Citizens Defending Libraries

Friday, October 27, 2023

Citizens Defending Libraries Main Page

Defend our libraries, don't defund them. . . . . fund 'em, don't plunder 'em

SIGN OUR PETITION TO SUPPORT LIBRARIES: Sign our new updated petition here:

Mayor de Blasio: Rescue Our Libraries from Developer Destruction

You can also stay informed by following us on Twitter (@DefendLibraries) and by liking our Citizens Defending Libraries Facebook page. And we post videos on our Citizens Defending Libraries YouTube Channel.

When We Started and Why

Citizens Defending Libraries was founded in February of 2013 in response to then breaking headlines about how, across the city, our public libraries were proposed to be sold and shrunk at great public loss, with libraries being intentionally underfunded, their books and librarians eliminated. Citizens Defending Libraries was first to point out how the the real estate industry's interest in turning libraries into real estate deals was driving such sales and the reduction of funding and library resources.

Achievements

Citizens Defending Libraries has had a number of significant successes fending off and preventing library sale and shrinkages and there has been some progress towards restoration of the funding of libraries to a proper pre-library-sales plan level of proper funding. These successes include:

    •   The sale of Mid-Manhattan, the most used circulating library in Manhattan, was prevented with the help of two lawsuits in which Citizens Defending Libraries was first in the list of named plaintiffs. That sale was prevented as Citizens Defending Libraries joined with others to successfully derail the New York Public Library’s ill-conceived consolidating shrinkage of major Manhattan libraries known as the Central Library Plan. Citizens Defending Libraries accurately predicted this sell-off and shrinkage of libraries was likely to cost over $500 million, far more than the $300 advertised by the NYPL as it promoted its real estate deals. Unfortunately, work remains to be done as aspects of the Central Library Plan still ominously survive:

    •       The NYPL still plans to sell and close the largest science library in New York City, SIBL, the Science Industry and Business Library, eliminating its collection of science books just when they are needed most,
    •       Millions of additional books are still missing from and need to be brought back to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library at Fifth Avenue (yes that's the building with the lions, Patience and Fortitude).
    •       The NYPL still plans to subject the Mid-Manhattan Library to a consolidating shrinkage with a concomitantly vast reduction in available books.
    •   The sale and closing of another beloved central destination in Manhattan, the 5-story Donnell Library is now widely understood to have been a mistake. Library administration officials now apologize acknowledging it was a significant mistake, but that is only so long as we keep reminding the public what was lost and how the library was sold for a pittance, while real estate industry insiders like Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner benefitted from this first “shrink-and-sink” deal by replacing it with luxury tower, a tiny underground and largely bookless library in its base.
    •   Working with others in the community, we have so far prevented the sale the Pacific Branch Library, the first Carnegie in Brooklyn, next to Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards megadevelopment (now aka “Pacific Park”), which in 2013 the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) announced was one of its two highest priorities to sell as it launched a program of real estate deal sell-offs.
    •   For almost four years, from 2013 to 2017, we delayed and fended off the sale and destruction of Brooklyn’s second biggest library, the central destination Brooklyn Heights Library, which included the central Business Career and Education Library and a now shuttered Federal Depository Library making federal documents, records, and history available to the public. This was another “shrink-and-sink” sale of property, also next to (and involving) Forest City Ratner property was the BPL’s other first announced highest priority. Again, a luxury tower will stand where an important central destination library once stood. Garnering over 2,000 testimonies from the community we surprised everybody by causing Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to come out against the project after it was launched. It was also reportedly the subject of a “play-to-play” investigation with respect to the development team that was an inferior bidder channeling funds to Mayor de Blasio. That investigation appears to have been dropped immediately after Donald Trump stunned the public by firing U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
    •    We alerted the public and Red Hook community about “Spaceworks,” a real estate company formed Mayor Bloomberg’s administration to shrink libraries viewing library space as being under utilized we helped to prevent the already woefully small 7,500 square foot Red Hook library from being shrunk down to just 5,500 square feet. Brooklyn Community Board 6 helped kill the shrinkage. (While we also worked to get the word out to the Williamsburg community about a proposed shrinkage there with Spaceworks being handed the second floor of the Williamsburg Library, we were not able to act fast enough and Councilman Steve Levin and Brooklyn Community Board 1 were supporting the scheme.)
     •   We alerted the Sunset Park community about long-secret plans to sell the Sunset Park Library and redevelop it into a mixed used project. We believe that because we were on the scene to shine this spotlight, and also because the BPL wanted to overcome our opposition to the Brooklyn Heights Library sale, Sunset park is the first time the BPL actually proposed to enlarge one of the the libraries it was targeting for sale. That will be a sort of victory if there is no subsequent bait-and-switch. Unfortunately, it is not a perfect victory. Our sense is that for good and valid reasons the informed Sunset Park community was still largely, perhaps 90%, opposed to the library replacement plan they were not involved in developing and from which they will suffer while the library is closed for many years before it is replaced. Unfortunately, those who were in place to fight for the Sunset Park community’s interests did not ultimately defend them. That includes Brooklyn Community Board 7 and City Councilman Carlos Menchaca.
     •   Citizens Defending Libraries was also on the scene to shine a spotlight and help put things quickly in perspective for the Inwood Community when the NYPL announced it wanted to turn the Inwood Library into a real estate deal, likely also as a part of an effort to help push through a upzoning of the area.
     •   Citizens Defending Libraries similarly sounded the alarm before word was out publicly about a proposal for a consolidating shrinkage of the Brower Park Library with the Prospect Heights Children’s Museum (reversing a previous expansion).
     •    Citizens Defending Libraries has been engaged in an education and publicity campaign. It included:

     •       Forums, including a mayor forum during the 2013 election with most of the candidates endorsing our proposals that libraries be properly funded, not sold and shrunk. Mayor de Blasio, whose position we changed during the campaign, joined with us in July to proclaim that our libraries should not be sold saying: “It's public land and public facilities and public value under threat. . . and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties.” Unfortunately, by October he was taking money from developers behind the curtain.
        •   As a result of our activism there have been hearings about the sale and shrinkage of libraries starting with a very important June 27, 2013 New York State Assembly hearing that embarrassed city library administration officials.

• A letter of support signed by multiple community organizations, electeds and candidates running for office.

• In May of 2016 Citizens Dfending Libraries was honored to be a recipient of the Historic Districts Council's Grassroots Preservation Award.

Despite our battles won, our NYC libraries are still besieged by a major war and the threat of such plans.

What libraries are affected?

Library officials said early on that they wanted to sell the most valuable NYC libraries first. And indeed, that is exactly what the NYPL did when its first move was to sell the central destination Donnell Library, a library that was documented to be on most valuable block in Manhattan at the time. Similarly, the concurrently launched Central Library Plan with its proposed sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library focused on the choicest real estate. The BPL did the same thing prioritizing two prime site libraries adjacent to Forest City Ratner property for probable luxury towers, the Brooklyn Heights Library and the Pacific Branch library. Unfortunately, the libraries that are most valuable to real estate developers are also the most valuable to the public for very similar reasons, including central accessible locations.

The most valuable libraries may be at the top of this list, but all libraries in the New York City system are currently under siege. All libraries are under siege because of the deliberate, unprecedented and absolutely unnecessary underfunding of NYC libraries that is being presented as an excuse to sell libraries affects all libraries in all our city's boroughs.

All libraries in the New York City system should also be considered currently under siege because each and every library sale becomes precedent and a model for the next. The shrink-and-sink sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library replicates the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library (in fact it was conceived at the same time with the same people in the background). Moreover, BPL president Linda Johnson told the City Council when it was approving the shrink-and-sink Brooklyn Heights Library sale that it would be a model for future library deals by all three city library systems, the BPL, which she heads, the NYPL and the Queens Library. Johnson has referred to herself as head of the Brooklyn Library system as having "over 1,000,000 square feet of real estate" at her disposal.

While Library officials are attracted to seizing for conversion the most valuable libraries first, they are also usually tactically coy about their plans. At this point they openly acknowledge going after only a few libraries at a time. They go after the very valuable ones they want and they also go after the libraries where they believe they have ascertained that they can overcome community opposition and expect that they can, at the same time, perhaps achieve another objective that attracts them, like laying the groundwork for an upzoning in Inwood or establish and entrench a principle of reduction as with Spaceworks in Red Hook and Williamsburg.

For more details about affected libraries click here: What Libraries Are Affected By City Strategy Of Defunding, Shrinking, Selling Off Libraries?

Are The Libraries Being Shrunk, Pushed Underground, Books and Librarians Eliminated Because the World Is "Going Digital"?

Although the people promoting library sales and elimination of books would like to use as an excuse that the world is going digital, that is not the case. New York City libraries are more used than ever. Although use was up 40% programmatically, most of the recent increased use is in terms of circulation, 59%, and almost all of that circulation is physical books. That is despite an effort by NYC library administration officials to steer people into the use of digital books (which, maybe surprisingly, are actually more expensive for the libraries) and away from what they derisively refer to as "old-fashioned analogue books."

While digital books sometimes have some advantages the general population tends to prefer physical books. Further, there are advantages with physical books related to the way people learn and think and there are problems and concerns about digital books that need to be considered. See: Physical Books vs. Digital Books.

At the same time, libraries do need to address digital needs and provide access to the internet; they need to help bridge the so-called "digital divide" between those who have ready access to computers and the internet and those who don't. For that reason libraries should actually be growing to address these expanded needs rather than shrinking. In this regard it is, indefensible and inexplicable that two top-notch libraries with some of the most advanced and robust support of computer and internet libraries, SIBL the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library and the downtown Brooklyn Heights Library with its Business, Career and Education Library, were both targeted for simultaneous elimination.

Are Libraries Just Too Expensive a Luxury to Pay For?

In the overall scheme of things, New York City libraries cost virtually nothing. When it comes to libraries, no matter how you slice and dice it, we are dealing with total funding figures that come to fractions of a percentage point, this despite the fact that, economically, libraries more than pay for themselves, and: “More people visited public libraries in New York than every major sports team and every major cultural institution combined.”

Notwithstanding, subsidies to sports venues like the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena dwarf what we spend on libraries. In 8 years when we spent at least $620 million on just three sports arenas, (the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" included) that amount was 1.37 times the amount spent on libraries serving seven times as many users.

The underfunding of libraries is notwithstanding that libraries are one of the public's top priorities. The city’s 59 community boards ranked library services as their“third highest budget concern” and“Brooklyn’s community boards ranked libraries their top priority.” In 2013 when the NYC Comptroller polled the public about its priorities for "The People's Budget" libraries were again one of the very top priorities.

Valuable in so many ways in their own right, libraries must also be considered an essential adjunct to schools and ensuring proper education and literacy of the population. One thing that a recurring trope in science fiction scripts gets right is that there is a high correspondence, if not quite one-to-one correlation, between the demise of great libraries and the collapse of once great civilizations.

NYC Libraries Are Being Sold For Huge Losses And For Minuscule Fractions of Their Value

People ask whether the public is at least getting good deals or "value" when we sell our libraries. We absolutely are not. We are selling our libraries for far less than their worth and far less than we have invested in them. The losses are actually profoundly embarrassing notwithstanding the proclivity of library officials to deceptively characterize proceeds from sales as "profits," and as "hefty" rather than "paltry." That's been true since the beginning. . .

. . . The first library sold, the Donnell Library, the central destination, 97,000-square foot, five-story central destination library on what was documented to be the most valuable block in Manhattan at the time, was sold to net the NYPL less than $25,000 million. The penthouse in the luxury tower that replaced it in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell went on the market for $60 million. Another single lower-level condo unit in the luxury building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50. There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower. according to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese investors made that hotel,“the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . . .more than $2 million a room.”

. . . The central destination Brooklyn Heights Library in Downtown Brooklyn, expanded and fully upgraded in 1993, one of the most modern and up-to-date libraries in the system would cost more than $120 million to replace. The city sold it for less than its tear-down value, for less than its value as a vacant lot, and because it was sold to a developer who's inferior bid was not the highest bid, it's sale became the subject of one of the pay-to-play investigations of the de Blasio administration. When costs are finally calculated it is likely the city and library administration officials will have netted less than $25 million from this library's ruination.

. . . In two suspicious real estate deals the NYPL has sold the 34th Street SIBL library, the city's biggest science library . . . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: TO READ MORE- Click: Libraries Being Sold For Huge Losses And Minuscule Fractions of Their Value

Who Is Selling Our Libraries?

The plans to sell our libraries were announced under the Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration and it appears that they go back to at least 2005 and probably at least 2004. Prior to the Bloomberg administration, NYC libraries were being expanded significantly under the Giuliani administration. During the 2013 mayoral race, candidate Bill de Blasio said that the library sales should be halted, but in short order Mr. de Blasio was taking money from real estate developers "behind the curtain . .very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties.”

Once in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio continued with the library sales he decried as a candidate, although, to give the devil his due, de Blasio did not proceed with the full-blown NYPL Central Library Plan. While the Mid-Manhattan library is now being subjected to a consolidating shrinkage it is no longer being sold straight out, but, under Mayor de Blasio we are still selling SIBL the city's biggest science library. We are also still exiling research books off premises from where they were once readily and quickly retrievable at the 42nd Street Library.

There are other elected officials that are avidly taking the lead pushing these city library sales. Foremost among them is city council member Brad Lander. Also clearly conspicuous in his enthusiastic and unrelenting support for these plans is Jimmy Van Bramer head of the City Council Cultural Committee of which the city council's library subcommittee is a sub-component he domainates in leading. . .

. . Each particular local city council member must also be held responsible for what happens to the libraries in their districts, but revelations are that many of them, like Councilman Stephen Levin (Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg libraries), Ydanis Rodriguez (Inwood Library) and Carlos Manchacca (Sunset Park Library), were brought on board behind the scenes in advance to . . .

TO READ MORE (including about the involvement of a Trump presidential son-in-law, Blackstone's Steve Schwarzman, the library boards of trustees, law enforcing officials standing idly by the sidelines and what are supposed to be charitable organizations serving the public) - Click: WHO Is Selling Our Libraries?

When Did The Plans To Sell Libraries (Plus The Launching of The Concomitant Underfunding of Libraries) Begin?

Chart from Center From an Urban Future report showing sharp decline in funding (coinciding with plans to sell off/"leverage" libraries) against escalating use.

As noted, although plans to sell NYC libraries were not announced by the Mayor Michael Bloomberg administration until much later, those plans actually to go back to at least 2005 or probably 2004. David Offensend was hired by the NYPL in June of 2004 and, though he is imprecise, he says that he started working on library deals not long after his arrival there. Janet Offensend, his wife, who helped launch BPL library sales started haunting the BPL and its board in 2005. Other city development officials were being positioned by Mayor Bloomberg on the BPL board around that time. (The Bloomberg administration took office January 1, 2002, shortly after 9/11. By contrast, the Giuliani administration implemented library expansion plans that carried over into the early Bloomberg years.)

The BPL's minutes for 2005 show that in January a developer, perhaps jumping the gun based on inside knowledge, was angling to buy the 12,200 square-foot Midwood Library. In November 2006 the New York Times ran a little noticed article about tearing down “obsolete” branch libraries to produce “new,” "better" library space in multi-use developments saying that a study had produced "an inventory of nearly every branch library in New York City" to identify "candidates for redevelopment" (like the "Red Hook, Sunset Park and Brower Park" libraries and the "Clinton Hill Library," which involves pushing through an accompanying rezoning.) The article mentions "deferred maintenance" as a reason to redevelop the libraries.

In May of 2006 it was revealed that four Connecticut librarians had won a fight, secret because of a gag order since it began in July 2005, to resist broad federal surveillance of their library patrons.

Although the public did not know what it needed to know in order to see it happening, 2007 and 2008 were extremely eventful years in terms of furthering the plans to sell NYC libraries:

2007
• In January 2007, Booz Allen Hamilton (known principally as a private surveillance firm, the "colossus" in the industry, working for the federal government) was hired to assist the NYPL trustees with their strategy of the sale and reformulating of libraries.

• In the Summer of 2007 the Mayor Bloomberg and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris expressed enthusiasm for the NYPL’s plans to sell and redevelop major central destination Manhattan Libraries.

• In November The Donnell Library sale was announced . . . .

TO READ MORE (a complete timeline of library sale events and maneuvers in 2007, 2008 and right through to to the formation of Citizens Defending Libraries) - Click: When Did Library Selling and Underfunding Begin?

It's Not Just The Real Estate Industry Threatening Libraries

While most New Yorkers are attuned to the power and excesses of the city real estate industry and therefore easily understand its role as a key motivator in the assault on libraries, it's unfortunately naive to believe that only the real estate industry has an agenda that is adverse to the tradition of continuing libraries as the democratic commons we have known them to be.

This gets us into some other big questions. TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

Control of Information

Does dumbing down the public make sense, is it truly workable if you want an effective democracy? The availability and control of information, including in libraries as copious storehouses of information, has always long disconcerted authoritarians. For instance, is it surprising to know that Senator Joseph McCarthy exercised his influence to ban from U.S. controlled libraries the music and scores of the "Fanfare For The Common Man" composer Aaron Copeland, because McCarthy believed . . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

No doubt there are those for whom it would be preferable if information in libraries was tidily circumscribed so that it just slipstreams comfortably behind the limited thinking and reporting of the corporate conglomerate controlled national media. That's a corporate media which among other things and by example underreports the climate change crisis, and . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

While the tradition has been to protect and preserve the information entrusted to libraries, information on the internet can be startlingly evanescent, its continued existence subject to decisions made by whim or out of wrath about what the public should see. . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

The Internet And Digital as Business

As the world speeds into digital, it is important to recognize the pull and tugs of what the internet corporations would like, including reasons for wanting things to go digital. There are reasons why, when just five or six (as of 2017) people control as much wealth as half of the rest of the world's population, that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon (and Washington Post) owner Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft's Bill Gates are three for them (with another Carlos Slim Helu incidentally, as part of his media holdings, being the largest shareholder of the New York Times. Those reasons coincide with the reasons Apple, Google/Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are all vying (along with Exxon Mobile) for the spot as largest U.S. company.

. . . Think where all this money comes from. There is, of course, the ubiquitous advertising, as the pop-up ads that saturate far-flung corners of the internet will remind you, just as advertising saturates the monopolistically owned TV and radio airwaves. There is also the data-scraping. As the "old internet saw" was quoted when Google was wiring all of NYC's streets for wireless internet "for free": "If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product." What the private internet companies know about you helps target you . . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats (or start by reading some of the snippets in different categories below.)

Privatized Political Advantage

Among those buying the data are political parties and their campaign operations looking to control the elected seats of government. Now with unprecedented insight into your preferences, those actors and operatives use the data to decide, with tools like gerrymandering, how much your vote should or should not be allowed to count. With "voter preference files" that contain tens of thousands of "sets of data points" they have graduated from "microtargeting specific groups" to "nanotargeting" with different kinds of messages (whether true or not) designed elicit particular `emotional responses' from voters. "Pay to sway" services supply a smorgasbord of . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

Owning Ideas and Culture to Charge For Them

The content industry has its wants as well. Its purveyors desire, for instance, to get the public out to the very latest movie you see touted on billboards, simultaneously on the sides of city buses, via the ads on Comedy Central and other channels, perhaps also boosted by a "sponsorship" mention on your local public radio station as it does featurette reporting . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

A Reduction to Dollar$ ≠ Sense

. . Traditional libraries have always stood as models opposite to the concept that everything in the world, plus everything that ought to be prioritized and perpetually pushed to the fore should exist in stripped-down monetizable dimensions. To evaluate the world exclusively in the very limited terms of seeing things in terms of just numbers or only following the money is, in an of itself, impoverishing. A 2015 report published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review studied how . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

Surveillance

The last big subject to mention bears a relationship to the first topic. When the government, whoever is in charge, isn't actually preventing citizens from reading certain books it might proscribe, it can, nevertheless, be interested in surveiling what books and information members of the public are reading. In theory, this could allow the government to . . . .

TO READ MORE- Click: Examining The Panoply of Threats

Who Is Hurt Most When Libraries Are Defunded and Dismantled? The Poor, The Racially Discriminated Against, Scholars, Future Leaders

Defunding and dismantling our libraries hurts society broadly, probably more broadly than many may have considered.

It is, of course, usually recognized that cutting back on library services significantly impacts low-income neighborhoods relying on them. A PowerPoint presentation to the Queens Library board told it that library service is most important to low-income users: 2/3rds visit at least weekly, & almost 30% visit every/most days. A recent Pew research Center report says "Low-income Americans, Hispanics and African Americans are more likely than others to say that a library closing would impact their lives and communities," see them as community anchors, and use them to pursue jobs. And it's been astutely commented that wherever it happens the loss of libraries is "another surefire way to entrench inequality."

Researchers and students also use the libraries. Arguing to destroy libraries, the NYPL tried a divide-and-conquer-the-community approach suggesting that the research library was elitist and not sufficiently populist when in any given year the researchers and students at its 42nd Street central reference library consult "only 6% of print sources." The same argument was being used to thin out collections at neighborhood libraries and move books off-site from those locations too. That "6%" consultation rate was referred to by Ada Louise Huxtable in her very last column, published just weeks before her death (Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, December 3, 2012), in which she lambasted the NYPL's Central Library Plan including its stingy thinking that books should not be kept on hand if they are consulted infrequently:

If we could estimate how many ways in which the world has been changed by that 6%, the number would be far more meaningful than the traffic through its lion-guarded doors. The library's own releases, while short on details, consistently offer a rosy picture of a lively and popular "People's Palace." But a research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not a popularity contest measured by head counts, the current arbiter of success. This is already the most democratic of institutions, free and open to all. Democracy and populism seem to have become hopelessly confused.

Among other things, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and SIBL are the libraries for the graduate students at CUNY, the City University of New York, who . . . .

TO READ MORE (about how the benefits of libraries are transmitted throughout society, the racial discrimination in selling libraries and divide and divide-and-conquer-the-community ploys) - Click: Who Is Hurt Most When Libraries Are Defunded and Dismantled?

How Many Books Are Disappearing?

Venturing into a library to witness scads of empty book shelves is a disorientating experience. The empty shelves constitute early warning signs: Empty shelves at Mid-Manhattan Library, SIBL, the Brooklyn Heights Library, the Grand Army Plaza Library, the 42nd Street Central Reference Library have meant that these libraries have been targeted to be involved in library sale and shrinkage plans.

It is stunning how many books have disappeared and become unavailable, multiple millions overall. (Library administration officials have done their best to obscure true counts of the reductions.) If the books disappear from targeted libraries far enough in advance library administration officials can deceptively promise that there will be as many books after the shrinkage of the library as before. Another deception is for library officials to claim that if books are exiled to be consolidated elsewhere in a "deduping" center there will actually be "more" books as a result. ("Deduping" is euphemism for book elimination, the idea being the more books you consolidate in a central location the more books you have that are "duplicates" to be eliminated.)

Amazingly, despite the increasing difficulty in obtaining books NYC book circulation is going up and circulation increases are mainly the physical books that patrons generally prefer. The idea that because some books (not all- for instance, Robert Caro's "The Power Broker") are available digitally we no longer need libraries to supply physical books is a myth. That library administration officials disparage physical books as "old-fashioned analogue books" or just "artifactual originals" or that those officials will spend more money to push people in to digital reading than what spending on physical books costs does not make that myth any more true.

When library officials solicit contributions from the general public they will jive about how they are asking for that money in order to buy more books because they know that is a vision the public will support and respond favorably to, but at the same time library officials are less than transparent about how they are actually removing books from library premises and from the system entirely.

For more information about how many millions of books have disappeared from which libraries . .

TO READ MORE- Click: How Many Books Are Disappearing From New York City Libraries?

Why Turning Libraries Into Real Estate Deals Isn't The Good Deal Library and City Development Officials Describe

At first blush, many people have accepted what city development and library officials have regularly asserted about the deals launching this city-wide program of converting libraries into real estate deals (or, similarly, "redeveloping" our schools for that matter), that by "unlocking" library real estate development rights with multi-use developments it is a "win-win" proposition that benefits the libraries as well as the developers and real estate industry.

The offer of a free lunch is a tempting thing to hope for, but it doesn't bear scrutiny. The math, when you do it, simply doesn't work out: It is expensive to tear down existing, frequently recently renovated libraries that the public has already invested substantially in. When these development ideas are promoted the math goes from initial wishful fantasies, to deliberately obfuscated lack of transparency, to outright mendacious misrepresentation. If library officials had insisted that the Donnell Library or the Brooklyn Heights Library be fully and completely replaced when they were sold (irrespective or their spaces being shoved underground), the sales would have to be calculated showing deep and obviously absurd public losses. . .

There is also the disruption that affects the public. And, although library and city officials try to skip over the point, when library assets are being divested, the libraries are, in the process, shedding their opportunities for future expansion and to keep pace as the city grows.

Moreover and probably most important, such multi-use development schemes force the libraries to "partner" with powerful private real estate interests that ultimately wind up in the drivers seat, setting the priorities with big checkbooks that bankroll false and misleading PR. With the moneyed interests throwing their weight around, the public is exposed to bait-and-switch variations. The Donnell Library sale deal that was described to the press and public when it was announced in no way resembled the deal that was consummated.

Selling Libraries And The Broader Issue of Private Sector Plunder of Public Property

Libraries are not our only public commons that are undemocratically under attack. The attacks on libraries reflect a much wider scourge of plundering our public assets with the selling off and privatizing of schools, hospitals, public housing, parks, and even the privatization of our streets and sidewalks. Accordingly, instead of just fighting the library fight, Citizens Defending Libraries (and you can join us) has reached out to other activists to hold a series of forums on the selling off of public assets and help engender and understanding of the commonalty of the threats and tactics an subterfuges we see. For instance, as Noam Chomsky has explained one such "standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don't work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.". . (In other words, when the door is open to privatization and sell-off there is an inducement to underfund.) And then, with the transfer to private ownership, the result for public gets even worse.

Some of The Biggest Lies To Watch Out For

City and library officials working with real estate developers trot out a standard set of misleading falsehoods and ploys to promote library sales. If you think they sound good, watch out, often what they are saying is pretty much opposite to the real truth.

Want to know what lies to watch out for? . .

TO READ MORE- Click: The Biggest Lies To Watch Out For When Official Sell Libraries

(Read about: lies about public process * Lies about how to oppose a sale * Lies that "replacement" libraries will be as big or bigger * Lies that libraries are too "dilapidated" to fix * The "same number of books" lie)

Where Does It Go From Here? What Can You do?

One thing you can do is consider this a worthy cause and inform yourself and others about it. Protection and preservation of our libraries is something that most people instantly and automatically understand. As one member of our group observed early on: "If you can't stop them at libraries, where can you stop them?" That's why we must stop them.. .

. . But also, because people do understand what it means to protect libraries, because they understand it in their very bones, the protection of libraries is an issue and a cause that can be used as a fulcrum to push back on the many other issues that relate to it, the impoverishing privatizations of public assets in general, abuses of the real estate industry, the corrupting influence of money in politics, inequality of power and wealth and the abuses of power by the wealthy.

What Can We Do Next?

TO READ MORE- Click: How to Defend Our Libraries.

(Read about: Altering the law * Insisting on transparency * defending library buttons * Our Letter of Support * Our petition * Our mailing List * Testimony at public hearings * Birddogging elected officials * Contacting the press * Social media * Having us speak to yous community organization * Letters to the editor/comment on web articles * Research help * FOIL assistance * Singing the marvelous Judy Gorman library song )

The morning crowd waiting for the Brooklyn Heights downtown library to open

The Petition Being Put Forth By Citizens Defending Libraries

The first petition (gathered over 17,000 signature, most of them online- available at signon.org with a background statement and can still be signed). On June 16, Citizens Defending libraries issued a new updated petition that you can sign now:

Mayor de Blasio: Rescue Our Libraries from Developer Destruction

CONTACT: To contact Citizens Defending Libraries email MDDWhite (at) aol.com.

The archive of our previous web page (used into December 2017) can be found by clicking HERE.

Monday, October 2, 2023

Obituary: Sheila John Daly White, last of the “celebrated Daly sisters”

My mother Sheila John Daly White died July 2, 2023 at age 95. (This is Michael D. D. White writing this with ample help from other collaborating family members.)

You may find this web/blog posting here a strange place to read an obituary, but it says something about the way things have changed: If I don't post this here, it currently seems that this obituary will appear nowhere else. No other media outlets seem currently interested in publishing this story when biographical facts were offered. For much of my mother's life she received a fair share of media attention, treated as a minor celebrity and interviewing and mingling with the top celebrities. . .

. . I remember when I was young the suspense of being at home watching her appear on CBS's "To Tell The Truth" quiz show where the job of the show's panelists was to guess whether my mother or two imposters were the real teenage advice columnist, once the nation's youngest columnist. It was very boring; it was over so quickly since the panelists had no trouble identifying my mother as the actual columnist and book author. Not that it was ultimately so important, but my mother once briefly dated Peter Lawford (or maybe "sort of" she once later hedged). She was on the set to watch when Lawford filmed one of his musical numbers for the 1947 film "Good News." I'm pretty sure it was "The French Lesson" number he performed with June Allyson. My mother would have been 19. I, myself, met Lawford (or "sort of') much later when he was hanging out with my cousin-in-law Jean-Paul Vignon in an after party at the Waldorf when they had both just appeared on Carson's "Tonight Show." (I didn't talk to him about my mother.)

Once upon a time, the media companies, now reduced mainly to five or six, would have taken a special interest in my mother's passing, but now, for whatever reason, that's not the case. My mother and the extended family of which she was a part was also very much a part of the media that once took an interest in her. This says something about the way information flows now, and how it flowed then.

Here then is a form of obituary to tell you something about my mother's life.

Obituary: Sheila John Daly White, last of the “celebrated Daly sisters” --- Died 34 Gramercy Park, New York, New York 10003- July 2, 2023 at 95

Sheila John Daly White, last of what Time Magazine dubbed the “celebrated Daly sisters” died quietly at home at 34 Gramercy Park earlier this July at the age of 95. Writing as Sheila John Daly, Sheila was, at one time, the nation’s youngest syndicated columnist and author of multiple teenage advice books while still in her teens. She later had significant success when she transitioned to the realm of advertising (after her husband’s death), using the name Sheila D. White and writing copy for, among other products, Oil of Olay, and Chanel. Sometimes, doing voice-over work, she was also a voice for Chanel in its advertisements.

Sheila’s death July 2, 2023 brought to an end the era of the Daly sisters, which began exactly 107 years to the day before, with the July 2, 1916 birth of Maggie Daly,* the first born of the four Daly sisters, in Castle Caulfield, County Tyrone, Ireland, followed by Kay (Kathleen)**- 1919 and Maureen***- 1921. Sheila, born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, 11/7/’27 was the first, and only one of the four sisters born in the United States where the family moved and settled to avoid political troubles in Ireland. The troubles came from two directions: Uncle Jack Kelly was in the British military while his brother-in-law Joe Daly, owner of a bicycle shop and father of the Daly sisters, "might have lent the wee lads (of the IRA) a bicycle or two" (used for some smuggling that was done.) Precipitating the family's departure from Ireland, men piled straw up against wall of the house where the wife and three young daughter's lived and said to the household's father: "We are not saying we are going to light it Joe, and we are not saying we're not."

   (* Starting as a fashion model, Maggie Daly wrote about fashion for magazines, then wrote a gossip column appearing first in Chicago's American, then Chicago Today, and finally in the Chicago Tribune. She also had a Chicago television interview show, was a frequent guest on other Chicago TV and radio shows and hosted regular lunchtime fashion shows where she simultaneously interviewed celebrity guests. She is the mother of actress Brigid Bazlen who married singer/actor Jean-Paul Vignon.)

   (** Kay- Kathleen- Daly, worked in advertising with such people as Richard Avedon, became a Revlon vice president responsible for its unique inhouse advertising division. Two of her most notable campaigns were Maidenform’s “I Dreamed I Was. . . In My Maidenfom Bra,” and Revlon’s “Fire and Ice.” Sheila also eventually worked with such people as Avedon as did other members of her more extended family. When Kay moved to San Francisco after World War II, her talent for promotion garnered her nationwide fame early in her career when she rented space with herself on a billboard to advertise for an affordable apartment. It also netted her many marriage proposals. A 1954 romantic comedy starring Judy Holiday and Peter Lawford, "It Should Happen To You," is based on a plot where an ambitious young woman rents a billboard to make `a name for herself.')

   (*** Novelist and writer Maureen Daly became famous for writing “Seventeenth Summer” at age 19, following a number of well-known short stories– “Fifteen” and “Sixteen”– that preceded it and is credited with launching the young adult genre.- See NY Times Obit. For the more than a million readers of “Seventeenth Summer,” more or less a Roman à clef— it’s never gone out of print– where the family of the young Daly sisters is represented by the Morrow family living in Fond du Lac, Sheila was recognizable as Kitty- attached to her Chow dog Kinkee, the ten-year-old sister and frequent companion of 17-year-old Angie Morrow, the protagonist and stand-in for the author Maureen. Fun family lore fact about Maureen: It was Maureen, working morgue reporting duty for her newspaper, who first identified the body of Frank Nitti, Al Capone's enforcer. The date was March 19, 1943 so Maureen would have been just a few days past 22 years of age. Longtime newspaper man Dynamite Sokol had taken Maureen around city haunts pointing out who was who, so that's how she knew, or, . . . talked less in the family, is that Maureen may have dated "Bottles Capone," Al's older brother. The Daly sisters were so well known that Maureen's husband, the very well regarded mystery novelist William P. McGovern decided to improve his billing as a writer by referring to himself as "the fifth Day sister.")

Sheila's originally Irish family was living in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin when Sheila was born specifically because her father, coming to America, and visiting Irish cousins in the Chicago area who offered him a job, declined the work when he realized it was bootlegging.

Sheila and her three sisters were the children of Joseph Desmond Daly (B. March 20, 1882, Castlecaufield, Tyrone, Ireland) and Margaret Dorothea Lockhart Kelly (B. July 13, 1887 Cross m' Loof, Scotland, near Glasgow). Her mother was from a branch of the Mellon family (Sheila’s maternal grandmother was Margaret Rose Mellon) giving her and her sisters a cousinship with the banker Andrew Mellon.

"Kitty" the 10-year old was the stand in for Sheila in "Seventeenth Summer." Sheila wrote her first published story at age 11. Here Sheila is with her Chow dog Kinky (slightly different spelling)

Sheila was just 11 years old when she sold her first story, “The Sisters;” published in the November 1938 issue of Woman’s Day magazine. As she told it, she was pestering her older sister Maureen to take her swimming. Maureen, seven years her senior, already a recognized writer, suggested, “Why don’t you write something!” That was because Maureen herself was concentrating on writing her first novel, “Seventeenth Summer” (1942). Maureen then sent the story on Sheila’s behalf to the magazine.

Sheila went to high school at St. Mary’s Springs Academy. One of the nuns, an English Teacher there, Sister Rosita, nurtured the interest in writing inspired in Sheila by her sisters.

When Maureen moved on from her job as a syndicated columnist for teenagers for the Chicago Tribune-NYNews Syndicate to become an editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, she suggested that Sheila, then a high school senior, be her replacement. Sheila undertook writing the column at age sixteen, the year her father died, and continued the five-days-a-week column. The teenage advice column she took over from Maureen was originally titled “On The Solid Side.” This Time Magazine story about "bouncy brunette" Sheila, nicknamed ChiChi, alternately spelled "Chi-Chi," has Sheila, painting the town in Manhattan when she was 21, while "she turns out two Sunday newspaper columns and a monthly feature for the Ladies' Home Journal" while writing her column and books as well. Time notes that in just over four years after taking the column over Sheila tripled the number of papers carrying it.

Sheila graduated St Mary’s Springs as valedictorian and continued the five-days-a-week column with an ever expanding audience for more than twenty-five years. One of her weekly featured columns was “Tops Among Teens,” a profile of an outstanding teenager making a mark in the world. Among those spotlighted: Mickey Mantle, Mel Tormé, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and a host of other show business and athletic stars, some perchance destined to go on to more fame than others, Natalie Wood, Joel Grey, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Jackie Collins, Susie Parker, Piper Laurie, Kenneth Nelson, Rosemary Williams, and, for instance Ice Capades stars, who were getting recognition at early ages.

Graduating from St Mary’s Springs in 1945, Sheila followed her sisters to Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois, folding in the demands of college with newspaper assignments in Europe, lectures around the country for the W. Colston Leigh lecture bureau and a growing number of magazine assignments, including participation in the Ladies’ Home Journal heralded series “Profile of Youth.” Midway in her sophomore year Sheila left Rosary College to concentrate on her career. While still in her teens, she wrote a number of books for teenagers “Personality Plus,” (1946) “Party Fun” (1948) and “Pretty, Please.” (1948). Other of her books include “Blondes Prefer Gentlemen,” (1949) “Questions Teen-Agers Ask,” (1963) “Teen-Agers ask More Questions,” (1964) and “Travel Tips For Teens” (1968). A 2012 blogger who fell in love discovering Sheila's writing in the 1940 provides a slew of wonderful quotes curated from Sheila's books. (Maureen, not Sheila, wrote, "What’s Your P.Q. (Personality Quotient).)

Sheila meeting Peter

Sheila met her husband, Peter Gillette White, accidentally while they were being photographed by Life Magazine as part of the Magazine’s preparation of a November 7, 1949 (Sheila's birthday) photo feature article about the four successful sisters. Sister Kathleen gave a party that Life requested to show the `social side’ of the sisters, and Kathleen invited Peter, son of Thomas Justin White, the General Manager of the Hearst Organization for whom Kathleen had worked in Chicago, to the party thinking, when she was on the phone with him, that she was actually inviting his brother, John Michael White. According to legend and Sheila’s account, Sheila plied her official date of the evening with drink in order to spend more time with Peter. (A few years prior, Peter had been a personal pilot to General Kenneth David Nichols, the second in command, responsible for logistics, at the Manhattan Project, flying the General in and out of Los Alamos. This was after the bombs had been dropped on Japan.)

Life Magazine ran a follow up feature on the sisters in 1959 with a picture of the four sisters posing with all of their respective children.

Sheila married Peter at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago November 4th, 1950. Sheila continued her newspaper, magazine and book work while Peter worked as a copywriter and group creative director at various New York City advertising agencies.

In 1964, Sheila added to her other activities and started working with her husband becoming Vice President of Peter G. White, Inc., a creative study group. The couple worked with four practicing psychoanalysts to create emotion-based advertising strategies and prototype advertising for agencies and manufacturers. The group proposed the basis for campaigns for clients such as the American Cancer Society, Arnold Bread, a high profile mouthwash, 21 Brands, Pet Milk and a score of other clients whose contracts required total confidentiality.

After Peter died unexpectedly December 26, 1968 at the age of 43, Sheila, with three sons, 16, 14 and 13, to support, went to work for Norman, Craig & Kummel (NCK), an ad agency where her sister Kay had been creative director in the 50s and for whom Peter had also once worked. Bother-in-law John Michael White also worked there. At NCK Sheila rose from senior copywriter to Associate Creative Director and Vice President, working on Chanel, Maidenform, TWA. Revlon, Saab and a range of other clients.

Sheila’s most notable success at NCK was working on Oil of Olay. When she began it was a not well known beauty skin cream and was one of the agency’s smaller accounts. (Olay began in the U.S. as a tiny South African company purchased by the Vick Chemical Company.) In the beginning, she wrote extended copy intimate columns about Olay that ran, discretely positioned, along the sides of ladies’ magazine pages.

The Olay account grew and Sheila worked as a two-person creative team with art director Nick LaMicela as her partner on Oil of Olay eventually doing TV advertising including a campaign that featured women from around the world talking about the product, (a “mysterious beauty fluid”). The international testimonial campaign in 1976 was reputed to be the most complicated and expensive shoot to that date. When the account was shifted from NCK to Young & Rubicam it was reported as the fourth largest advertising account switches in advertising history.* The client soon requested that Sheila move with it, and she followed going to work for Young & Rubicam working with art director Beverly Okada.

(* See: New York Times: Advertising, By Philip H. Dougherty, November 10, 1977: “Oil of Olay beauty lotion, which went from $2.5 million in sales and a 5 percent share of the market to more than $50 million in sales and 26 percent of the market while its advertising was handled by Norman, Craig & Kummel, is switching agencies.” Also see Encyclopedia Britannica on the large advertising account switch. )

Del and Sheila

In 1974 Sheila started to live and spend her time with Ralph Delahaye (Del) Paine Jr. who had been married to her husband’s sister, Nancy White, Editor of Harper’s Bazaar (who took over in that position from her aunt, Carmel Snow). Mr. Paine, formerly high up in the Time/Life corporation, had been a personal assistant to Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce, and was well known as the editor and publisher of Fortune magazine, and publisher of Architectural Forum from 1954 to 1963 and House and Home from 1962 to 1963. During World War II, Paine was in charge of the Time’s “The March of Time” staff’s retreat as the Nazis invaded France. In her relationship with Mr. Paine, the couple spent time at Del’s homes in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire and at Sheila’s Gramercy Park home. The relationship continued until Del’s death January 12, 1991.

In 1982 Sheila was asked by Kitty D’Alessio, who had been hired at NCK by her sister Kay in the 50s and was now president of Chanel in the U.S., to join that company’s creative department. Shortly thereafter, the U.S, creative work was moved in-house and Sheila spent the next twenty-two years at Chanel, most of that time as the only writer. The department handled print, television and radio (much of it based on the initial creative work from France) for the U.S. In addition to writing, Sheila’s work at that time ranged also into TV and voice-over and radio work for Chanel and its subsidiaries. And, if you called Chanel’s office at this time, it was Sheila’ recorded voice on the answering machine and incorporated into the switchboard service. By virtue of this, Sheila was a member of SAG/AFTRA.

After Sheila left Chanel in 2006 she spent her time on personal writing projects, provided editing services, and did some additional voice-over work. Sheila also recently sold for preservation (to the Lake George Land Conservancy) 59.6 acres of lake front property on Lake George, N. Y. after preparing it for subdivision into seven lots. It was the last remaining 1/5th portion of White family Land (in Warren County) that she worked hard to protect and preserve from 1968 onwards after her husband Peter died. All the other acreage from the original family-owned parcel also went into preservation during those years.

Sheila was the oldest and the longest continuous resident of 34 Gramercy Park, the oldest continuously co-op building in New York City, living in the same apartment for 69 years. Sheila is survived by her sons and three granddaughters: Michael D. D. White and his daughter Eve and Audrey, her son Stephen A. White and his daughter Marina, and her son Anthony S. White, and is also survived by a niece Marguerite Gaul who is an honorary sister to those brothers. In her last years, Sheila was especially well cared by Chi-Chi (Chinyere Ugwu) who lived with her 24/7 helping her to deal with medical challenges since 2017.

We will have a celebration of life event Saturday, 11:00 AM, November 11, 2023 at the Manhattan Friends Meeting House on Rutherford Place (between 15th and 16 Street, just East of Third Avenue).

PS: A recording of the Friends Meeting House celebration is now available here: Sheila John Daly White Celebration of Life (among other things you can hear about my mother's conversation with Karl Lagerfeld who had an incredible library of books. Also, here is the White Family Song sung that day crafted to honor my mother's life: Sheila John Daly White Celebration: White Family Song 11/11/2023.
(Also available via Google drive, but without subtitles.)

Sunday, October 1, 2023

WBAI 99.5 fm, Listener Supported Radio for the 99.5%, Needs Promotion- Here’s Some Promotion!

WBAI Radio, 99.5 fm, “Radios for the 99.5%,” “Peace and Justice Radio,” “Free Speech Radio,” the only truly listener supported radio station in New York City, needs promotion.

So here is some promotion we’ve put together.

The following are “carts,” radio spots that can be played on WBAI’s air waves. Some of them are already being played on WBAI. The links below present these as internet versions, YouTube shorts, Tweets, etc.

Members of our library defending community will probably recognize some of the voices heard. And by the way, if you’d like to volunteer to do some reading, we have more spots in the works, or we may produce new versions of some of these. Plus we are producing more, which means you can also suggest new scripts!

Listening to these spots you’ll realize that the reasons for promoting WBAI coincide greatly with the reasons for protecting our libraries, including having refuge from the internet and a protected realm for alternative narratives to the just-not-so and so-not-just stories that the powerful pump out for mass consumption.

One of our newly elected WBAI Local Station Board members* who is expert at and very successful at getting publicity, said that when he was running for the board he was stunned by how many of his friends just didn’t know about WBAI, or, at least, didn’t know what WBAI is up to recently. . . . And that ignorance has serious financial implications given how important it is for WBAI to be a robust institution.

(* Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White- whose voice you’ll har in many of the spots- is also on the Local Station Board)

As noted, these are audio spots that may be played on the air, but they are also now set up for internet distribution. Like it or not, the internet has a lot to do with the way things get promoted these days. Also, it is a way to reach out and promote the station to people who are not already listening to the station. And it’s an opportunity to remind people in the internet’s sphere that, when it comes to censorship, there can be a certain tenuous evanescence to the internet and that the internet and narratives there can be subject to strange and problematic combinations of monitoring and manipulation.

The spots below are set up for easy access and sharing via YouTube (including a playlist), Twitter (X?), and Facebook or other platforms. Please consider helping promote WBAI by sharing them.

If sharing produces certain favorites, we may find that means you’ll hear those spots when they played more often on WBAI as a result!

Hope your listening (and sharing) will be fun!

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