[URBAN NOTE] "Buildings and Books"

[rfmcdonald]

Ian Frazier's article at The New Yorker, besides sharing the good news that the beautiful Bryant Park library will remain intact, makes a good case for the importance of the library in the modern world.

The New York Public Library’s announcement that it is abandoning its Central Library Plan has been praised as a good and sensible thing, and indeed it is. The C.L.P. would have sold off the Mid-Manhattan Library and the Science, Industry, and Business Library (called SIBL; five of its floors not open to the public have been sold already). The collections of those libraries would have been moved to the main research library, on Fifth Avenue, and elsewhere. That hundred-and-three-year-old edifice (now known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building), with the stone lions out front, would have been reconfigured: seven floors of its stacks taken out, a lending library added to what had been a research library only, more than a million books moved off-site, and a four-level atrium and other new elements put in, following a design by the architect Norman Foster.

Observers could be excused for finding the plan too complicated and strange to think about at first. The library’s management and board of trustees developed the C.L.P. without the public’s knowing much about it, but as the time for construction approached, and more public meetings were held, it became clear that the C.L.P. represented a major retrenchment. Anyone with experience in household austerity and the cost of modern real estate could get the picture. The main research building was like the elderly but still healthy parent; the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL were the grownup offspring. Pressed for cash, the family was selling the kids’ apartments and moving the kids in with the parent. To make room, some of the parent’s belongings would have to be put in storage in New Jersey. When the sacrifices that the C.L.P. would entail sank in, thanks in particular to reporting in The Nation and n+1, library users began to object loudly and persistently. The protests, the new mayor’s lack of support, and the fact that the financial projections did not add up eventually undid the C.L.P.