Bloomberg Plans To Destroy Mid-Manhattan, Central Libraries

This evil little man isn't done destroying the city, selling off the commons and privatizing every thing in sight:

DON’T GUT THE 42nd STREET LIBRARY!

Join us for leafleting at the 42nd Street Library
and a rally May 8th! Click here for more info.

STOP THE CENTRAL LIBRARY PLAN

The Central Library Plan (CLP), at enormous cost to New York City and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library – one of the world’s great reference libraries and a historic landmark. The CLP would demolish the library’s historic seven-story book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would replace the Mid-Manhattan Library (at 40th and 5th Avenue) and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library, at 34th and Madison), which would both be sold off.

• It will be hugely expensive, costing a minimum of $300 million (probably much more), of which $150 million will come from New York City taxpayers. There is great concern that the Library’s focus on a highly-complex construction project will absorb desperately-needed funds which might otherwise pay for renovations of branch libraries, and replenish slashed curatorial and acquisitions budgets.

• It will radically reduce the space available for the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL.

• It will threaten the 42nd Street Library’s status as one of the world’s great research libraries.

• It will threaten the architectural integrity of the landmarked 42nd Street building.

• It does not take into consideration more efficient and less destructive alternatives, such as combining SIBL and the Mid-Manhattan into a rehabilitated and expanded building on the Mid-Manhattan site.

Underlying the widespread concern is the closed process through which the Library administration has made its decisions. Despite the fact that the 42nd Street building is owned by the city and is one of our most iconic structures, the plan was formulated with minimal public notification and no public input. The $150 million that the city has earmarked for the project was awarded without oversight by the City Council and with no public hearings. If alternatives have been considered they have never been disclosed, and no cost-benefit analysis or detailed budget has ever been presented.
Famed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in the Wall Street Journal, attacked the Central LIbrary Plan as

a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of or willful disregard for not only the library’s original concept and design, but also the folly of altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and architectural integrity. You don’t ‘update’ a masterpiece.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman derided the design for the new circulating library which would replace the book stacks in the 42nd Street building as having “all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall,” and called it an

awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.

The Committee to Save the NYPL calls for a halt to the CLP until an independent agency can conduct a detailed cost analysis. This analysis should also evaluate the costs of an alternative proposal suggested by both Huxtable and Kimmelman that the 42nd Street building be left intact and attention directed instead to a renovation of the Mid-Manhattan building. As Kimmelman writes, “A new Mid-Manhattan branch should cost a fraction of gutting the stacks and could produce much better architecture.”
For an in-depth analysis of the Central Library Plan, please see The Truth About the Central Library Plan.
We are investigating all avenues of opposition to the Central Library Plan and we need your help! All donations are fully tax-deductable.