Too Little Information And Perhaps No Good Explanation: Can Anyone Say Why Methodist Hospital Should Be Expanding When Nearby LICH Is Closing?

Preserve Park Slope's flyer announcing the Thursday Community Board 6 meeting about the LICH expansion

I usually like to have more information before I write an article, but maybe the fact that I have so little information to provide here is evidence that the public has far too little information about some significant and very big decisions that are being made concerning development in the historic brownstone neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, and, in connection therewith, the health and hospital systems serving those neighborhoods and the rest of Brooklyn . . .

. . .  There is a public hearing scheduled before Brooklyn’s Community Board 6 for 6:00 PM, this coming Thursday, November 21st (John Jay High School, 237 7th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY).   Will the public be equipped with the information it needs to deal with it?  The hearing is about the proposed 500,000 square foot expansion of Methodist Hospital in Park Slope, an expansion that will apparently increase the previously reported size of the hospital’s physical plant by about 60%.  That’s ostensibly all that the hearing is about, but mightn’t it really be about a lot more? . . .

Image from Preserve Park Slope's Facebook page showing scale of Methodist expansion in context near Prospect Park in background 

. . . At the same time very significant expenditures will be directed into this Methodist expansion, state health department officials have been involved with the intricacies of shutting down nearby Long Island College Hospital (LICH) in Cobble Hill where it borders Brooklyn Heights.  Don’t let anyone tell you this isn’t a public spending issue: In the end it is all paid for and financed through the insurance and government reimbursement rates for which we all pay.  In addition to LICH, another nearby hospital, Interfaith Hospital, providing services to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights and Brownsville, is under threat.

Selling Off Long Island College Hospital Real Estate

Recent reports in the real estate press say that the closing of LICH would put 200,000 square feet of real estate on the market but that figure apparently considers just just the land itself.  More than 765,000 square feet of medical facility space would be shut down.  Whatever the total is, it's additional to other LICH medical care facility space that has already been shut down.  In 2008, LICH doctors, alleging the hospital’s real estate assets were being looted, were able to provide a list of previously sold LICH real estate that appeared in a new York Times article:

    •    The Lamm Institute, at 110 Amity Street, fetched $6.123 million

    •    The former International Longshoremen’s Association Medical Center at 340 Court Street, which had been used as a nurses’ residence, $24 million

    •    A building at 145 Sackett Street for $3.1 million

    •    St. Peter’s Church and School on Hicks Street, which had been used as a nursing and radiology school

    •    A dozen brownstones on Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street

(See: Doctors Say Hospital Is Falling Victim to Its Own Real Estate Value, By Anemona Hartcollis, June 10, 2008.)

The article said that the real estate in the last two bullets above, the dozen brownstones plus the church and schools, were sold off for the low-sounding figure of  “about $16 million.” (The big downturn in real estate prices following the peak of the bubble came later in September of 2008.)

A Google Earth view of the LICH complex, next to the BQE, elevated and overlooking expanses of harbor just a little further on

A much more recent New York Times article about LICH, almost exactly five years later, underscored the attraction of selling off LICH’s real estate, hardly making it seem like it should be going for low values:

With its dwindling patient population, the huge red brick building in Cobble Hill stands on the border of Brooklyn Heights, with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline that make it more valuable as a real estate development site than as a medical center.

(See: Nurses Roam Empty Halls as Long Island College Hospital Is Prepared to Close, by Anemona Hartcollis, July 18, 2013.)

What a difference five years can make!  The “dwindling patient population” referred to in the summer 2013 article is due to the efforts the hospital owners are making to shut LICH down to effect those real estate sell-offs, even contravening recent court orders, but in the article five years ago Stanley Brezenoff, the president of Continuum, then the owner of the LICH, defended the real estate sales that were then transpiring in these terms:

He said that the company had no plans to close the hospital but acknowledged that it might soon be “reconfigured.”

What else was happening in those intervening five years?  Methodist was working on its plans for its expansion about two and half miles away.

The Real Estate Shell Game Model: St. Vincent's Hospital In Greenwich Village

In that article five years ago Mr. Brezenoff offered another, probably much more truthful observation:

He cited St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, which has threatened to close if it is not given permission to move the hospital so that some of its landmarked property can be redeveloped into luxury condominiums.

“What’s St. Vincent’s except a real estate strategy?” Mr. Brezenoff said.

Indeed, in the end, with administrator’s eyes on that St. Vincent’s “real estate strategy” what survived at the end of the day was a real estate deal for a developer as St. Vincent’s hospital itself went bankrupt.  See: Tuesday, December 13, 2011, Tough Luck: Heads the Developer Wins, Tails the Public Loses. . Unprincipled Upzoning for Rudin Luxury Apartments at Former St. Vincent’s Site.

When stripped down, St. Vincent’s “real estate strategy” referred to by Mr. Brezenoff essentially amounted to the use of St. Vincent’s special status as a public institution providing “charitable” public benefit to sell off a portion of the Greenwich Village Historical District so as to build at greater density than would have otherwise been permitted.  Property the hospital was divesting itself of was to become residential development.  Some of that residential development involved converting existing health facilities and some was new construction at density greater than normally permitted in the historic district.  At the same time, entirely new facilities for the St. Vincent’s hospital were to be built where a historic building was being taken down.  The new hospital building was going to be enormous and tower over the historic district.

It was all a bit of a real estate shell game.  Those who may have been motivated by the real estate profits from the switcheroos and property put into play ultimately got what they wanted, but those charged with the job of continuing to provide the public with health care services failed.  There were many confusing moving parts and that failure was probably not something that most bystanders would have thought to predict before it happened, but it did.

A developer slide showing the proposed new St. Vincent's tower with a ghostliness that disguised how it wold tower over the historic district.

Model showing more clearly the change in scale a new St. Vincent's was to bring to the historic Greenwich Village Historic District neighborhood

Looked at as if it were a single combined transaction, the shrinkage and extermination of LICH with the concurrent expansion of Methodist, the next nearest hospital in Brooklyn, reiterates virtually all the same elements seen in the St. Vincent’s real estate shell game:

   •     Hospital property will recycled to become expensive new residential development in a very desirable neighborhood,

   •     Some of that residential development may wind up being new and at increased densities greater than the surrounding historic area,

   •     Meanwhile other buildings in a historic neighborhood (though in this case not yet themselves historically designated) will be leveled . . .

    •    . . . so that new hospital facilities can be built that tower over a historic district and recalibrate its sense of scale.

In this case will the new medical facility (unlike St. Vincent’s) actually be built and will it be a success?  That depends in large part on whether the health planning that underlies these ambitions is any good.  If good planning is shunted aside by those led by real estate motivations, like St. Vincent’s, that is far from assured.

Large new Methodist building would be on Park Slope's 8th Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets

Google view of where the expansion woul dbe expected to fit in on the block on the right

Expansion building would be bigger than these existing ones

Is the Methodist Expansion Really Needed?

The public’s worry in this regard should be accentuated by the fact that Thursday’s hearing before Community Board 6 is for a real estate variance to let the Methodist real estate plan proceed and it is being requested to be put in place before the New York State Department of Health has issued a “Certificate of Need” for the expansion, and even before an application has been submitted that frames and defines what this project's developer might argue that need is.  Why?

Meanwhile, events that likely affect such planning are unfolding without any planning the public can perceive.  For instance, after the fact, wouldn’t a sale of all of LICH’s properties make the issuance of a certificate of need for Methodist a tad more credible?  But, conversely, should LICH be shut down before it is decided it makes sense for Methodist to expand?

Build and expand the Methodist medical campus at great expense at the same time other health facilities are being demolished?  No articles in the press have been covering this, but Brooklynites seizing upon the opportunity to comment on an article about the Methodist expansion in the Brooklyn Paper saw the connection immediately and spontaneously debated it at length.

Building From Scratch vs. Utilizing Existing Resources

The conservative economic approach to creating additional value normally involves building upon existing resources rather than demolishing and starting again from scratch.

Nevertheless, it is not necessarily an apples to apples comparison.  With new technologies and surgeries that are more minimally invasive, there is an ongoing shift these days to ambulatory care not requiring hospital beds.  Methodist is reportedly not proposing to add additional beds in the course of its huge expansion, but LICH has many beds.  Methodist may actually be increasing the amount of space devoted to beds so as to have more private or semi-private rooms, while not actually increasing the number of beds (this is not clear).  Even so, adaptive reuse of existing facilities is almost always the least expensive way to go.

Location of Brooklyn Hospitals In Relation To Potential Clientele

Does it make sense to consolidate the shrinking bed population into an expensive and more massive Methodist complex?  One argument that is being given for selling off LICH is that the people in the relatively well-to-do neighborhoods surrounding it are more likely to travel to the major medical complexes of Manhattan for those significant medical needs they can shop for and premeditatedly plan for, thus bypassing the services of LICH except in an emergency.  Do the administrators of Methodist believe that the more super complex they seek to build in Park Slope will survive such an argument to the extent that it is true?  Or do they view themselves as being an extension of the Manhattan complexes because they are part of the growing Presbyterian network that includes the original Columbia Presbyterian complex?

My understanding is that Methodist has historically done well being able to draw from the reasonably wealthy surrounding Parl Slope area, but would a larger, built-up Methodist start drawing the Brooklyn client population that the LICH executioners say go to Manhattan?  If not, Methodist, like LICH or Interfaith, is left to draw from two remaining sets of client populations, those who need emergency care and those looking for local convenience in getting the kind of care that they feel can be dependably delivered without going to a major medical center.

Those two client population sets don’t benefit from a consolidated Brooklyn complex; they benefit from dispersed provisions of resources.  Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has issued a report as Public Advocate on the reduction of emergency response times if LICH or Interfaith are closed (see illustrative images below).   In terms of local convenience, Methodist is near a stop for the F and G trains, further from others, and difficult to get to by car.  Overall, it is not that convenient.  LICH is a little more accessible by public transportation, and, just off the BQE, more accessible by automobile.

In the future the nearest emergency room might be somewhere else a lot further off

LICH emergency room ambulances

Unknown Expense of Methodist Expansion

I have referred several times to the expense of the Methodist expansion.  What is that expense?  Interestingly, as the public debates these matters Methodist has produced no figures for what its expansion will cost.  That concealment of such critically relevant information is an indication that they don’t want the public to know or think about the expense and that the expense itself is a strong argument against the expansion.

Elsewhere in the system where the Presbyterian network has submitted a Certificate of Need (go to page 41) for a similar ambulatory faculty (including maternity hospital space) to be located at 1283 York Avenue (an extension located across the street from NYP-New York Weill Cornell Center Campus facilities at 525 East 68th Street in Manhattan) its estimated cost is $830,020,454.  Without making too fine a point of guessing the unfurnished Methodist cost figures, that Manhattan facility is comparably sized with a total floor area of 568,801 square feet.

Public vs. Private Expenses and Matters of Interest

Rather than furnish information about what the cost of the project will be Methodist has issued statements (including in its project fact sheet):

Financing

NYM intends to privately finance the project.

What that actually means is unhelpfully vague in world where PR descriptions are plastically used to describe the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena as privately paid for when it is financed by municipal bonds and a diversion of New York City’s tax revenue stream.  In 2004 municipal bonds issued by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (still outstanding), financed Methodist’s adjacent 100,000 square foot expansion.  It is likely that this new expansion would be similarly paid for by this low cost, taxpayer-subsidized source and certainly no enforceable promise that this would not ultimately be the case.  No matter what, in the end, the insurance payments together with public reimbursements from programs like Medicaid and Medicare, mean that these directed income streams are paying for all the capital improvements in our health care system.  In fact, that’s why health facilities are regulated and the state Department of Health issues Certificates of Need.  Without properly submitted plans at the state level New York cannot get the kind of waivers for funding it needs at the federal level.

It is interesting how protestations that enterprises are “private” are being used to keep the public out of decisions that concern it.  The publicly financed New York Public Library (note the word “public”) largely paid for with taxpayer dollars has also asserted that it should be able to make unimpeded decisions because it argues it is a “private” institution.

What's Planned, What May Happen, A Seismic Detour?

While the Methodist expansion costs may edge into the billion dollar territory and will further cost Park Slope by ripping its historic brownstone fabric, the bang-for-the-buck may be questionable.  Methodist is asserting that of the 300,000 square feet of programmable space in the proposed new building, 220,000 square feet would be used to relocate and concentrate existing services offered by Methodist, and only 80,000 square feet -- just a bit more than 25% -- would be used for expanding services.  See 1st attachment to the BSA application (letter from NYM Sr VP explaining programmatic need), at page 4.  A net gain of only 80,000 square feet?  Mightn’t it then be better to build something far smaller and cheaper, perhaps only adding 80,000 square feet of new services and leave other services where they already are?

But, if the expansion occurred in the fashion Methodist is now requesting might Methodist not actually give the existing space from which it says it will relocate these functions, or might it expend to reoccupy those spaces later?  Things don’t always happen as planned.

Methodist is not now proposing to expand in the way that was originally contemplated when the current zoning was established.  That similar alternative, discussed as an as-of-right alternative, would involve Methodist building on top of an above-and-underground parking lot built back around 2004, as they previously said they meant to do.  Methodist officials say the don’t want to go forward with their original plan because changes in the seismic provisions in the building code which the garage doesn’t meet would make this difficult:

A development consultant from Washington Square Partners said that building on the parking garage would be difficult because of a seismic building code.

(It don’t fit: Residents blast Methodist building plan, by Natalie Musumeci, The Brooklyn Paper, July 12, 2013.)

The relatively smaller existing Methodist buildings on Park Slope's commercial 7th Avenue

A very long paragraph in the Environmental Assessment Statement (Bottom of page K-8) under the heading, “COMPLYING DEVELOPMENT BUILDING SEGMENT OVER EXISTING BELOW-GRADE PARKING GARAGE” makes it seem all the more formidable with sentences like:

Next, the floors and the columns of the existing garage would be demolished because the necessary seismic retrofitting is not possible and the existing columns and foundations are not adequate to support the new 10-story structure that would be constructed on this portion of the site for the Complying Development. Minimal additional excavation would be required since the depth of the existing below-grade garage is already near the required depth of the proposed building. 

A garage recently built for the purpose of being the foundation for a future medical facility and it was not properly designed to withstand earthquakes?  Irrespective of whatever changes there have been to the New York building code with respect to potential seismic activity that seems like poor planning.  If inconvenient to build on it now would Methodist someday in the future build on this parking lot?

Some of Methodist's existing smaller buildings on 7th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue are cleverly scaled and styled to fit in fairly well with brownstones across the street

The Methodist Rationale For Not Taking Over LICH: Superior Methodist Management

It is my understanding that when Methodist officials have been asked why they shouldn’t take over LICH and its facilities instead of building its expansion they cite the superior management of Methodist.  But if management is the sole difference then a transplant of management would seem to be the solution, unless they mean that poor management at LICH has somehow compromised the LICH real estate and other physical assets.  It would seem unlikely that would really be the case.

Toomas M. Sorra, M.D. of Concerned Physicians of LICH tells us that he doubts those commenting negatively know anything “about the physical plant at LICH,” that:

the physical plant has never been an issue, the issue is SUNY's systematic destruction of LICH via closing departments, services, etc.

For more about the looting of LICH’s assets in Noticing New York articles see: Friday, February 15, 2013, Last Night’s Community Meeting To Save Long Island College Hospital- Pictures And The Big Picture and Wednesday, February 13, 2013, One-Stop Petition Shopping: Report On The Brooklyn Heights Association Annual Meeting, LICH and Libraries.

The proposition of getting rid of LICH is not just a question of getting rid of its management or its physical plant.  It is a move that also gets rid of existing staff and potentially unions.

Unions

Right now, in the sort of world we live in, unions provide one of the best, most stalwart defenses when a public asset like LICH is threatened when it should be preserved.  Unions, not always guaranteed to behave altruistically, can also introduce friction against changes in the status quo when such changes might benefit the public.  But, as in the case of conversions of public to charter schools, getting rid of unions represents one more thing that some may even have as a covert but important goal: As labor force pay scales decrease, the ability to jettison a union represents the elimination of bargained-for improvements in worker's lives.  If you come to things with a Bain Capital mind set this may be favorable viewed as “creative destruction,” or it may just be another expression of opportunistic greed.  The problem is that what is happening with our hospitals is already complicated enough without having also to take into account that these motivations also lurk in the mix to complicate matters further.  

One Roof or Two?

Is it really important to bring everyone to one location under one roof?  In upper Manhattan the Presbyterian runs the Allen Hospital which is about 2.9 miles north of the Columbia Presbyterian campus (with which it has integrated function), about the same distance LICH is from Methodist.

The Methodist Expansion Intrusion Into the Scale of Park Slope

7th Avenue on left.  8th Avenue on right.

Methodist provided drawings above from which the perhaps 17-residential stroy equivalent height of the building on 7th Avenue is difficult to calculate and discern.  Above the reverse: 8th Avenue on left.  7th Avenue on right.

What does the scale currently proposed for Methodist mean for Park Slope?

•    The new building, measuring from the down slope 7th Avenue side, is approximately the equivalent of 16 or 17 conventional residential stories.  The height as measured from the up slope side is 146 feet and the slope adds about 15 or twenty feet of height to that.  The Methodist materials seem like they were prepared to obscure that fact and make the measurements for the 7th Avenue side difficult.

•    The new building will likely be visible from Prospect Park.  As yet, there no visual representation showing what that will look like.

•    At least fifteen Park Slope townhouses will be sacrificed.

As Preserve Park Slope points out on its “Frequently Asked Questions” page, “For comparison, less than 1% of all the buildings in Park Slope rise above five stories, or about 50 feet.”  Preserve Park Slope also has an online petition: Oppose the Mega-Complex Being Proposed by New York Methodist Hospital.                   

Methodist rendering showing a view of the building not on context of the surrounding buildings of one third the height 

Again: Where's the neighborhood?

The renderings of the expansion released by Methodist show its building close up, not in the context of being three times the size of these surrounding buildings.

Townhouses on 8th Avenue across the street from where new Methodist Building would stand.  New building would eb three times as tall.

The scale at which people in Park Slope are accustomed to living happily?

From Preserve Park Slope- Does this image suffice to convey how the new hospital building would be three times the height of the 8th Avenue townhouses across the street

Another image from Preserve Park Slope

Any tall development comes with shadow studies.  See below. 

Here is a very short shadow study video animation from Preserve Park Slope: Shadow Study- Preserve Park Slope Preserve Park Slope.

 

Some advocates for development would assert that we should relentlessly proceed to levels of ever greater density and that, accordingly, greater and greater density for Park Slope is inevitable and desirable.  Maybe not.  Charles Montgomery has a new book out on the benefits of urban living, including the fact it apparently makes people happier: “Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design.”  Even as he suggests that urban density helps people to be happier, he says that, based on surveys, there is a Goldilocks zone were people are happiest.  People living in cities are happier than those living in suburbs, but those living in city towers are not as happy as those living in more low-rise environments.  See: Does City Living Make Us Happy? Leonard Lopate Show, Monday, November 04, 2013

Google view showing how close the huge expansion would be to Prospect Park

A Bing version of that evidence

What might the expansion look like from Prospect Park?  Still guessing exactly.  Preserve Park Slope generated this image.

Insufficient Information To Reach The Right Decisions

Is Methodist’s big expansion the right decision for Park Slope?  Further, is it right for Brooklyn to close down other hospitals like LICH and Interfaith at the same time?  I have my suspicions that the answer is “No,” but I think that I and the rest of the public have a problem weighing in on these things at the present time because too little information has been furnished.  And yet hospital and state officials would proceed in closing LICH and would give the real estate approval needed to expand Methodist without such information being supplied.

I have asked Methodist a number of questions, intending to make this article more informative.  They have not replied.

What would I suggest to Community Board 6?. . . That it demand, at a minimum, that a Certificate of Need package be supplied before it considers what Methodist should be allowed to do with its real estate.  In addition, the future of LICH and Interfaith should be looked at in the context of an overall plan for Brooklyn’s hospitals.  That’s not where we are at the moment.

Where we are headed at the moment is the de facto implementation of what may be some pretty strange results, without having given any public consideration as to their likely lack of common sense.

Oops! NYPL Documents The Blank Check Mentality of Certain Reliable Supporters of Library Sales and Shrinkage

NYPL's "Voices of Support" page for the nonexistent Central Library Plan starting off with praise from the Daily News editorial page

Gotcha!  Smile!  Say Cheese!  You’re on Candid Camera!   Caught in the act!

The NYPL (New York Public Library) has just documented the blank check mentality it expects from a cast of supporters it believes can be trotted out to reliably  . .  

. . . To reliably what? We’ll get to that in a moment.                   

The other day the New York Times ran a story letting us know that the NYPL is in bigger trouble than most probably suspected.  It won't be releasing the “new” version of the Central Library Plan (now AKAing as the “42nd Street Library Renovation Plan”) this fall as planned.  The plan’s obvious flaws are too difficult to paper over in the time frame they expected!  (See: New York Public Library Postpones Release of Revised Renovation Plan, by Robin Pogrebin, October 23, 2013.)

Just so everybody knows (pardon any repetition): The Central Library Plan (CLP) is the consolidating shrinkage of more than 380,000 square feet of library space down to just 80,000 square feet of space.  Two significant pieces of Manhattan library real estate would be sold, going the way of the 53rd Street five-story Donnell Library before them: the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library).  As part of the big squeeze, the research stacks of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library would be ripped out, the books banished.

Don’t expect the “new” version of the CLP to be anything more than the old version with a new veneer, its real estate sale and shrinkage goals still intact, still preeminent and still driving all the decisions being made.

What do you do in the interim if you are the NYPL and you are beset by such difficulties?  You dig your grave deeper by putting up a "Voices of Support" page for the nonexistent plan, thus having your “supporters” on record as supporting virtually anything and virtually nothing.

Here is my comment on the Times article:

Putting up a "Voices of Support" page for a nonexistent plan? All that exists of the plan that can be supported is a plan to sell off library real estate, shrink library space way down (from more than 380,000 squarer feet to 80,000) and exile books. Statements of support from a group like Urban Librarians Unite? Research the group and see what that means. A healthy antidote to these "Voices of Support" with lots of specifics can be found in the testimony that Citizens Defending Libraries delivered at the recent City Council hearings on the sell-off of public libraries around the city, available here:

Report on Monday, September 30th City Council Hearing On Sell-off of NYC Libraries Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries

    Michael D. D. White
    Citizens Defending Libraries

The Times article doesn’t mention that furtherance of the half-baked plan may have been impeded somewhat by the two lawsuits that have been brought against the plan, including the one in which Citizens Defending Libraries (I am a cofounder) is a plaintiff.  (The article doesn’t mention the lawsuits, but comments can.)  The timing of the article was somewhat luscious in that the NYPL’s announcement came just one day after Citizens Defending Libraries delivered its 16,000 plus signature petition (most of those signatures are online) to Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall.

Who are some of these supporters the NYPL feels can be depended upon to support, sight unseen, a plan for sale of library real estate, shrinkage of libraries and banishment of books?  Urban Librarians Unite, Kathy Wylde of the New York City Partnership and the Building and Constructions Trades Council of New York.

Kathy Wylde testifying for the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment at the MTA on Monday, June 22, 2009 after it had markedly degenerated

We’ve seen Ms. Kathy Wylde in this blank-check approval mode, before when she supported the Atlantic Yards mega-development.   At an MTA hearing Monday, June 22, 2009, after the proposal for the Atlantic Yards mega-development had been vastly changed to the detriment of the public Ms. Wylde testified to support the project, speaking in terms of the Partnership’s long-term support for it, virtually oblivious to the fact that the project was so much worse and less defensible than ever.  (See: Tuesday, June 30, 2009, The Partnership for New York City's evolving (and misleading) support for Atlantic Yards.)

In the case of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan, Ms. Wylde’s blank check support will be the inverse of Atlantic Yards: In the case of Atlantic Yards, supporting the megaproject from the beginning, Ms. Wylde continued her unswerving support as the megaproject degenerated profoundly; in the case of the CLP, she is now documented as supporting from day-one a plan so bad that its authors had to withdraw it out of embarrassment.  In either case, the minimum standard for her fixed support as things shift is a discernibly low bar.

Unfortunately, what we get from power-elite representatives like Ms. Wylde is the bottom line of wealth speaking to wealth, resulting in what many of us see as rigged deals, where the vagaries of any public benefit are relegated to afterthoughts to be primped up for public consumption afterwards. . 

Support from Urban Librarians Unite for a plan about which nothing is known except that libraries will be sold and shrunk and books banished may seem strange, until you closely consider that it is almost seems as if Urban Librarians Unite was created with such support being their primary purpose.  See: Saturday, June 8, 2013, Irony Of Ironies: Urban Librarians Unite, Holding A “We Will Not Be Shushed Read In June 8 & 9th! Sign Up Now!” Event, Wanted To “Shush” Citizens Defending Libraries About It.

Support by the Building and Constructions Trades Council of New York?  I have previously observed construction unions’ Pavlovian support for what creates construction jobs irrespective of public harm:

Construction unions are interested in the churn. They are not interested in what is in the public interest (hence their partnering with Ratner). Frank Lloyd Wright once facetiously proposed that all of Manhattan be leveled and replaced by just two phenomenally enormous tall towers. I often think that if such a plan were proposed today the construction unions would be out in droves to support it, not because it was in the public interest but because it would mean a huge amount of union jobs, both demolition and construction.

(See: Friday, March 18, 2011, The Real Question to Ask About the Ratner Bait-and-Switch Approach on Atlantic Yards.)

When it comes to libraries, this reflex on the part of construction unions hurts not only the public, but also other union workers as well.  As was mentioned at a forum at Barnard College this past week (For the Public Good: Public Accountability in NYC, A panel with Elizabeth Blackmar, Aaron Pallas, and J. Phillip Thompson, Thursday, November 7, 2013) the selling off and privatization of public assets like schools and parks is often intertwined with motivations of disenfranchising union workers.

The NYPL’s false step of bringing in the construction unions and creating this documenting gallery of automatic supporters, the likes of those above, arrayed together with others such as the soundly-defeated candidate for mayor City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is probably the first work of the Parkside Group, the NYPL’s expensive new lobbyist.  News of the hiring of the Parkside Group surfaced in the New York Times the day after it was announced that the NYPL wouldn’t be releasing its plans to the public this fall. (See: New York Public Library Hires Firm to Promote Renovation Plan, by Robin Pogrebin, October 24, 2013.) 

The hiring of the Parkside Group means that, in these maneuvers of arraying all these automatic supporters and others, library administration officials are prepared to divert huge amounts of public money and charitable donations into arguing for the sell-off of these public assets for the ultimate benefit of the real estate community.  (See: Wednesday, October 30, 2013, Conundrum For Those Wanting To Donate To Libraries: People Who Would Use Our Donations To Shrink and Sell Off Libraries.)

When will the NYPL be releasing the new edition of its plans?  According to the Times the NYPL said in a statement:

We now expect to unveil the new design sometime after the New Year.

Sometime after January 1st?  What’s important about that January 1st date?  That’s the date when Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio will take office at the city helm.  It would have been impossible for the NYPL to have released more bad plans during the mayoral race as de Blasio would have had to reject them, for the sake of his campaign’s consistency and to keep himself appropriately distinguished from his opposition.  (Candidate de Blasio had already stood on the steps of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library calling for a halt to the sale of New York City’s public libraries.)  (See: Sunday, November 3, 2013, Candidate Lhota's Flub!: He thinks library lovers don't read the Wall Street Journal!!- Checking In On Mayoral Candidates’ Library Positions, de Blasio vs Lhota.)

In addition, any bedraggled release of plans at the tail end of the Bloomberg administration would just associate a design rehash more firmly with the increasingly unpopular departing Bloomberg administration.  No doubt, what the NYPL will want to do is seek a willing collaborator in the de Blasio administration to make it somehow seem that they have a plan that can be considered as “new” and different and probably that the plan is even, in part, a response to Mr. de Blasio’s own high standards and insistence on improvement.  At that point they will trot out again the supporters now on record as supporting the old, discredited plan and hope that nobody will be keeping track.

Chiara de Blasio, candidate de Blasio's daughter vouching for her father about the the sell-offs of public assets we won't see if her father is elected.

Will de Blasio fall for it, or, acting in collaboration, expect that others will?  During the campaign his daughter, Chiara, gave us assurance about where her father stood respecting the sale of public assets.  In the end, the sale of NYC public libraries will remain at bottom what it is: real estate deals for the benefit of developers, not the public.  I don’t think de Blasio will fall for such an NYPL ruse and I certainly hope that when it comes to these matters he will steer his own unveering course.

Candidate Lhota's Flub!: He thinks library lovers don't read the Wall Street Journal!!- Checking In On Mayoral Candidates’ Library Positions, de Blasio vs Lhota

"Libraries Not Luxury Condos"? Or "Hospitals Not Luxury Condos"- Same thing, really, although a little Photoshop magic helped this de Balsio campaign ad bridge the very small difference. 

Here is some bad news for New Yorkers who love their libraries (somewhat ameliorated) coupled with some good news, all courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

The bad news is that Joe Lhota the Conservative Republican candidate for NYC Mayor and former NYC budget director, who ought to be a model of fiscal probity, loves the inanity of spending what could easily be around a half billion dollars on the NYPL's Central Library Plan (now redubbed “42nd Street Library Renovation.”) to sell and shrink NYC Libraries.  Lhota gave a quote to this effect for publication, apparently believing that library lovers don't read the Wall Street Journal.  Wrong!  Maybe Mr. Lhota believes that only real estate developers and Stephen A. Schwarzman's friends read the Journal.  This singular ineptitude handily illustrates why Lhota has virtually no chance of being elected mayor this year.  Library lovers can consider those odds the ameliorating factor.

The good news is that candidate de Blasio, through his spokesperson quoted in the Journal, sounds as firmly on the side of library lovers as ever.

Here is what's in the Journal about each of the candidate’s positions on that sell-off of libraries and consolidating shrinkage whereby the NYPL's Central Library Plan would cram the 300,000 square feet of space from the Mid-Manhattan and Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) into a very small amount of space in the Central Reference Library whilst ripping out its venerated and historic research stacks.   

Mr. de Blasio has called for a financial audit and review of the project and, according to his spokesman, "believes that it was made without enough forethought to the building's historical and cultural integrity."

As for Mr. Lhota?

"I love it," he said of the renovation. "We've got to make sure that our facilities change and evolve with the world around us."

(See: NY Culture- On Arts, Mayor 'a Hard Act to Follow'- New York's Cultural Institutions Are Wondering: What's Next? By Jennifer Maloney, Oct. 31, 2013.)

We should heartily thank the Wall Street Journal for this report.  What’s tragic is that no other local news organs have yet covered the split between the candidates on this issue, including, very importantly, the New York Times and WNYC.  The issue not being reported upon is actually much bigger. . .  The Central Library Plan is essentially an even larger scale version of the Donnell Library sell-off debacle.  .  Together, they are emblematic of citywide plans to sell and underfund libraries as the system is shrunk at a time of significantly increasing use.

Since the beginning of his campaign Mr. Lhota has been unwilling to supply Citizens Defending Libraries (a group I helped found) with a statement of his position about the sale and shrinkage of city libraries.   When Citizens Defending Libraries held its Mayoral Forum on Libraries August 30th Mr. Lhota’s campaign feinted  (declining to attend the forum), saying that Mr. Lhota soon wished to meet with Citizens Defending Libraries to supply his campaign postion on the sell-offs.  He never did.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lhota’s campaign posted the following on its website.  It is the only mention of libraries and it is a reference to selling public property, selling their air rights (emphasis supplied):

As mayor, Joe will:

    * * * *
Undertake a complete inventory of vacant and underutilized land in New York City to create more opportunities to develop affordable housing. For example, if a post office shuts down, we should use that land for affordable housing.

Undertake a complete inventory of available air rights from city-owned properties like schools, libraries and firehouses to create revenue for the city, while incentivizing developers to utilize the air rights to create low and middle income housing—housing that can be affordable for our teachers, firefighters, police officers and other civil servants.

]Utilize land-use planning studies of various neighborhoods to plan and target areas to upzone.  The goal is to permit large scale development where we can mandate low and middle income units as part of the rezoning.

It is a campaign stance (campaign stances are invariably tailored to sound good) and doesn’t actually say that the city’s libraries would be closed and shrunk when the development rights that go with them are sold off as is presently exactly what’s happening.  Instead of allowing that the sell-offs might result in top-of-the-market luxury condominiums, hotels or office towers which is what is, in fact, what’s actually happening now, it holds out the campaign-promise carrot of affordable housing.  Really?  What it describes sounds too uncomfortably close to what is presently happening.  Indeed, why does it fail to say that we won’t continue to sell libraries for shrinkage?  That’s suspicious, and if there is any doubt about where Mr. Lhota’s judgements might take him on these things he has cleared it up by giving his enthusiastic endorsement of the Central Library Plan to the Journal.

There is also the issue of how Mr. Lhota judgement when it comes to public-private partnerships brought into play for the selling of libraries and how this get confused and perceptions manipulated when it comes to who is actually benefitting from them, the public or the private "partner"?  (See: Wednesday, September 26, 2012, Promoting Obfuscation of What Government Does and Doesn’t Do To Give The Private Sector (Including Ratner) More Credit, but compare Monday, October 28, 2013, Across from arena, Lhota slams de Blasio (again) on Atlantic Yards, claims Ratner close to default on MTA railyard last year (video) .

Mr. de Blasio on the other hand has come out against the sell-off of public assets, libraries and other properties like hospitals and NYCHA public housing.  For more on Mr. de Blasio’s position calling for a halt to the selling off of public libraries see the following from Citizens Defending Libraries (two other candidates still on the ballot for Mayor, Randy Credico of the Tax Wall Street Party and Green Party candidate Anthony Gronowicz, heartily oppose the library sell-offs and shrinkages): Mayoral Forum on Libraries Held August 30, 2013 and PHOTOS & VIDEO & MORE- First half of July 2013: Two lawsuits against the Central Library Plan, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio Comes Out Against CLP.

Chiara de Blasio, candidate de Blasio's daughter vouching for her father about the the sell-offs of public assets we won't see if her father is elected.

The fact that Mr. de Blasio is prominently opposing the sale of public property across the spectrum provides important reassurance, as does the fact that he is likely to be kept in check by the new Public Advocate, Tish James, a fellow Democrat who comes into office after a crushing 60-40 defeat of her opponent during the primary run-off likely due in part to the fact that Ms. James opposed the selling off of libraries early and steadfastly.  (See: Monday, September 23, 2013, Sell-Offs Of New York City Libraries Gets Focus In Public Advocate Runoff Race Between James and Squadron.)

In one of Mr. de Blasio’s most frequently run campaign ads he features his daughter and his son with his daughter assuring the voters that her father would not sell off hospitals for “luxury condos.”  That’s basically the same as the library issue.  And his kids vouch for him on this!

In campaign ad candidate de Blasio's daughter vouches her father won't sell off public assets like hospitals

By the way, while we must thank the Wall Street Journal for covering the candidate split on this library issue, one of our readers commented about the Wall Street Journal that it seems to represent Mr. Bloomberg to be an important “philanthropist” (“As a philanthropist, he is believed to have given more than $200 million to arts and social-service organizations since 2002”) that isn’t really the case.  More on what’s really the case here:  Wednesday, March 6, 2013, Bloomberg’s Increasing Annual Wealth: 1996 to 2013, Plus Updates On His Annual “Charitable” Giving.

The reader is correct.  Credit is often given where it isn’t due.  This Monday night, on the eve of the election for the new Mayor, the NYPL will anomalously give its headline award at its annual fund raiser to Mr. Bloomberg, who as mayor is responsible for an unprecedented defunding of the city’s libraries (see below) while presiding over plans to sell them.  (See: Wednesday, October 30, 2013, Conundrum For Those Wanting To Donate To Libraries: People Who Would Use Our Donations To Shrink and Sell Off Libraries.)

That downward blue line on funding while use (upward lines) ascended is what Bloomberg did to the libraries just after his third term was won and just as he was blessing the sell-off of NYC libraries

Inspiration For The Non-Library: The Genesis Of The Design For The Space That Won’t Be Able To Replace The Donnell Library

Library?- The design to 'replace' Donnell

The bleacher/stairs can be used to show people David Niven movies in the daylight

Who knows what will serve as inspiration for the fertile imagination?  Or, as the case may be, for the not-so-fertile imagination.

Previously, it was once supposed that the design (above) for the largely underground and bookless “library” that is supposed to suffice (at less than one-third the size) as a replacement for the formerly magnificent and beloved Donnell Library (sold off to net only a fraction of its value to the public) was the design (below) for a very non-library space, a Prada store.  See: Friday, May 24, 2013, Previews Of The Proposed New Donnell Library: The NYPL Unveils Its Version Of The “Silk Purse” Libraries It Envisions For Our Future.

The Prada store the library design resembles

Close enough, I suppose, but now it turns out that there is a good chance that inspiration for the non-library design came from another source (see below), the Musashino Art University Museum & Library.

From A AS Architecture

From Flicker

The design for this space, part museum and art gallery (and part. . . what else?). . .  intentionally flaunts its absence of books as it ostensibly “proposes a new relation between the user and the books” (or, more precisely, the physical absence thereof).  (See: Musashino Art University Museum & Library / Sou Fujimoto, 28 Jun 2011. ArchDaily, accessed October, 31, 2013.


Going to the Architectural Daily link provided above you can hear architect Sou Fujimoto explain that while information technology has no concrete existence, people with physical bodies need to feel like they live in a real world (with the light shifting during the day and seasons being important!).  Apparently to give that sense of reality he filled this environment with its theme of empty bookshelves.  He’s quoted: “I imagined books, bookshelves, light and the atmosphere,” a “dreamlike” space “made from [empty] bookshelves.”

The concept of the “idea” of books filling in for actual books may explain a lot.  When the design for the new shrunken underground Donnell was presented to the local community board the architect was asked about one rendering involving many books that stood out amongst the multiple others that showed very few books: The rendering showed a high wall of books that was literally impossible because it would have violated codes, regulations together with basic practicality and safety itself (see below).  The architect explained that this was not a real depiction of books or the way that they would be.  The rendering was only intended to show that the idea of books is conceptually important, “just simply to say that books are important to us, the books are important to the library.”

A slide shown in both presentations showing what the books in the library won't really look like, but showing that having books in a library is conceptionally important 

That concept could have cribbed from the Japanese gallery meditation on books as a dreamlike theme suggesting reality rather than the real thing.

Is it just coincidence that NYPL’s design for what is to replace Donnell is so similar to the earlier Japanese one?  When asked, the architect for the NYPL design said that NYPL officials hadn’t specified anything in terms of a book count or a required square foot area for books.  But what if it was actually the reverse?  What if, instead of just neglecting to express an NYPL goal of having a minimum number of books on site, the library administration officials overseeing the project had instead expressed a goal of having some sort of  `library of the future' that would avoid physical books?  Wouldn’t the architects then, perhaps simply by Googling it up, have come across the bookless Japanese space whose empty shelves suggested the motif of books while actually dispensing with them?

It could have happened that way, or maybe the inspiration came from the fact that the shelves of New York City libraries are already actually beginning to look much like that sparse Japanese space as they are emptied in preparation for sales as the system is shrunk to manufacture real estate deals.  Compare the photos below of the Japanese space with the New York library shelves from the following article (where even more such photos can be found): Saturday, September 14, 2013, Empty Bookshelves As Library Officials Formulate A New Vision of Libraries: A Vision Where The Real Estate Will Be Sold Off.

The two above images are from ArchDaily

Mid-Manhattan Library, up for sale

Brooklyn Heights Library, RFP out for its sale

SIBL, Science, Industry and Business Library, being sold- more pictures of empty shelves in various libraries being sold here

However well the aspiration of having bookless libraries may fit in the goals that current library administrators have of vacating the library real estate they are preparing for sale, those administrators should give some thought to the fact that a recent Pew poll says that people still want physical books in the libraries, including the new young “tech-savvy” generation just as much as the old, if not more so.  (See: School Library Journal: Pew Study: Teens Still Love Print Media, ‘Traditional’ Library Services, by Karyn M. Peterson, June 25, 2013).

Before library administration officials rush to adopt new models that exile physical books from the premises perhaps they should read the Scientific American article this past month that tells us that our brains are probably hardwired to learn and retain facts better when reading physical books.  See: The Reading Brain in the Digital Age- Why Paper Still Beats Screens (Why the Brain Prefers Paper), by Ferris Jabr, November 2013.

If award-winning author Neil Gaiman were advising our library administration officials, he too would caution them about the criticality of retaining physical books.  In a speech he gave this month covered by Britain’s The Guardian he addressed the value of reading, the importance of defending libraries and spoke about the future of physical books saying, “I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens” observing that:

a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them.   

(See: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming, October 15, 2013.)

Let’s hope that one place where there will always be a place for physical books is in our libraries.

I want to thank the troops of Citizens Defending Libraries (petition here), a group I helped found to protect libraries from being sold off to benefit developers, not the public.  Without their help I might have overlooked the Musashino Art University Museum & Library design and some of the articles I have mentioned above.

Mock up of portion of Musashino