As NYPL Senior Execs Present Pretty Pictures To City Council Of Expensive Mid-Manhattan Do-Over Renovation They Neglect To Mention One Thing: Rush To Immediately Sell SIBL (at a suspiciously low price?) To Very Interesting Buyer

On December 14th senior NYPL officials (lower right) testified before the City Council Library Committee (upper left) and did not mention that in a few days they were selling SIBL (lower left)- read for more surprises

Wednesday, December 14th senior NYPL officials, President Tony Marx, COO Iris Weinshall- Senator Schumer’s wife- and Chief Branch Library Officer Christopher Platt, were presenting pretty pictures to City Council library committee members of the proposed redoing of the Mid-Manhattan Library (that the NYPL is now calling a “campus”).   What they neglected to mention to the City Council members they addressed was that if any of those City Council members were readers of the real estate press they were almost immediately about to hear, reported in the Real Deal (December 28, 2016), about the NYPL’s rush to immediately sell SIBL, the NYPL’s 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library. . . .

. .  And the Science, Industry and Business Library is being sold, at what could be criticized as a suspiciously low price, to the kind of tycoon who could easily hold his own if slipped into a James Bond script.    

This library sale is woeful indeed.  One thing that the NYPL officials were telling the City Council members was that SIBL, already an exceptionally well-used central library, was, with the Mid-Manhattan renovation, about to get a slew of new patrons who will appreciate just how marvelous a library it is.  It’s getting those patrons because the NYPL is choosing to renovate Mid-Manhattan by closing it down entirely for a period of years even though the central destination Mid-Manhattan is its most used circulating library in Manhattan . . . . NYPL officials say they think it is actually the largest circulating library in the country. Mid-Manhattan will be closed, however long it takes to renovate, with or without construction delays.  The NYPL currently expects, without delays, that period of closure to be two years.  And all those library patrons who use it will have to go someplace.  SIBL, in the former B. Altman department store building, is only a six block walk down Fifth Avenue from Mid-Manhattan.

SIBL, the state of-the-art "Library of the future" completed in 1996 at a cost of $100 million

To spend time at SIBL is to love it.  SIBL’s increased use for this extended period of time is virtually certain to further build up the constituency dedicated to preserving SIBL and to heighten awareness as New Yorkers seek to hold accountable any elected officials willing to participate in the folly of selling it.  That folly includes the NYPL’s intention to do away entirely with the science library SIBL now houses (notwithstanding that the 'business' portion of SIBL would theoretically `continue' consolidated with Mid-Manhattan).

Is this increase of love inevitably destined to come from the public the twisted reason for the NYPL’s rush to sell SIBL?  The NYPL is selling it quite awkwardly, years before the as yet unpredictable date when it can deliver possession to a buyer. And what comment might have ensued if the NYPL had more transparently spoken of the imminent sale to the City Council members or to the public in the room that day?

If you want to read about the real estate deal that sells SIBL and get into some juicy analysis about whether the price received was too low, skip to the second section of this article.  If you want to savor in near disbelief biographical details that would make it easy for the gentleman who has turned up as SIBL's buyer to be interpolated into a secret agent adventure story, skip to the third and last section of this article.  If you want to read about the reason those things are coming to pass, the NYPL’s background plan for an architectural book-shedding redesign of Mid-Manhattan in a consolidating shrinkage that gets rid of SIBL, you can proceed reading right away below.

The NYPL Plan To Renovate Mid-Manhattan

To be fair, the NYPL’s plans for Mid-Manhattan are not all that bad if you don’t mind expensive and you don’t mind getting rid of books.  You also have to not mind scrunching in after getting rid of a lot of library space, and not mind getting rid entirely of the science library housed at SIBL along with the NYPL’s cessation of its collection of science books.  (This is at the very same time that there is consternation that the incoming Trump administration may purge archives of federal agency science data, e.g “temperature of the planet from weather stations, from satellites, from ocean buoys” and other information, especially if there is not a robust “environment that supports libraries.”) Lastly, you have to not be bothered by concerns about how the switch over from readily available physical books to an introduced interface of library electronics brings to the fore recurring concerns about surveillance and the elimination of libraries as private spaces for freedom of thought.

As for not minding expensive, you have to not mind spending a currently estimated $265 million (as of the date of the hearing) on this Mid-Manhattan fix-up it at a time when the city’s library administration officials are crying poverty and citing underfunding as a reason to sell major libraries. That $265 million number is, according to COO Iris Weinshall, for “the entire Midtown Campus,” out of which she told the council members they were “pretty confident” they could do the Mid-Manhattan building renovation for $200 million, what the Wall Street Journal and Times reported, and the NYPL trustees were told November 16th when they were told the renovation budget was coming out to $855.6 p/s/f.  That’s despite construction increases in the past.

NYPL Trustees November meeting meeting where Mid-Manhattan designs were presented before they went on to City Council

The higher $265 million figure involved also covers additional expenses for concurrently handled and related changes for the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  Nevertheless, Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer began the hearing referring to the overall project as “a $300 million project” where “we want to see the funds spent correctly.”  The NYPL’s website also refers to the overall “Midtown plan” as costing “$300 million,” that final $35 million difference apparently involving expenditures on other libraries (perhaps even SIBL before it is sold) affected by the plan and picking up the slack for Mid-Manhattan’s multi-year shutdown.

Click to enlarge- NYPL's website: "The Midtown plan is a $300 million project to completely renovate and update the Mid-Manhattan Library, and to create increased public space, including for researchers and for exhibitions, at the iconic Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street."

Overall, in line with my testimony given at the hearing as co-founder on behalf of Citizens Defending Libraries at the City Council hearing, the plan can be looked at as a very expensive way to get rid of SIBL and get rid of books.  And the drive to get rid of books has to be looked at as suspect, and as an experiment that may not work out.

The NYPL has been unwilling to say precisely how many books are disappearing which would require a census going back before the plans were concocted and before book eliminations commenced.  We know that, just at SIBL, over one million books have been banished.  When the NYPL presented its plans to the public the night before going to City Council, its officials were unwilling to say how many books would be in the renovated Mid-Manhattan versus what had been available previously.  The renovated Mid-Manhattan is to be a consolidation of itself, SIBL (without the Science Library) and the erstwhile Donnell Library.  The next day when City Councilman Daniel Garodnick probed about the book number, the NYPL said they couldn’t be exact, but would get exact information in the future while giving numbers that hovered around 400,000.  The Wall Street Journal article on the new design reported that Mid-Manhattan would hold 400,000 books and other circulating materials.

Click to enlarge- Two views of the special five floors of book shelves reached by walking aerially through the atrium.  On right: at the far left of cross section view.  And on the left.  The shelves would be at the widest part of the library, using a soft of "leg" that juts off to go all the way through the block, from 40th to 39th street.   

One of the clever aspects of the new Mid-Manhattan design is that, in order to house at least the reduced number of books that the NYPL hopes to in such a greatly contracted amount of space, a limited portion of the library, an area where most of the books will be, will be built specially much like the brilliantly designed research stacks of the 42nd Street Library under the famous Rose Reading Room, which were designed for maximum efficiency in getting requested books up to the readers.  Mid-Manhattan have is to have five floors of these stacks, which because of their shortened height would replace what would normally be three regular floors. . . (There are seven floors of stacks, now empty, under the Rose Reading Room that cover a vastly larger area and intended to hold three million research books.)

Don't like having books?  Architect from the Mecanoo firm presenting to the NYPL trustees at their board meeting tells them of the library's book shelves (pointed to): “They are not structural, the shelves, you can take it away later if you want.”

. . . But if you are worried that there already too few books going to be housed at Mid-Manhattan by virtue of this arrangement, consider what the Mecanoo architect for the plan said when she was presenting the Mid-Manhattan stack design to the NYPL trustees: Sounding as if she was nervously alluding  to some sort of difference of opinion, she told them: “They are not structural, the shelves, you can take it away later if you want.”

So the bookshelves are regarded as possibly just temporary?

However clever the creation of this special section for books in the library might be, it has the flaw of not integrating the books with the population using the libraries.  The books would be reached by walking gangplanks crossing intervening atrium space allowing for the grade change.   Making the most of the light in the atrium (or teasing the lightheadedness of those prone to vertigo) the ramps across would have clear glass bannisters.  The books set aside in the book section are meant to be “browsable,” but if in browsing you discover certain books you want to spend a few extra minutes studying there won’t be a nearby table to lay them out for closer inspection and you may feel hemmed in among the shelves unless you traverse back across the gangplanks.

The new Mid-Manhattan plan is clearly better and less expensive than the $500+ million Central Library Plan that preceded it.  That ill-conceived plan was derailed by the opposition of book lovers and activists opposing it, including Citizens Defending Libraries, which was a plaintiff in two of the lawsuits that helped stop it.  Helping to prove the proposition that the more you shrink libraries the more it costs to do so, the Central Library Plan would, at far greater cost than the current Mid-Manhattan plan, have shrunk library space even more drastically, extending to the total elimination of Mid-Manhattan as well as SIBL.  Headstones for those libraries could then have been set up in the library graveyard next to Donnell’s.

Otherwise, short on space with the shrinkage from the discard of SIBL, the new Mid-Manhattan plan conscripts basement space for public use that was previously not public. The underground is where the plan will put the teenagers in a teen center and younger children architecturally cordoned off from each other `because they don’t like to be together.’  Outfitting the basement for public use is not such a bad idea if you think of it as adding to the above-ground space at the Mid-Manhattan library which is not shrinking like the plans driving replacement literary space underground with the Donnell and Brooklyn Heights library sales.

If, instead, you think of the underground space as replacing SIBL’s spaces it is maybe not such a great substitute.  Moreover, this midtown teen center is not actually a new teen center, but, when it opens (projected now for the beginning of 2020) will be the long-awaited replacement of the teen center that was at Donnell, closed in the spring of 2008.  That Donnell teen center, newly renovated when the library closed, was not underground.  Previously, the underground space in the Mid-Manhattan basement was ancillary book-supporting space, so that is lost too.

When NYPL representatives presented the plans January 5th to Manhattan Community Board 5's Budget, Education and City Services committee, the community board members were told that the plan was giving the NYPL “35% more public space.”  But that is only approaches a vague level of `truthiness’ if you totally disregard elimination of SIBL (and Donnell before that).

When the community board members asked about what was being given up by the plan, “what are you giving up, what is not included in this new plan that is in existence now?” the NYPL representative told them “currently we are not giving anything up. . . there didn’t need to be any sacrifices.”   The NYPL’s representatives simply skipped over the fact that SIBL was being sacrificed, its whole science library component eliminated.  Nor did they mention the NYPL’s recent rush to sell the vast amount of public space at SIBL, all of it in pristine condition because it was so recently built.

Saying that nothing would be lost, The NYPL representatives `explained’ that the new plan would result in “way more technology,” without noting how technology already abounds at SIBL at a level the Mid-Manhattan plan is unlikely to recoup.  Extolling the virtues of the Mid-Manhattan Plan for a “dynamic state of the art library,” Elizabeth R. Leber, the architect from Beyer Blinder and Belle (Beyer and Mecanoo are the two firms working together on this) presenting the plan to CB5 members made much of the creation of “consultation rooms where you have one-on-one or two-on-two meetings, group sessions, working groups.”   Not mentioned is that these “consultation rooms” and “meeting rooms” are abundant at SIBL together with auditoriums and public presentation spaces, spaces the NYPL is pretty  keeps under wraps now.

Above and below, floor plans for SIBL: Tons of conference room, meeting room and auditorium space

When SIBL opened in 1996 it was written about as the “library of the future” and the “library of the 21st century” with the New York Times proclaiming that “even the smell of the place. .  emanates `future.`”

Similarly, even though queried, these NYPL representatives did not inform the CB5 members about, or in any way acknowledge, the drastic reduction in the number of books.  The NYPL representatives also did not want to address the interrelated question about electronic surveillance in reformulated libraries (they said they didn't understand the question).

From the NYPL CGI video of the new design, views of the envisioned roof deck

The new Mid-Manhattan plan makes a gracious gesture of opening up at the top of the building a new roof deck for public use, something that oughtn’t to be too expensive.  It should help counterbalance any feelings of campedness, while simultaneously addressing an obvious priority for libraries (just kidding about that concluding phrase).  Meanwhile, this gives the library some space to rent out for private social functions, something that has become a new priority at the NYPL with the NYPL regularly hosting high-society weddings across the street.  Asked by CB5 members about “revenue opportunities” by virtue of the changes being made, George D. Mihaltses, the NYPL Vice President for Government and Community Affairs, explained that the roof deck would likely have a café for dining, but then said he didn’t “want it to appear that space was being created for dinner events, that’s not the purpose of the space; the primary purpose of the space is to serve the public. .  but when that space is not being used we have the opportunity to rent it out.”

Above, -click to enlarge- from the NYPL's online page inviting weddings, “The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building is rated Best of Weddings Venue by The Knot magazine.- Office of Special Events  212.930.0730 -  spev@nypl.org” overlaid with two images with which the NYPL is touting the creation of the roof garden with overhangs so it is enjoyable no matter what the weather.

The CB5 committee voted to issue its general approval of the proposed Mid-Manhattan plan and figure out its problems with the plan afterward.  The reasoning for the vote was partly because the plan is considered an obvious improvement over the absurd Central Library Plan that the committee and CB5 had voted to endorse previously.

Click to enlarge- Presentation of NYPL Mid-Manhattan Plan being made to Community Board 5 committee

The NYPL is hawking its plan with new CGI video of how good the renovated library will look with the freshness of spotlessly new CGI generated carpet, glistening new surfaces still pristine bedecked in their first coats of paint, new CGI furniture perfectly arranged as only computer conceptualization can manage.  Imagined patrons walk about in dark, fashionable suits looking like those boutique hotel doormen whose dark suits are their uniforms (or maybe Neo in “The Matrix”).  The envisioning does not neglect to include a patron in a wheelchair on the roof deck talking (maybe?) to someone on a cell phone.

The renovation means that there will be an overdue cleaning of what everyone agrees is the building’s beautiful facade (covered by scaffolding until recently).  The building, once the Arnold Constable department store (1914), is roughly contemporaneous with the architecturally renowned 42nd Street reference library (1911) sitting kitty-corner across the intersection.  It is also roughly contemporaneous with the former flagship B. Altman department store (1906) that SIBL inhabits.

If we have the money, the Mid-Manhattan building facade should be cleaned. Fresh carpet and fresh paint are worthwhile expenses too.  The lack of timely and suitable basic maintenance tries the public’s patience. If we have the money to spend, our libraries should be gorgeous as well as functional. Hopefully, if Mid-Manhattan is renovated it will be maintained better in the future than it has been of late. As the committee closed on in its vote for the plan, one of the CB5 board members reasoned why she favored that vote, saying of the Mid-Manhattan building as presently maintained, “it just doesn’t have that spark.” Similarly, in connection with its vote, the CB5 committee head Layla Law-Gisiko said of the current Mid-Manhattan, “it’s a sad building, it’s an overused building.”  (emphasis supplied)

"Overused"?  As already noted, NYPL officials are saying it is the most used circulating library in Manhattan, and, they think, in terms of circulation, the largest circulating library in the country. . .

. . . A huge increase in use is projected.  The senior NYPL officials presenting the reasons the City Council members (and CB5 committee) should favor the plan predicted a significant escalation of use of Mid-Manhattan library after the renovation, citing as examples greatly escalated use of three libraries after other NYPL renovations: Washington Heights (visits up 47%, circulation up 46%), Stapleton Library on Staten Island (visits up 33%, circulation up 51%), and Kingsbridge Library (visits up 80%, circulation up 76%).  (Note the circulation increasing is made up of mostly physical books.)  If Mid-Manhattan’s visits can be be expected to increase shortly after renovations anywhere from 33% to 80%, (probably more with the demise of the well-used SIBL), the theoretical “35% more public space” and “extra seating” in Mid-Manhattan is likely to prove cold comfort.

If, sadly, Mid-Manhattan is already “overused,” should we be selling SIBL and, with a substantial decrease in library space and resources, increasing the problem of that already recognized `overuse’?

Selling SIBL In a Rush and For a Suspiciously Low Price

What is the NYPL getting for giving up SIBL, a library which without any renovation, is already in perfect shape, already looking as purdy as some of the glossy sketches the NYPL is flagging for its Mid-Manhattan plans?  That’s something that really needs to be examined.

First, to be clear, the current rush to sell SIBL is a second rush by the NYPL to sell the remainder of SIBL.  The NYPL’s  first rush was in June of 2012 (the Bloomberg era) when, without prior public notice or fanfare, virtually without mentioning it all, the NYPL sold the part of SIBL that the public doesn’t see.  From a technical standpoint of just square footage it was the greater portion and it was sold for what then seemed like a low price.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t the space occupied by the public patrons of the library, and wasn’t, on a square footage basis, the most valuable portion of the space.

The first rushed sale, was in anticipation of and, indeed, a partial execution of the NYPL’s Central Library Plan, a plan that because it was then scrapped for its preposterousness two years later, May of 2014, never came to fulfillment at all.  One other foolish rush was involved, the foolish rush to banish more than a million books from SIBL which is what allowed the space holding most of those books, along with some administrative space to be sold.

Although SIBL has cost the public $100 million to put in place as a brand new state-of-the-art library in 1996, and although midtown real estate prices were making dramatic increases, five floors, a substantial majority of a “seven-floor” library (sometimes variously described as "eight" floors) was sold for a mere $60.8 million.  The 2012 transaction and that seemingly low price was discussed at length by in Noticing New York here: SIBL, NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library Sold At An Unreported Loss To The Public (And an Elucidating Sideways Look At The BAM South Library Real Estate Games), June 15, 2013.

When NYPL president Tony Marx excused what seemed like that very low sales price of most of the SIBL space, that book shelf space and some administrative space, in 2012, he predicted that the sale of the remaining space would close the gap to make up for it.  That prediction was based on the fact that remaining space to be sold was very valuable retail space accessed by the public at street level. 

Now with the Real Deal announcing the sale of that retail space, reportedly “roughly 100,000 square feet” for $93 million, we finally know all the figures and can calculate exactly what the public is getting financially in exchange for its loss.

    Total 1996 all-in cost for SIBL $100 million

    Total 2012 sale price $60.8 million- $41.55 in 1996 dollars

    Total 2016 sale price $93 million- $63.55 in 1996 dollars

That's $105.1 million for this sale in adjusted for inflation 1996 dollars, meaning the NYPL came out just about even, a few pennies more (maybe enough to cover transaction costs).  It's not such a blatant squandering that the NYPL can be criticized it for unless you realize how much more than that the Manhattan real estate market has gone up in the intervening 20 year period.  Of course, rightfully, you'd have to consider writing off the costs of the improvements that where particular for making this a worthwhile library.  (Or, maybe not, as we will get to.)

Not adjusted for inflation, the combined sales were $153.8 million for an asset that originally cost $100 million, a 53% increase without adjustment for inflation.

According to the index for NYC condos the index was 268.2 in the fall of 2016 and 73.31 in May of 1996.  In other words those real estate values (not adjusted for inflation) went up 266% in those twenty years.

Here is a hard-to-read graph on Manhattan Luxury housing prices from Bloomberg for roughly the same period.

Here is an article with graphs from "Real Clear Markets" with similar findings - Not surprisingly, as density and building continue the value of land escalates faster than the value of condos within buildings on the land.

This year we have in the New York Times:  A Record-Setting Year in City Home Sales, by Vivian Marino, December 23, 2016

The average sales price of those properties - all apartments, co-ops and condominiums sold in Manhattan this year - reached a record $2.2 million, or $1,886 a square foot, according to a year-end market report by CityRealty, which tracks apartment sales. The previous record, set last year, was $1.9 million, or $1,735 a square foot.  [emphasis supplied]

(That links to a chart showing average p/s/f sales going from a starting point of 2003 Q1 of 551 p/s/f to 2016 Q4 1,845 p/s/f, a 235% increase.)

 In 1996 we have the Times reporting: Co-op Sales Rise In Manhattan, September 8, 1996:

At the same time, the overall median price for co-ops decreased significantly, to $298,500, compared with $372,500 in the second quarter of 1995, according to the report. While the impetus for the drop in median price was increased sales of studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments, prices for units of three bedrooms or more increased.

In other words from 1996 to 2016 the average price of a co-op in Manhattan went up 637% from $298.500 to $2.2 million.

This latest reporting on the space involved accentuates questions about what the original size of SIBL actually was and what portion of that each of these sales represents.  In April 24, 1996 the Times (Adopting Branch Libraries) reported that SIBL was “roughly 160,000 square feet in the former B. Altman building.”  But, in August 24, 1996, (Fire on 34th Street Snarls Traffic and Shuts Library), the Times reported “The Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library occupies nearly 200,000 square feet on the eastern end of the building.”  August 6, 1995, describing the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York bond issue financing the sale, the figure was stated by the Times to be still larger (plus, at least prospectively, adding an eighth floor): “in 213,000 square feet on the lower eight floors of the Madison wing.”  (emphasis supplied)

None of these figures is sufficiently large to encompass what the new sale of SIBL to Vulcan (“roughly 100,000 square feet” or $930 per square foot) plus the previous 2012 sale to the Pension Fund (“140,000 square feet and only the fifth floor is currently occupied” according to the Real deal- $434.23 p/s/f) would total out to: i.e. 240,000 square feet.  Perhaps the main significance of how large the SIBL square footage is calculated to be is to make clear how much library space is being lost.  Another side of the equation: The greater the amount of space being sold, the lower the p/s/f figure the library appears to be getting. . . . From either standpoint, it wouldn't seem to be in the PR spinning interest of the NYPL to exaggerate the amount of space involved at this point.

Retail Condo prices currently (looking at the Real Deal):

•    Zara's set a record for SoHo with a $20,588 p/s/f deal, $280 million for 13,600-square-foot ground floor of a newly created retail condo at 503 Broadway.

•    At 670 Columbus Avenue, located between West 92nd and 93rd streets at combination, ground floor unit plus 31,000-square-foot parking garage went for $1,728.57 p/s/f (retail space or )- a 36,000-square-foot retail condominium for $60.5 million.

•    At 147 East Houston Street- 1,105.77 p/s/f- a 5,200-square-foot retail condo for $5.75 million.

•    1273-1281 Madison Avenue, also known as 47 East 91st Street- 3,750 p/s/f - $30 million for 8,000-square-foot space (The condo last sold for $20.3 million in 2013)

•    Three retail condominiums just south of the World Trade Center (at 120 Greenwich Street at Albany Street) for 6,401 p/s/f - $35.5 million for 4,683 square feet of ground floor space and 863 feet on the lower level.

•    2460 Broadway, also known as 215 West 91st Street at $1,511 p/s/f-  $13 million for 8,600-square-foot space.

•    868 Broadway (currently leased by British footwear brand Dr. Martens) for $3,970.59 p/s/f- $13.5 million for a 3,400-square-foot space.

•    145 Greene Street, at Houston Street, $4,000 per square foot- $9.75 million for the nearly 3,000-square-foot property - "well above the median price for commercial condos in the area, which is $1,824 per square foot, according to PropertyShark." (I don't pay $70 per month to subscribe to PropertyShark so I haven't duplicate the median price info this Real Deal article supplied.)

•    2008 Broadway near West 68th Street, Lincoln Square- 37-year master lease interest $70 for $2,160 p/s/f-  million for 32,400-square-foot commercial condo, 22,000 square feet of selling space with rest of the property's square footage housing storage space in the basement and mechanical equipment in the mezzanine level.

•    465 Sixth Avenue near West 12th Street - 46-year ground lease- for maybe $2,307 p/s/f for a 13,000-square-foot retail condo rumored to be in contract with another buyer for more than $30 million.

•    132 Mulberry Street, north of Canal Street in Little Italy for 1,049.22 p/s/f - $17.5 million for the 16,679-square-foot space (Which levels besides the ground floor of the six-story building are included in the sale was not immediately clear.)

To reiterate, the NYPL is selling the SIBL retail ground floor access condo for $930 per square foot.

A Very Interesting Buyer: Vulcan Development’s Paul G. Allen 

Above: A real James Bond movie yacht first owned by Adnan Khashoggi and used (as in the foreground) in the film "Never Say Never," the Sean Connery remake of "Thunderball"   This 85 m, 281-foot, 5-deck yacht was later the "Trump Princess" until the one-day-to-be- president-elect lost it as the result of one of his bankruptcies.  You want to call that a Jame Bond "yacht"?  See below.

I said at the outset that the new buyer of SIBL’s magnificent space is a mogul intriguing enough to provide spice if included tales of panoramic international mystery.

If inserted into a James Bond movie, maybe the character would be like the “Willard Whyte” character in “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), obviously modeled after Howard Hughes.  To say that Vulcan Development’s Paul Allen owns a specially outfitted (and almost immediately refitted) $250 million yacht that is the 14th largest in the world (126 m, 414-foot yacht, 8 levels, two helicopters, two submarines, one for ten people, an remotely operated underwater vehicle, “ROV,” a glass-bottomed swimming pool, a music recording studio and a basketball court, with a staff of 60), may not sound too impressive.  It is probably better to speak of his ownership of a fleet of three mega-yachts, more than one of which is among the world’s hundred biggest.

The Octopus via Wikipedia- By Metallion - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

A never-filmed, earlier-conceived ending of “Diamonds Are Forever” involved a climactic yacht chase, billionaires chasing billionaires in their yachts.  Too expensive and challenging to film?  Paul Gardner Allen could have supplied, no sweat, all the resources needed, forget about having to resort to cheesy CGI.

Allen’s largest yacht is the Octopus, which name might bring to mind the name of the 1983 James Bond film, “Octopussy” with a floating palace as one of its plot points.  Octopus was the world's biggest yacht when Allen bought it.  Does the fact that this yacht built in 2003 has already worked its way so far down the gigantitude list say more about the racing income inequality in our time or how yacht-building technology is racing ahead?

The Tatoosh via Wikipedia- By Intersofia - Own work, Public Domain, Link

Allen’s second biggest yacht is the $160 million, 92 m, 303 foot Tatoosh.  He just recently sold his third yacht, the 60m yacht Meduse, and a couple of years before that sold a fourth from his fleet, the 46.9m Charade.  Along with the yachts, Allen was one of the wealthy who owned a private island, accessible only by private transportation which he just sold, “Allen Island,” actually already named after someone else when he bought it.  How many James Bond films, beginning with the first, “Dr. No,” have private islands in them?  At least four and more if you want to consider mid-ocean oil drilling platforms an equivalent.  “Thunderball” was filmed on a private island, but that doesn’t count.

Allen’s private island was a 292-acre island in the San Juans off the coast of Washington state.  He traded it in for a 387-acre peninsula site on another nearby island.

Above on left,from the Smithsonian, SpaceShipOne.  On the left, via Wikipedia, a more conventional aircraft to own, a Boing 757.- Konstantin von Wedelstaedtderivative work: Altair78 - This file was derived from  Icelandair Boeing 757-200 Wedelstaedt.jpg: , GFDL 1.2, Link

Along with the fleet of ships go some serious flying machines.  There’d be air cover in the event of a war! (Your fleet should never be without it.) Private jets have included a Boeing 757 he sold to Donald Trump, our president elect. The fictional Willard Whyte in “Diamonds Are Forever” has his space toys, launching satellites and, by virtue of an almost impossible-to-explain plot point, even had a “moon buggy” on the premises.  Paul Allen is an investor, joint venturing with what is now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman, in SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft, a vehicle capable of  suborbital flights into outer space 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, attaining extraordinary speeds and then landing again on a runway after reentering the earth’s atmosphere. .

. .  Now, with his own aeronautics company, Vulcan Aerospace, he has been secretly building the world's largest airplane, a twin-fuselage Goliath as wide as a football field and bigger than Howard Hughes's famous Spruce Goose.  This is likewise a bid to be able to get into outer space more routinely and less expensively with rockets “air-launched” from the plane at 35,000 feet.   Allen owns Captain Kirk’s chair from the original “Star Trek” series.

Flying Heritage Collection website

Allen also curates and oversees a collection of restored WWII war planes (including a Curtiss Tomahawk, a Messerschmitt 109, a Grumman Hellcat and a Spitfire), all in working order, at his Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Wash. Also in terms of boy-toys, he owns several professional sports teams.

Paul Allen’s money, is rooted in his history as co-founder of Microsoft.  He has a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio including technology and media companies, with Forbes recently ranking him as #21 on its Forbes 400 list of richest Americans with an estimated $19.2 billion in wealth.  He pursues an interest in artificial intelligence and holds a number of patents.

Paul Allen might be acquiring the SIBL retail condominium through his Vulcan Development as just another real estate investment, planning to gut it and build something from scratch, but it's almost more consistent to imagine his acquisition of an entire science library with auditoriums and meeting spaces as the acquisition of one more fabulous toy.  Wouldn't the convenience of a sparkling venue dead-center in midtown Manhattan venue provide a superior lure, at least occasionally, for the upper echelons and celebrities he wants to attend his frequent parties who now, instead, have to helicopter off to his yachts?  (Allen may be feeling a tad depressed down right now with the death of Carrie Fisher because she was reportedly the one introducing him to the members of the Hollywood set he invited.)

Such parties held at SIBL might shroud it in mystery to which it has previously been unaccustomed: Allen is "so obsessively private" that "guests to his famously lavish parties have to sign non-disclosure agreements."  That's according to a caustic Daily Mail article that came out in 2011 when Mr. Allen published his autobiographical memoir: "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft" that describes Allen as a "Gatsby-esque recluse" for the 20 years prior.  He was described in a blurb by a Time editor for another biography of him (Laura Rich's 2003 one below) as "the Loch Ness Monster of the internet age.”  . . 

. . . Although all recently checked out, there are three copies of Allen's "Idea Man" (a New York Times bestseller) that sometimes become available at SIBL.  A single reference copy of another biography of Allen, "The Accidental Zillionaire: Demystifying Paul Allen," by Laura Rich is available at SIBL for in library use.  The Daily Mail article notes another "sobriquet" in the U.S. press "the bitter billionaire," because of Allen's complaints about Bill Gates respecting what led to the breakup of their years together at Microsoft.

Wouldn't you think that more music recordings could get made at the convenient location of SIBL in NYC than the recordings Mick Jagger or the Beastie Boys have made on Allen's Octopus?  (Usher, Dave Stewart, U2, and Johnny Cash are supposed to have performed, not recorded the on the yacht.)  Allen loves music, socializing with invited musicians, and plays guitar and writes songs himself.  And SIBL ought to be so much more economical?  Octopus is estimated to cost $384,000 a week ($20 million a year) to operate.

But wouldn't SIBL, continuing its emphasis on science and even continuing as a library (it is still in a space where the CUNY graduate center library in the same building is supposed to act synergisticly on this basis), be a spectacular place for Allen to bring people together to discuss and explore the important ideas of science?  According to the Daily Mail article Allen once had a heart-to-heart with author Douglas Adams about exactly such a possible use of his money, bringing together "a group of 'brilliant thinkers' to dream up some great philanthropic endeavour." Allen had confessed to Adams that he felt frustrated with his wealth ("I've spent money on jets, boats. I don't know what to do next")  . .
 
. .  Allen's personal website, describing him as an "entrepreneur and philanthropist" says that he is "still exploring the frontiers of technology and human knowledge, and working to change the future" and that he is "working to save endangered species, improve ocean health, tackle contagious diseases, research the human brain and build sustainable communities."

Although Allen's various exploits assume command of many verging technologies, his focus seems to be steered by interests other than making money for money's sake.  It has been suggested that his "many millions" put into "more than 50 companies" have only dragged him down the rich list and that other investments would have been more lucrative.  Does that make him something of an altruist?  In 2015 he was given the Carnegie Medal for philanthropic efforts and "as a signer of The Giving Pledge, he has committed to giving away the majority of his fortune."  (As of now he has never been married.)

But here is what might be an even better, more stunning idea: What if Allen simply gave SIBL back to the public as a library, maybe calling on his friends to help replenish the books eradicated by the NYPL. If he returned it to the NYPL he could do so with an iron-clad stipulation that the NYPL maintain and not sell it off again, and to boot, that the NYPL stop turning its libraries into real estate deals impoverishing the public.  He could have an army of well-paid lawyers standing by ready to enforce those terms.

It would cost him comparatively little, just the sacrifice of his $93 million purchase price, insignificant compared to his $250 million Octopus, his $160 million Tatoosh, or the $20 million every year he is spending to operate the Octopus.  It would be 00.4% of the $19.2 billion fortune he has committed to giving away.

Why would Mr. Allen do this to benefit the public? . .

. .  Allen is the founder of Allen Institute for Brain Science established (2003) "to accelerate understanding of the human brain in health and disease."  From this, he is likely to understand the science surveyed by Scientific American, and written about on the front page of the New York Times specifically with respect to children, about how the brain learns better with physical vs. digital books.  That's notwithstanding how this institute's tackling of projects at the leading edge of science respecting the intersection of biology and technology may have something to do (in a very HBO-"Westworld" way) with Allen's also founding the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) to achieve breakthroughs in the ability of computers to reason, learn and read.  (AI2 was founded in the beginning of 2014, but Allen has been backing various AI ventures since 2001)

. . Allen is another one of the remarkable people in the world (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jane Jacobs being others) who has achieved what he has without a college degree; he dropped out of college.  Understanding what it is to be an autodidact Allen should appreciate all that libraries provide to those who teach themselves and set off in singular self-motivated directions of discovery.  More so, according to the Verge's reporting (when he launched AI2) of what is in his biography, Allen's father worked at a library and Allen marveled about libraries in his youth:  "He would tag along to his father's job at the library, overwhelmed by the information, and daydream about 'the sci-fi theme of a dying or threatened civilization that saves itself by finding a trove of knowledge.'"

. . Allen may also, because of his expressed interest in saving the environment and achieving sustainability, recognize that the solutions to problems like climate change and ocean acidification are not likely to come in the form of a “silver bullet” handed out “top down,” but from “myriad of approaches locally tailored and designed” with everyone participating in which resources  for discovery and self-education like libraries will be important.
     
Allen could even, possibly, make some money returning the library to the public. . .  This past July, Nick Pinto writing in the Village Voice wrote about how Google and a consortium of companies led by Daniel Doctoroff, Bloomberg's erstwhile deputy mayor in charge of real estate development, have been installing internet kiosks around the city seemingly for free, but Pinto warned, "Be Suspicious of Anything Free in New York City."  Pinto explained how the consortium would expect to make money from its product monetizing the data collected from the kiosk users.  Said Pinto: "as the old internet saw goes: If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Allen could open up a library and then similarly collect all the data from the people using the library. . .


. .  But that privatizing effort, yet one more of so many multiplying encroachments of the public commons, would get away from the idea of libraries as we have classically esteemed them, places that should be zones of privacy where freedom of thought is protected.

Where do we go from here?

Biography page of Paul Allen's website: "Paul Allen has a question. And if you ever meet him, you'll hear him ask it more than once. What should exist?"- click to enlarge

Prominently on the bio page of Paul Allen's website it says:

Paul Allen has a question. And if you ever meet him, you'll hear him ask it more than once.

What should exist?

Here's the important answer we can deliver to to that question:  SIBL should exist!

But Mr. Allen is a man who has always been dedicated to looking into the future.  How easy it would be for him to be ahead of us already.  . . .

. . . Certainly, he is likely, longer than any of us, to have had his eye on SIBL, christened, from its inception, as the "library of the future." And isn't he likely to have been thinking about SIBL's future in the context of what he thought about libraries as a child?: how libraries, collecting troves of knowledge, can save "dying or threatened" civilizations?  Maybe giving SIBL back to he public is precisely the reason Mr. Allen is buying it in the first place.  Wouldn't supplying the public with a real working library that serves and takes our civilization on a more secure, clear-headed path into the future as we confront the unfolding vast mysteries of science be an even better trophy than owning Captain Kirk's chair from the bridge of the fictional Enterprise?

Hillary Clinton’s New National Campaign Office Next to the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library: Why Everyone’s Talking About Income Inequality From An Economy That Supports the 1%.

Hillary Clinton's new national campaign headquarters, at the juncture of Tillary and Clinton beside, and actually part of, the library there

Why would Hillary Clinton locating her new national campaign office next to a local library, albeit probably the second most important library in Brooklyn, resonate in the discussion of issues in the 2016 presidential race?  It has to do with income inequality and the fact that the library she has located next to is being targeted to be sold and vastly shrunk in a real estate deal to create a tower of luxury condominiums and to benefit, at public expense, an elite private school.

Awkward?

Fun With Names

There’s a lot more to explain what might stoke the potential resonance of this fact in the discussion, but first, let’s have some fun with names.

Back when William Jefferson Clinton was in office as the president beloved by Democrats (and with fairly high approval ratings generally), liberal New York City Councilman Tom Duane, who went on to become a state senator, used to like to boast that he represented the district of “Chelsea Clinton” invoking the name of the president’s daughter.

Duane is from one of the oldest esteemed families of New York for which a downtown Manhattan street and park and Duanesburg in upstate’s Schenectady County near Albany are named.  James Duane was mayor 1784–1789.

In turn, Duane Reade, the ubiquitous drug store chain, takes its name from that Manhattan street, the chain’s original store having opened on Broadway between Duane and Reade Streets in Manhattan.

I’ve recently heard complaints about what was referred to as the “Duane-Reade-ification” of Manhattan.  I’ll hold my judgment.  I often shop there.  (The chain is now merged with Walgreens.)

Now there is another confluence when it comes to Clinton family names and the New York area.  It also involves street names. . . and the library.

It turns out, the prime spot in Brooklyn where Hillary Clinton just recently announced she is locating her national campaign headquarters right next to, cheek by property-line jowl, adjacent to the key Brooklyn destination library that’s getting a lot of attention because it is under siege from coveting New York real estate interests.   As noted, those interests want to turn the public’s library into a luxury condominium tower, with a vastly shrunken “replacement” library underneath.  The library stands at the corner of Brooklyn’s Tillary and Clinton streets. . . or, if you want, where on the grid Tillary Street transitions seamlessly via the curve that hugs the library to become Clinton Street.

That’s right! Hillary Clinton’s new national campaign office is located right next to the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library.  Cementing the nexus further, the building in which her campaign office stands has actually, with a scheme of partially combined ownership, been made part of the same zoning lot with the library, and, as we will discuss here, that means there is even more that connects presidential candidate Clinton’s office with the Tillary Clinton Library.

A Symbolic Location

One of a string of reporters on April 12th who lined up outside the new Clinton national campaign office to report on Hillary's declaration that she's running for President.   It was fun how they politely took turns using what was considered the best spot.

The One Pierrepont Plaza entrance to Hillary’s new campaign office became a cynosure for media outlets looking for a telegenic accompanying backdrop for on-site reporters when, on April 12th, Clinton was releasing her videoed announcement to make it official that she was running for president.  The media broadcast trucks lined the street along the curb up and down in front of Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library where Citizens Defending Libraries (a group I am a co-founder of) regularly canvasses to save libraries and where we have held multiple demonstrations protesting their sell-off.  Protection of this particular library was a focus in another of those demonstrations when Bill de Blasio, running for mayor, stood with Citizens Defending Libraries on the steps of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library calling for a halt to these library sales:

VIDEO

De Blasio:

It’s public land and public facilities and public land under threat. . . and once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties.

The Deck is Stacked in Favor of Those at the Top According to Clinton. . .

The night Clinton’s video announcement came out John Oliver on his HBO “Last Week Tonight” lambasted it for anti-climactic contentlessness. He asserted it contained no more than “exactly four relevant words: I’m running for president,” telling his audience that there was “nothing else to see, nothing else to talk about” in its 2 minute 18 second length.

John Oliver was a little unfair.  Although most of the Clinton video was set up with noncommital obliqueness, essentially a Rorschach test inviting its viewers to fill in on their own blanks about what they suppose Hillary might stand for in her campaign if she was similar to and was going to “champion” a string of ordinary Americans depicted in the video (including a couple hoping to train their dog not to eat the trash), Hillary made one very striking definitive statement as she invited viewers to join her on her “journey” on the “road to earn your vote.”

What was her striking statement, the only substantive statement of a position in the video?  She said that the deck is “stacked in favor of those at the top.”

In doing so Ms. Clinton invoked not only that growing income and wealth inequality plaguing the nation, but also acknowledges how that inequality flows from the way that living life in America is rigged to favor those at the top.

Everybody Agrees that Income Inequality Is the Issue 

Only one thing that makes this statement less striking . . .   everybody, and I do mean everybody, is saying the same thing.  April 18th Charles Schumer, senior senator for New York, was saying it at the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats 46th Anniversary Dinner (where he was also saying he was not sure that he was in a position to lobby his wife, Iris Weinshall, Chief Operating Officer at the NYPL, not to sell off some other New York City libraries like the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library completed with a contribution of federal funds in 1995).

Senator Schumer at the CBID dinner (above) speaking about how the primacy of income inequality as an issue and saying that he did not think he could lobby his wife, NYPL COO Iris Weinshall, not to sell the Science, Industry and Business Library (below) completed with federal funds in 1995. 

The Science, Industry and Business Library completed with federal funds.  The "Bridgegate" indictments of New Jersey public officials under Section 666 are predicated on the fact that public assets managed by the Port Authority were paid for with more than $10,000 of federal money. 

De Blasio, Clinton and Income Inequality

When Mayor de Balsio stood with Citizens Defending Libraries opposing the sale of the New York Libraries he was running a “Tale of Two Cities” campaign for city-wide office that was about economic inequality.  He is now talking about the  crisis of income inequality as being a national concern of utmost importance for Hillary and the other national candidates to talk about.

De Blasio has not yet endorsed Hillary for president.  It’s pretty certain that doing so immediately would not have garnered much attention given that de Blasio worked his way up the political ladder working for Ms. Clinton as campaign manager when she ran fifteen years ago to become U.S. senator from New York.  De Blasio also chose tp associate himself with the Clintons by being sworn in by former president Bill Clinton at his January 1, 2014  inauguration.

WNYC’s morning host Brian Lehrer proposed what he termed a “conspiracy theory,” that de Blasio’s current non-endorsement of Clinton is a bit of kabuki theater,  “comfy” “coordination” to avoid the appearance of a “coronation.”  The de Blasio endorsement of Clinto will therefore come later and with more drama, perhaps a to achieve some other balance in the news cycle.  In the meantime, de Blasio will makes a show of pulling Hillary to the left with demands for `more policy detail’ and assurance of her commitment to issues about which the electorate cares.  That’s all more than likely.

WBAI host Jed Brandt and executive editor and publisher of City Limits Jarrett Murphy conversing in an interview April 23rd on WBAI’s “Morning Show” suppositioned that in the 2016 election the Democrats will be using “de Blasio’s position as a Liberal Progressive running a big city to put forward a national vision for urban areas” with de Blasio “charting a new vision for cities .”  The new vision includes attacking economic inequality.   “That’s why he was in Iowa this weekend,” commented Murphy.

De Blasio was in Iowa, lickety-split, after Hillary’s announcement.  This is some of what he said inveighing against income inequality in an interview from Iowa he granted a WNYC reporter about his visit to that state:

I'm looking for every opportunity to address what I think is the crisis of our times, which is income inequality, and growing, rampant income inequality at that.. . . And I think it's the kind of thing that should be talked about by all the presidential candidates. . We are in a different economic reality . .  the reality of an economy that is basically supporting the 1%.   . .  you could argue that unless something really jolts the political dynamics of this country this status quo will continue for years where the rich get richer and most people fall behind.  You can have much greater income disparity going forward, and I think that destabilizes the nation. . .  this is a serious crisis that has gone under recognized and under addressed. I think it is absolutely fair to say to any candidate: Show us your plan and your vision before we can make a decision on who to support.

Republicans Now Talk About Income Inequality Too

Other pictures of what the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library looks like are available here.  What the building that would replace it would look like can't be said, because no real designs are available although a developer was "selected."

But it is not just the Democrats that are talking about income inequality.  It’s a top topic that the Republicans are also now inveighing against.  A string of candidates, including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, and complaining about the “worsening” income inequality, “the opportunity gap” as the “defining issue of our time” (Jeb Bush) “with more Americans . .  stuck at their income levels than ever before” and even Mitt Romney, for whom the topic was once verboten, warning of how the “rich have gotten richer” with an `exacerbated’ inequality that they, naturally, are blaming on Obama.  Ditto Paul Ryan and John Boehner.  See: Republicans are suddenly talking about income inequality, by Colin Campbell, Feb. 5, 2015, Republicans have started to care about income inequality, by Catherine Rampell, January 22, 2015, Why Republicans Are Suddenly Talking About Economic Inequality, by Brebdan Nyhan, February 13, 2015, Republicans Are So Desperate, They're Blaming Obama for Income Inequality, by Danny Vinik, January 26, 2015, Thomas Piketty Calls Out Republican 'Hypocrisy' On Income Inequality, The Huffington Post, by Mollie Reilly, March 11, 2015 and The GOP's 2016 playbook? Republicans rip income inequality, by Howard Kurtz, January 22, 2015

The following is from Jeb Bush’s website:

Millions of our fellow citizens across the broad middle class feel as if the American Dream is now out of their reach. . 

That site further proclaims:

that our politics are petty and broken; that opportunities are elusive; and that the playing field is no longer fair or level.

(See: Why Republicans Are Talking About Income Inequality, by Ben Brody, Jan 26, 2015.)

Bernie Sanders . .  Same Issue, but There First?

Populist Elizabeth Warren may not be running but senate independent Bernie Sanders, a professed Socialist, says he will be challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.  His platform?: He has been talking about the gap between rich and poor longer than anyone.

If Everybody Is Talking, What Are They Doing?

So, there is no question that at this point everybody is going to be talking about escalating income inequality as a crisis.  The question is who is it credible to believe will actually take steps to effectively address the way that opportunity and fairness is vanishing from the playing field that increasingly tilts more toward already privileged insiders with an inside track?

Chart of the government's spending under different presidents, but every likes to quibble on parsing such figures

The best selling point the Republicans have in this regard is that they would do the best job to fend off the kind of big government that will take your money away and give it to somebody else, buying things you don’t want.  Their problem making that case is that when they seize the reins of government you see just as much crony capitalism as with the Democrats, or more.  Need we say more than “Halliburton”?  Bigger government may increase the thereat of crony capitalism, but while delight is taken in different parsings of the data, Republicans cannot exactly be depended upon to reduce government spending or the favoritism of corporate welfare.  What’s more, far too often Republicans view control of government as an opportunity to privatize the functions government inherently does best.  Privatize social security with a hand off to Wall Street?  Really!

Mayor de Blasio and Libraries

Elected to take office January 1, 2014 Mayor de Blasio, with more than a year in office, is now perhaps furthest down the road of demonstrating what tackling the crisis of inequality and diminishing opportunity can look like, in terms of what he is speaking of.  In May of 2014, following through on what he called for the year before as a campaigning candidate, de Blasio quashed the NYPL’s proposed Central Library plan which, as proposed, was going to cost the public more than half billion dollars to vastly shrink its library space and eliminate millions of books from the 42nd Street Central Library.  Very importantly, that plan was designed to hand-off two significant and valuable central Manhattan libraries, the 40th Street Mid-Manhattan circulating library, most used in its system, and the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) as real estate deals.

There is a great deal of good news in this regard.  It was tardily disclosed not long after de Blasio acted that the Central Library Plan was going to cost more than $200 million more than the NYPL had previously been publicizing when promoting it.  Nevertheless, aspects of the Central Library Plan ominously survive and the NYPL, acutely aware of the public’s opposition, is obscuring facts apparently to downplay this and forestall suspicions about what aspects of the plan it might hope to resurrect in the future either under the next mayoral administration or, perhaps with persuasion, while de Blasio is in office.

As noted, the NYPL still wants to sell off the recently completed Science, Industry and Business Library in a transaction that Senator Schumer’s wife, Iris Weinshall, was hired to handle after the embarrassing collapse of the first iteration of the Central Library Plan.

Obfuscation About Library Sales and Shrinkage by Library Officials Dealing With Public Opposition

Mayor de Blasio officially killed the Central Library plan but an example of how word is not getting out to that the public is not getting the full benefit of that plan’s be killed could be heard Thursday morning, April 23rd (1:28-1:53) on WBAI’s “The Morning Show” when David Giles from the Center for an Urban Future and Christopher Platt, the NYPL’s Vice President for Library Services, visited to make the case that de Blasio, having not restored unprecedented cuts in funding by the Bloomberg administration, is starving the city libraries, an essential service desperately in need of funding.  When WBAI  host Jed Brandt asked about the removal of millions of books from the 42nd Street Central Reference Library as part of it Central Library Plan, Mr. Platt trotted out a now standard NYPL obfuscation and getting away with a lie that went out to the WBAI audience unchallenged by Mr. Brandt.

Mr. Brandt asked, on behalf of life-long library fans, if the NYPL had moved the collection out of the stacks and Platt responded:

The collection is- ah, ah,- currently, temporarily out of the building while space is being built underneath Bryant Park for storing it.  So the collections that have been moved out are coming back next year.  Uhm, and all of those books will be back in central Manhattan, uhm, available for people to call, just as they’ve been able to call before.

The space under the Central Reference Library’s Rose Reading Room, which was designed to hold the library’s first three million books, was cleared during the Bloomberg administration in mid-2013 with an intent to demolish the book stacks.  The additional space proposed to be outfitted under Bryant Park (built twenty years ago) was designed to supplement those book stacks for a growing collection.  This additionally outfitted space was designed to hold only 1.5 million books, so it is false to suggest that “all of those books,” the entire collection moved out, “will be coming back.” Only a fraction of them will.

Platt’s response also ignores the larger picture of the millions of other books that have disappeared.  There were once perhaps as many as thirteen million books in Manhattan’s key central libraries.  That total number may ultimately be reduced to fewer than 4 million.  The Donnell Library was sold.  Its collection is not coming back.  There were over a million books at SIBL that are gone.  The NYPL’s 42nd Street Annex was sold.

Previously nailed for being non-transparent about its real estate sell-off plans, the NYPL is now theoretically adjusting course and inviting comment and input from the public about what it wants.  On March 26th the NYPL held a “public forum” or charrette, its very first, about what the public wanted concerning alternatives to the Central Library Plan that isn't proceeding.   Nearly everyone there voiced their opposition to the sale of SIBL.  Notwithstanding, less than three weeks later the public was informed, via the Wall Street Journal, that the NYPL plans, exactly as it previously intended, to proceed with a sale of SIBL . . .

. . .  Does that sound like the NYPL was holding a public forum to consider public opinion, or just to be able to say they took public comment about something they already had a set intention of doing anyway?

The Brooklyn Public Library similarly held a “charrette” for public input with respect to its planned sale of the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Library on March 23rd, three days before the NYPL’s forum.  Public reaction was interesting similar, with the BPL apparently similarly intent on ignoring it.

Mayoral Underfunding of Libraries as a Supposed Justification For Selling Them Off as Real Estate Deals

The self-cannibalizing sale and shrinkage of New York City libraries as real estate deals is supposedly justified by mayoral underfunding of libraries.  This was a subject that Mr. Giles and Mr. Platt entirely avoided when they appeared on WBAI.  It is also something the New York Times strangely never mentioned when it similarly featured a recent article sounding the alarm about the “staggering crisis” besetting city libraries given the pitiful level to which funding for library infrastructure has currently been reduced.  This was even though in 2013 the Times ran a front page article saying how the sale of city libraries was viewed as justified as an answer to this same crisis.

Wouldn’t it make sense that public would want to know that the current underfunding of the city’s libraries would mean that city libraries will have to be sold off and shrunk at a loss to the public, but that if proper funding to the libraries is restored that simply isn’t necessary?

In February 2013, when Michael Bloomberg was still mayor of the city, we attended a meeting about the proposed sale of the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library where we were tauntingly told by a spokesperson for the BPL, Josh Nachowitz, that an increase in the city’s library budget would eliminate the need to sell libraries, but that we should forget about it because the Bloomberg cuts to library funding where not going to be restored.

Said Mr. Nachowitz:

Realizing the situation that we’re in, we would all love that the [Citizens Defending Libraries] petition would be hugely successful and that we’ll get the mayor and the administration to see that a change in the way they look at funding libraries would solve a lot of this, but in the meantime we, as a library system, have to make some of the hard choices . . given diminishing resources and given the capital needs and crisis that we face . . . as [Citizens Defending Libraries] pointed out with [its] petition, the libraries are being squeezed in terms of our budget and we are in a position where we have to make difficult decisions, and unfortunately this is one of them.

The amount it would take to restore the library budget and avoid these sales is relatively minuscule, a small fraction of the city’s budget, especially compared to other components.  Last week New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer made this point cleverly and with exquisite eloquence.

Even Though More People use Libraries Spending on Them is far Outpaced By. . . . Sports Arenas AND

Mr. Dwyer made a point that I have made in Noticing New York before about much is being publicly spent on sports facilities like the Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays” arena (just yards away from the Pacific Branch Library the BPL designated for sale) versus how little is being spent on libraries.  Dwyer bested us however by going to the city’s Independent Budget for figures we have not cited before (although we have cited IBO figures to describe the absurdly little amount city libraries get as part of the city budget as a whole).

Dwyer pointed out that in the last 8 years at least $620 million has been spent on just three sports arenas, (the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" included) and that this amount was 1.37 times the amount spent on libraries serving seven times as many users.

Dwyer writes:

The city's libraries - the fusty old buildings, and a few spiffier modern ones, . .  have more users than major professional sports, performing arts, museums, gardens and zoos - combined.

    * * * *

Over the last decade, they have not gotten anywhere near the kind of capital funding enjoyed by sports teams.

From the 2006 fiscal year through 2014, the city budgeted at least $464 million to build new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets, and $156 million for the Barclays Center. That's $620 million for just those three sports arenas - a sum more than one-third greater than the $453 million that the city committed for capital improvements to the its 206 branch libraries and four research centers, which serve roughly seven times as many people a year as attend baseball games. (The budget figures were provided by the city's Independent Budget Office; the teams are getting an additional $680 million in subsidies spread over 40 years.)

For decades, the libraries have served a single function in the city budget process: hostages. Mayors say they have to cut library hours to make the financial books balance. . .

(See: Denying New York Libraries the Fuel They Need, April 23, 2015.)

Dwyer's calculation of sports expenditures quickly overtaking what was spent on libraries cites just three city sports venues. He could, of course, have added others, starting with Madison Square Garden.  He could have also added what the city spends on other sorts of venues on his list of those things that, even in the aggregate, are used less than libraries:

Major museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum or Museum of the City of New York..

Performing arts, like those at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, City Center and Snug Harbor.

Sports teams like the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Jets and Giants.

Natural-world attractions: the botanical gardens, Wave Hill, the zoos and aquariums.

Dwyer could also have pointed out that building a new Yankee Stadium to replace the older one (for which the taxpayers had also footed much of the bill) was a transaction structured to replace local tax-paying businesses in the area with business the stadium owners would instead conduct off the tax rolls.  In the case of the Barclays arena much of the benefit of subsidies mobilized for the developer are going to Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokorov.

Banana Republic Crony Capitalism

Does this dishing out of topsy-turvy benefit for sports culture boondoggles sound a little like Banana Republic style cooperate-directed crony capitalism?  I couldn’t help but think of the odd skewing of expenditures this week while watching one of the latest editions of Vice on HBO.  In a fifteen minute segment, “Haitian Money Pit,” it reported on what it termed “disaster capitalism” (double entendre clearly intended I think) where money ostensibly directed toward Haitian earthquake relief disappeared into the maw of lobbied-for diversions, skimming most of the cash while benefitting others, frequently U.S. companies, not the Haitians.  It reported that of every dollar of U.S. government aid more than 99 cents went to non-Haitian organizations for delivery of aid, substantial amounts disappearing altogether in the process.

The earthquake that forced more than 2 million form their homes was in 2010.  Since that time what has the billions of dollars supplied for disaster relief provided?  Homes?: Not many.  Haitians whose health is imperiled by cholera and other diseases because they have no sewers and must truck in potable drinking water aren’t getting relief.  Instead, in communities where basic amenities were lacking, money went to build two new soccer fields and a cultural facility, each of them little used.   Two of these facilities were in a town unaffected by the earthquake seven hours north.  In the vicinity of the earthquake, the International Olympic Committee built an $18 million state-of-the-art soccer field and recreational facility amidst a shanty town.

Bill Clinton, in a brief shot above, gets dinged in Vice's “Haitian Money Pit”

The segment, featuring use of the work of reporter Jake Johnston, dings ex-president Bill Clinton, for the travesty of a wastefully useless “Zoranje housing expo” reconstruction project headed by Clinton and the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission.  (The Vice reporter for the segment was Vikram Gandhi.)  Elsewhere, Johnston has been a critic of the Clinton Foundation’s activities in Haiti.

The Vice report offered that in some cases, Haitians who “received little to no foreign aid actually appeared to be doing better than those in designated relief areas.”

Why this segue focusing of sports funding getting crony capitalism benefits from government? 

Hillary Clinton's Government-Subsidized Landlord

Hillary Clinton’s new landlord in the premises next to the library is Barclays Arena owner and developer Forest City Ratner.

Comments Norman Oder in Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report that tracks all developments with respect to Ratner's highly subsidized Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly:

And while it's unclear whether Clinton got a discount--or whether anyone believes that the anodyne One Pierrepont Plaza represents "Brooklyn cool"--it can't be a bad thing for Ratner (and his ally Mayor Bill de Blasio) to have a Clinton connection.

When I was a senior official in the legal department of the state finance agencies, making sure that developers didn’t hand out campaign offices in our subsidized buildings was something we were on guard to prevent.  In fact, in one case I remember putting the kibosh on such an arrangement where it looked like a Chelsea developer was looking to curry favor with the earlier mentioned Tom Duane, although I was myself friendly enough with Duane.  In 1994 we shared eulogy responsibilities for a good friend with others, including Marvel's Stan Lee and Alger Hiss.

Just as Forest City Ratner, with governmental assistance, became owner without competitive bid of the Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly of which the Barclays arena is a part, Forest City Ratner was made owner of Hillary’s One Pierrepont Plaza building in 1985, also without competitive bid.

Forest City Ratner’s business model is to never do projects without government subsidy or that require competitive bid.  The Ratner/Prokhorov Barclays arena was promoted as a possible location for the Democratic National Convention, probably unwisely.  It wasn’t chosen.

"Brought To You By Forest City Ratner?"

The obvious concern for the electorate is that you don’t want your presidential candidate “brought to you by Forest City Ratner.”  It is the same concern people are chewing over with respect to the Clinton Foundation: You don’t want to have your nation’s foreign policy “brought to you by the donors to the Clinton Foundation.”  Similarly, even if it came with de Blasio’s endorsement, you wouldn’t want the `charting of a new vision for America’s cities’ to come you courtesy of  Forest City Ratner.

There is already too much of this sort of thing in politics and too much of it when it comes to Forest City Ratner.  WNYC, New York City’s principal public radio station, which the public relies on to report on real estate development in the city, and which is now is now covering the presidential race intently, is now also running ads for Forest City Ratner.  No this is not an April Fools' joke.  (Noticing New York’s last April Fools' article can be found here and National Notice also ran one.). .

. . . First WNYC put MaryAnne Gillmartin on its board of trustees and then, after Noticing New York warned about the impropriety of this together with presenting concerns about corporate sponsorship spots and their influence (really advertising in many cases), the station began also running what are in all respects essentially ads for Forest City Ratner.  They do not say “WNYC is brought to you by Forest City Ratner,” but pretty damn close:

WNYC & RadioLoveFest is supported by Forest City Ratner Companies, Brooklyn-based for more than 30 years while working to create vibrant communities throughout New York City.

Most people informed on the topic would take issue with this controversial statement broadcast as fact: “Brooklyn-based for more than 30 years” . . . “working to create vibrant communities throughout New York City”?

The “Brooklyn-based for more than 30 years” is designed to counter the perception of the firm as an interloper from Cleveland and the “working to create vibrant communities throughout New York City”  is designed to counter the perception that ..  well you've probably guessed.

In simplest terms, when the time comes, the public ought to be able to believe that Hillary would straightforwardly denounce the selling of New York City libraries rather than hold back out of concern for her landlord.

City's Legal Ownership of  Tillary Clinton Library Is Merged With Ratner Property

The city’s legal ownership of the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library has, from a development zoning lot standpoint, been partially merged with the Ratner building that Hillary Clinton's office will be in, Ratner stands as a sort of gatekeeper to the transaction to sell and shrink the library to create the luxury condos.  In Brooklyn, the plans to sell the borough’s libraries go back to at least 2007 when a former Forest City Ratner vice president, Karen Backus, was secretly hired to create the Brooklyn Public Library’s real estate strategy for those sales.

The first two libraries that the real estate strategy created by Backus prioritized for sale as real estate deals, including the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library, were both next to Forest City Ratner property.  The other one was the Pacific Branch across the street from Ratner’s Atlantic Yards site.

How an Elite Private School Benefits by The Public Assuming Costs/Taking a Loss

There is another reason Ratner stands as a gatekeeper to turning the library into a luxury tower.  There is more than developer greed driving the Tillary Clinton Library sale.  An elite private neighborhood school also stands to benefit mightily.  The Saint Ann’s School has valuable unused real estate development rights the sale of which will be unlocked if the library is sold and shrunk.  One of Saint Ann’s buildings stands on the other side of the Ratner building from the library with the Ratner building wrapping around it like a horseshoe.

Above, Saint Ann's School building with development rights that are not yet utilized.  The Ratner building, now with Hillary Clinton's campaign office is in the background, literally and metaphorically

The only way that Saint Ann’s could otherwise use these development rights would be for the school to demolish its existing building and then rebuild to create a larger building that will utilize all of the available rights.  But that would entail the costs of demolition, the costs of rebuilding and, finally, Saint Ann’s having to go without this currently used school facility for an extended period of time, still another inherent cost.  Not surprisingly, it is something that, over the years, Saint Ann’s has chosen not to do.

If, however, the library is sold for redevelopment, then all those sorts of costs are off-loaded and borne by the public and the library instead of the private school.  The school nevertheless coasts in, incurring no such costs, but collecting on the entire benefit of using its previously locked-up development rights.  It can take that benefit either in cash or by being given additional built-out property for its campus.  The developer is discussing giving the school a combination that will include both.  Clearly, Saint Ann’s saw a payday, and in connection with the sale and shrinkage of the library it is looking to launch a fairly substantial upgrade of other of its facilities when the money flows in.  The school has influence.  Quietly, and escaping public notice, Saint Ann’s promoters have, in conflict of interest situations, been pushing the library deal forward in the community.

A Lot of Space For the Private School and For Hillary; Not Much For a Proposed Library

As part of its envisioned deal, the developer was first talking about bestowing a gymnasium upon the private school but more recently said that a new school theater was being discussed that might be 20,000 square feet, pretty much the same amount of space as proposed for a shrunken “replacement” library.  The current library, built in 1962 and enlarged in later years, is 63,000 square feet of space of which approximately 37,703 square feet is in the library's two above-ground stories.  The new library is proposed to have only 15,000 square feet of above-ground space on a ground floor with another 6,000 square feet below ground.  (For more of a breakdown respecting the existing space, including belatedly released floor plans see: Floor Plans of the Brooklyn Heights Library Considered In Light of the Library's Proposed Sale and Shrinkage.)

In contrast, Hillary Clinton is renting “more than 80,000 square feet of space” for her offices,  two full floors of the adjacent Ratner building.

Reason the Library Is Being Shrunk?  It's an Essential Part of the Shell Game.

Why shrink the library?  And why shrink it so much?  Why not enlarge it?  Once it is at the base of a condominium tower it will never be possible to enlarge it again.

Of course one reason to shrink the library is that its better for the developer in that the public is handing over just that much more of its development rights.  Is another reason that the owners of the developer’s luxury apartments will be less nuisanced if the proletariat patronizes a smaller, less noticeable library?  The library is on the border of Brooklyn’s downtown and Brooklyn Heights.  (Some consider it “more a part of Downtown Brooklyn.”) Brooklyn Heights, once much less so, is now a highly gentrified neighborhood.  One thing that is coming out is that some in the now gentrified Brooklyn Heights are not that tolerant of having certain kinds of visitors from other neighborhoods.

What is actually the most important reason library administration officials decided to shrink the library is not an immediately apparent one.  The sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library is modeled on the sale and shrinkage of the Donnell Library.  Both were conceived at almost exactly the same time, going back to 2007, or not long before.  In 2007 the NYPL sold the 97,000 square foot Donnell Library to net less than $38 million.  Eventually there will be a replacement library of less than one third the size, 28,000 square feet.

The penthouse apartment in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell is on the market for $60 million.  A few days ago another single lower level condo unit in the building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50.  There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower and earlier this year Chinese investors made that hotel, according to the Wall Street Journal, “the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . .  .more than $2 million a room.”

Even though the developers and related real estate interests involved in the Donnell sale are doing unspeakably well, the NYPL realized so little from its sale of Donnell (at the very top of that year 2007 real estate bubble) that it would have suffered a net loss if it were building a full scale replacement for Donnell.  It ought to be noted that much of the previous Donnell had been renovated relatively recently before its sale.

The situation with the Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library is fairly similar.  Without rejiggering things like the size of the library, the transaction becomes more transparent and the extent of the public’s loss more glaringly obvious.  As is, the Brooklyn Public Library has refused to provide calculations of those losses such as would be suffered implementing the prospective shrinkage.

Hillary Located Her Office Beside the Library Because It Is Such A Publicly Accessible Location

Why is Hillary choosing this location for her offices?  Politico writes that the office “is close to 12 subway lines and a dozen bus lines.” 

The space is definitely desirable for its central, easily accessible location, accessible to all of Brooklyn and the most of the rest of the city as well. 

When the BPL and the city real estate development officials were pitching the desirability of the library site to potential condo developers they made the same point:

It's accessible to numerous transit lines.  So you have the Jay Street hub, you have the Borough Hall hub, the subway lines.  You have Clark Street, Court Street, High Street, all of these different subway lines are serviced at this location. There are parts of Manhattan that are not as well serviced as this particular site and you're able to get to downtown Manhattan within minutes.

Exiling Business and Career Library Functions From Brooklyn's Central Business District

The BPL has another explanation for why it is shrinking the Tillary Clinton Library and it runs opposite to why Hillery Clinon is seeking to locate next to its central location.  Integrated into the library are “Business and Career Library” functions and the BPL is arguing that it would be beneficial to the public to extricate and exile these functions away from what the public officials, bragging about the desirability of the site to developers, describe as a “nexus” with the adjacent “financial hub of Downtown Brooklyn,” theoretically moving them to the Grand Army Plaza Library next to the northern tip of Prospect Park and the Botanic Garden.  Notwithstanding the proposal to exile these functions, according to the BPL the business and career library functions have been located "in the commercial hub of Brooklyn since it opened in 1943."

In 1991 the BPL spent a considerable amount, millions, about $10 million by today's standards, for an "extensive" renovation and enlargement of the building, expanding its second floor, part of the purpose of which was to give which was specifically to better "accommodate the business library" with more space.  As recently as 1997 the BPL was, speaking of these renovations, telling the public in its rhetoric of the time: "[t]he Business Library looks forward to serving Brooklyn's business community into the 21st Century."

43% of the existing 63,000 square foot Tillary Clinton Library is devoted to Business and Career functions but no new space would be added to the Grand Army Plaza Library as and when these functions are theoretically shifted and crammed into the Grand Army Plaza Library location.  That’s to the extent that those functions will really continue to exist there at all.  Some space devoted to the functions will probably simply disappear entirely with the BPL saying it was space the public simply doesn’t need to have.

The BPL has acknowledged that a reorganization to jam the function into the the Grand Army Plaza Library will require physical alterations that involve considerable expense, but BPL president Johnson refuses to release a figure for this expense to be netted out as a public costs from the relatively small amount the BPL will be paid by the developer getting to demolish the Tillary Clinton Library.

Johnson says that she does not have to consider or net out the cost of moving the Business and Career Library because the BPL had decided to move it anyway, that it was “in the works” before the sale so that it is not really a part of the transaction that is shrinking the Tillary Clinton Library.  That’s not what the BPL’s record shows although Johnson says emphatically that it was “not the case” that this was always in conjunction with the sale.

The idea to move the Business and Career functions and shrink the library was conceived synchronously in 2007/2008 (the same time the NYPL similarly sold Donnell for shrinkage) as part of the strategic real estate plan for “leveraging” all of the BPL’s real estate.  This was the plan former Forest City Ratner VP Karen Backus was commissioned to create.  It was Linda Johnson's first priority.  When Linda Johnson arrived at the BPL as the new interim Executive Director (a position eventually corporately rechristened "president,") she told the BPL board of trustees at her first July 20, 2010, the meeting according to the BPL minutes that the first “great challenge” she faced was “getting the organization to think strategically,” building from the “foundation” of “the Real Estate Plan.”

According to the BPL’s February 2009 minutes, not long before Johnson showed up, Backus was told to go back and further adjust her plan to “strengthen the argument” for the real estate strategy according to which the BPL was going to take a “proactive approach to the improvement and right-sizing of its physical plant,” and at that meeting the board resolved that it would “promote the plan with elected officials and stakeholders.”   Read “right-sizing” as a euphemism for “shrink.”

Notwithstanding, at their May 17, 2011 meeting Ms. Johnson spoke to her board about how information about libraries being sold was to be kept “in strict confidence” when it was shared, and at their October 11, 2011 meeting, Ms. Johnson reporting on the real estate plan:

reminded the Board of past conversations about the plan and let them know that the goal was to get far enough into the plan with this Mayor so that when a new Mayor takes office, the plan will be deep in progress and he or she will not derail it.

In 2011 Ms. Johnson didn’t know who the next mayor was going to be, but a shift in the polls determined that it would be de Blasio right after, in July 2013, he called for a halt to the sale of the libraries in his "Tale of Two Cities" campaign.

This martini glass chart shows how growing support for de Blasio took him all the way to in an election win with that really taking off in July 2013 just when he joined with Citizens Defending Libraries in decrying the sale and shrinkage of the city's libraries.

Moving the Business and Career Functions Makes No Sense

Move the Business and Career functions out of Brooklyn’s Central Business District to shrink the library?

Brooklyn’s Downtown is growing fast.  When analyzing population it is important to recognize that Brooklyn has at least two populations, a daytime population reflecting where people work that includes Brooklyn residents and many other constituents of Brooklyn for planning purposes.  There is also a nighttime population more reflective of where Brooklyn residents sleep.  There is also the those who travel through and might during their travels stop in Downtown Brooklyn.

During the daytime, commuters nearly double the daytime population of Manhattan due in large part to all the commuters coming in from the Boroughs and elsewhere, with seven out of 10 commuters coming from another county.  The daytime population of Downtown Brooklyn, just across the river from the Wall Street financial district similarly swells as people visit its office buildings, courthouses, schools and universities (see population map).  The borough that sends the most commuters to Manhattan is Brooklyn although most Brooklynites remain in Brooklyn to work, many in Brooklyn’s Downtown..

Here, adapted from a graphic in Gizmodo, the foreground enlargement shows how the expansion of the daytime population in Downtown Brooklyn resembles Manhattan's commuter draw.  

There are ambitious plans for Downtown Brooklyn to become even more of a daytime draw with a new “Tech Triangle” including the downtown and the DUMBO district just down the hill from the library.  Immense almost immediate growth in this regard is projected with the conversion to tech use of Watchtower properties the Jehovah's Witnesses are selling off around the Downtown in DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights

The nighttime population of Downtown Brooklyn as it accelerates a super-dense residential component is growing even faster, reportedly in 2011, faster than any Sun Belt community, by “2,900-percent . . .  during the same time when the population of the city overall grew about five percent.”

That’s due to all the many towers springing up, part of the same building boom that is causing developers to crave the Tillary Clinton Library as valuable, as a place to put up one more of the towers.  But that same development and escalating density that makes the property increasingly valuable to private developers makes the property increasingly valuable to the public and hard to duplicate if it is ever lost.  A denser, growing city means we should be growing our public assets to keep pace, but the paradoxical irony is that when competition heats up that’s exactly when it's hardest for the public to find space and figure out where additional facilities can be squeezed in.   Giving up and shrinking the assets we already have is opposite to a solution.

One case in point exemplifying the city's difficulty in finding the land it needs to provide essential services is the city's inability to find and supply additional space in the neighborhood to overcrowded P.S. 8, already at 142 percent capacity.   With more than 3,750 new housing units to be developed in the school zone through 2017 another tower replacing the library would only increase the escalating burden, yet nary a thought was given that if land was being taken from a library supporting the school it might be put to other use. .  Actually, that not quite so: Behind the scenes its being said that a luxury is being built is because the School Construction Authority has said there isn't a good place for buses to park if a school was to be built on the site.  Not true!

Some people are quietly saying that a luxury tower is best to replace the library site because the School Construction Authority says the inability to park buses by the site would make it problematic to have a school there.  Really?

Whether it’s Manhattanites or somebody from Queens working in Downtown Brooklyn, or a Brooklynite working a few subway stops away in Manhattan, the true constituency of a public library like the Tillary Clinton Library is anybody for whom it is reasonably convenient to stop and visit the library.  That includes those traveling through an area for whom a stop is convenient. . .

The above shows how nearly all the Manhattan subway lines converge and travel over to land in a clump by the Tillary Clinton Library in Downtown Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights.  Proportions are not quite correct.  In real life Manhattan is lengthened and the subways are even more clumped together.

. . . . Almost all the subway lines in New York City are Manhattan-centric and they almost all travel down to the bottom of Manhattan before jumping the river to land in a clump in Brooklyn Heights and the first stops in Downtown Brooklyn.  Because the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library is where it is, almost every subway line going to or fro between Manhattan and Brooklyn stops right near it except for the L train going out to Williamsburg, but even L travelers get to Brooklyn Heights with superb ease.  That’s a huge number of mass transit users passing through for whom a central destination library stop like this is always convenient.

The usually recommended path, take Clinton to Tillary- Click to enlarge

Even if you are traveling to and fro between Manhattan and Brooklyn via automobile the same sort of bottle necking applies because you are likely to use either the Brooklyn Bridge or Manhattan Bridge, turning on either of them from Tillary probably passing the library via Clinton on the way.

Nevertheless, the BPL has offered as a rationale for shrinking the business and career functions out of the downtown Tillary Clinton location and moving what will remain of these services to Grand Army Plaza that it will then be more conveniently located, more convenient for those with a business focus.

In actuality, even if you set aside any particular focus on business and instead adopt a Brooklyn-centric measure of accessibility, the Grand Army Plaza library despite being somewhat more centrally located in the borough is, because of Downtown’s superior transportation, not more accessible than the Brooklyn’s Downtown.  It’s perhaps even less so.  There’s probably a related reason that the MTA prioritized making its Downtown stations handicapped accessible and has yet to get around to the Grand Army Plaza stations.

If you use the more Brooklyn-centric measure of having the location of all the various libraries in Brooklyn stand in as a proxy for where library users might be coming from in Brooklyn in about half the cases (see chart) the estimated travel is greater if a user is traveling to the Grand Army Plaza location.  In about a third of the cases the travel time is appreciably greater.

You can try these calculations at home.  These were done with Google Maps.  Because Google takes into accounts how schedules apply for whenever you do the calculations they will vary, but slightly in the overall. So, for instance, asking for a calculation at a slightly different time might get you, respectively for travel to the Brooklyn Heights Library and GAP Library, 52 minutes and 1:02 minutes from Jamaca Bay, or 37 and 47 minutes from Bushwick, 36 and 40 minutes from Washington Irving Library, all of which are results that turned up in when I tried again at a different time.

 The Concept of Consolidating Shrinkage, Getting Rid of Most Destination Libraries

Under the original traditional scheme of things in the city, users had a choice of centrally located destination libraries to go to and could make their decision based on convenience.  That was similarly the case with the NYPL where you could choose to go to the Donnell Library, the Science, Industry and Business Library, or the Mid-Manhattan Library.  When the NYPL and BPL adopted parallel plans to sell libraries they came up with a concept of consolidating shrinkage collapsing the fuller services of destination libraries into the fewest locations while elsewhere there's be only smaller libraries, places where patrons could run in to pick up orders books without browsing.

Such smaller libraries could conceivably be quite small indeed: In 2007/2008 as it was implementing its strategic real estate plan to right-size and sell the bigger libraries, the BPL envisioned creating one such very small library, piloting it as a “new library model.”  It would have been put in DUMBO, down the hill from the Tillary Clinton library.  This “Out-Post” library would have been only 1,700 square feet, a virtual postage stamp and far smaller than the minimum “10,000 square feet” that the Center for an Urban Future, usually a BPL ally, cites as “simply too small” for a “full-service” library.*

(* Keep in mind that the space proposed replace the central Tillary Clinton Brooklyn Heights Library would consist of only 15,000 above-ground square feet.)

The NYPL Central Library Plan and the sale of the Brooklyn Heights library to collapse surviving functions into the Grand Army Plaza are both examples of such consolidating shrinkage, but for elected officials who want to be alert and stand with the public to fend off all such disasters, it should be noted that other consolidations have been talked about, with the NYPL mentioning its next, still undescribed parallel plans for “Northern Manhattan” (Harlem?) and Staten Island.  Resulting space reductions tend to be down to between only one-third to one-quarter of the amount of space that previously benefitted the public.

Understanding Sale of the Public's Libraries as Reflective of the Broader Issues: Disparities of Wealth and the Abuse of Disproportionate Power

Schools, public housing, not just libraries, are being looked at to create real estate deals.

For Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio the issue is bigger than simply libraries.  The sale and shrinkage of New York City libraries, although glaring, high-profile, and instantly easy to understand, is reflective of the sell-off and privatization of public assets in New York in general: Schools, hospitals, public housing, parks, landmarks and historic districts, even streets, avenues, sidewalks, and public gathering space.

Two demonstrations and press conferences going on simultaneously at 11:00 AM on April 23rd blocks from one another and the Tillary Clinton Library, both to protest real estate industry attacks on public assets.  One is for LICH a local hospital de Blasio said he would save as mayor, the other for Save the View Now about new buildings blocking the view from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. 

In New York the principal driver of such proposed public property seizures is the monied real estate industry, so very powerful that commentator Bill Moyers recently devoted the entirety of one of his programs to describing that power and the damage it is inflicting on the public.  On a national stage other monied special interests that benefit a privileged few at the expense of the many replicate the kind of influence the real estate industry has in NYC.

It is important to recognize the root causes for the neglect of the public will we see when the public’s own priorities are sacrificed for those with influence.  Addressing money in politics, election and campaign finance reform are long overdue needs.  Most of us only get to vote once, but money in politics weighs in heavily, voting early and often spending  mega-bucks galore in multiple districts at the same time.  While we are in an era of increasing income and wealth inequality with the most affluent in our society lowering the taxes they pay, the really insidious issue is how the growing political inequality and the power that flows from these mounting economic disparities is being abused.

Save the View Now represents the community in objecting to how these buildings being built way taller than was supposed to be permitted block the view of the Brooklyn Bridge.  There is a substantial overlap between the members of the arcanely structured Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation who permitted this and the Trustees of the BPL selling libraries.  In each case they treat the public similarly.

In New York people are beginning to suggest, as on Brian Lehrer’s local public radio talk show the other day, that people may be ready to distance themselves from the real estate industry in view of the recent indictment of Albany leaders, Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Democratic Assembly until he was indicted and Dean Skelos, majority leader of the Republican state senate.  That’s two out of three of the fabled “three men in a room” power triumvirate.. The third man in that room is Andrew Cuomo, who once worked in the Bill Clinton administration.  Cuomo is already in trouble for peremptorily dissolving the Moreland Commission investigation that should probably itself had led to a version of these two other indictments.  People are now wondering whether Cuomo will be the last of three men to fall.

But as Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig (“Republic Lost”) and Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist David Cay Johnston (“Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)”) and a zillion others as well are noting, the real crime is not what is illegal, but what is getting defined as legal.  And isn’t this rewriting of the rules we are all thinking about when Hillary says that the deck has been “stacked in favor of those at the top”?

What Does Hillary Clinton's Campaign Mean for the Tillary Clinton Library?

New York Times article about casting Hillary as a populist.  Quotes: “Nothing stings members of her inner circle more than the suggestion that their candidate is late to these issues. . .  But affirming Mrs. Clinton’s sincerity as a populist, especially given her reputation for caution and careful consideration of political moves, is proving an uphill battle.” .  . Quote from Hillary: "Enough with the corporate welfare"!  Quote from Clinton economic advisor: Mrs. Clinton “wakes up asking how she can accomplish real things for families.”

It has been suggested that the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library won’t be torn down while the 2016 Presidential campaign is ongoing with Hillary Clinton’s campaign office right next door.  All that heavy-duty construction destroying a library would be just too unseemly and distracting!. . . .

. . . The bigger issue is whether Mayor de Blasio can stand to let the demolition of the city’s libraries on his watch be the backdrop in a campaign where the foremost issue will be the subject of income inequality and the increasingly unfair advantages of the wealthy.  It is, after all, a campaign in which Bill de Blasio as mayor of the city hosting Hillary’s campaign office is supposed to take a big part.

Two items in a "pop-up" exhibit at the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library documented the gift that Andrew Carnegie made of libraries to New York City and the promise the city, including a prior NYC mayor giving thanks, made to properly fund those libraries and keep them open for the public.

This week the New York Times editorial board expressed its opinion that de Blasio needs to restore funding to the libraries: New York City's Libraries Need Money, May 5, 2013.  The Times editorial mentions columnist Jim Dwyer’s analysis (cited earlier here) of how while libraries were starved, money was diverted to the “seldom neglected . . . corporate and entertainment infrastructure,” specifically mentioning Dwyer’s identification of the “Barclays” center in that regard, that highly-subsidized arena owned by Hillary Clinton’s landlord Forest City Ratner together with a Russian Oligarch.

Although the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library has always been a site for canvassing and demonstrations on the subject of library sell-offs, Ms. Clinton’s office adjacent location is probably destined to increasingly become a site that attracts all sorts of attention related to the campaign.  Sunday, police barricades were set up outside the campaign headquarters door to contain a group of Tea Party activists.

Police barricades set up at the entrance of Hillary Clinton's Tillary Clinton campaign office to contain Tea Party demonstrators May 3rd

Our calendars tell us the 2016 campaign plays out for quite a while, until November 8, 2016, and even then there’s an aftermath.  That takes Mayor d Blasio through two full New York City budget cycles and into the beginning of a third where he must focus on whether he will properly fund libraries as others are calling upon him to do, or let them be sold off and shrunk as symbols of his failure in that regard.

Anyone predicting that this will not get a lot of national focus will probably wind up pretty chagrined.  Don’t you think that people are going to be asking Hillary Clinton where she stands on the Tillary Clinton library issue?