridharadas’ “Winners Take All- The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and David Callahan’s “The Givers: Wealth, Power and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age”

The panel discussion was in the Brooklyn Borough Hall Courtroom, the very same space where multiple “hearings” have been held about the sale of Brooklyn Libraries to turn those libraries into real estate deals, such as the shrink-and-sink sale that got rid of Brooklyn’s second biggest library, what was the Business, Career and Education Federal Depository Library, the central destination Brooklyn Heights Library in Downtown Brooklyn.   . .   BTW: The luxury condos in the tower replacing that library are just now coming to market.  See: As Condo Apartments Set Brooklyn Heights Sales Records (You Heard About Matt Damon’s $16.645 Million Penthouse?) Central Library Sold To Build (Now About To be Marketed) Luxury Condos Nets Mere Pittance.

Thus it was highly ironic in multiple ways that, before the panel even had a chance to commence, who should jump in but library-selling Brad Lander who previously grabbed the spotlight at so many of such hearings leading those who  champion and push for the selling of libraries in deals that will impoverish the public.  (For instance, see him in several clips here: Will Steve Levin Save the Brooklyn Heights Library?)

Brad Lander presenting himself as a progressive activist at the Brooklyn Book Festival's "How to Change The World."  The lectern is the same one where so many people have testified opposing the NYC library sales Mr. Lander promotes when he testifies.

Lander did a breathless double-time spiel associating himself with the `politics’ of ‘activism.’  Like every other knave these days who dresses up in fauxmanteau progressivism, Lander ventured forward in his “bonding” with the audience, starting with an all too usual and easy `I am anti-Trump pot-shot.’   Here are the Landerisms the audience had to sit through before the panel they came to hear got to talk:

I am so exited to come and listen to this panel- I don’t know about you, but I feel like my normal day is something like, you open Twitter and you’re like `Oh my god, what did Trump do today? . . .Who is going to be harmed by it?’  Then you see all this incredible activism taking place.  You think: `Wow!; people are really rising up in creative and new ways, and maybe there is a new world we could build that reflects people’s full selves!’ . . . What would it take to actually bring the change that we need?  I feel like we are in a moment when people have woken up for the need for really big change.  The question of how to bring it remains really, really challenging, so people are focused on just how big the inequalities are economically, but across so many lines of difference as well.  What would it look like to have real equality, real representation in our world, the climate crisis, weakness in our democracy.  But each of those challenges also presents a challenge for the kind of activism that we need to make that change, those very lines of division that general hopelessness about our institutions, they present those challenges: How are we going to make those changes? . . .

This is the same city councilman whom the library selling BPL president Linda Johnson and the library selling Jimmy Van Bramer both proclaimed to be  "very clever."

It gets worse, as we will come back to, during the Q&A that wrapped up the panel discussion, Mr. Klinenberg told the audience that those seeking to change the world (including apparently people wanting to defend and build libraries) should seek out Lander to help them, because they were not going to be able to do it alone.

In the same room, at the same lectern where Brad Lander pitched himself as a (library supporting?) activist, many members of the public testified against library sales Lander was promoting.

We were prepared, in fact we were on the very edge of our seat, trying to get called upon during the Q&A.  We wanted to ask a question about the degree of care with which we need to select our allies for activist change.  We were eager to ask this given the example of Mr. Lander’s usurpation of the opening moments with his self-promoting appeal, and also because of many cautions from Mr. Giridharadas during the session telling us to beware of how the wealthy use their money and foundations.  Giridharadas told us the wealthy try to always to be in the driver’s seat steering, or “changing change” so that change will never take off in a direction offensive to what they have in mind respecting continuing their self-enrichment; over and over again their goal is to just soften the abrasive edges of their self enrichment by appearing to be on the side of the public  — Ah well, we did not get called upon and therefore did not get to ask our question about how to decide who to trust before it was all over.

Here are some highlights of the discussion preceding the Q&A that pertain most interestingly to libraries:

    •    Mr. Klinenberg told the audience that “a week ago, I did an op-ed about libraries, public institutions, which for me are extraordinary a source of inspiration and are in neighborhoods that we live in . . . a place that deserves our resources, our attention, our love. . .”  (We should note that Mr. Klinenberg should have a certain amount of credibility dating a ways back- We previously wrote how Jane Jacobs, in her last book, admired Mr. Klinenberg’s work as a graduate student done a number of years ago.)

Anand Giridharadas

    •    Mr. Giridharadas sounded the alarm not to trust appearances or announced good intentions when the wealthy deploy their philanthropy.  His words sounded sharper than we’ve heard them before (we wrote more about this before):

       •    “We live in a day where the elites seem to really want to help, and yet this is by any reading of the numbers this is the most predatory elite we’ve had in America in one hundred years.  I became interested in how billionaires are helping us while screwing us at the same time. . . . Is the help what upholds their hoarding?”
       •    “When rich people . . . come into the space of changing the world, they never sit in the back row of changing the world; they sit in the front row.  They always get on the board of directors of changing the world.  The wind up as the COO or CEO or something with a `C’ of changing the world, and they change change.  They defang change; they tend to define change in ways that don’t threaten winners.”
       •    He said we get a “light facsimile of change that is the kind of change Mark Zukerberg can get on board with.”
       •    We shouldn’t be looking at these “sugar daddies” to fix inequality and “outsource change.”
       •    He said, “I don’t think that we should be turning first to the `woke’ billionaires to fix this.  My goal is to remind people that we built things like this [the grand court room and Brooklyn Borough hall building we were in] again, and we don’t need permission slips from the powerful to make changes.”
       •    He said we have to clear the brush of a lot of widely believed bullshit and terminology that needs to be dismantled:

          •    “Win-Win”- Neoliberal bullshit.
          •    “Thought Leaders” are thinkers that don’t threaten power.  There are “thinkers” and then there are “thought leaders”- You don’t want to be a “thought leader,” bad thing to be.
          •    “Doing good by doing well, and doing well by . . .”  Again, not good, not real change.
          •    “Innovation”- Not the same as “progress.”  We got a lot of innovation in the last 30 or 40 years.  Unfortunately it just skipped about half of us.
          •    “Giving back”- Sounds nice?- Not the same as “taking less.”

        •    “There is a significant silent minority within the power institutions of our age that understand that they are sitting in temples of cruelty, that understand that they are part of system that’s indefensible.”

Kristen Ghodsee

   •    Kristen Ghodsee said,  “I am trying to think outside of the box of capitalism.  I am trying to push back: Why is it we always turn to the billionaires?  And why do we think of our social infrastructure as something that has to happen within a fundamentally private market where the prices of good and services are always informed by the caprices of supply and demand.”  She blamed “a particular form” of “unregulated neoliberalism capitalism” as the “source of all our problems,” devastating us with “the idea that everything has to have a price” and “even our most intimate experiences are increasingly commodified.”  (She also said she was “totally on board with” the practical benefit of building more libraries.)

   •    Klinenberg said he believed in turning toward the state for help, not billionaires.  We agree with him on this.  It’s one reason why it is so worrisome when the city cuts back on funding libraries with private partnerships and “new philanthropies” stepping up as the potential replacements.

Following the panel, there was this self-explanatory exchange with Mr. Klinenberg that starts with the following email from Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White:

Dear Mr. Klinenberg,

When we talked after the morning Brooklyn Book Festival panel and you signed my copy of your new book (inscribing it “solidarity”) I noted that during the Q&A when you were answering for the audience the question of `what to do to change the world’ you told them to `find Councilman Brad Lander’ and work with him; and I was clear with you about how Councilman Brad Lander has been in the forefront promoting turning New York libraries into real estate deals, their sale and shrinkage and elimination of books, (basically across the board) and including specifically, for example, the NYPL’s Central Library Plan and the shrink-and-sink sale of Brooklyn’s second biggest library, deals that benefit real estate developers, not the public.  The latter, the shrink-and-sink sale of Brooklyn’s second biggest library was modeled after the shrink-and-sink sale of the Donnell Library.  Those two shrink-and-sink schemes were conceived essentially at the same time.  I also see that, although you say that Citizens Defending Libraries and the Committee to Save the New York Public Library were unknown to you when you wrote your book, your book includes descriptions of both of those library sales we were so active in criticizing.

I have reviewed your Brooklyn Book Festival remarks when you told people who were seeking to change the world to `find Councilman Brad Lander’ because I intend to write about what you said, and it seems reasonable that people hearing how you phrased things and the context in which you were offering your advice, would probably conclude that you were instructing them that, rather than work alone (which you said would be unsuccessful), they should “find Brad Lander” because they could “believe” in him, should “support” him, that Lander is some who we can think of as helping to “build libraries,” and, finally, that Mr. Lander is someone who exists safely exterior to the trap of neoliberal thinking.

I’ll also remind you that just before the panel began its discussion, Councilman Lander jumped in to speak to the crowd and portray himself with some heavy duty rhetoric as a fellow political activist looking to make the same changes the audience of activists were wanting.

Accordingly, before I write about your instruction to “find Brad Lander,” I wanted to contact you and see if you wanted to retroactively supply some sort of caveat or warning that I can pass along from you, perhaps particularly to people seeking to defend libraries and our public assets and infrastructure, about Mr. Lander and what to expect from him. . . before they put themselves in Mr. Lander’s hands or let him lead them.  Would you like to do so?

Perhaps I should also mention that I have found the descriptions in your book about the Donnell and Brooklyn Heights Library sales. The flaws I find in them is the overall mildness of what you wrote and what is missing be virtue of what you elide in your descriptions.  I can take that up with you further a bit later.

Mr. Klinenberg responded:

Dear Mr White,
   
I respectfully ask that you do not misrepresent my statement. I told the audience that they cannot change the world by asking alone. I told them to speak to people like Mr Lander because he is an elected representative in our local democracy. That is clearly not the only way to change the world, and I said that as well. The way you’ve described it here is a gross simplification of my remarks.

I believe in solidarity. I’d like to see advocates for the city libraries work together more effectively. I know there are differences in strategy and in opinion about some matters, including how to finance the system. I take a position in the book. You can write Bantu it, of course. I simply ask that you represent it fairly.

Bets wishes,
Eric

Mr. Klinenberg did not take up the first or a subsequent invitation extended to him to join Citizens Defending Libraries in warning people about what Councilman Lander is up to in terms of the libraries.

— Another thing that Mr. Klinenberg could do in the interest of “solidarity” (and staying informed) would be to sign our Citizens Defending Libraries petition that the New York City’s administration should adequately fund our libraries,  not sell them as real estate deals. 

Mr. Klinenberg's book inscribed with "Solidarity," by him.

Here is exactly what Mr. Klinenberg said in answering the question about how to change the world.  It is up to you to decide its implications with respect to Mr. Lander who had orated entreatingly earlier.  To be fair, Mr. Klinenberg does not technically say exactly why it would be good to seek out this elected representative.

Mr. Klinenberg:

The question is how can I as an individual do something to change the world?  The answer is you can’t.  But if the question is how do we do something, then there is a world of possibilities, because these are major problems that we are fighting right now; it’s about the shape of the world.  The only way we do something is if we do something as a collective.  And that means that we export that collective out of the space of neoliberalism that has made us think of ourselves as individual actors who can change the world with our consumption.  So whatever it is that’s your passion, and in this room there are going to be a lot of passions (there are a lot of things that are fucked up and need to be changed), find the other people who share your passion, persuade people who don’t know what they are passionate about that this is a passion worth fighting for, take time out of your schedule to meet with those people and do something.  Find Brad Lander and other members of the local political infrastructure or the national political infrastructure; find the organizations that you can believe in and work with them and support them.  And I am not an opponent of social media, but we are not going to change the world by “liking” things; we are going to change the world by building libraries and day care centers, and safe places where people can spend time and enjoy each other’s companionship.  That’s the world we want to make together.

Perhaps you want to know what Mr. Klinenberg’s book said about the library sales that we think is misleadingly mild?

Below are the paragraphs he wrote. For balance and perspective we will intersperse them with our comments to indicate his shadings and what he left out of the story- 

Klinenberg: The current battle pits the library's executive leadership, which is anxious about the system's declining fortunes, against local patrons who fear they'll lose neighborhood branches and specialized services if the system consolidates.

[Our comment: Portraying the library's executive leadership (presumably the library boards interconnected with that “leadership”) as “anxious” (does that mean “caring”?) about the “declining fortunes” skips over possible characterization of the board and “leadership” as being real estate deal oriented and wealthy in the kind of way* that Mr. Giridharadas scrutinizes in his analysis.  It is also perhaps inconsistent with Klinenberg’s own endnote buried at the back of the book- for those who read endnotes- mentioning the NYPL’s Central Library Plan describing it as a “misguided, massively expensive, and ultimately ill-fated effort . . .led by elite trustees who, as one former library executive said, “only care about the 42nd Street Building” and “don’t care about the branches.”  For that quote, he refers to Scott Sherman’s book “Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” about the Central Library Plan which was derailed in part by the efforts of Committee to save the New York Public Library and Citizens Defending Libraries and by two lawsuits in which Citizens Defending Libraries was the first named plaintiff, but Mr. Klinenberg told us he’d heard of neither group when he wrote his book.

(* In fact, just a few pages before Klinenberg has a few sentences that make him sound perplexingly, but not exactly, similar to Giridharadas: “Like Zuckerberg, corporate leaders are always happy to experiment with projects that promote the common good while raising their market capitalism.  But there are limits to how much they can accomplish by giving while taking.  How much more wealth do they need to accumulate before they are ready to help?”  Both men’s books are promoted by Greenlight Bookstore.– Klinenberg next writes he finds the lack of support for libraries from the corporate tech world “puzzling,” but the minute you start wondering about that question there are plenty of answers available.  Amazingly, Klinenberg acts as if he comprehends so little that he cites as an exception to this stinginess, as an example of generosity, the transfer of money by Stephen A. Schwarzman to the NYPL on the understanding that the NYPL would proceed with the Central Library Plan selling major Manhattan libraries.) 

At this point in Klinenberg’s narrative, it would have been an excellent time for him to mention the Central Library Plan and how it involved the proposed sale of central destination libraries: Mid-Manhattan, New York’s biggest circulating library and SIBL, the Science Business and Industry Library (among other things the city’s biggest science library), and, as it was announced at the same time, the central destination arts and media Donnell Library.  It also involved the banishment of millions of books intended to be shelved at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  He could have mentioned these things here, but they go unmentioned in his book.—   Klinenberg does mention what he calls the current “renovation” of the Mid-Manhattan Library and money for it coming from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, but only in a way that his readers would assume that it was unquestionably good, not questioning the shrinkage or book loss involved or the questionable expenditures of money.

“Consolidates,” the word used by Mr. Klinenberg, sounds relatively neutral, like a possible good thing, compared how we more fully we convey the threat of these “leadership” proposals describing them as “consolidating shrinkages.”]

Klinenberg (continued): They have good reason to fear. According to the Center for an Urban Future, the New York Public Library system has more than $1.5 billion in construction needs-just for repairs and maintenance on existing facilities. In Manhattan, the city sold land and air rights to the beloved Donnell Library, across from the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street, in 2007, for $59 million, promising to open a new facility within the new luxury hotel and condo building there by 2011. It opened in summer 2016, and while some appreciated its twenty-first-century design, both users and critics complained that it felt soulless, more like an Apple Store than a community hub.

[Our comment: The “They have good reason to fear” formulation, splits the possible blame for that fear between the described underfunding of the libraries and the first mention of any sell offs of NYC libraries.  This doesn’t describe for Klinenberg’s readers our admonitions about efforts on the part of the library “leadership” to overstate and exaggerate repair figures (even while holding back available funds) and, as can been seen in part from the minutes of the BPL trustee meetings, an agreement with Bloomberg city administration officials to start building up those repair figures made just as they were also launching the library sell-off plans.  In his back of the book endnotes, Klinenberg says he is taking his figures from the testimony of Jonathan Bowles of the Revson funded Center For an Urban Future at the September 30, 2013 City Council hearing.  That hearing, at which Citizens Defending Libraries delivered copious opposing testimony, was the first city council hearing about selling libraries, and was set up and orchestrated by the City Council and Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer to justify selling libraries (including at that time the NYPL Central Library Plan) shortly after plans for selling libraries were eviscerated (including follow up in the newspapers) in at a June 27, 2013 state assembly hearing on the subject. Klinenberg doesn’t note that Bowles and the Center For an Urban Future have actually advocated the library sales that Klinenberg is only softy bemoaning in his text here.  (In our communication with Mr. Klinenberg we said that we wondered where he was getting his information.)

While “beloved Donnell Library” is the phrase we consistently use remembering its unforgivable sale, Klinenberg says that the library was sold “for $59 million,” without indicating, especially for non-New Yorkers not knowing real estate prices here, how much less this figure was than the huge central library’s actual value to the public.  He also does not note that this is a gross figure and that if he was paying attention to Scott Sherman’s book, what the NYPL netted after expenses for selling the valuable library was probably less than $23 million at best.  Also, maybe because he doesn’t know, Klinenberg does not say that the Donnell was sold off in what was for practical purposes a no-bid deal where one of the principal financial beneficiaries of the transaction was Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

Klinenberg says the NYPL promised to open “a new facility” in what was rebuilt.   What they really promised was that the Donnell Library would be rebuilt.  Ultimately, the NYPL was too embarrassed to call what was built a new “Donnell”: it became just a “53rd Street library,” jettisoning reference to the past.  They did not, at the time the sale was announced, tell the public about the huge luxury tower that was coming.  The NYPL just talked about an “11-story hotel” being built.

For Klinenberg to say that the criticism of the “new facility” was that it “felt soulless” is an extreme understatement.  What about the fact that library was smaller, just over a fourth the size?  That it was largely underground?  That books were largely eliminated, along with other facilities like that auditorium and media center as well?  That, to add insult to injury, the new facility was showing huge picture screen slides of fancy real estate developments and construction?  And how can Mr. Klinenberg be aware of any of this criticism at all without knowing that Citizens Defending Libraries and the Committee to save the Public Library were leading demonstrations about it, plus consolidating the published criticism that regularly quoted us?    As for the “twenty-first-century design” gibberish, that’s pure Center for and Urban Future PR speak, some of the “brush” and “widely believed bullshit and terminology” that needs to be cleared away in this context.

To point out that the library’s opening in 2016, after almost nine years, was later than promised is to miss the point that its opening lagged the opening of the luxury hotel, restaurants and condos by more than a year or what that, in turn, said about the NYPL’s priorities in making the library into a real estate deal.]        

Klinenberg (continued):  In Brooklyn, where estimates for repairing the borough's sixty branch buildings top $300 million, the public library board tried to sell the historic, heavily used Pacific Library branch in Boerum Hill to real estate developers, only to withdraw the offer because of fierce neighborhood protests. Soon after, the board voted to sell the land rights to the Brooklyn Heights Library for $52 million, so that another developer could build a thirty-six-story, mixed-use tower that, as in Manhattan, would include a new library, considerably smaller than the current one. Once again, neighbors protested, but this time for naught. The Brooklyn Borough Board approved the sale in early 2016.

[Our comment: Again, Klinenberg promotes the believability of the repair figure that “leadership” trotted out to sell libraries they were intentionally underfunding to have an excuse to sell these valuable assets.  Klinenberg notes the “fierce” opposition to the sale of the Pacific Library, but somehow again, by his account, never noticed our Citizens Defending Libraries leadership in the fight?   Once again, Klinenberg describes the sale of the central destination Business, Career, and Education Federal Depository Brooklyn Heights Library in downtown without noting that it was the second biggest library in Brooklyn, recently expanded and fully upgraded, or how much below its value it was sold for, for less than its tear down value of that of a vacant lot in what was criticized as pay-to-play deal for campaign contributions to the mayor.  He doesn’t lay it out for non-New Yorkers or indicate that, $52 million aside, the library sale will, just like Donnell, actually net far less than that gross figure he gives.  This time, Klinenberg does say that the new library will be “considerably smaller,” (about 40% of what it was), but he doesn’t note the loss of books, the discontinuation of the Business, Career, and Education plus Federal Depository functions banished from the site, and he doesn’t note that, again, like Donnell, the public will be pushed more underground.  Again, he notes the protests and, once again we must wonder how he professes to be unaware that we led them.  Mention of us would, of course, have the consequence of leading people into a more informed state of affairs.]     

Klinenberg (continued): The fiscal crisis in the New York Public Library has had more immediate consequences too. Between 2008 and 2013, New York City cut the library system's operating funds by $68 million, resulting in a 24 percent drop in staff hours. A century ago, most branch libraries were open seven days a week; today, most are closed on Sundays, which have always been popular days for immigrants, blue-collar workers, and families to visit. No other institution can fill the void.

[Our comment: There is no reason for the libraries to be underfunded, especially when they are a top public priority and cost relatively little to fund.  Mr. Klinenberg writes as if he does not recognize the games that are being played here, dangerous ones at that.  If underfunding of the libraries is allowed to work as an excuse to sell libraries then that underfunding will persist as long as the real estate industry and its allies still want libraries to be sold.]

If Mr. Klinenberg is writing so mildly, taking the edge off what he is telling the public every conceivable which way, should we be wondering why?

In the acknowledgments to his book, Mr. Klinenberg offers an origin story with respect to his writing of his book— It started with an approach to him to write about libraries— And that approach came from the Revson Foundation which has funded all sorts of initiatives in connection with promoting the sale of libraries (it has on its board Sharon L. Greenberger who lead the Brooklyn Public Library’s launch of its library sales, while Reynold Levy, another of its board members is president of the unaptly named Robinhood Foundation spearheading the Inwood Library sale)– emphasis is supplied:

I am also lucky to have met Julie Sandorf, president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation and fierce champion of public libraries.  In early 2016, Julie came to IPK [Institute for Public Knowledge- established in 2007 by the President and Provost of New York University] and pitched a small, collaborative project on the state of New York City’s branch libraries.  I raised the bid, and came back to the foundation with a proposal for what ultimately became a wide-ranging project on libraries, social infrastructure, and civic life.  Julie and her team have been all in ever since, and I thank them for their support.

We have asked Mr. Klinenberg about his funding from the Revson Foundation and how much it was.  He hasn’t informed us about that.  He did respond to another inquiry when we asked whether his writing about the library sales was reviewed by the Revson Foundation or the Center for an Urban Future (whose promotion of Library sales is funded by the Revson Foundation).  He told us he did not have the “Revson or CUF vet my writing.”

Mr. Giridharadas tells us to be wary of the foundations of the “new philanthropy,” because they are not what they seem, often wanting to soften the edges of greed to let it persist in its pursuits.  And he also describes foundations that veer off course from what would actually be helpful, because keeping the interests of the wealthy always in mind they set the wrong priorities. But until we have settled down with his book to read it through, we won’t know whether he has ventured to describe foundations such as the Revson Foundation, the Robinhood Foundation and the Center for and Urban Future (not to mention the oddly comprised boards of the libraries themselves), who apparently represent something worse, efforts to use the guise of charity to plunder public assets, case in point, turning libraries into real estate deals that benefit the real estate industry, but impoverish the public that relies on libraries.

Back of book blurbs

Mr. Klinenberg’s book is likely to get good readership.  He seems to have risen to a certain level of access that plugs him into the mainstream media.  He has appeared on Bill Maher.  The back of his book has endorsement blurbs from a number of recognized names: Jon Stewart (Citizens Defending Libraries would over to have had Mr. Stewart or John Oliver pay attention to our publicizing of the library sell-offs; hasn’t happened yet), Renzo Piano (who designed the New York Times building), sociologist Alie Hochschild (who credits Mr. Klinenberg with a “Jane Jacobs-eye”), Rebecca Solnit (of “mansplaining” fame) and “How Democracies Die” authors  Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.  That may mean that Klinenberg’s story about what is happening with New York City library sales will tend to become more the official one than ours. . . Especially if our press releases are not picked up. . . .

 . . . We think it would be unfortunate if that proves to be the case.  Among other things, we think the information we provide is far better researched and is a far more neutral and careful expression of the facts and the concerns that face us.  And, we are careful about with whom we ally; we don’t take money from the Revson Foundation!