It Gets Personal, But This Gossip Is, In Fact, Real News About The Business of Selling Libraries- Two From That Constellation of Library-Selling Stars Hook Up As A Couple: Bruce Ratner and Brooklyn Library President Linda Johnson– Guess Where?

The photo of Bruce and Linda that creeps in here is from a recent BPL gala

Sometimes to report truly relevant news, even about the real estate deal sales that plunder our libraries, you have to sound a little bit like a gossip column. . . .

Guess who’s dating whom on the sly?  Guess who just got divorced?  What two darlings spotlighted in the annals of library sell-off deals are shacking up in a love nest the location of which you might find startling and hard to fathom?

A couple of days ago reporting by the Real Deal highlighted three “memorable” residential sales that just “popped up in records.”  The number one deal highlighted was a couple’s purchase of one of the luxury condo apartments in the much litigated over and promenade-view-impairing Pierhouse development in Brooklyn Bridge Park at 130 Furman Street. . .

And who was the “couple”?: it was Bruce Ratner and Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson.

To wit, here is what the Real Deal reported:

    1.) Forest City Ratner co-founder Bruce Ratner along with Linda Johnson snapped up a condominium along the Brooklyn waterfront. The couple paid $4.7 million for the two-bedroom pad at 130 Furman Street. Ratner split from Dr. Pamela Lipkin, a plastic surgeon, who at one point during the couple’s divorce had alleged Ratner was trying to evict her from her clinic at 128 East 62nd Street.

See:  These are some of the most notable NYC resi sales of the week- Lots of Brooklyn Nets connections, by Mary Diduch, January 28, 2019

We generally like to be well wishers when couples unite, but what a confluence of the unsavory this is.  Where do we start in making the connections; there are so many connectable dots in play:

    •    Bruce Ratner is, after all, the Bruce Ratner “developer” of Forest City Ratner, who, as in the case of the Atlantic Yards Project (now going by the alias “Pacific Park”- Park?), has specialized in subsidy collection and preferential no-bid handouts from government.  When BPL president Linda Johnson first announced the sale of Brooklyn public libraries, saying that the BPL wanted to sell the most valuable libraries first, the two libraries at the top of her list for sale first were both adjacent to Forest City Ratner property.  See:  What Could We Expect Forest City Ratner Would Do With Two Library Sites On Sale For The Sake Of Creating Real Estate Deals? and A Ratner in the Stacks: Library To Sell Forest City-Adjacent Branches, by Stephen Jacob Smith, February 5, 2013.

    •    The BPL’s plan that prioritized for first sale of the two Ratner adjacent was part of a strategic real estate plan that applied to all Johnson’s BPL libraries, and we found out that the consultant who put that plan to together was Karen Backus of Karen Backus & Associates. Karen Backus was Vice President at Forest City Ratner until 1997 when she left to start this firm.  See: Mostly In Plain Sight (A Few Conscious Removals Notwithstanding) Minutes Of Brooklyn Public Library Tell Shocking Details Of Strategies To Sell Brooklyn’s Public Libraries.

    •    BPL’ spokesperson Josh Nachowitz said that the BPL would not rule out the possibility that it would sell to Ratner one of those BPL libraries prioritized for first sale, the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights federal depository library in downtown Brooklyn.  Ultimately, under the circumstances, doing so would have been very bad optics.  The Heights library was not, in fact sold to Ratner.  Nevertheless, the deal was structured in such a way that Ratner became the gatekeeper controlling whether the transaction could proceed.  See: Forest City Ratner As The Development Gatekeeper (And Profit taker) Getting The Benefit As Brooklyn Heights Public Library Is Sold.

    •    BPL president Johnson and Ratner will settle into the Pierhouse amongst company they know well and have significant connections to.  In September 2015 it was considered a scandal when it was discovered that Hank Gutman (Henry B. Gutman) and David Offensend had both purchased condo apartments in the Brooklyn Bridge Park Pierhouse condominium.  Both Gutman and Offensend were board members of the board of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation (BBPC) that had to approve the Pierhouse development, something that then required the Conflicts of Interest Board to rule on whether this was a conflict (a ruling that it is not, is only a ruling by a politically connected COIB).  The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation has pushed for development in Brooklyn Bridge Park.  It has a lot of probably not so coincidental overlap with the board of the BPL where the trustees have pushed to turn libraries into real estate development.  Two of those overlaps are Mr. Gutman and Mr. Offensend themselves. Mr. Gutman who is also on the BPL board has been one of those pushing for library sales.  Mr. Offensend’s wife, Janet Offensend, was also on the BPL board for a critical period of time where she spearheaded adoption of the BPL strategic real estate plan to sell BPL libraries. That included hiring consultant Karen Backus from Forest City Ratner and overseeing the creation and submission of the Backus recommendations).  Janet Offensend’s work as a trustee closely mirrors the work that David Offensend, her husband, was concurrently doing as he set NYC public libraries up for sale when he was Chief Operating Officer of the New York Public Library (NYPL).  Thus, two of the first library sales by the NYPL and BPL respectively, the shrink-and-sink deal of the Donnell Library and the shrink-and-sink deal of the Brooklyn Heights Library (with Ratner as gatekeeper) mirrored each other closely   

    •    With David Offensend being involved in the approval of both transactions, Starwood Development wound up being involved both as a developer of the challenged Pierhouse development in Brooklyn Bridge Park and the luxury development that replaced the Donnell Library sold by the NYPL.

    •    The reason that the Pierhouse development was legally challenged, that community residents were so angry with the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation and its board, and with Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation board members Gutman and Offensend getting condo apartments from the developer (even if the COIB declared there was no conflict of interest) was because of the shenanigans involved when the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation (pushing for more development all the time anyway) allowed the Pierhouse development to violate representations and promises made to the community: The Pierhouse development surprised the community by being built extra tall, and obliterated views from the Brooklyn Heights promenade that were supposed to have been protected.  The Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation tried shuffling off some of the blame to the Pierhouse development architects and including the way that those architects had done their numbers while interpreting some obscure rules the architects chose to apply in making the Pierhouse taller.

    •    Johnson and Ratner’s familiarity with Marvel Architects, the architects of their new digs also relates to libraries.  Marvel Architects, headed by Jonathan Marvel, in addition with being accused of running funny numbers to make Pierhouse taller is also the architect for the luxury tower replacing the Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library, plus is acting as advisor to Ms. Johnson and the BPL on design issues related to selling that library.  Marvel, as advisor to the BPL and Ms. Johnson came up with some very suspicious numbers respecting book counts and bookshelf capacity as the BPL tried to mount and press arguments to ensure that the library was sold for development.  See: It’s Marvelous To Have Books!- Indeed, But Architect Jonathan Marvel Designs a Library Seemingly Oblivious To The Tradition of Finding Books In The Library.

•         At this point, would it be superfluous to add that one of the first so-called “public/private partnerhsips” that BPL president has recommended for the BPL to be pursuing manifested itself in the form of the BPL partnering to promote to local school children Ratner’s Nets at his Atlantic Yards “Barclays” arena?

Back to gossip our column Hedda Hopper voice: We have a page up with more about the BPL trustees and the BPL’s senior officers including well worth reviewing bio of Linda Johnson,  Ms. Johnson started at the BPL in July 2010.  At her first meeting with the BPL board Ms. Johnson told the board how the BPL's real estate plans were her priority and not long thereafter reminded the BPL to remember that their goal was to lock the next mayor (whoever was successor to Bloomberg) into the real estate plans that were secretly underway.

Prior relationship: Linda Johnson with billionaire Leonard Lauder.

Often noted is that until December 2013 Johnson was dating another very wealthy man from a big company, Leonard Lauder, with plans to marry that were broken off just before the scheduled ceremony.  The New York Post states that they had been dating since 2012.  The Times says they were engaged in 2013.  (The relationship reportedly began after Lauder’s first wife Evelyn died in 2011.)  Leonard Lauder's very politically active brother Ron Lauder, also a famously wealthy billionaire was involved in clearing the prohibitions that allowed Bloomberg to get his third term.

The Pierhouse development offers extraordinary views of the New York’s harbor and the lower Manhattan skyline.  What allows it to manage it to do so involves, to an extent, the interposition by which the Pierhouse is grabbing views that were previously available from the Brooklyn Heights promenade and no longer are.  That raises an overall question about who gets the benefit when public assets are usurped for private benefit . . 

Above: Luxury NY Harbor and Manhattan skyline views offered, respectively by Pierhouse where Bruce and Linda bought a condo and by the luxury tower replacing Brooklyn's second biggest library that they were involved in selling off.

The luxury tower now replacing the downtown Heights Business, Career and Education Library that will now dominate the sky of historic Brooklyn Heights is, similarly to the Pierhouse, advertising stunning views.   Those views likewise include sweeping views of the harbor and the downtown Manhattan skyline.  And, as that luxury tower looks down on the much shorter federal courthouse across that way (that, with some success, was challenged for being too tall) it is worthwhile to remember that the spectacular views offered to residents of that tower are based on what the public sacrificed.  We mean by that not only the surrender of the skies of over historic Brooklyn Heights, but the sacrifice of a major library that was recently thoroughly renovated and upgraded to be state-of-the-art and one of the best in the BPL system.

If you are benefitting from the views in either of these developments you are unlikely to have second thoughts about any diminishment of the public realm by which those views may have been achieved.  However, like Bruce and Linda, you may have to keep buying new apartments, whatever has just been built, to stay ahead, and keep you back turned on the losses the public realm is suffering. . .   But the option of continually buying new apartments affording the latest edition of a good view may be something that only those who remain wealthy will be able to afford– That's true; Isn’t it? . .

. . . In that case, if you are benefitting from these newly marketed views, you might indeed actually have second thoughts about the diminishment of the public realm that made it all possible.  That’s because, like Bruce and Linda, your ongoing participation in that diminishment is vital your staying one step ahead on the treadmill.

(BTW: For those who may be confused seeing recent pictures of Mr. Ratner, he has recently shed a great deal of weight.)

It’s Marvelous To Have Books!- Indeed, But Architect Jonathan Marvel Designs a Library Seemingly Oblivious To The Tradition of Finding Books In The Library

Did you catch this?

An Architect Works With a Source of Inspiration: His Father, by Matt A.V. Chaban, June 15, 2015.

It’s a puff piece about architect Jonathan Marvel that appeared in the New York Times, perfectly timed to blunt some bad news about projects Mr. Marvel is the designer of.

And in the background for the big photograph accompanying the piece (did you notice?) like so many of these puff pieces: Books, books, books!  Because books are reassuring.  Books make you trust people.  Books are read by thoughtful people, cultured people, people who know things and have studied things.  Yes, how marvelous to have books, and how marvelous when you want to present people as trustworthy, to present them as book people. . .  present them as people who love and want to live around books. . .  People who, when they want to let the world know who they are think its best to be photographed in front of books!

We’ll get back to the subject of books here shortly, because appearances can be deceiving or at least highly ironic.

The two projects about which Marvel urgently needed criticism muffled or distracted from don’t lie very far from each other.  Each can also be cited as an example of overbuilding.

Marvel's two projects: Blocking the view of the Brooklyn Bridge and squashing out a library

Here’s the bad news with respect to each:

    •    On June 12, 2015 (reported by the Times June 14, 2015- the day before the puff piece) a judge of the Sate Supreme Court, Justice Lawrence S. Knipel ruled that construction of Marvel’s  Pierhouse, a hotel and condominium complex could continue even though it obscures historic views of the Brooklyn Bridge from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.  The building is at least 30 feet in height over what the public was expecting based on negotiated understandings of how development in the park was to be restricted to preserve and respect those views.  We’ve been to public meetings where representatives of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation (BBPC) explained how this extra development disrespecting the understood limits occurred.  The explanation involves an intricate dance where with a pro-development bias the BBPC and those working with it for the developer two-stepped, figuring that the BBPC was exempt from city zoning laws when it was helpful, and referred to following zoning laws when it was helpful.  It is difficult to believe that the architect was not knowingly complicit in this dance that came out with the extra development a developer would want while breaching the understanding that the community expected to followed about protecting the historic views.    

    •    On June 15, 2015, (the day after the puff piece) there was an information dump on the public showing Marvel’s new designed for the 38-story luxury condominium tower that would replace, stomping down to one-third its previous size, the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn's central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at Tillary and Clinton.  The information dump was two days before the start of the ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), a first hearing about whether the city should sell and shrink this valuable public library property getting virtually nothing in return.  The proposal is to sell and shrink the library (which can never be enlarged ever again, like it was in 1993), without even designing a new library first to figure out just how cramped the result might be.  But Marvel, the architect working for the developer who wants the site and the library shrunk did lead some Charrettes (Charades) for the BPL about how to shrink the library down design-wise.  More on the blindness with which the pro-development Marvel was willing to blithely proceed on this shortly.

Both of these Marvel projects above are the subject of petitions opposing the senseless excess and plunder of the public commons involved.  They are respectively:

    •    The petition of Save the View Now challenging the illegal over-building is here: Return the construction of the Pierhouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park to be consistent with the plans approved in 2005.

    •    The petition against these deals selling and shrinking NYC libraries is here: Mayor de Blasio: Rescue Our Libraries from Developer Destruction.

It turns out that Marvel’s architects completely ignored the entire question of book capacity when it came to conducted three public charrettes/charades about how best to shrink the library down to one-third size and it proposed tentative designs for the replacement library without knwing how many books the current library holds or how many it might be good for the new library to hold.

This is despite the fact that the Marvel architects acknowledge that at these charrette/charades the public clearly expressed that what it wanted in the new library was “Books, Books. Books.”   

The following email to Marvel documents that fact in self explanatory fashion.

Email from Citizens Defending Library Co-Founder Michael D. D. White to architect Jonathan Marvel respecting how many books the current central destination library in downtown Brooklyn is designed to hold vs. how many books the drastically shrunken library he is designing would hold.

    Mon, May 25, 2015 4:15 pm

    Jonathan,

    At the design charrette run by Marvel last Monday (the 18th) the Marvel representatives seemed largely unfamiliar about certain things and, for instance, in particular, how many linear feet of book shelf space capacity the current entirety of the 63,000 square foot library including the two half floors underground has vs. how many linear feet of book shelf space capacity the proposed editions of the Marvel design fielded that night were conceptualized to accommodate.

    I thought all the Marvel representatives, each and every one of them, were all going to tell me they didn't know the answer, until Guido at the last table said that he knew the answer and he said that the existing 63,000 foot library on all four floors had 4,500 linear feet of book shelf space and that the designs presented furnished 6,000 linear feet of book shelf space.  I told him that this seemed implausible to me, especially that the entire 63,000 of buildings space including the basement storage areas has only 4,500 linear feet of book shelf space.  I emphasized that the question was linear feet of book shelf space shelf capacity, not the number of number of linear feet of actual books, reduced now that the BPL has been getting rid of books.

    Further, since we were clear that we were talking about the all of the entire 63,000 feet of existing library space, there should be no doubt that we were not asking Guido to play games and supply the result of a weird or self-serving allocation of shelf space to only a portion of the library such as to the so-called "branch" functions vs. business and career functions.  We also are aware and made clear that not all the book shelf space is in the public areas, so we were asking about ALL the shelf space wherever it was, underground, in staff or conference areas.

    I will withhold comment on whether we think the number of linear feet provided for in the new designs were envisioned feasibly or workably or how many feet there actually appear to be.  Among other things, readable scales were not provided that night, and things appeared cramped.

    As none of the other tables or Marvel representatives that night had the information about the amount of relative shelf space, as things got underway, I conveyed Guido's information to them all together with my misgivings about its plausibility.  Interestingly, at my table the head librarian argued for the rest of our table to believe the information furnished by Marvel via Guido.

    Frankly, we find Guido's information about shelf space suspect and inconsistent with what we know about the 63,000 square foot library at the corner of Tillary Clinton.  Nevertheless, I am writing this email to ask that you confirm (or correct) the information Guido furnished at the design event hoping that you will appreciate the opportunity to do so.

Marvel didn’t respond to the email, but later, at a May 27, 2015 Brooklyn Community Board 2 Youth and Education Committee meeting where the BPL and Marvel were making a presentation to the committee pitching for a sell and shrinkage of the library the architects were asked again to state the book capacity of the current library vs. the proposed shrunken library and this time flatly admitted that they didn’t know what that was.  Instead, they offered that it was information that they could sometime obtain and make available.  They haven’t yet. . . 

They haven’t furnished the information which means that Community Board 2 is being asked to approve the library sale and shrinkage without this basic information about the library’s core function.

Mr. Guido Hartray’s representation that the whole 63,000 square foot library had only 4,500 linear feet of shelf capacity amounts to a representation that the library has shelf capacity for maybe only 32,400 or 33,000 books at most.  Yet, in 1992, with a rapidly growing collection that the library was expanding by one-third to accommodate better, the library had 130,000 books plus substantial other materials so the shelf capacity then (and probably added to later as well), should have likely have exceeded at least18,000 linear feet by that year.

The well-timed puff piece tells us cheerfully that working on projects like these two in Brooklyn* Jonathan Marvel’s practice “has already doubled in size to 65 designers, with no space left to grow” to accommodate Mr. Marvel and his books!

(* Relevant to each of these projects is the fact that Marvel, along with his library development team partner of the library have been sending money to Mayor de Blasio.  See: Saturday, June 6, 2015, WNYC Reports Mayor de Blasio’s “Furiously Raising Funds”- Including From Developers “Lurking Behind The Curtain” of Library Real Estate Sales- And WNYC’s Money?)  

“No space left to grow”?  Oh my!  That means that Mr. Marvel finds himself in pretty much in the same spot as he is putting the library he is shrinking in. . .  The shrunken library, stuck at the bottom of a residential building under a stack of luxury condominiums will never be able to grow again afterwards.  As noted, the last time the library needed to grow, at appreciable public expense and inconvenient was with its expansion completed in 1993.  The library won’t be able to grow if this reverse-course shrinkage is a mistake, or because the city, borough, central baseness district or immediately surrounding neighborhood all grow at a fast rate (which they absolutely are doing).

So yes, it’s “marvelous” to have books and being pictured in front of them is a great strategy to encourage people to have good feelings about you. . . . But it doesn’t mean that the person photographed cares about and is dedicated to other people having books.  It doesn’t mean that although an architect undertakes to design a library (shrunken or not) that the architect cares on whit about that library having books.

By the way, Marvel Architects has only designed one library prior to this one.  It was hired to design that library back in the old era of libraries as we used to have them.

Click to enlarge and inspect book titles

In the photograph, most of the titles of the books in Mr. Marvel’s Library can be read.  The Brooklyn Heights downtown Brooklyn Library is a central destination library, at least the second most important in Brooklyn.  Want to guess how many of the titles in Mr. Marvel’s collection can be found in the library when you pop in to visit?  In fact, want to guess how many of these titles can be fund in the entire Brooklyn Public Library system now run by people who seem dedicated to getting rid of books?