Scott Sherman Writes An Article In The Nation That Declares Us As Activists The Winners In Thwarting Library Destruction Plans: Is It Believable?- Let’s Boil It Down To Some Quotes

Scott Sherman's new article in The Nation declaring Library Defenders victorious- His 2015 book and bio from its dust jacket.

Let’s begin here with a few quotes:

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.—
   Wilson Mizner

History is written by the victors.—

That’s an old adage that so reflexively accepted as true, we don’t even know who first said it and there are so many various iterations of it that hardly matters. . .  like Winston Churchill famously saying, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  

We begin with these quotes because?–  Because Scott Sherman has written an article in The Nation that declares us as library defending activists the victors in the fight to rescue our New York City libraries from destruction by the trustees.  See: The Rescue of the New York Public Library—Activists—and The Nation—thwarted NYPL trustees’ harebrained plans and restored democracy to this vital public institution, July 26, 2021.

When you’re flattered, there is always the impulse to go along willingly to accept it as true, but that can be dangerous, which is why Machiavelli counseled shunning flatterers.    “Flattery is all right so long as you don’t inhale.” said Adlai E Stevenson somewhat more lightly.

The reason why we are not inhaling Mr. Sherman’s flattery, is because, to go back to our first quote, his flattery is so careless that, try and exhaust ourselves as we might, we just can’t believe it.

What also makes Mr. Sherman’s article so hard to believe is his very strange way of writing this history of us as the ostensible victors: He may have proclaimed us as the `victors’ but he never contacted us for quotes or perspective on the conclusions he was about to assert.  So much for ‘history being written by the winners’!

In fact, whatever accomplishments we might in fact admit to, and they exist, and whatever caveats Mr. Sherman supplies about his proclamations, we overall disagree with Mr. Sherman’s simplistic conclusion that we’ve rescued the NYPL libraries or restored democracy to the NYPL as an institution.

We were one of two groups with overlapping membership foremost in taking the lead and working together to prevent the library destruction that Mr. Sherman writes about: The Committee to Save the New York Public Library and Citizens Defending Libraries.  Although Mr. Sherman names our groups in the book he wrote and in earlier articles he had published in The Nation, we go unnamed in this latest article.  Citizens Defending Libraries was the first of the named plaintiffs in the “two lawsuits” Mr. Sherman mentions were filed against the NYPL’s destructive Central Library Plan. The plan was the intended consolidating shrinkage of Manhattan’s most important centrals destination libraries: The 42nd Street Central Reference Library (the one with the lions), The 34th Street Science, Business and Industry Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the remnants of the then just destroyed Donnell Library.

Mr. Sherman notes that the “trustees, from 2007 to 2014, were bent on selling the property, on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, to real estate developers,” and he rhetorically asks “How did one of the world’s greatest libraries get into the real estate business?” then supplying his analysis that the “sordid” answer was that the NYPL wanted to “profit from the city’s real estate boom” by central Manhattan real estate.  While Mr. Sherman had already written derisively about the NYPL’s dismantling plans for the 42nd Street Research library, Citizens Defending Libraries was first to identify the role that real estate interests played in driving proposals so adverse to the public interest.

We don’t want to underrate the value of Mr. Sherman’s prior work.  He was on the scene writing about the expensive foolishness of the NYPL’s plans for the 42nd Street central reference library as early as November, 2011.  That’s before Citizens Defending Libraries was born in the very beginning of 2013.  His 2015 book “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” brought further attention to these issues and included valuable additional research.

The main criticism some offered of his analysis back then was that he was too kind in the judgments he offered of the New York Public Library’s wealthy and powerful trustees even while he described them as inept and clueless.  He never accused them of greed, self dealing, or of placing any other goals above the public interest in setting their agenda.  As he described it, the main flaws these wealthy trustees had was apparently not being very clear sighted about financial matters and not caring enough about scholarship and the real value of the information in libraries, and being too enamored of the glitzy, glamour of the redesign of library space by starchitect Norman Foster.

Mr. Sherman also confined himself to writing about just the NYPL, which only has  responsibilities for the New York City libraries in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten island, and he wrote mostly just about a few libraries in Manhattan.  He did this without relating how the issue of library trustees straying off path this way was a citywide issue.  For example. he pretty much neglected to mention the sell-off of libraries in Brooklyn. Although, as he obviously had to, he wrote often about David Offensend the NYPL’s Chief Operating Officer being very involved in steering the NYPL into its library sales, including, the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved 97,000 square foot Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art, he totally didn’t mention the striking non-coincidence that at the very same time Janet Offensend, David Offensend’s wife, was a trustee of the Brooklyn Public library who was steering that library system into its own library sales including the shrink-and-sink sale Brooklyn’s second biggest library (63,000 square feet) in a transaction mirroring the Donnell sale.       

Mr. Sherman’s book did unveil relevant numbers showing that when the very valuable Donnell was sold in 2007 in what was essentially a secretly handled no-bid sale (the transaction brought Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law a hidden windfall), the NYPL netted less than $30 million for it, maybe only about only $25 million when all costs are reckoned.  In other words, it netted less than individual apartments would be selling for in the in the luxury hotel and condo building that would replace Donnell.  It likely netted less than the hidden windfall to Jared Kushner (a windfall that Mr. Sherman did not identify or mention, something he has never caught up with to include in his writings).

Although Mr. Sherman tells us in various of his writings that the NYPL’s Central Library Plan was “born in secrecy, with Booz Allen Hamilton as the midwife” he does not tell enough about Booz Allen and he leaves it mostly to the readers of The Nation and his book to be self informed enough to wonder an important question: Why Did The NYPL  Hire Booz Allen Hamilton, A Top Spy Firm Working For The U.S. Government, Before Launching These Book Banishing Plans?

Booz Allen Hamilton “is really an arm of the intelligence community,” that we know from the 2013 Snowden revelations has been involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years.”  It is:

virtually indistinguishable from our government itself when it comes to surveillance, with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis."

And with the U.S. contracting out the huge preponderance of its surveillance to private firms, and mainly to just a very few firms with  Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the “colossus” of those few.

Mr. Sherman mentions Booz Allen Hamilton being hired and describes the firm as “a gargantuan consulting firm that derives much of its revenue from U.S. military and intelligence agencies.” He did not, however, follow up well on the implications of that passing statement.  The closest he got was in the one of his last Nation articles, (The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan- Why did one of the world's greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate? August 28, 2013) where he expressed some anxious concern about what Booz was up to, but neglected to identify Booz as a spy agency, instead identifying it to readers of The Nation in alternative, if related, terms:

Finally, what was the role of Booz Allen Hamilton—the gargantuan consulting firm whose tentacles reach into the defense, energy, transportation and financial service sectors—which was hired by the NYPL in 2007 to formulate what became known inside the trustee meetings as “the strategy”?

Mr. Sherman did us a favor by combing through the minutes of the NYPL to find juicy tidbits that help tell his story in compelling ways (for instance he reports Booz Allen was paid $2.7 million by the NYPL), but he neglected to report how those NYPL minutes reveal that the NYPL hired Booz Allen not very long after its board was advised of the expectation that new federal law might “require” the NYPL and “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement's ability to monitor and intercept communications.”  Moreover, under direction from Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and his First Deputy Mayor, Patricia Harris, the Booz services were extended to the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, thus applying to all three. The NYPL’s initial hire was also around the time that it was finally disclosed to the public that a group of Connecticut librarians had fended off a federal government attempt to surveil their library as the government secretly asserted the PATRIOT Act for years.  

Scott Sherman also let us know that, before Booze Allen was hired, McKinsey & Company, replaced by Booz, had been advising the NYPL starting around 2003 on what became its real estate sell-offs.  Since that information about the NYPL hiring McKinsey & Company was furnished a lot of has come out affecting people’s understanding of the unsavory things McKinsey & Company (a private company that thereby avoids publicly reporting its activities) routinely gets involved with.  It has recast the firm’s reputation.

See: Why McKinsey’s Century Old Brand Name Is at Risk- Accused of aiding corruption, bribery, fraud, and opioid sales, the consulting giant faces reputation damage it may never recover from
Lance Ng, March 18, 2020,  Has McKinsey Lost Its Luster? More tough headlines for the consulting firm. By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
February. 25, 2021, How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments, By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, December 15, 2018, The McKinsey Way to Save an Island–  Why is a bankrupt Puerto Rico spending more than a billion dollars on expert advice? By Andrew Rice, April 17, 2019, The Secretive Firm Profiting from Puerto Rico's Crisis, WNYC, April 18, 2019, CIA has paid millions to a consulting firm to help with reorganization, By Greg Miller, July 1, 2015, Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence- Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective. By Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman 07/02/2019, US gov, Tony Blair, and McKinsey plan to rebuild Gaza – with sweatshops to exploit Palestinian workers, Max Blumenthal·October 16, 2014, Immigration and the Prison Industrial Complex, – Major companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and McKinsey & Company have contracted with ICE, and it is the latter which has gained the most notoriety for its connections.  By Andrew Moss,  January 8, 2020, Doing Business with Tyrants, By Lawrence Davidson, January 9, 2019

McKinsey & Company surfaced as a topic in the 2020 election given that it was part of Pete Buttigieg’s resume.  He worked there from June 2007 to March 2010.  At first Buttigieg treated this as a commendable part of his past, but then while being evasive about what he did for the company, he switched over to saying that McKinsey has made a lot of “poor choices” in recent years and that some of its work was  “disgusting.”  The issue of his employment there was being raised by those referring to Buttigieg as “Deep State Pete” who saw such evidence of deep state connections in Buttigieg working for McKinsey on unspecified assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and his thereafter going back to Afghanistan to work alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer in 2014.  See: Media darling Pete Buttigieg was in unit that worked with CIA in Afghanistan, Alexander Rubinstein, February  7, 2020

In other words, there is a pattern that’s become much clearer in recent years of seeing McKinsey & Company get hired for dirty business.  This is something that Citizens Defending Libraries has come to appreciate only lately and well after the fact of knowing earlier that NYPL had hired McKinsey in connection with its library restructuring plans.  So we can’t chide Mr. Sherman for similarly not making more of a point of disreputableness of McKinsey & Company when he first wrote, but we are catching up with our writing here.

Mr. Sherman could, however, have brought more attention to the implications of hiring the Booz firm.  Did he hold back because he worried about sounding too shrill or too suspicious?  Or did his editors at the Nation want him to write at the level that the issue would only be picked up on by Nation readers capable of recognizing the issue and knowledgeable from reading other Nation articles about Booz and surveillance?

Booz Allen aside, had Mr. Sherman contacted us for quotes about how successful we consider ourselves to be in the ongoing fights to defend our libraries and where we consider ourselves to be in those fights, we would have brought up things not mentioned in Mr. Sherman article proclaiming us victorious.  We would have brought up things relating exactly to what Mr. Sherman mainly wrote about in his previous writings, the sale of libraries and the elimination of books.

We would have . . .

. . . brought up the fact that, just as previously planned, one of Mid-Manhattan’s central libraries has been sold: SIBL, the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library and the city’s biggest and only real science library was sold one of the very richest of the world’s multi-billionaires to be turned into a “comic book museum.”  See: Wall Street Journal Reveals Fate Of SIBL, The City’s Biggest Science Library: Super-Wealthy Paul Allen Will Turn It Into “Pop-Culture Museum.  June 4, 2018.  More shutting down of science just as we are facing challenges like global warming’s climate chaos?

Losing SIBL we lost a library that held a research collection of 1.2 million volumes, plus a circulating collection of 40,000 books and videos, over 10,000 business and scientific serials, open shelf-shelf reference offering 60,000 volumes.
 
Where are those 1.2 million+ volumes from SIBL going?–  To the revamped Mid-Manhattan Library with which SIBL is supposedly being consolidated?  The NYPL is not even really pretending that such is the case.  The resource is more or less simply vanishing with the NYPL saying to the public that it is abandoning collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to “the internet” to learn about science instead. . . . That's the increasingly censored internet. . . that's also data scraped and surveiled.

In his latest, Mr. Sherman retreads his previous account of the loss of Donnell and while asserting that we Library Defenders were victorious he says that “much was still lost,” cites as the examples of what he means the money lost and squandered on the plan he indicates was abandoned and he does not mention the loss of SIBL as being part of that plan fulfilled and he does not mention the loss of its books.  In fact, what he writes implies that with our saving of the Mid-Manhattan Library there has been a happy outcome with respect to the availability of books at Mid-Manhattan.  He says:

The NYPL wars of 2011–2014 were about saving the libraries and preserving the books on the shelves. When the trustees hatched their plan in 2007, they mistakenly assumed that e-books would replace actual books. That faith impelled them to hastily remove 3 million volumes from the 42nd Street facility; those books were never returned to the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. It is appropriate that the new Stavros Niarchos Library* has 400,000 books.

(* The Mid-Manhattan has been renamed the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”– We say SNFL, Sniffle, for short– after the Greek Shipping Magnate with whom Edward G. Robinson, who played a librarian in his very last role, had a beef.)

Mr. Sherman does not put into context that "400,000" quantity of books for Mid-Manhattan, New York City’s largest circulating public library, as we have, when we, for instance, point out that Karl Lagerfeld’s personal, one-man, private library when he died held 300,000 books.  (See: Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned, March 8, 2019)

Moreover, no one reading Mr. Sherman’s words would know that the previous incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan was designed to hold 700,000 books, Plus, aside from supposedly absorbing SIBL that once held 1.2 million+ volumes, Mid-Manhattan was supposed to absorb another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collections when that central destination library was shut down.  And the NYPL has publicized that there could be even fewer books in the library in the future because the bookshelves “are not structural . . . you can take [them] away later if you want.”  Another dirty little secret: Although some administration space will be converted and added onto the public space, with only 100,000 square feet, the “renovated” SNFL Mid-Manhattan will have one third less space than the pre-renovation library.  This significant loss of valuable floor space is due to the floor space lost through the creation of atriums in the building.  See: Open House New York Hosts an NYPL Presentation of Its Mid-Manhattan Library “Renovation” Plan March 6, 2018

Had Mr. Sherman interviewed us we would also have told him that when it comes to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and its banished 3 million books we Library Defenders are complaining strenuously about proposed and ongoing renovations designed to commercialize it.  See:  NYPL’s Presentation of its “Master Plan” to alter and commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, January 27, 2018.  Heaven knows what has rushed forward under the concealing cloak of Covid.  

Moreover, we have pointed out and objected to in testimony before the City Council the NYPL’s very contracted and shortened hours for use of the 42nd Street Central Referenced Library by scholars in order to hold private gala events at the library, and “cocktail parties for the connected” represents a highly inappropriate privatization of that public asset intended to serve the public.

We would also have told Mr. Sherman to talk about the loss of other libraries and library space, like the Inwood Library, Sunset Library, etc.

Mr. Sherman’s article has a feel to it that he wants to close the book on this story, but his journalism in doing so is a very poor first draft of history.

There are well-known sayings about history, knowing and remembering it.  One of the best known is George Santayana’s “When experience (which is history) is not retained...infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which may be viewed as something of a retread of Cicero’s “Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.”  Malcolm X took a crack at essentially the same sentiment with: “History is a people's memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animals.”

If Mr. Sherman had so much as mentioned Citizens Defending Libraries or the Committee to Save the New York Public Library by name instead of just referring nondescriptly to “an indefatigable group of citizens came together to save the libraries” as the victors his readers might have gone to our respective websites to get a far different picture of the status of our fights than he portrayed.

Dwelling on problems unrelentingly without solutions can be enervating and it can defeat the activist spirit.  That’s why on our Citizens Defending Libraries main page we proudly do declare our actual victories.  See: Achievements and Partial List of Successes of Citizens Defending Libraries (founded early 2013).
 
Notwithstanding the importance of giving due recognition to our victories in maintaining spirit and forward momentum, Mr. Sherman’s account that everything is now happily taken care of in some kind of lulling “end of history” way seems designed to send all the activists home and for all challenges to and questioning of the library trustees and their decisions, current and future, to cease.   Such a happy-ending erasure of our ongoing fight and important history raises this concern: If history is, as they say, written by the victors and we did not write this history, then somebody else somewhere, other than us, must be the actual victor. .  Somebody who had more to do with what te wanted written.  Then, with dread we remember George Orwell’s, words: “Whoever controls the past controls the future.”  

Hope you found some quotes you enjoyed reading this post, because, answer is, if you are looking at Mr. Sherman’s latest article in The Nation we don’t think you’ll find anything in it that’s in any way worthy of quoting. 

Defending Libraries Testimony To City Council Regarding NYC Library Budget, The Sale of Libraries, Privatization of Libraries, Short Library Hours, And The Elimination of Books

Matthew Zadrożny and Michael D. D. White testifying at City Hall about the destruction and privatization of the libraries

On March 11, 2019 Michael D. D. White of Citizens Defending Libraries and Matthew Zadrożny of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library testified at a New York City Council budget hearing before the council’s library committee presided over by councilman Jimmy Van Bramer.

Mr. Zadrożny’s testimony focused on objections to very shortened hours that the 42nd Street Central Reference Library is now open to researchers and the public (there is a petition), and the relationship of those short hours to the privatizing of that library as it is increasingly used for private gala events of the wealthy.

Mr. White’s testimony focused on the elimination of books and sale and shrinkage of libraries in the system overall. . . . even as designer Karl Lagerfeld had just died with a private library of physical books for his personal use rivaling in size the number of book collections down to which some of the biggest public libraries in New York City are now shrinking.

Councilman Van Bramer said that he was unaware of some of what he was being told in the testimony presented. 

Video of the testimony and Councilman Van Bramer’s reaction is available below.



City Council Hearing March 11 2019- Testimony of Library Defenders (click through to YouTube for best viewing)

Here is an example (a Gotham Gazette article about the hearing) of how such incisive testimony as this doesn’t get covered and the public likely gets a very different message about what is happening from the reporting that is furnished:

Library Presidents Seek Additional Funds at City Council Budget Hearing, March 12, 2019, by Ben Brachfeld.

Here is the text version of the testimony of Michael D. D. White:

March 12, 2019

Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer
Committee on Cultural Affairs,
   Libraries and International Intergroup Relations
Council Chambers
City Hall, New York

Re: March 11, 2019 Testimony respecting Preliminary Budget Hearing - Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations-  New York City Council Budget and Oversight Hearings on Fiscal Year 2020 Preliminary Budget, The Preliminary Capital- Plan for Fiscal Years 2020-2023, The Preliminary Ten-Year Capital Strategy for Fiscal Years 2020-2029 and The Fiscal 2019 Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report.
   
Dear City Council Members and Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations:

This letter provides the written version of our Citizens Defending Libraries oral testimony delivered yesterday.

As the New York Times covered in its recent obituary for Karl Lagerfeld,  (Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Is Dead), Mr. Lagerfeld had an estimated 300,000 volumes in his personal, private library.  We presented pictures at the hearing that we have up at Citizens Defending Libraries.  Those 300,000 volumes are only a few books shy in number from the number that is being talked about as the number that will be in the reduced Mid-Manhattan Library.

See: Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned               

That’s not the way it should be.  The mid-Manhattan Library was designed to hold 700,000 books.  And now we are talking about it’s being consolidated with SIBL (the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library), from which over one million books are missing.  And then it is also supposed to be absorbing all of the hundreds of thousands of books that disappeared from the Donnell Library that was shrunk and sunk to be replaced by a luxury tower.

Mr. Lagerfeld was something of a polymath, but these 300,000 books represent his personal interests, those of just one single man.   The Mid-Manhattan Library, the main circulating library for New York City, should provide books representing the interests of all New Yorkers.

We also presented pictures at the hearing that we have up at Citizens Defending Libraries of the empty shelves at the Flatbush Library.  The pictures were taken the evening that the Brooklyn Public Library trustees held a trustees meeting above these empty shelves, quite oblivious to them and their emptiness, while they held a sort of goofy meeting about how to rearrange furniture in shrunken libraries so that library users wouldn’t notice that the libraries didn’t have enough space.

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

Earlier at the hearing we heard Brooklyn Public Library president Linda Johnson testify about how the replacement for the Brooklyn Heights Library is going to be a bigger, better configured library.  That’s not true; it’s going to be smaller, 40% of the previous library’s size; it will not be an “Education Library,” not a “Business Library,” not a “Career Library,” not a federal depository library (it was all these things before); it won’t have lots of books like before; and, in terms of configuration, it will be configured as an afterthought (an awkward horseshoe shape) to what the developer wanted for his luxury project.   

Similarly, NYPL COO Iris Weinshall said that the reason to sell the Inwood Library was because of its poor configuration, but when they assembled the developers to bid on the property the library administration officials and city development officials told those developers that configuration of the replacement library didn’t matter.

See: The Voice of an Inwood Library Defender- Jeffrey Wollock Provides an Overview: Libraries as Real Estate -How NYC's Libraries are Being Stolen

So what you are told is not true, and we are eliminating books and living in a world where people like Karl Lagerfeld, who have the privilege to own what is valuable, own more books than we are furnishing the citizens of New York City in our public libraries.

Please not as well that Citizens Defending Libraries endorses and supports the testimony of Matthew Zadrozny of the Committee to Save The New York Public Library objecting to the NYPL’s very contracted for the 42nd Street Central Referenced Library and how keeping those shortened hours in order to hold private gala events at the library represents a highly inappropriate privatization of that public asset intended to serve the public.

For more about the disappearance of books from our New York City public libraries see the section of information about it on our Citizens Defending Libraries main page:

How Many Books Are Disappearing From New York City Libraries?     

Sincerely,
       
Michael D. D. White
Citizens Defending Libraries   

Mr. White presented these visuals during his testimony of the many books in Karl Lagerfeld's library and of the empty shelves ignored by the oblivious BPL trustees visiting the Flatbush Library:

Here is the text version of the testimony of Matthew Zadrożny:
   
Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries and International Intergroup Relations

City Council of New York City

March 11, 2019

Chairman Van Bramer, Councilmember Borelli, Councilmember Cumbo, Councilmember Koslowitz, Councilmember Moya, thank you for holding this hearing.

My name is Matthew Zadrozny. I am a data scientist and a member of the Committee to Save the New York Public Library, also known as, SaveNYPL.org. I've used the NYPL for 25 years, as a student, freelancer, and recently to research NYC history. I donate money to NYPL through its Young Lions program and attend board meetings as a member of the public.

Earlier today you heard Tony Marx, NYPL's president, request additional funds for longer hours. I support this. But there's more to the story.

The leadership of NYPL wants longer hours for the branch libraries. However, they have resisted longer hours at NYPL's Central Research Library at 42nd & 5th Avenue. For sixty years after its founding, the main library was open around 87 hours per week. Now it is open only 56 hours. Most days, today included, the main library closes at 6pm — before working New Yorkers can get there. On Sundays, the library is only open for four hours. And last summer it was closed on Sundays.

Historically, longer, later hours allowed New Yorkers to come after work and stay till 9 or 10 in the evening, researching, studying, and bettering their lives. NYPL reduced hours in the 70s due to a budget crisis. Now the library's endowment is at a record high of more than $1 billion. The obstacle is not money but leadership's addiction to corporate events and weddings.

SaveNYPL has been protesting this. We want NYPL to give priority to the public and readers, not parties and rentals. We have collected some 2,000 signatures from New Yorkers who need the main library to be open late. These include high school kids, college students, researchers, writers, and freelancers — people who are the engine of NYC's economy and culture.

Over the library entrance are the words: "The City of New York has erected this building for the free use of all the people." The 42nd street building is owned by the City of New York and it belongs to all New Yorkers. It is the greatest publicly accessible research library in the world. Closing the library for private events during prime time is de facto privatization and unbecoming of a great city.

What is more important: Cocktail parties for the connected? Or a quiet space for students, scholars, startup founders, and job seekers?

The City Council should tell NYPL's leadership that the best way to help the public is not through expensive and unnecessary capital projects. Instead, keep the central library, and all libraries, open longer. Serve readers, not cocktails!

Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned

Lagerfeld loved to pose and have pictures taken of his library that appeared in many, many, many, many, many, many  promotional stories.  Take a peek: Can you spot the two-volume set related to a semi-obscure poet who lived in the south of France?

After renowned and prolific fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld died in Paris, Tuesday, February 19th there was so much written about him, and there were commemorative full page tributes paid for in the New York Times by Chanel one of the fashion houses he most famously deigned for.  For us, one of the most fascinating descriptions about the man published was in the New York Times obituary (Karl Lagerfeld, Designer Who Defined Luxury Fashion, Is Dead), which commented that “he estimated his library at 300,000 volumes.”

Confirming that Lagerfeld loved and valued his books, we can relate that three of the volumes in Lagerfeld’s collection were given to him by the mother of Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White who worked for Chanel when Lagerfeld was designing for that fashion house.  Two of those books were a two-volume set that Lagerfeld wanted (and couldn’t find) because of his interest in a semi-obscure poet who lived in the south of France.  Lagerfeld took the time to personally extend his thanks when the book was given to him.

Lagerfeld “estimated his library at 300,000 volumes”!   That library of volumes personally collected by just one privileged individual is almost equal in size to the 400,000 volumes that the  NYPL sometimes talks about the new downsized version of its Mid-Manhattan Library holding. Mid-Manhattan (now to be rechristened “SNFL,” the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”) was designed to hold far more books than that, 700,000 books.  That downsized 400,000 number at the NYPL’s largest circulating library in New York City is what is supposed to represent, after a consolidating shrinkage, all the volumes that were also in SIBL, the Science, Industry and Business Library from which more than a million books have gone missing, and another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collection when that central destination library was shut down.  Moreover, the NYPL’s architects for the shrunken Mid-Manhattan Library have represented repeatedly, including assurances to the NYPL trustees that the shelves meant to hold the 400,000 books can always be removed is the collection is shrunk still further.

This shrinkage of physical books in the NYPL’s libraries is occurring when circulation, mostly physical books is way up, nearly 70%, and the public still prefers physical books rather than the (more expensive) digital books that library administration officials are pushing at them.

We have supplied information about how with huge and overwhelming percentages of our countries population agreeing quite sensibly about what they want (and could and ought to be able to have), elected officials representing corporate and monied interests are not delivering those things.  Tim Wu wrote an op-ed that appeared the New York Times Wednesday offering up the same stark observation about the thwarting of democracy (See: The Oppression of the Supermajority-  The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public.)

What’s happening in New York with the real estate deals dismantling libraries and the elimination of books is another prime example of the way the public is not getting what is a top priority for a huge majority of citizens even though what the public wants is entirely affordable and makes sense, especially as a public commons . . .

. . . The other side to this is to see, via the expression of of privileges of wealth and rank in our society, how those in a position to make their own personal choices (like Lagerfeld) value books and their own private libraries.  So, for instance, the NYPK sold the Donnell Library in a book-eliminating shrink-and-sink deal that netted the NYPL perhaps less than $23 million for the for the drastic shrinkage of what was once a beloved five-story, 97,000 square foot central destination library . . . The double page color advertisements in the New York Times advertising the luxury condos featured the penthouse apartment on the market for $60 million.  In the color advertisement you looked through the windows of the penthouse condo to be allured by the private library therein. 

Adding to the embarrassing contrast, that penthouse apartment devotes a far, far higher percentage of its floor space to luxury owner’s private library as a amenity than New York City devotes in its budget to public libraries as a shared resource serving all New Yorkers.  See- What’s Wrong With These Numbers?: The Baccarat Tower’s $60M Penthouse and NYC’s Library Budget, April 29, 2014.

Real Estate News: Even While Sacrificing NYC PUBLIC Libraries To Create Real Estate Transactions, Developers Use The Creation of PRIVATE Libraries To Promote Their Projects.

Similarly, we have written about how developers apparently are adding private libraries to their their developments as selling points to market them better.  See: Real Estate News: Even While Sacrificing NYC PUBLIC Libraries To Create Real Estate Transactions, Developers Use The Creation of PRIVATE Libraries To Promote Their Projects.

The Brooklyn Heights Association, which once fought for a bigger and better Business, Career and Education central library in Brooklyn Heights reversed course to side with the development community coming out in favor of selling that library in a development deal that generated a windfall for the Private Saint Ann’s School.  Until just recently the Brooklyn Heights Association raised money with neighborhood house tours that afforded the public tantalizing views of the select interiors of many of the magnificent homes in the neighborhood. One of the most spectacular hits on the BHA house tour the year before the BHA started promoting the sale and shrinkage of the local public library was a was a townhouse equipped with its own two-story private library customized with magnificently detailed yellow-green wood bookshelves . . .  (In retrospect we can only wonder whether it was the home of a Saint Ann’s school family.)

The architect hired by the developer and Brooklyn Public Library for designs respecting the shrink-and-sink deal selling of that Brooklyn Heights Library in downtown Brooklyn Marvel Architects headed by Jonathan Marvel.  The firm refused to produce numbers describing the number fo books being eliminated from the libraries by its redesigns.  However, when the firm needed some good PR to counter the negative news about its involvement with the library sell-off and the shady calculations that resulted in the oversized Pierhouse impairing the view from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the New York Times obliged with a Matt Chaban authored puff piece that generated some of its warm and fuzzies plus gave the architect’s cred by posing Jonathan Marvel and his father in front the shelves holding their library of architectures books. . . many of those books are likely to be hard, if not impossible to find, in a New York Public library.  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.

It endears Karl Lagerfeld to us that he so loved books.  No doubt his easily accessible library contributed heartily to his wide ranging productiveness.  We’d love to love everyone who loves books, and when you peer through the windows afforded when the privileged make the choices that they are free to make, it is clear that there are many who love and value their books.  It’s just that we’d like it if all those who have such privilege to have their own libraries would also love for the rest of us to have books in our public libraries of New York.  Please.  Please.

Some other tidbits about Mr. Lagerfeld and books.  To accommodate his growing library, Lagerfeld planned a facility underneath the tennis court at his house in Biarritz the centerpiece of which was a 10,000-square-foot, 20-foot high library space.  And Mr. Lagerfeld ran "his own bookstore, 7L, on the Rue Lille in Paris."

One last surprise, while New York library officials take pot shots at "dusty" physical books (calling them "analogue books" and "artifactual originals," while they speak dismissively about “old time" versions of libraries that are not "twenty-first century" "Libraries of the future"), Mr. Lagerfeld perceived the world differently– Rumors came true, and Mr. Lagerfeld, who one must think of as quite intimately linked to the renowned fragrances of Chanel, helped produce a new perfume based on a loving evocation of the scent of books.  It was named  “Paper Passion.”

Article In The Villager On What’s Happening To NYC Libraries Featuring Citizens Defending Libraries- Some Contradictions Are Picture Perfect

It is so valuable and so rare when the press runs stories about the selling off of NYC libraries, valuable even when NYPL officials are allowed their talking points– That’s why we are thankful that The Villager just ran an article on the subject, which featured Citizens Defending Libraries and what we are saying to a fair extent.  See:  A new chapter for public libraries has watchdog growling, by Gabe Herman, December 27, 2018.

The whole article is a recommended read, but in response to a few of those NYPL officials talking points, we thought a picture or two is worth a few thousand words.

The article quotes Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White a number of times.  This is one: 

White, of C.D.L., specifically criticized the Schwarzman plans as “commercializing the library.” He said a focus is being put on the gift shop and adding a wine bar, while fewer books are now available there, citing off-site storage in New Jersey.

In rebuttal:

    . . .  A library spokesperson said there were never plans for a wine bar or any alcohol to be served at Schwarzman. . .

However here is a visual the NYPL furnished in connection with those plans (and maybe the close-up of what's intended for the Map Room helps just a bit to make a point).   . .  At the NYPL trustees meeting where this was discussed, one trustee expressed hopes the plans could include an expansion to include outdoor cafe space as well, which would mean taking over some of the city land in Bryant Park.

What is in those wine-shaped bottles behind the bar?

And presumably, the NYPL official who says that there are "never plans for a wine bar or any alcohol to be served" at 42nd Street central research library is just not thinking in terms of how the NYPL advertises (see picture below) its space there for ritzy events like society weddings with consequent risk that the library will be closed early to researchers to accommodate them.   

NYPL "Beverage Program" as it advertises its space for events: Just Apple Juice?  

From the NYPL's brochure for using its space for events-- Do we know the etiquette well enough to know that this si showing both red and white wine glasses at the ready standing side by side?

An astute library defender also reminded us about the discussion that has gone on about the current work creating new cafe space atop the Mid-Manhattan Library (the main circulating library across the street), about which the NYPL administration official explaining things said he didn't: “want it to appear that space was being created for dinner events . .   .  but when that space is not being used we have the opportunity to rent it out.” Arguably, this is part of the same plan that includes the Schwarzman building.  Without argument, it is part of the same ethos.

Views of the space being created atop the Mid-Manhattan circulating library, which it is suggested could look down on the front steps of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library that the NYPL promotes for use as wedding space.

 Similarly, the NYPL officials wanted to downplay the loss of books:

The N.Y.P.L. denied any books are missing from Schwarzman, countering that many were moved to a second sublevel beneath Bryant Park, for climate control and a more efficient organizational system.

How Many Books Are Disappearing From New York City Libraries?

Here, to go along with the visuals above, is everything you need to know about the disappearance of books in New York City’s public libraries.  See: How Many Books Are Disappearing From New York City Libraries?

The article notes that “White sees a trend of selling off branches,” and:

“We think they’re picking off libraries one by one,” he said, referring to the S.I.B.L., the Donnell branch in Midtown in 2008 and another strongly opposed plan in Inwood, plus others in Brooklyn, which is under a separate system from the N.Y.P.L.

“Others in Brooklyn,” includes what was the second biggest library in Brooklyn the Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library, the central destination federal depository library, that was the easiest significant library for the many New Yorkers and Brooklynites to get to.

Reading The Villager article you’ll see that NYPL Chief Operating Officer Iris Weinshall, Senator Schumer’s wife, tries to counter the notion that we are losing library resources, but one of the recent articles you may want to read as background on this is an overview from Jeffrey Wollock of Inwood that brings to light that even the daughter of the Schumers has gotten involved in these library sales, being involved in initiating the Inwood Library sale with her mother.  See:  The Voice of an Inwood Library Defender- Jeffrey Wollock Provides an Overview: Libraries as Real Estate -How NYC's Libraries are Being Stolen.

As for the way that books are disappearing from the libraries as these schemes dismantle them, we like this Michael Michael D. D. White quote from the article:

“The public still prefers physical books,” he said, “the use of the libraries is up, and we’re selling them off and changing the nature of the libraries.”

There is a lot more to learn about this on our web pages.

Irony: Manhattan’s Newest “Library Of The Future” Will Be Named The “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library,” But A “Librarian Of The Future,” Personified By Edward G. Robinson In His Last Role Says Niarchos Acted “Miserably”

Edward G. Robinson playing a librarian of the future in his last role had stern and unappreciative things to say about Stavros Niarchos after whom the NYPL will name its newest "Library of the Future"

Perhaps you have picked up on this point already: What was once the Mid-Manhattan Library is undergoing going changes now, and it will be relaunched under a new name the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.”  But is this “SNFL” rechristening of the library to name it after the Greek shipping millionaire fortuitous? . . .

The NYPL is promoting the book-eliminating changes at the Mid-Manhattan Library, a consolidating shrinkage that will simultaneously eliminate New York’s biggest science library (which will be turned into a comic book focused “Pop-Culture Museum” by another ship-owning multi-billionaire) as a “Library of the Future.”  There is, however, one thing that may inconveniently haunt that “future”: It’s a “Librarian of the Future” who says the Greek shipping magnate Niarchos “acted very miserably” towards him. 

We are speaking of Edward G. Robinson who played a librarian of the future, a “book,” in the science fiction, future dystopia film “Soylen Green.”  Robinson’s role as a future librarian was famously the last role he ever played shortly before dying: He died January 26, 1973 just 12 days after the filming.  Robinson’s remarks about Niarchos were published in the New York Times shortly before his death, November 5, 1972, in an interview about his life that he gave to promote the film: Little Caesar' Is Still Punching, by Charles Higham.

It’s an interview well worth reading.  You’ll find yourself feeling for the elderly Robinson who had suffered and was feeling the effects of a number of tribulations at the end of his life, including having battling with the House Committee on Un-American Activities when his blacklisting meant he was suddenly deprived of any opportunities to work in the early 1950s.

In the interview Robinson describes the Soylent Green film:

“Soylent Green’ is, I believe, an important picture, a harrowing projection of our existence 50 years from now. It shows very clearly what may well become of us if we don't look out. It is set in Manhattan, a city of 40 million people living miserably and horribly in a depersonalized Orwellian state.

Made in 1972 and released in 1973, the film looked forward to what was then decades away, the year 2022, a year we are now actually about to arrive at.  Whatever people will tell you about when we truly first knew about the dangers of greenhouse emissions and global warming, the film presciently explains that in its version of 2022 “greenhouse effect” has created a stiflingly warm world climate, “A heat wave all year round” where “everything’s burning up.”  The world ecosystems have collapsed and people are starving because food production is minimal.

In this Manhattan of the future, wealth inequality is extremely accentuated, with the wealthy living apart in tall luxury towers protected by extra security.  They treat the common folk of the world as disposable and, with a sort of Harvey Weinstein sort of callousness, apartments come optionally with attractive and usable young women referred to as “furniture.”  The wealthy of this world are more likely than not connected with a few conglomerate mega-corporations, which, if you look behind the scenes, are in control of and virtually indistinguishable from the government that's in charge.  The highest government official wears a military style jacket.  The public is helpless and uninformed.

If you want to know anything, if you want to have any hope of piecing together any part of the big picture to understand matters in context, things that might otherwise never be fully understood or investigated in this world of the future, then books are important . . .

Edward G. Robinson, the future's librarian, a "book"

. . . That’s where the character played by Edward G. Robinson comes in.  He is the one who has access to books and who does critical research to understand the world better.  In the future slang of the movie’s invention he is known as “a book,” but that slang term is essentially the term for the librarians still functioning in that future. The Sol Roth character played by Robinson has his own personal library of books in his shared apartment.  To extend the utility of that small collection he periodically meets with other “books” (other librarians of the future) to exchange books and their knowledge of them as part of a more effectively functioning commons.  A key point plot in terms of learning the landscape of power behind what's unfolding is a banned corporate book that reveals what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.  The frail and elderly Roth is also a touchstone in that he remembers distinctly the once robust natural world of plenty that has vanished.

A key censored book: what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.

Roth, “the book,” lives with and is a symbiotically functioning sidekick assisting the film’s main protagonist, a police detective played by Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in the film

A major set-piece in the film that sets up the film’s climax is the ceremonially orchestrated death that Robinson’s Sol Roth chooses for himself.  The scene was filmed just days before Edward G. Robinson’s own actual death and, to add the ultimate pathos, Robinson reportedly waited to tell Charlton Heston  (and only Heston) that his doctor had told him he was actually about to die until just before the cameras rolled.  And this reportedly affected Heston’s performance.

Edward G. Robinson’s gripe with Stavros Niarchos, laid out fully in the Times interview, involves how  Robinson lost $3 million worth of paintings in a divorce suit.  Robinson had been an avid art collector.  Then, when he was still financially weakened in the wake of his recent blacklisting, he was forced to sell much of his collection.  He sold to Niarchos who later was unwilling to sell back paintings that Robinson was most personally attached to:

    . . .  in order to comply with the California community property laws in his divorce from the former actress Gladys Lloyd, whom he had married in 1927, he had to sell more than half his superb collection, started in 1933, of masterpieces of art. “It was so brutal—the worst ordeal I ever went through. I went to everyone I could think of—rich men who had an affinity for art—Winthrop Rockefeller, Bobby Lehman, Kirkeby out hereto try to arrange for a loan to pay off the estimated worth of half the paintings, but these men played games with me; they only agreed to help provided I would sell them four or five of the paintings for little or no money. And so I said, ‘No deal.’

    “My wife had been very ill, and it proved impossible to reach any kind of sane agreement with her. I had no real estate, very few stocks, nothing else could sell. I had put my money, my whole life's blood, into paintings. Finally, some dealers took the paintings for over three million on behalf of Niarchos, the Greek shipping millionaire. He acted very miserably in the whole matter. He wouldn't let me buy back what I wanted when I finally got the money. Just a few things he condescended to part with, crumbs from the master's table. It was horrible.

    “The worst blow of all was losing Rouault's ‘The Old Clown.’ It was the king of my collection, I used to call him ‘Everyman’ The symbol of man's inhumanity to man. After that divorce suit, I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

    Robinson's eyes clouded over with tears. “As for the remainder of the pictures, I don't know what I'll do with them. For years selected groups, classes, have come to see them. I have never closed them off from the public. You don't own any painting, you pay for the privilege of being a custodian. But I don't like the idea of them ending up in a museum. It's like putting a beautiful dead man or woman in morgue. Last December, I was in the Prado and I was horrified: the paintings there are badly hung, badly lit, you can't see the details. And it's supposed to be a foremost tourist attraction of Spain. No, I don't want to leave these lovely things to a museum, although I suppose inevitably they will end up there. What will I do with them otherwise? I don't know. I don't know.”

George Rouault's "Le Vieux Clown" or "The Old Clown." 
"The symbol of man's inhumanity to man."  -
"It was horrible. . .  I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

Planned Overhaul of Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Library- Another “Central Library Plan” Questionable In All The Same Ways

Presentation of the Brooklyn Public Library's Central Library Plan to the real estate committee of Community Board 9 (courtesy of The Movement To Protect The People (MTOPP)

The Brooklyn Public Library is overhauling the Grand Army Plaza Library, by far the biggest library in the Brooklyn system.  This so-called “renovation plan” ensues after the destruction of the second biggest library in Brooklyn, the central destination, downtown Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library, a library that was also an important Federal Depository Library whose function was to make now increasingly scarce and unavailable federal government documents available to the public.

A Brooklyn Central Library Plan Like the NYPL Central Library Plan

The Grand Army Plaza Library overhaul is not newly planned.  Planning goes back to at least 2008 when the BPL hired an architect to create a Master Plan for its Central Library (eliminating books) that was very much like the NYPL’s contemporaneous “Central Library Plan.”  In 2014, in the face of enormous public resistance and opprobrium, which Citizens Defending Libraries helped provide, that other Central Library Plan, the New York Public Library’s “Central Library Plan” was derailed.  The NYPL has nevertheless resurrected aspects of the NYPL “Central Library Plan,” one remnant at a time, while continuing to be careful not to again use the derided “Central Library Plan” name . . .

. . . The BPL is presenting this plan for its own biggest library as its “plan for the Central Library”; That’s easily transposed to simply calling it Brooklyn’s own `Central Library Plan.’*

(*  If you would like another, almost eerie connection linking these two central libraries found in Manhattan and Brooklyn respectively, besides the fact that they are now both going through similar, and similarly-driven "Central Library Plans," try this:  Previously, just before each library was created, the site of that library was the location of a major, incredibly huge reservoir serving the borough, in Manhattan at 42 Street and Brooklyn at Mount Prsopect by Grand Army Plaza.  So each of these libraries found in public parks is more a dapple-ganger of the other than one might immediately suspect.)   

One reason the consolidating shrinkage of the NYPL’s very expensive Central Library Plan, unveiled at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008, was so widely opposed was it’s elimination and banishment of books.  The contemporaneously proceeding BPL Central Library Plan also eliminates books and banishes them off-site.  It’s first inaugural phase was the computer and tech oriented (Shelby White and) Leon Levy Information Commons (January 2013).  The “Information Commons” has no books and, located smack dab and center on the first floor, it is what automatically sops up your attention when you enter the Grand Army Central Library.

Most prominently before you when you enter Brooklyn's biggest library: The bookless, tech oriented "Information Commons"

As with all these central library plans what you see reflected in them is what might be described a slow drift away from what libraries have traditionally been towards something increasingly bookless, something that is also increasingly commercial and corporate in theme, and thus less democratic in insidious ways; something less substantive, that’s more superficial.  It is not really a “drift” so much, as it is a steady pull or tug by those who are now library administration officials.  The changes may seem slow, particularly if your visits to the libraries are not so frequent or closely observed, but the change is not as slow as it seems.  It seems slower, however, because the language used to present these plans generally obscures where library officials intend to go with them.  Their language also obscures memory of the ways in which libraries have succeeded in the past.

Presentation of the Brooklyn Central Library Plan to Community Board 9 land Use Committee- Conflicts of Interest

On April 10, 2018, the BPL’s Central Library Plan was presented to the Brooklyn Community Board 9's Land use Committee for approval.  The suspicious handling it got at that community board meeting deserves scrutiny.  It came before the board without warning or fanfare.  We have the community activist organization The Movement To Protect The People (MTOPP) led by Alicia Boyd to thank for letting us know what went down that evening.  You can watch the entire presentation in two segments via video MTOPP has posted:

Community Board 9 Land Use committee meeting on April 10, 2018 Part 1

Community Board 9 ULURP committee meeting April 10, 2018 Part 2

Along with the videos, Ms. Boyd sent her MTOPP mailing list an outraged description of what unfolded at the meeting.

One of the biggest headlines about this CB9 Land Use Committee library plan presentation was an abject failure of proper process; one that is hard to dismiss as unintentional.  The meeting was chaired by Michael Liburd, the Land Use committee’s usual chair.  (For those of you who do not know Community Boards of New York City, think of the Land Use Committee as the Community Board’s committee for handling real estate development.  Also know that for political reasons, the composition of these land use committees and their leadership tend to reflect friendliness to development.)

Near the end of the CB9 Land Use Committee meeting Michael Liburd says “thank you very much library folks” as if these presenters were somehow separate from him; on the contrary, what he doesn’t say is that he is a trustee of the Brooklyn Public Library, a member of the board to whom the “folks” must report and are accountable to.  If you don’t believe it without seeing it with your own eyes come to a Brooklyn Public Library Trustees meeting and watch these same presenting  “folks” deferentially report to Liburd and the other trustees.  In other words, Liburd personifies the BPL too; he is one of these “library folks.”

This is a particular concern in terms of what then happens immediately afterward—  Liburd tells the Land Use Committee that he is interested in giving “these folks” (he uses that term yet again) “what they are looking for.”  There was no quorum of the land use committee (a problem in and of itself), but then Liburd has the committee members who are present vote their approval of the proposed plan, himself leading off the vote with his own raised hand voting approval.  This failure to disclose important underlying relationships is despite the fact that BPL's press release telling the public about the renovation says: "Library staff is committed to open communication throughout the construction process."

There is another layer of seeming conflict with the community's interest in that Liburd, often criticized by the community for pushing real estate development plans, has apparently been positioned as the head of the CB9 Land Use Committee in order to do so more effectively.  His function as a pro-real estate development operative pits him against the interests of the public if the priority of a board overseeing the libraries should be the provision of library services, not real estate developments.

Another question to ask: If what is being done to Brooklyn’s now most important library is truly about what libraries actually are supposed to be, then why was the presentation to CB 9's real estate oriented Land Use Committee?  It could have been instead to (or also to) the CB9 Education Committee (“responsible for advocating for the educational needs of the district”), its Parks, Recreation and Culture Committee (if it has responsibilities for “Culture”), its Health and Social Services Committee (“addresses the district’s needs for social services”), or its Youth Services Committee (“responsible for . . youth services needs assessments, and . . filling any gaps in services provided for young people.”)?  (The BPL presenter said "We want to talk to everybody we can about this project.")

And should this presentation be limited to Community Board 9, just one community board in Brooklyn?  At over 350,000 square feet, this biggest library in the Brooklyn system that has about 1 million square feet of library space, comprises about one third of all the public library space in Brooklyn.  What happens to it should be of concern to all Brooklynites and to all New Yorkers.   The now leveled central destination Business, Career and Education Library that was in Brooklyn's Downtown Central Business District easily reached by almost all New Yorkers was 63,000 square feet.

Conflicts of Interest at the Board Level, Including Newest Trustee Working For The Real Estate Development Mayor

For those who don’t think they understand how conflicts of interests like Liburd’s (or those of the others of the member’s of the BPL board) can be a problem, consider how Liburd chose to pitch his request for the vote to the Land Use committee and public attending the Meeting: In essence he was saying, “you may know me as the head of the Land Use Committee and you may have pegged me as someone who likes to promote development, but these here are `library folks,’ not like me– You can trust them to be caring about libraries, not development priorities.”

Unfortunately, if you look at the board of the BPL and its other members besides Mr. Liburd you find a rogues gallery of people whose first and foremost priorities are likely to be in conflict with the public getting the best possible libraries.  Most commonly those conflicts are by virtue of the interest those BPL board members have in Real Estate development.

Carolee Fink

Just Seven days after the Liburd CB9 BPL Central Library Plan Presentation, Mayor de Blasio’s newest appointment to BPL board attended her first board meeting with Mr. Liburd.  The name of that new appointee is Carolee Fink.  Ms. Fink is Chief of Staff to Alicia Glen.  Alicia Glen, who joined the de Blasio administration coming from Goldman Sachs (there are a lot of connections of BPL board members to Goldman Sachs), is Mayor de Blasio’s Deputy Mayor in charge of real estate development.  See:  New Brooklyn Public Library Trustees- Can You Imagine?; One of Them Is Carolee Fink, Chief of Staff to Alicia Glen (formerly of Goldman), DeBlasio’s Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development.

When the BPL sold the central destination downtown Brooklyn Business, Career and Education Brooklyn Heights Library that real estate deal (investigated for pay-to-play) was pushed through at City Hall by Alicia Glen.  In December 2015 when BPL president Linda Johnson told the BPL board of trustees how the sale of that library sale went down (it’s a shrink-and-sink deal replacing the central destination library with a luxury tower), Johnson told the BPL board of trustees that Ms. Glen had adopted the library sale and shrinkage deal as “her own” to “push it across the finish line.”  The secretive final negotiations at City Hall included raiding Department of Education funds for space in the luxury building to help the developer.

Moreover, the trustees were told that this sale was a “huge turning point for the library system” and “across the city in general” with Johnson `pioneering’ the future of libraries.  And previously Ms. Johnson had told the city council that the shrink-and-sink sale would be a model for all three of the city’s library systems.

Introducing Ms. Fink to the other BPL board members, Ms. Johnson told them that Ms. Fink “loves libraries.”  Maybe so, but in just what manner of speaking does Ms. Fink love libraries?  For their libraryness?

When "Loving Libraries" Is Nothing But Satire

Although those trustees and administrators now in charge of the libraries increasingly see them in real estate development terms, they do not want the public to know that.  Hence the need to carefully parse what is behind their actual words.  On April 1st Noticing New York did an April Fools satire about the PR the BPL was breaking out for its Central Library Plan: Reimagining Our Library Spaces: Where Once There Were Books There Will Now Be “Maker Rooms” To Be Named Appropriately After A Famous Hedge Funder and Presidential Candidate.  The satire did not have to stray very far from actual facts in its lambasting of the kind of library administration double talk that requires incredible vigilance from any listener.

One thing that helps when listening to current library administration officials telling us about plans for the libraries is to let what we know other library plans inform our intuition about what we should be alert for: For instance, the former NYPL Central Library Plan and now, in the wake of its derailment, the NYPL plans for the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL).

The presentation to the CB 9 Land Use Committee began by telling those present that the Grand Army Plaza Library "has challenges" because it “opened in 1941" and "hasn't seen much comprehensive improvement since that time."  That disingenuously seems intended to make the library seem like an old library in need of an expensive overhaul.  The presentation did not say that the library was actually not actually completed until 1955 (a substantial public commitment, the library took almost sixty years to put in place beginning back in 1898), or that it was expanded in the 1990s and again in 2005.  After that last expansion (back in the days when libraries were still expected by everybody to have books) the library was still not sufficiently large to house the Education Library, which had to be moved to the Brooklyn Heights downtown Brooklyn central destination library. (Because the Heights library is now destroyed, the Education Library has theoretically come back to Grand Army Plaza.)   The Land Use committee was also not told that the Brooklyn CPL, as previously defined, was already underway with the opening of the Leon Levy Information Commons in January of 2013, done with at least a $3.25 million expenditure that replaced the library's media section. Additionally, according to the BPL‘s minutes, it cost $5 million to jettison the books (February 23, 2010 BPL minutes), not the $3.25 million figure given by the Times, which lower figure in the Times, was the amount of Leon Levy Foundation gift money paying for this.  One figure the Times gave doesn’t include, for instance, is the $1,334.764 that came from Albany by virtue of taxpayer largess (June 15, 2010 BPL minutes).

The Land Use Committee was told that the library was not getting rid of books.  This despite the fact that New York Times article about it said that plan called for, among other things, getting rid of “two levels of old-fashioned `stacks’” describing these shelves to hold books as “unused space that Ms. Johnson wants to repurpose.”   This is the kind of deceptive description of what is going on that listeners need to be alert for.  It also says something about how administrators proceed.  If library administration officials remove books from the shelves before they tell the public about subsequently revealed physical changes they intend to make to the libraries then they can say then, they are not getting rid of books.  If the stacks have already been denuded of the books they were built to hold then the space that they occupy can be derisively referred to as “unused.”

Pictures Citizens Defending Libraries posted in 2016 showing shelves at the Grand Army Plaza Library were already extensively emptied as of that spring.

Pictures Citizens Defending Libraries posted in 2016 show that shelves at the Grand Army Plaza Library were already extensively emptied by the spring of that year.  These empty and thus “unused” shelves were in public areas like the Grand Army Plaza Library’s history section, but the Times article referred to elimination of other book shelving stacks the public doesn’t even see and thus, with the books they held, would not be as automatically conscious of.  These empty shelves were despite and don’t take into account all the books that disappeared from the Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library, including the Federal Depository included there that disappeared with it.  The layers of forgetting are being lathered on . . .

In his book “Dismantling the Public Sphere- Situating and Sustaining Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy,” John E. Buschman, complaining about some of the objectionable things that befell libraries after 9/11, noted that, in addition to some of the surveillance undertaken at libraries, “librarians have been ordered by the federal government to purge government documents items from their collections.”   Early in the book, Buschman noted that in 1984 “the Federal Depository Library program was seriously curtailed” and that “between 1982 and 1985, about four thousand government documents were eliminated— among them titles like `Statistical Reporter’ and `Health Care Financing trends.’” Nevertheless, in 1993 the Brooklyn Heights Federal Depository library needed to be expanded in 1993.

When the BPL closed the Brooklyn Heights Library, it promised that the once very substantial Business and Career Library that functioned within it (not, however, the “Education” portion) would be reopened at Grand Army Plaza.   Technically, this was a consolidating shrinkage.  What the BPL opened immediately at Grand Army Plaza was a pathetically small room of books hidden at the end of a narrow wending hall that it called the Business and Career Library while promising at the time, with supplied visuals, a bigger and glitzier “Business and Career Library” via future remodeling of some other Grand Army Plaza space.

In a hidden room the remains of a Business, Career and Education Library that was also a Federal Depository Library

What they were then destroying in 2016 was called a “Business and Career Library” (emphasis supplied) and so that losses would perhaps be less noticed, what they in 2016 provided in the interim and promised to provide in improved form in the future was a “Business and Career Library.” The word used was “Library.”  Now in 2018 as the BPL promotes the overhaul at Grand Army Plaza the terminology has shifted and the public is being told that what it will be getting with the overhaul is a “Business Career Center,”(emphasis supplied) a “center” not a library.  These shifts in terminology are important, insidiously implying that libraries don’t have value and must be replaced with facilities described with other terms, most likely those sounding more potentially more worshipful or respectful of technology and sometimes real estate.

Although Buschman was writing his “Dismantling the Public Sphere,” in 2003, before some of the worst NYC library plans would first see the light of day, he was already picking up the way even library schools were starting to eschew honoring graduates with the title of “librarian” or referring to collections of books; library schools were instead becoming “schools of information” and the schools were coming up with descriptors for graduates like “information professional,” “information manager,” “knowledge specialists.”  In New York we had also stopped referring to those in charge of libraries as head librarians, substituting the real estate term “project manager.”  As
Buschman points out these terms, increasingly general and abstract tend to lose their meaning.  What is the difference between a bookless "Information Commons" that encourages business meetings and a bookless "Business and Career Center?"  Probably not much: The BPL told the Community Board that two spaces would on top of each other and would "work together." 

Indeed, the new image of what is now proposed to be the “Business Career Center” is now supposed to look like is unabashedly devoid of books.  Sterile and white, rather like a makeshift low-budget hospital cafeteria I suspect that most people will find the image unappealing and lacking in imagination.

Don't call it a "library", call it a "Business and Career Center"

It feels like a bait and switch: As noted, called a "center" now, not "library" it's not the same name given for this 'replacement' as when the Brooklyn Heights Business, Career and Education Library was being sold to a developer and it's not the same name rendering supplied at that time either.  One must wonder if the budget has changed.  Perhaps it's not the budget for building what the public might actually get someday (who knows if there were actual designs to price that out back when the Heights library was being destroyed); Maybe it's just the budget available for making attractive renderings.  When approval of a developer's development proposal is at stake gobs of money get spent on persuasive PR and renderings, but now the David Kramer Hudson Companies proposal is in the bag and the Heights library leveled, a hole in the ground.  Does the budget for renderings therefore go down now?

A better "library" or a better "rendering"?: The previous "conceptual rendering" of the "Business Career Library" offered in 2017.  Does it seem to have more books, or is it just that you can't tell because the elevators and stairs are featured so prominently instead?

How do you tout bleak, empty spaces as beneficial to the public and distract from mention of their unlibrarylike booklessness?:  Dutifully picking up, without question, from the Monday, March 26, 2018 BPL press release announcing the latest iteration of these plans the Brooklyn Eagle article about them quotes Linda Johnson as saying that with the overhaul of the library the public will get, not a `library,' but the “inspiring, flexible space” the public `richly deserves.’  That's right, the empty bookless space that Johnson thinks the public deserves is “inspiring, flexible space.”
 

The "so cool, so cool" Leon Levy Information Commons space- Immediately usable to hold your wedding!

"Flexible space" means that once was once "library" space dedicated to such uses can be diverted to other uses.  The "so cool, so cool" Leon Levy Information Commons space be easily used to host a wedding (with the BPL swiftly contacting the press to promote it). (See:  Public Spaces- At Brooklyn Library's New Center, Books Are Secondary, by Eli Rosenberg, May 9, 2013.) The BPL, just like the NYPL, has a whole program now set up devoted commercially renting its spaces to host events; Weddings are a featured subcategory— That's if you are among those luck enough to be able to afford them.  One problem is that this can dictate that the library sometimes closes for special events, evicting those who want to use actual library services and making library hours unpredictable.

Another rendering of“inspiring, flexible space,” a virtual empty dance floor devoid of books that the BPL intends to create out of library space in its plan, is what the BPL is now calling its "Civic Commons" . . . a "first-of-its-kind."

"Civic Commons"?

The Noticing New York April 1st satire about the BPL's plans spoke in jest about how the BPL supposedly saying it was creating the “neo-commons that makes sense today.”  How far away from this satire will the "Civic Commons" be?   The BPL says that it intends to make use of this space with "partners."   One day we may find out who those "Civic Commons" partners actually wind up being as they materialize, but it doesn't bode well that some of the first "partnering" the BPL started off with when going down this road was real estate developer Forest City Ratner and partnering with the Nets basketball team.  That's what Ms. Johnson told her board of trustees at the December 2013 board meeting just months before the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" arena for the Nest was to open.  Indeed, afterward tents were set up taking over the plaza space fronting the Grand Army Plaza library to promote the Nets to children.

That the BPL's future be structured to involve “alliance and partnerships” was recommended in a suspiciously produced “Community Needs Assessment” that finally saw the light of day at the Trustee level in the fall of 2009.  The same “Community Needs Assessment” said that BPL should be engaged in "support for economic development."  Don't such "partnerships," especially when they are commercially oriented, together with the support of economic development compromise the mission of the library and subtract from public sphere?. . .

John Buschman has another question in this regard: He asks if libraries are not providing an alternative model, are not serving democratic ideals, "What public purpose is served by public funding of" projects that "are imitative of the private sector?  What right do we have to public funding to compete with [other?] businesses.  Perhaps more importantly, does society need another model of media-dominated, entertainment oriented consumerism in its public institutions?" 

Buschman suggests that key to attaining the equilibrium whereby libraries will provide a democratic public sphere is to avoid the "'steering mechanisms' of money and power (i.e. corporate-dominated mass media)." 

 
Here is what might happen to the "Civic Commons" or some other of the library space being converted through possible future "partnering."  Along with a lot of other commercializing changes, The NYPL is currently proposing to convert the Map Room and map reading space at its fabled 42nd Street Central Reference Library into an apparently fancy wine-serving wait staff-equipped café.  Rather than being alarmed by this proposal when it was presented to them NYPL trustees wanted to make sure officials were considering expanding and opening up the café to absorb some of Bryant Park’s public space. That was something apparently part of their out-of-public-sight discussions. . . .

Parts of the BPL's plan would readily facilitate a Brooklyn version of this: a new restaurant space within the library building that could open up into and include outdoor café space in a public park.  The BPL intends to convert parking space now behind the library into green space.  That green space abuts Mount Prospect Park, a public park which sits between the library and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  Mount Prospect Park includes the promontory that is the second highest point in Brooklyn; the highest point in Brooklyn is Battle Hill in Greenwood Cemetery.  Explaining what was intended, the BPL spokesperson said that it was hoped the park's boundary with the BPL's space 'seamless.'  The BPL press release says, "to connect the branch with Mount Prospect Park to create a Central Brooklyn green campus that includes the library, park and Botanical Gardens."

The BPL spokesperson said this plan to “dramatically open up the exterior of the library” was what “gets the Oohs and Ahs.”

Right now Mount Prospect Park, closed on all other sides, can only be entered from Eastern Parkway. To the Park's East side, there is the boundary around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden where visitors must pay a fee to enter, a fee which, after 85 years of being free, the Garden started charging in 1996. That fee was originally $3.00 if you weren't a student or senior, but, significantly outpacing inflation, it's now up to $15.00.

Where it not for the heavily trafficked Flatbush Avenue and the fences that close both of them off, Mount Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden would be extensions of Prospect Park.  The creation of connections that would allow people to, by walking behind the library, go from Flatbush Avenue through Mount Prospect Park all the way to Eastern Parkway arguably could be a good thing; Jane Jacobs in her precepts generally praises the multiplication of connections in cities.  Still, there should probably be some wariness about for whose benefit these changes are being launched intending and whether they are intended to serve a gentrifying impulse.

At the same time that the BPL is creating the "Civic Commons" and adding the green space outside, it is asking for Landmarks Commission approval to add a new door on the Flatbush side of the building to access the "Commons."  Although that could be convenient for some patrons, it would also allow for that portion of the building to be accessed separately from the rest of the building and perhaps shut off from it to maintain separate hours.  The proposed door, no image of which was circulated by the BPL with its press release, was shown to Community Board 9, presumably so Landmarks could be told they had seen it.  The board was told the door along with new windows would make the building look less "scary."

A new door and windows will be less "scary"?

For some reason the BPL with its press release included an image of new staircase and seating area looking rather like the reception area of a midtown law firm (minus a magazine table).  

A staircase you can sit under to watch people ascend and descend!

Although the Central Library Plan involves all this bookless space in the images above, the first picture slide that was actually shown to the land use committee was the one slide that showed them the most books. In fact, the committee was told that BPL wanted to have the library to feel more like a library when someone walked in the front door;  “When you walk into the library it doesn’t feel much like a library”(i.e. You don’t see any books), said the BPL's presenter.  (That's partly, as noted, because the smack-dab-in-the-middle "Information Commons" — soon visually to be essentially two stories when  — is presented as the most prominent feature.)  So the BPL says it is proposing to “pull the library experience forward” by “repositioning” the “Popular Library” near the entrance.  The “Popular Library” according to the presenter is currently it’s a lot of “magazines and a lot of comic books,” but he said to generate that book experience the BPL plans to "reformat" the Popular Library to make it more “book focused” “so that just as you walk in the front door you” by turning you head will “see the popular library off to the right.”


New York City libraries have been focusing on the popular and the new designs for them tend to include "grab and go" book desks by the front doors of the redesigned libraries to streamline visitor interactions with the libraries to efficiently brief interactions that supply the patron with what they probably think they already want when they walk in the door.

Pushing a superficial focus on the currently popular has a lot in common with the how media obsessions with junk food news stories (Jonbenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy or runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks) can take over the 24/7 news cycle of outlets like CNN, corporate commercialism thus hijacking, en mass, public attention away from deeper exploration of probably more relevant news. Even obsessions with supposedly “serious” news like Russiagate can effect that kind of hijacking.  And should we all be steered into reading exactly the same books as suggested by a new Mayoral NYC subway promoted ad campaign “Let's get everyone in New York on the same page— NYC.gov/onebook #OneBookNY.”  (The NYC library systems are participating in this campaign.) Doesn't this crowd control of having everyone reading the same few books at the same time thwart discovery shunting the exploratory wandering of individual imaginations into more predicable mainstream channels while exacerbating that fabled race to the down to “the lowest common denominator”? . . .

. . . Does it also remind you of how "teaching to the test" has turned over to the monopoly of a few testing corporations the job of determining how everyone should be educated no matter where they live or what communities they are parts of?

In the subway, the NYC-promoted campaign“Let's get everyone in New York on the same page— NYC.gov/onebook #OneBookNY.” (click to enlarge)

In “Dismantling the Public Sphere” Buschman (p. 121) writes that essentially the idea of a consumerish “give ‘em what they want” focus of librarianship, putting up “a large number of `hot’ items on the shelf to compete with bookstore chains” and quantifying the value of a library only through popularity ignores “merit or lasting value” in curating selections.  While not arguing that libraries should be unresponsive to the public, Buschman says that “customer-driven librarianship abandons a number of public sphere roles.”  “The first of these,” he says, is “our role in organized social memory and rational discourse in a democracy.”  He says that the consumer driven fixation on “exclusively what is popular at the moment” by definition “abandons the public sphere goal of a plurality of ‘voices’ and viewpoints on anything not ‘hot’ to a present or future reader.”  He reminds us that “there is a reason some services are in the public sector; their value is very real but difficult to measure and requires a different kind of judgement and management.”

In a democracy where we can get our information and where we get out news is important.


There was one slide the committee was shown that was not one of those it distributed with its press release about its central library plan:  The BPL says that early on they want to implement “a concept” of a “teen center” they say they will work out after they have talked with some teens.  Is this sort of "been there-done that"?:  May 4, 2000, with a $2.5 million "renovation and expansion of the Eastern Parkway wing" completion, the "new Youth Wing" officially opened that had "exclusively designed areas for children and teens."

Getting Rid of Books Is Expensive

At a time when the BPL claims a desperate shortage of capital funds is hobbling its entire system, these book-eliminating Central Library Plan changes will not come cheap.  Now, at the starting point the BPL is projecting, without actual plans to cost everything out, the total project costs will be $135 million, but over the at least eight years execution of the plans if now expected to take it is more likely to exceed $200 million.  When the NYPL first promoted its original plans for its own Central Library Plan they promote the plan as expected to cost $300 million for the consolidated shrinkage that would eliminate space, bookshelves and books; We never found out how much more those plans would actually cost, only that they would cost more than half a billion dollars ($500 million+).

John Buschman in his book looks skeptically at how promoting a "crisis culture" in libraries is used to put libraries on the defensive while pushing them into ill thought out responses.   The suspect tales of how we are supposedly no longer able to afford our libraries sure fit within that mold.

Buschman also makes the case (p. 149) that there is an extreme imbalance that allows those hyping "technology"  to speak with a louder voice during decision making about our libraries; that when librarians shop for any traditional library resources that are somewhat expensive they "will professionally and critically evaluate the resource against their needs and weigh costs," but "when an electronic resource costing multiples" of those amounts are considered "critical facilities seem to go out the window," the focus becoming presentation and style, while "the authority and efficacy of the product" is just assumed because there is no real way to evaluate it.  This is the way that technology that will readily be outdated in just a few years gets substituted for the time-tested curation of books and human history of the centuries.
    

Meanwhile, where are the books going?  Not so very, very long ago, New York Magazine put the number of books at the Grand Army Plaza library at 1.5 million.  The Business, Career and Education Federal depository library previously in Brooklyn Heights and now leveled once had at least another 130,000 books.

Getting Your Head Around The Idea of a Commons 
       
As they were waiting for a quorum, before the BPL’s April 10th meeting officially began BPL president Linda Johnson told some of the BPL trustees that she had just returned from a trip to Cuba.  Explaining what it was like, Johnson said about the island that “it was hard to get your head around, but the people are very nice.”

“Hard to get your head around”?— Cuba is a country organized insistently around the idea of much more extensively shared public commons and mutual support.  Among other things it’s been observed how that means delivery of better health care than in the United States.  It also means that after Cuba was one of the islands hardest hit by Hurricane Irma in September, Cuba, “a world leader in hurricane preparedness and recovery” suffered minimal loss of life and, within days provided aid to its neighbors sending “more than 750 health workers to Antigua, Barbuda, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Saint Lucia, the Bahamas, Dominica and Haiti.”

By contrast, Hurricane Maria hit the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico just a few days later that month and six months later, under the auspices of our capitalist country, tarps had still not been provided to cover leaking and wrecked roofs and all sorts of other basic relief lags.  The New York Times was willing to blame “bungling” on its front page (subsequently suppressing the word, not the concept, from its internet article), but that ignores how this “bungling” furthers plans for privatization of the island of Puerto Rico that were afoot before the storm hit and how, there has been a subsequent  “disaster capitalism” intensification of the machinations to privatize the island of Puerto Rico, chase out its current inhabitants and make it a tax-haven paradise for the likes of cryptocurrency adventurists. 

What was Linda Johnson doing in Cuba?  Theoretically, as head of the Brooklyn public library system, she is herself is in charge of caretaking one of the biggest most important commons in the city of New York.  Officially, the Trump administration is now trying to dissuade Americans from the more frequent visits to Cuba that began with policies the Obama administration made.  Johnson went to Cuba just before April 17th, the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. sponsored invasion of Cuba, chosen as the day for Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel, to step down from power.  What changes are expected; hoped for?  Who hopes to be in on them?

Meanwhile, there are interesting developments on an island closer to Brooklyn.  When Governor’s Island was transferred from the U.S. government to New York City there was a covenant that housing on the island was prohibited.  Since the military left and the subsequent transfer, people haven’t been sleeping on the island; everyone gets ushered off at the end of the day. . . But now, although the word is being avoided, "glamping" is coming to Governor’s Island via a company that specializes in it.  What is "glamping"?: It is `camping' for the glamour set.  "Luxury tents that come equipped with chandeliers  . .  start at $500."

April BPL Trustees Meeting

At the April board meeting, Linda Johnson told the trustees that the Brooklyn Central Library Plan "is underway" and that "all of the planning is being done so we have actually just one big construction project that goes over a significant period of time" saying the BPL wanted to "seemlessly move from one phase to the next."  She said that the BPL was thinking of the phases from a "development standpoint," because they are "concerned about raising the money needed as `public-private partnership.'"  She said that come next January people using the library are going to need to understand that use of the library is going to be "compromised" for a time because "things are going to be tight around here."

At the April board meeting, the trustees were told that the demand for physical books at the library was not diminishing, not being reduced by any continuing shift over to the more expensive digital books library administration officials years have been pushing after introducing many years ago: Digital books steadily remain at a continually low, essentially flat, 7%, with circulation of physical books for the year at 13 million, and the more expensive, more evanescent, typically just "rented" digital books being pushed by the library at only 1 million.  Nevertheless, Johnson's focus was to emphasize to her board that there had been an incremental increase to that low 7% figure this year (about 1%).

Elected Officials?

 Can we expect help from our New York City elected officials? . . .

The BPL press release includes the statement of New York City Council Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo that she is "proud to join in support of the four-phase renovation" and what it will mean in terms of the ability of "future generations" to access the "vast resources" of the library.  Other statements showing a lack of appreciation for the very worrisome aspects of the BPL's plans were furnished in the press release from United States Congresswoman Yvette Clarke, New York State Senator Kevin Parker, Assembly Member Walter T. Mosley.