Libraries | NYPL | Advocacy
Grassroots activists thwarted a costly and destructive renovation scheme—but the NYPL still lacks effective governance.
by Scott Sherman | The Nation
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| (CC BY-SA 2.0) | | |
One morning in the spring of
2010, while standing in line in the New York Public Library’s majestic
Rose Reading Room, I was approached by a middle-aged librarian, a man I
had known for years; we had common interests and would frequently chat
while he was on duty. He read
The Nation and knew I wrote for it.
On this particular morning, he leaned over and whispered into my ear:
“Our trustees are planning to sell the library across the street”—by
which he meant the Mid-Manhattan Library, a decrepit facility on 40th
Street and Fifth Avenue. “It stinks,” he continued. “You should look
into it.”
I was busy with other projects and let his tip go. But a
year later, I received an assignment from this magazine to profile
Anthony Marx, the New York Public Library’s incoming president. Early in
my research, I quickly grasped what the librarian had tried to tell me a
year earlier: The NYPL’s leadership—aided by the consulting firm Booz
Allen Hamilton—had conceived a wildly ambitious transformation plan. The
grand library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue would undergo a massive
renovation in which 3 million books would be removed from the historic
stacks in the center of the building and sent to an off-site storage
facility; the stacks would then be demolished, and a new, modern library
(designed by the celebrated British architect Norman Foster) would be
built in the space that, for a century, had held the books. Foster would
create a library within a library, one that carried a heavy price tag:
$300 million. To pay for this
Central Library Plan (CLP), two nearby
libraries that occupied prime real estate—the Mid-Manhattan Library and
the Science, Industry, and Business Library on 34th Street and Madison
Avenue—would be sold. In a soaring Manhattan real-estate market, the
NYPL (which is the subject of Frederick Wiseman’s latest film,
Ex Libris) would not be excluded from its share of the spoils.
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