Is Forest City Ratner, As Victor, Writing Our History?- WNYC's Press Release on Appointing Forest City Ratner's MaryAnne Gilmartin to Its Board of Trustees

“History is written by the victors.”   That's certainly the old adage that reflexively gets accepted as true by so many of us even without knowing who first said it.

But first the victor must wrest the pen that writes history into its own grasp. . .  That’s what Forest City Ratner seems to be trying to do when it comes to Atlantic Yards and its exploits in New York City.

In October Forest City Ratner’s Chief Executive Officer MaryAnne Gilmartin was appointed to the board of trustees of the board of New York Public Radio, better known as WNYC and its sister station WQXR, according to the press release appointing Gilmartin, “America's most listened-to AM/FM news and talk public radio stations.”  How did that happen?. . .

. . . Certainly not without a lot of maneuvering and purposeful intent on the part of Forest City Ratner.

The WNYC public radio stations are not are not only the “most listened-to” stations; there is also an implicit agreement with their listeners that, because they are listener financed, they can be trusted as a much more reliable source of earnest news reporting, an alternative free from the corrupting influence that saturates commercially owned and operated news media.  Accordingly, for instance, the idea that the WNYC family of stations provides in-depth news and information that is vastly superior to the kind of press release-conduit journalism that commercial stations put out was propounded again and in the sales pitches made during WNYC’s last fund-raising drive, just as that idea has been highlighted in the many years of fund-raisers before.  This most recent WNYC fund-raiser was subsequent to Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment to the WNYC board.

Ms. Gilmartin’s arrival at her policy-making trustee’s position on the WNYC board is reminiscent of another board’s takeover and ensuing 180-degree policy changes seen most clearly with respect to Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards: That of the once venerated Municipal Art Society.

The Municipal Art Society was once thought of as representing the public and standing up to developers in the face of abusive development.  Kent Barwick, when he was the head of MAS, called Atlantic Yards “the poster child for what goes wrong when process is ignored. . . a poorly designed project that has polarized the community and that squanders both opportunity and public trust.”   Not so long ago, MAS had scores of forums about development in the city invoking the name and principles of Jane Jacobs in which, while the moderators kept civil order, the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly was excoriated by expert panelists and attending public alike, for a zillion villainous transgressions against the public interest.
  
More recently, after an orchestrated reconstituting of the board, essentially, as it was disclosed to me, happening as something of a coup, MAS has reversed itself to the extent that many no longer regard it as representing the public.  This new version of MAS has given not one, but two, awards the to the Atlantic Yards mega-development, essentially praising Forest City Ratner for the kind of neighborhood destruction that was previously decried, an absurdity that’s siren for satire, essentially an award for “preserving a swath of Prospect Heights by tearing it down to build the Ratner Prokhorov Barclays arena while letting the rest of the destroyed neighborhood acreage lie fallow for a few decades.”   (See: Monday, June 16, 2014, Ratner, Gilmartin & the MAS Onassis Medal: selective memory, glitzy gala, and enduring dismay.)

Just a few days ago I ran into a woman who was a new resident of New York who, without knowing any of the history of how MAS’s mission has been recently redirected, told me that she had attended a MAS event and unexpectedly found it an almost unbelievably depressing pro-development spectacle.  I don’t know. .  I wasn’t there, but I do know that there has been a massive exile of those who used to be involved with MAS, including its former president, Kent Barwick, to resurrect The City Club of New York.  What’s left of the former Municipal Art Society seems to have gobs of money, but its soul is and moral compass are lost.  In its place, the new, leaner City Club is shaping up credibly to fill in the void of what MAS once was.

There are, of course, other well-worn sayings about history.  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.”

It provokes thought and fright to consider that when history is written by the victors it will be rewritten so that those things that should never have happened in the first place will happen again virtually by design.  In other words George Orwell’s, “Whoever controls the past controls the future.” 

This brings to mind another adage about victors and victory: “To the victor go the spoils.”  Getting to write history, the ability to control the past and thereby own the future too, may be viewed as just a subset of the spoils that the victors get to walk away with.

It is not then surprising that at the groundbreaking for the Ratner Atlantic Yards arena, Ratner and Atlantic Yards supporter Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed to focus wishfully about his expectation of public forgetfulness to cement the highly controversial victories: “nobody's going to remember how long it took. They're only going to look and see that it was done.”  Such ablution via deficient memory extends to the cleansing almost any means-to-an-end in public debate and governance if “only results matter.”  

The sad thing, if Forest City Ratner gets to write the history of Atlantic Yards, is that such writing of our history will not just be the consequence of victory, but another victory unto itself.  Although Forest City Ratner overpowered the public interest and the community to achieve many things it ought never to have achieved, I think it is quite fair to say that the community won a good share of the battles.  The most important was the laying bare of Forest City Ratner’s deceptive practices. That's more important even than the successful adjudication respecting such practices when the community won its environmental lawsuit.  These victories helped ensconce a public understanding of the abuses in the competing narratives of what happened.  In this way, the predatory Forest City Ratner cat was belled to warn those mice who might appeal to the cat as its future meals.

Evisceration of WNYC and the Municipal Art Society is a way of silencing that bell on the cat.  The “Braveheart” quote about writing history, put in the mouth of Robert the Bruce, is “history is written by those who have hanged heroes” with a concordant implication that those dead heroes and their deeds are then written out of our pasts.  That saps the spirit of resistance even further.  The heroes of the Atlantic Yards fight and other community battles may now be largely exhausted, having worked unpaid against well-financed minions.  They may have paid the price of many wounds, made many sacrifices.  We may even now think of some of them as the equivalent of the dead on the battlefield, but it’s truly grievous to think that all their hard work and truth that was brought to light by, for instance, the “No Land Grab” team or the “Battle For Brooklyn” documentary would be forgotten.

Maybe history will be rewritten so that WNYC’s future listeners or those going to next year’s MAS functions devolve, uninformed, into the feckless, perpetual infants or children of Cicero’s and Santayana’s admonitions, but on its own side of the fence Forest City Ratner is not going to forget its perfected playbook.  Similarly, other developers seeing what Ratner got away with will remember and emulate.  Which is to say that whatever battles have been won or lost it is still an ongoing war.

That brings us to what should be a number of critical realizations about the road we are not yet at the end of.  Yes, there is a question as to whether other developers will use, throughout the city, tactics Forest City Ratner used with respect to Atlantic Yards and its other New York City exploits going back to at least 2002, and there is the likelihood that Forest City Ratner’s tactics on future projects will resemble those its used on Atlantic Yards, but. . . .

. . .  Anyone who thinks that Forest City Ratner has won the Atlantic Yards war thinks in very circumscribed terms.

Completion of the Atlantic Yards mega-development from this point on could still take as much as another forty years.*  Even now, twelve years after Forest City Ratner started moving in to take over a swath of Prospect Heights with the threat of eminent domain, it has built only the arena (that's not even technically finished at this point as a corrective new secondary green roof is being built).  It has not built any housing.  It has not replaced any of the residential units it destroyed, including the low-income units it will never actually replace.  It has not replaced the businesses it evicted.  The one attempt Ratner has made to build a residential building stands halted, mired in a lawsuit about incompetence and may have to be torn down to be built again from scratch, its original estimated cost of $155 million now rising to perhaps $215 million or even $265 million.

(*  Even though the new, most recent, contractual deadline now theoretically stands as 2025, with the deal subject to perpetual negotiation with Forest City Ratner in the position of a politically muscular monopoly, no future terms can be assured.)

Forty years, or however many decades it actually takes to complete Atlantic Yards, affords ample opportunity for the community, albeit exhausted, to insist, as it should, that the mega-project be divided up and bid out to multiple developers, restoring the streets, sidewalks and avenues that Forest City Ratner has privatized.  Conversely, it affords opportunities galore for Forest City Ratner to reenact more times than we will be able to count what it has done at juncture after juncture, renegotiate repeatedly the terms of its monopoly to shift benefits increasingly in its favor.

In fact, as an example of how easily things can go one way or another, just recently in June, hardly anytime at all before the residential constructions problems and ensuing litigation about it was to be disclosed in August, something that would have made Ratner extremely vulnerable to finally losing monopoly control over the project especially given the community's litigation victory, Ratner slickly maneuvered, taking advantage of a new administration under the incoming mayor to renegotiate new terms for its deal (and more subsidy), once again more to its advantage.  Not knowing how how income eligibility bands were being rejiggered in the background, the representatives who ventured to negotiate for the community were snookered in the deal they'd probably have been better off never making no matter how good it was made to sound. Without cinching this deal, Ratner might have failed in his desperate deal selling a portion of the mega-project to the Chinese government. 

Consequently, Forest City Ratner is not presently the victor seeking to write history.  Still not yet the victor, it is simply doing what it has done from the start, seeking control of the news media and those who write the news in order control the narrative, in order to be the victor when all is said and done. . . .

If ever a definitive tale is told about the still-ongoing Atlantic Yards saga it is virtually certain to be in the form of the book on the subject that Norman Oder is writing.  Mr. Oder writes Atlantic Yards Report (currently retitled “Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report” in view of the fact that the Ratner firm euphemistically rechristened its project to divorce its self from years of bad press).  Atlantic Yards Report originally began as the “Times Ratner Report” much of its earliest focus being about how irresponsible and misleading the coverage of Atlantic Yards by the New York Times was. 

Conception of the Atlantic Yards project goes back to the summer of 2002.  In February of 2001 an eminent domain land deal was reached that turned Forest City Ratner into a real estate partner with the New York Times to construct its new headquarters.  For more about how the questionable reporting by the Times undoubtedly assisted Ratner’s Atlantic Yards to advance and ultimately succeed as far as it has, see:  Sunday, June 26, 2011, “Page One: Inside the New York Times” Reviewed; Plus The “New York Times Effect” on New York’s Biggest Real Estate Development Swindle.

This means that rather than being anything new, Forest City Ratner's encroachment into the theoretical bastion of public radio and public broadcasting is just a shifting of the previous line of influence, a pushing forward to dominate more completely by extending tactics previously used successfully by Ratner.  In fact, while public radio has done better in the past to escape the influence of Ratner and the real estate industry, the same cannot be said of New York City’s WNET public television station where criticism of the city’s real estate is never heard, but Forest City Ratner has gotten great promotion on Charlie Rose.  (See:  Monday, April 2, 2012, Charlie Rose Does Infomercial For Forest City Ratner and Tuesday, April 3, 2012, Channel 13, New York's Premier Public Television Station, Provides Promotion For The Ratner/Prokhorov Barclays Basketball Arena: What To Do About It?)

Ratner is also well infiltrated into the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Brooklyn Museum.

Ms. Gilmartin’s first WNYC trustees meeting is scheduled to be Wednesday, December 3, 2014.  Before that, Tuesday November 18, 2014, the WNYC Community Advisory Board is meeting at 7:00 PM at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights.  The Community Advisory Board is supposed to take comment from the public about the station’s operations.  At their last meeting the CAB groused that far too few members of the public come to their meetings.  (With Gilmartin's appointment  they may be on the verge of ironic solution.) 

The WNYC Community Advisory Board was established to comply with the Public Telecommunications Act the purpose of which extends to providing “a source of alternative telecommunications” that will be “responsive to the interests of people.”  To receive public funds public broadcasters must have Community Advisory Boards to review the “programming goals established by the station, the service provided by the station, and the significant policy decisions rendered by the station.”  (emphasis supplied)

Under that rubric, it would seem that Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment to her policy-setting position on the WNYC board should be of vital concern to the CAB.  To argue, contrarily, that it is only a board appointment and that the CAB should wait and be concerned only when station policy actually changes after enough board members of Ms. Gilmartin’s ilk have been appointed would be to say the CAB should react to close the barn door only after there has already been an irreversible escape of the horse.

CAB members face a conundrum in regard to whether they will screw their courage to the sticking point and object to Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment.  According to the by-laws of the Community Advisory Board: “CAB members are subject to the approval of the [WNYC Board of Trustees] or its designees, including members re-nominated for a second term.”- . . .

. . . . That means that, by getting appointed to the WNYC Board of Trustees, Forest City Ratner head MaryAnne Gilmartin now has a say-so about who is on the Community Advisory Board supposedly watch-dogging her implementation of station policy.

Although the Community Advisory Board should probably be recommending Gilmartin's removal from the board and holding up her appointment as an example of what never ought to be done again, if they do, it could subject their members to her vengeance.

Although WNYC is keeping confidential more specifics and the deliberations that were involved, we know that the Trusteeship Committee (comprised of the following Trustees: Tom Bernstein, Martha Fleischman, Anton Levy, Herb Scannell, Lauren Seikaly, Peter Shapiro, Susan Solomon, Nicki Tanner, Andrea Taylor, Keith Thomas, Cynthia King Vance, Laura Walker and Alan Weiler) nominated Forest City Ratner CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin for trusteeship after an evaluation they were supposed to make of her qualifications and suitability for service and probably someone on the committee identified Ms. Gilmartin as a potential candidate for trustee.

Since WNYC is not telling us we have to guess while noting that it could even have been WNYC president Laura Walker who pushed Gilmartin's nomination forward.

A hint that Ms. Gilmartin might have been coming to the WNYC board involved her bizarre appearance back in July accompanied by WNYC president Laura Walker fluffing up a Brian Lehrer show segment about how to get `a good night’s sleep,' something, as commented by me at the time, it's questionable that Ms. Gilmartin actually deserves.  Giving a burnishing heft to Ms. Gilmartin's credentials though not necessarily making her being there seem less odd, Arianna Huffington was also a part of this surreal segment. Oh, Oh, WNYC!  Oh Brian!  See: Wednesday, July 16, 2014, On Brian Lehrer, FCR's Gilmartin reports on CEO Sleep Experiment.

If and when WNYC policies begin to change subsequent to this Gilmartin appointment it is doubtful that we see that change manifest in Brian Lehrer losing his prominent morning slot in the near future: He is expert at what he does, beloved by his audience, young enough to be around for a long time and, although moderating with reasonable fairness, he has never expressed hostility toward Atlantic Yards.  We would be more likely to see change creep in with a replacement of a retiring Leonard Lopate, an older broadcaster who has more regularly acknowledged the legitimate basis for the community's dissatisfactions with the megadevelopment.  It would be nice if Mr. Lopate were around to interview Mr. Oder when his awaited book comes out, but who knows when that will be as the Atlantic Yards saga continues to lumber forward in surprising ways frustratingly postponing any neat point at which to wrap up.  Mr. Lopate could likely be replaced by someone who, on the spectrum, is more more likely to be confused with a corporate lapdog than Brian Lehrer, perhaps friendlier to developers like Ratner than even Charlie Rose.

In pertinent part the press release announcing the appointment of Ms. Gilmartin to its board reads in cheery PR speak as follows:

NEW YORK PUBLIC RADIO ANNOUNCES FOUR ADDITIONS TO ITS BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Richard Brail, MaryAnne Gilmartin, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, and Brad Whitman Named to the New York Public Radio Board of Trustees

(New York, NY – October 9, 2014) – New York Public Radio today announced that Richard Brail, Managing Director and Head of the Media, Entertainment, Communications and Technology Group at Peter J. Solomon Company, and MaryAnne Gilmartin, President and CEO of Forest City Ratner Companies, have been elected to its Board of Trustees. Loretta Brennan Glucksman, Chairman Emeritus of the American Ireland Fund, and Brad Whitman, Vice Chairman in the Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley, were also recently elected to the Board at the Spring meeting of the Board of Trustees.

As a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, New York Public Radio is governed by an independent Board of Trustees that meets regularly throughout the year. There are currently 35 NYPR Trustees, headed by Cynthia King Vance, Chair. Information on all Trustees can be found here.

“Rich, MaryAnne, Loretta, and Brad bring vast experience in business, media and non-profit governance that will advance both the work of the Board and the mission of New York Public Radio,” said Laura R. Walker, President and CEO, New York Public Radio. “I look forward to collaborating with them to keep New York Public Radio at the forefront of digital innovation, award-winning content creation and enterprise journalism that enriches the lives of New Yorkers and audiences around the world.”

“I am delighted to welcome Rich, MaryAnne, Loretta, and Brad to New York Public Radio’s Board of Trustees,” said Cynthia King Vance, Chair, Board of Trustees, New York Public Radio. “These accomplished leaders bring a passion for public radio and new and valuable perspectives to a highly engaged Board of Trustees. We are lucky to have them join us as we reach for even more ambitious heights at New York Public Radio.”

* * * *

MaryAnne Gilmartin is President and Chief Executive Officer of Forest City Ratner Companies. She has been point person in the development of some of the most high-profile real estate projects in New York City. Ms. Gilmartin led the efforts to build Barclays Center and Pacific Park Brooklyn, a 22-acre mixed-use development. Ms. Gilmartin also oversaw the development of The New York Times Building, designed by Renzo Piano and New York by Gehry, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere, designed by Frank Gehry. In addition to these projects, Ms. Gilmartin has managed the commercial portfolio at MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn, which consists of 6.7 million square feet of Class A office space. Ms. Gilmartin served proudly for over 7 years on the New York City Ballet Advisory Board. Currently, Ms. Gilmartin serves as a Board Trustee for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM); a Member of the Board of Governors of the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY); and as a Member of the Industry Advisory Board of the MS Real Estate Development Program at Columbia University.

* * * *

New York Public Radio is New York’s premier public radio franchise, comprising WNYC, WQXR, The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, and New Jersey Public Radio, as well as www.wnyc.org, www.wqxr.org, www.thegreenespace.org, and www.njpublicradio.org. As America's most listened-to AM/FM news and talk public radio stations, WNYC extends New York City's cultural riches to the entire country on-air and online, produces award-winning programming for local and national audiences, and curates the best offerings from networks NPR, Public Radio International, American Public Media, and the British Broadcasting Company. WQXR is New York City's sole 24-hour classical music station, presenting new and landmark classical recordings as well as live concerts from the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and Carnegie Hall, among other New York City venues, immersing listeners in the city's rich musical life. In addition to its audio content, WNYC and WQXR produce content for live, radio and web audiences from The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, the station's street-level multipurpose, multiplatform broadcast studio and performance space. New Jersey Public Radio extends WNYC’s reach and service more deeply into New Jersey. For more information about New York Public Radio, visit www.nypublicradio.org.

# # #   

Press release about Gilmartin appointment, page one, click to enlarge

Press release about Gilmartin appointment, page two, click to enlarge

Ms. Gilmartin brings a "passion for public radio and new and valuable perspectives to a highly engaged Board of Trustees"?  And, we are lucky to have Ms. Gilmartin join WNYC "as we reach for even more ambitious heights at New York Public Radio.”  Really?  Plus there's that cleverly oblique reference that Ms. Gilmartin has been the "point person in the development of some of the most high-profile real estate projects in New York City."*

(*  Commenting on this article Norman Oder in Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report post 11/18/2014 writes:  "Forest City has a passion for shaping perception--such as the erasing-history effort to rename Atlantic Yards as Pacific Park. - So even the capsule biography of Gilmartin, surely supplied by her office for the press release, is part of that effort [incorporated in the WNYC Press Release!]. According to the press release, Gilmartin `led the efforts to build Barclays Center and Pacific Park Brooklyn, a 22-acre mixed-use development.'- Actually, Pacific Park Brooklyn hasn't been built yet. The first tower is stalled. The second break ground next month.")

Another item in the press release that's probably of interest in this context is that Brad Whitman also being appointed to the board, although now with Morgan Stanley, came from Barclays Bank just months before where he was head of mergers for financial institutions.  Barclays is the bank whose name is on the Ratner arena. That prominent public spot was sold to it as advertising, confusing what the public should think about its misconduct.  The world is too entirely too small, isn't it?

(click to enlarge) The kind of public interest advertising we might see in the subway if the public were coming up with funds for what's posted there.  Instead, the recidivist Barclays has the subway station and publicly paid for arena named after it to wash away thoughts of its misdeeds.

Forest City Ratner has never done a project without deep publicly paid for subsidy and it has never done a project where it was selected by competitive bid.  Its modus operandi in pursuing its usually large scale crony capitalistic deals is to get on the political inside, buying elected officials with campaign contributions and then misrepresent what is going on, that which the public is getting and what the public is losing. 

For a little more background on this and Ms. Gilmartin's appointment, see: Saturday, October 11, 2014, The Forest City Ratner Cafe, at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, and Gilmartin's new role on WNYC board, Atlantic Yards Report- Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report- Atlantic Yards, Pacific Park, and the Culture of Cheating, Tuesday, December 1, 2009, Unfair Substitution of Fiction For Fact in the Atlantic Yards Dialogue and Wednesday, July 18, 2012, Noticing New York's Hearing Testimony Re New York City Housing Development Corporation's Subsidization of Ratner's Atlantic Yards Mega-Monopoly.

Am I being too inhospitable, too unwelcoming to Ms. Gilmartin's arrival at WNYC?  Should one's attitude be more of a civilized "live and let live" approach where commercial and noncommercial interests could cohabit in the public broadcasting space, exchanging ideas with he-said/she-said balances?  Would that be the right resolution?  Could we expect that cohabiting commercial interests in public broadcasting would restrain themselves and not use the usual tactics of superior financial resources to overwhelm? . .

. . I don't think so.   Public broadcasting is supposed to be the alternative to other broadcasting already steeped in and motivated by commercialism (dubbed the "vast wasteland" when public broadcasting was conceived- "endlessly screaming, cajoling commercials"), not another sandbox where commercialism can play in a different guise getting elevated to equal footing with the public interest and that which the public wants to pay for.

There are those reading what I write here who will say that public broadcasting is already too infected by and susceptible to the influences of commercialism.  Environmental Action has a current campaign against what are essentially bought and paid for pro-fracking advertisements on public radio:

"NPR has been accepting millions of dollars in "sponsorship" from the fracking front-group known as ANGA. In exchange for their support, NPR hosts like Steve Inskeep, Melissa Block and Audie Cornish routinely read messages that blatantly misrepresent the dangers of fracking to our planet and people.

(See: Fracking the signal.)

Indeed, too often NPR and APR's MarketPlace (we won't review the complicated pluralistic structure of public broadcasters here) have run one-sided stories about how good fracking will be for the economy that appear to have come straight from that industry's press department representatives.  But the fact that these inroads have been made is not a reason to let there be more.

No, Forest City Ratner and MaryAnne Gilmartin don't cohabit nicely in the sandbox with others and they don't share toys.  When they want the property that you have they take it for themselves by eminent domain, stealth, cheating, and dirty and brute politics.  And that is why MaryAnne Gilmartin should not be on the board of New York Public Radio setting policy, including news reporting and public dialogue policy, for the WNYC family of radio stations.

Atlantic Yards Report Fine Tunes Calculation Of Mounting Land Subsidies For “Barclays” Arena

Bloomberg arriving to give his State of the City Address at the "Barclay" arena

Mayor $25 Billion-and-counting-in-personal-wealth-since-entering-politics Bloomberg is visiting the piled-up pirate plunder of the so-called “Barclays” arena today to deliver his (last?) State of the City Address.  Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report today has new calculations posted about the freebies handed out to Ratner for that Ratner/Prokhorov arena just in terms of land: $124 million?  See: Thursday, February 14, 2013, Uncounted savings on the Barclays Center: perhaps $124 million in free land for developer Forest City Ratner.

Mr. Oder carefully adds updates, just with respect to city land giveaways for the arena, the cost-of-subsidy-to-Ratner calculations Noticing New York has addressed on previous occasions: See: Wednesday, October 10, 2012, Weighing The Change In Brooklyn: The True Cost Of “Barclays” Center Glitter, The Cost Of “Barclays” Center Tickets and Monday, February 8, 2010, Award of No-Bid Mega-Monopoly Means Forest City Ratner Hopes To Claim an Awful Lot of Housing Subsidy, ALSO Without Bid.

The total cost of subsidies to Ratner with respect to just 22 acres out of the 30+ contiguous acres of the Ratner Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly is in the billions ($2 to $3 billion).  No one has yet tried to aggregate the cost of the Ratner subsidies for the entire 30+ contiguous acres, not Noticing New York, not Atlantic Yards Report, not the New York City Independent Budget Office, (IBO).
                               
In other words, if the money flowing into “Barclays” arena for land giveaways were redirected into the city libraries it would make all the Bloomberg-manufactured financial problems of the libraries evaporate.  (Manufactured to create real estate deals.)

It would not be nearly as important to pay attention to the almost obsessively fine-tuned calculations Mr. Oder presents with respect to the arena land giveaways if this heap of “uncounted” subsidies had not been given to Ratner without competitive bid.  More than once, the MTA, the city, and ESDC made it very clear they did not want an effective bid process bringing in alternative bidders to compete with Forest City Ratner. . .

. . . This was important on Day One when the deal was intentionally structured as a “private-public” partnership with Forest City Ratner, where the priority was to set up and then protect a Ratner monopoly on the development opportunity of all those multiple acres and it was subsequently important as the terms of the deal with Ratner have been continually and malleably shifted to confer even greater benefit on Ratner.

Taking such a careful look at the actual amount of these subsidies would hardly matter if Atlantic Yards, like the properly-managed Battery Park City, was carved into multiple building sites and bid out to multiple developers.  That’s just what the community is demanding and it can still be done with the rest of the enormous site.  And if that is done we can start paying for essential city services like libraries.

Instead, it looks like Bloomberg wants the city to sell off city libraries, including the Brooklyn Heights branch and downtown business library, and the Pacific Street library, likely enough to Forest City Ratner, in a “private-public partnership” so that we can be faced with all sorts of other deep, hidden subsidies to the likes of Ratner that are a challenge to ferret out and properly count.

Libraries That Are Now Supposedly “Dilapidated” Were Just Renovated: And Are Developers’ Real Estate Deals More Important Than Bryant Park?

Foreground: The lion Patience , of Patience and Fortitude fame, in front of 42nd Street Research Library whose research stacks will be sacrificed.  Background:  Mid-Manhattan Library that will be sold in system shrinkage plans

You may be aware that Noticing New York has run a series of articles (this will be another) about how the priorities of running a good city library system are playing second fiddle to a system-wide effort to create real estate deals for developers by selling off, closing, shrinking and consolidating libraries and divesting system assets.  It’s worse than that because to incentivize these divestitures there has been a system-wide strategy of mayoral defunding of the libraries at a time of escalating use by the public, city growth, and increased city wealth, with the public being told that libraries will not be adequately funded unless libraries are sold and the system shrunk.

Libraries “have experienced a 40 percent spike in the number of people attending programs and a 59 percent increase in circulation over the past decade”: That’s from a new report on New York City libraries from Center For An Urban Future:  Report - Branches of Opportunity, by David Giles, January 2013.  These figures for what are some of most important and well-used libraries in the country were achieved despite the fact that, as the report notes, New York is not even funding its libraries well enough to keep them open as many days as the troubled city of Detroit keeps its libraries open.

Part of the argument to sell off assets to create real estate deals is that system assets are “dilapidated” so there is no other feasible choice.  Aside from the fact that mayoral defunding of the libraries does stress the system, running assets into the ground (“demolition by neglect”), the assertions of dilapidation aren’t necessarily true even if library spokespersons are eager to make them.

“Dilapidation” of the Stacks Under the 42nd Street Research Library

Main library at 42nd Street the research collection of which would be be dispersed in city-wide shrinkage of library resources

The research stacks under the city’s main research library behind the lions, Patience and Fortitude, at 42nd Street are so dilapidated that they need to be done away with?  You can find people who will tell you the opposite, but how about this?. . .

. . . . I found the following hiding in plain sight, with just a quick reference to recent history, newspapers that I myself read on the way to work not so very long ago: Just 21 years ago the library completed a project costing over $25 million to bring the library’s research stacks up to the standard they needed to meet.  The project was supposed to be good for at least 30 years, at which time it might be time to, once again, add more stacks. That project, which addressed a backlog of need was actually designed take accommodate 55 years worth of the library's growth of its collection.  It involved building 84 miles of stacks two floors deep under Bryant Park.  (See: Library Starts Road to 84-Mile Shelves Under Park, by Susan Heller Anderson, Published: October 27, 1987.)

Under Bryant Park (skating rink in foreground) there are 84 miles of research volumes (two floors of them) integrated into the 42nd Street Library (in the background) 

The project was important enough to close down Bryant Park over a number of years, The original plan was for that to be two and half years, but there were delays and then more delays and  the park was not finally reopened until April of 1992, four and a half years after the October 1987 groundbreaking.  Part of the cost of the overall project involved restoration of the park, originally estimated to cost $5 million but coming in, instead, at $8.9 million.  It should be borne in mind that big construction projects have a way of taking longer and costing more than initially projected. (See: Shhh! Kids and Scholars at Work, by Bruce Weber, September 23, 1990 and $8.9 million restoration of the park, Architecture View; Bryant Park, An Out-of-Town Experience, by Paul Goldberger, May 03, 1992.)

According to the Times article that appeared in 1987, one reason the project was important enough to spend that money and to close down Bryant Park for so many years was, according to the Times, so that patrons researching in the library would not have to “wait one day for the volume to arrive” when volumes were not on the premises.

Not have to “wait one day for the volume to arrive”?  And now we are proposing to spend more than $300 million to rip out the stack system?  Which will mean exactly what?: That when anyone using the library is doing research there they will have to wait at least a day for volumes they will need to order to arrive.   A day’s worth of research could now be transmogrified into the work of weeks.

Hopefully, the plans to move the volumes for storage in New Jersey will not go worse than planned. . .  The New York City Opera company suffered a huge setback in 1985 when costumes for 69 of the company's productions were consumed in the fire where they were stored in Passaic, New Jersey.  The Metropolitan similarly lost millions of dollars of rarities and sets, costumes for 43 productions in 1973 when what it had stored in a Bronx warehouse burned.  Hopefully there will be no similar conflagration at the remote warehouse sites the library sends it collection off to or the metaphorical analogy to the incineration destroying the collected works of the Ancient World in the Ptolemy Dynasty’s Great Library of Alexandria will be complete.

Of course the best defense is a good offense so,  those selling the 42 Street development deal are conversely arguing the Rose Main Reading Room, that researchers use above the stacks built in 1911, is now in peril (after a hundred plus years) because the stacks below are not properly fireproofed.  (My, of my! What were people thinking during that stack renovation work that ended twenty-one years ago?)  

The Rose Main Reading Room, extolled by the New York Times in 2007, was completely renovated and restored, reopening in November 1998 with a gift of $15 million from Frederick P. Rose, the real estate developer, and his wife, a gift they made in honor of their children.  That’s nice, but it should be noted one problem when charitable non-profit institutions take money from real estate developers is that it gives them influence, sometimes seats on boards, and the real estate community has its own preoccupations and ways of thinking.

Mid-Manhattan Library, across from the 42nd Street Library, one of the many libraries the city library systems slated to sold off in real estate deals as part of city-wide shrinkage of the system

And why do we now theoretically want to spend more than $300 million to rip out the stack system?: So we can sell off the Mid-Manhattan library site across the street and the science library at 34th Street.  How much might these sell-offs net in terms of public benefit?  Sale of the Donnell Library grossed only $67.4 million.  That isn’t a net figure.  It costs money to demolish libraries and then rebuild what needs to replace them.  Developers get paid and make money on the entire package, including whatever portion is just the churn, but what it costs to stay or get back to the same place must be subtracted out in any argument that  attempts to measure cost and benefit to public.  (Also, when libraries are sold the money goes to the city, not to the library system.)

What the site of the Donnell Library closed and sold off in 2008 looked like last week.

Making way for condos and a high-end hotel

Site's future

Meanwhile, the public loses things.  The public has lost the Donnell library closed prematurely in 2008 (and not reopened).  Materials from Donnell was sent over to the Mid-Manhattan library and the developer-deal advocates are now asserting that one reason to do away with the Mid-Manhattan Library is that it is not sufficient to handle some of the functions, like a teen library that the Donnell once very adequately served.

Sale of the Donnell Library site was no doubt inspired by the MOMA Museum tower rising to great heights right across the street

Consider that the public now stands to loose the research stacks that it paid for partly with the closing of Bryant park for all those years. . .

. . . Same-day immediate access to a complete research collection was important enough to close Bryant Park for more than four years, but selling off public libraries to generate real estate deals is more important than same-day immediate access to a complete research collection?  That makes generation of real estate deals more important than keeping our public parks open to the public!  Is the next step going to be to suggest the selling off of the park for real deals?

For those for whom visual assistance in solving this logic puzzle is helpful, see the following visual:

Does selling off parks for real estate deals sound foolish?  I just wrote about William F. R. Ballard, who was New York City Planning Commissioner from 1963 to 1966, and I noted how the Times obituary for Mr. Ballard cited as a highlight of his tenure that he fended off  “a proposal to build public housing in Central Park,” saying it was “patently absurd.”  You see the development industry is actually capable of proposing such sell-offs of the public realm.  Things change and pendulums swing back.  We had once done a lot to addess income inequality in this country.  Just as the country has swung back to a new Guilded Age where wealth inequality is even greater now than in the late 1800s, so too are we having to fend off again the policies of those seeking to rehabilitate Robert Moses and his real estate churning policies, something else I wrote about in that article about events in 1963.

We are about to move on to discussion of a contrastingly different library, a local branch in Brooklyn.

This article is about how those arguing for the sale of system libraries for development are using every conceivable argument they can make and not necessarily honestly.  Arguing for the dismantling of the research stacks at 42nd Street, they are making the case that the research library is, in essence, elitist.  It is an argument to which Michael Kimmelman, architectural critic for the Times, gave a hearty, well-deserved lambasting. 

Kimmelemn acknowledged that “inconveniencing of researchers who might have to wait an extra day for books to arrive at 42nd Street from New Jersey” might be portrayed as a “snobbish-sounding” objection that fuels “the library’s public relations offensive, which has advertised the plan as democratizing a building that many New Yorkers find intimidating” and then went on to make the point:   

But the library, free and open, is already an exemplar of democracy at its healthiest and best, of society making its finest things available to all. Climbing the library steps, passing the lions, rising up to the reading room where anyone can ask for books, enshrines, architecturally, the pursuit of enlightenment. Inspiring more people to reach those heights is the library’s loftiest mission. Peddling “democracy” as if it were a popularity contest is what “American Idol” does.

What galls most about the charges of elitism used to support these sell-offs is that the elitism truly in play here involves the small privileged club that gets to benefit from these real state deals at everyone else’s expense. That will become even more clear as we next move on to discuss the branch library in Brooklyn where it is impossible to accuse those wanting it to stay open of elitism. Quite the reverse.  While the argument of elitism is out of bounds, the familiar argument of “dilapidation” is, however, still being made.

“Dilapidation” of A Local Library In Brooklyn: Pacific Branch

Pacific Branch Library 25 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217, on Pacific Street right near the "Barclays" arena

The following is from Community Board 6's Resource Directory:

BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY - PACIFIC BRANCH  
Pacific Branch was the first Carnegie library to open in Brooklyn. The building won praise for its 'dignified' design and its first-of-its-kind children's room. 

Here’s more continuing from the library’s website where the above appears to have been taken from:

Describing the second-floor children's room, the Tribune's writer went on to write that Pacific is the most completely equipped room for children in the country, with tables and chairs built especially for children. Other features included a rotunda with interior semi-circular iron balcony, fine wood work on the banisters, doors, doorways and arches, a tiled fireplace and wood panelling.

The Pacific Branch Library is one of the Brooklyn libraries that the Brooklyn Public Library system has announced is at the head of the line of those it wants to sell because they are “dilapidated.”  See this story in the Daily News about these two “dilapidated  branches” where a Brooklyn Public Library official, apparently Josh Nachowitz, said, “are in need of crippling repair costs the system can’t afford.”

The other now receiving prominent attention is the Brooklyn Heights Library on the border of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn’s central business district.  The 62,000 square foot Brooklyn Heights library, constructed in 1963, is actually two libraries housed together, the Brooklyn Business Library and a local branch library.  The Brooklyn Public Library system plans to reduce that space to 16,000 square feet.  I won’t go into the details in this article (this also involves shrinkage of facilities at the Main Brooklyn library at Grand Army Plaza), but I would personally say that the Brooklyn Heights library is actually in pretty good shape given the city’s withholding of adequate funding in the Bloomberg years.

The Pacific Branch Library is the library with respect to which the public has been given the following message: The public can expect to get the library back in a new location if the public tolerates zoning changes to allow a Walentas-developed building into which it would be put to be nearly double the size permitted as of right.

When a similar previous scheme concerning putting a library into a Walentas building fell through in 2008 a skeptical “Steve from Fort Greene” commented on The Brooklyn Paper article about the lack of necessity for such a new library because “there is already one at Pacific Street!” (Referring to the Pacific Street branch.)  (See: June 21, 2008, Kiss the glass library goodbye, by Mike McLaughlin, The Brooklyn Paper.)

Too bad for “Steve from Fort Greene”: This time the system has him headed off at the pass (as they say in Westerns) since the system has announced it is closing and selling the Pacific Branch.

“Steve” was outflanked in another way even earlier.  Preparatory to everything that is going on now the library system “quietly cut branch hours by an unprecedented amount” in the fall of 2010 for this and 25 other locations, “nearly half of the system’s 60 locations,” closing them “for both weekend days”   See: September 22, 2010, Unhappy ending at library as branches are slashed on weekends, by Joe Anuta.
  
The problem is that the Pacific Branch may not be as dilapidated as you might think when you hear library spokesmen calling it that.  A community activist who lives on the block where the library is located and pays astute attention to matters like this pointed out to me that the library was renovated two years ago.  “It’s tight as a drum,” my activist friend commented.

A constant stream of people are going in and coming out of the library

I wanted to include a link in this article that you could click on to read documentation of the library’s recent renovation.  When I experienced difficulty in finding what I wanted I called the Pacific branch and explained I wanted help with the research I was doing.  The librarian I talked to immediately became exceptionally skittish and told me no librarians there could help me research the information I wanted (I said I was hoping to find, for instance a collection of newsletters that would talk about the renovation) because the librarians had all been directed not to speak to anyone about the renovations: All they could do was give me the name of a marketing person to whom I should direct questions.

I was nevertheless able to verify in my conversation that the librarian had been around when a year’s worth of recent renovations were done.  The marketing person I was directed to call for information on the subject did not call me back.

In the vestibule of Pacific Library:  Library purposes of providing information and community centers

I called Community Board 6 to see if I could get information about the renovations but what I got was a complaint that the library system had shared virtually no information with the board about things it was doing.  I was assured it would not be worth my while to review the on-line minutes of the community board or any of its committees (such as Landmarks/Land Use or Parks/Recreation/Cultural Affairs) because I wouldn’t find anything there.

One thing to note: If the Pacific branch is closed and a new library is opened in a double-size Walentas building, the new library will then be within the boundaries of Community Board 2, not 6.  Overall, I got the impression the library had been rather furtive about letting the community in on its plans.

It seemed that the the best way for me to verify that the library was in good shape as represented by my friend was to go visit it.

Main reading room in Pacific Street

There are those who when they look at a building or a neighborhood to assess what kind of shape it is in will be less inclined to see the actual infrastructure they are looking at than the people who are filling that space.  If the people in that space are of the same socio-economic strata as themselves, or above, they may be more inclined to conclude that the neighborhood or the buildings they are assessing are in good shape and quite serviceable to their purpose.  But if the people inhabiting that environment have less wealth (or are of a different race) that conclusion might not be so quickly reached.

Reading on balcony overlooking the rest of the main reading room

Andrew Carnegie who donated the library believed in enabling people to help themselves. “nothing for nothing. Youths must acquire knowledge themselves.”

Library Chess

Computers throughout the library are well-used by the public

That's pretty much how it turned out that neighborhoods were slated for demolition under urban renewal in the past.  Neighborhoods that didn't get demolished and were then reoccupied by wealthier people were suddenly better regraded as a result.  When Brooklyn Heights was less wealthy even it was in danger of demolition and some of it was torn down.  Now it's regarded as a premier historic neighborhood.

One resource available at Pacific: A collection of video DVDs

My own experience of the Pacific branch is that it is a hardy building that is getting hard use and standing up well to that hard use to stay in good shape.  Its main room has a linoleum floor that appears to have been put down on rock solid, level concrete.   All around there was evidence of intense use.  The place was filled.  As with any space getting a lot of use there was a reasonable amout of superficial scuffing as a result.  I didn’t see any evidence of prettifying financial expenditures but the building didn’t seem to need them to be durably functional.

150 seat capacity public second-floor auditorium

The building also has some beautiful community meeting space that anyone can arrange to use so long as it isn’t for profit.  Downstairs there is a room that will accommodate up to fifty.  Upstairs there is a gracious second floor auditorium that will accommodate a larger group of up to 150.  I am thinking of arranging to use space there to host a meeting to discuss community change.  I asked and was told that everything works perfectly, there’d be no problem with heat, air conditioning (window units in the summer), electricity, or the movie screen.

Public community room available gatherings with a capacity of up to 50

Kids are us!  Library has a children's reading room so you have to handle strollers.

I've spoken to some other people I know who are active in community affairs and they told me they love using the community space for meetings.  They then joked about the idea that if the space weren’t there that  “community space” might have to be found in the deeply subsidized “Barclays” arena a short block away, privately owned by Bruce Ratner’s Forest City Ratner company and Russian Oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.  Under the bogus provisions of the “Community Benefits Agreement” applicable to the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly, now being largely unenforced, the arena owners were supposed to provide a form of community space: a “meditation room.”  That has turned out to be pretty much a joke.

Library on right, receiving shallow city funding.  On left, just a few feet down the block the "Barclays" arena is receiving incredibly deep subsidies on the order of perhaps $20.00 a ticket 

The library system is painfully underfunded by Bloomberg and it hurts libraries like the Pacific branch. But at the same time tickets to attend Barbra Streisand or Jay-Z concerts at the "Barclays" arena only a short block away are deeply subsidized to the tune of perhaps $20 a ticket.  Imagine if library patrons could come to the library depositing into the library's till a $20 bill (furnished by the city periodically) to assist operations. . .   the libraries would be strong in their own right and there would be little excuse for Bloomberg's development deals.

One individual in the community fighting to keep the Pacific branch open commented in a communication forwarded to me that as between the Brooklyn Heights library being sold and shrunk (built as part of urban renewal in 1963) and the Pacific branch being closed: “The Pacific street branch building has more historic significance and its closing blatantly discriminates against people of color, the main users of the library.”

Another activist I spoke with told me that there was significant worry in the community that, if the Pacific branch is closed and a new library is opened in the enlarged Walentas building in Community Board 2's district, those in the community now using the Pacific branch would not feel welcome in the new space.

In the vestibule: The tale of the library's previous savoir by community activities when the library system was not working with them, not against them and for real estate deals

There happen to be activists in the community who are old enough to have participated in saving the library once before in the first half of the 70's.  The following is from the library's website.  It is almost the same as what can be read in the vestibule upon entering (see image above):

Problems soon beset the fine new library. In 1914 construction of the BMT subway system caused structural damage, and in 1917 all of the children's books and one third of the adult books were ruined by the water used to control a fire. In the 1930s W.P.A. workers created a large second-floor mural which has unfortunately not survived. After another fire in 1973, the building was slated for demolition, but community activists and the Brooklyn Public Library worked together to save it from the wrecker's ball.

After extensive renovation, the Pacific Branch reopened to the public in 1975. For almost 100 years the Pacific Branch has served a changing community. The branch, which boasts an active Friend's group, looks forward to serving the people of this busy crossroads neighborhood for generations to come through its wide range of information and recreational resources, its video collection and its innovative events and programs.

. . .  “the building was slated for demolition, but community activists and the Brooklyn Public Library worked together to save it from the wrecker's ball” and it was reopened in 1975.  Now community activists are working to save the building, but the Brooklyn Public Library is working against them to create real estate deals.

Historical photo of library in the vestibule

I was told that activists have tried to have the building landmarked in the past but the commissioner of the landmarks Commission refused to put the building up for consideration.  That is an indication that the real estate community wanted the building to remain in play.  I don’t know dates.  I don't know how far back this matter was first being pushed by the community, who was commissioner at the time, or what particular mayor’s bidding the demurring commissioner was doing when not proposing the building for consideration.

Library in happier days when it was not under threat. . . Atlantic Yards Report used this image from library's web site

The effort is ongoing.   The Historic Districts Council is pushing to save the Pacific library, the first Carnegie library to open in Brooklyn, as part of its “Campaign to Preserve the Carnegie Libraries.”  According to HDC’s site:

New York City’s collection of Carnegie libraries is the largest of any city in the country. Of the 67 built, 57 branches are still standing. The 54 that remain in operation make up one quarter of the city’s public library branches. . . . 13 branches have been designated New York City individual landmarks

The suspicion is that when the library closes the city will also close and sell the adjoining parcel housing the Boerum Hill Medicaid Office and offices of the Human Resources administration.

The adjacent two-story building providing city services that people think will be sold and leveled when the library goes to a developer

Perhaps not so coincidentally given arrival of the "Barclays" arena, the community is also struggling to preserve and prevent destruction of the1866 Gothic Revival Church of the Redeemer that is kitty-corner to the library across the intersecting street and avenue.  The church is very like the several churches that have been preserved just west of the Gramercy Park area, helping to give that area its character.  Not surprisingly those eager to make a profit on a tear-down of the church are asserting that the church, like the library, is too decrepit to preserve. 

The essential point to remember here is just one thing: When library system representatives tell you that libraries are being closed and sold off and the system shrunk because they are dilapidated and no longer serving their function, that isn’t true. . .  They are being sold off to create real estate deals for developers.  What make this worse, is that to make these stories more plausible, to provoke these sales that will shrink the system, Bloomberg is withholding funding from the library system at a time when the city is growing, getting wealthier, and library usage is up.

There is now a petition available to sign and pass around demanding that these priorities be rearranged and that the city start funding the library system properly, that real estate deals take a back seat to the needs of the library system.  I will soon write more about it in a coming post.

The petition, with more background on the website where it can be signed is:

Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction (click on the hyper-link to get to it)

The petition text: 

 We demand that Mayor Bloomberg stop defunding New York libraries at a time of increasing public use, population growth and increased city wealth.  Shrinking our library system to create real estate deals for the wealthy at a time of cutbacks in education and escalating disparities in opportunity is not only unjust, it is a shortsighted plan that will ultimately hurt New York City’s economy and competitiveness. 

Reiterating: Here are prior Noticing New York articles in this series followed by three other articles of relevance:

•    New City-Wide Policy Makes Generation Of Real Estate Deals The Library System’s Primary Purpose, (January 31, 2013)

•    City Strategy Of Withholding Basic City Services To Blackmail Public Into Accepting Bigger Development (Friday, February 1, 2013)

•    What Could We Expect Forest City Ratner Would Do With Two Library Sites On Sale For The Sake Of Creating Real Estate Deals? (Sunday, February 3, 2013)

•    New York Times: Critic’s Notebook- In Renderings for a Library Landmark, Stacks of Questions, by Michael Kimmelman, January 29, 2013.

•    Wall Street Journal: Undertaking Its Destruction, by Ada Louise Huxtable, December 3, 2012.

•    Center For An Urban Future:  Report - Branches of Opportunity, by David Giles, January 2013