Discernible in the year 2077 pile of rubble that the film "Oblivion" envisions, the wreckage of the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library

There’s a powerful intuitive link between libraries and our future.

That’s probably why libraries have been a recurring feature, an anchoring reference point in science fiction that envisions the future.  Frequently, in those speculative fictions libraries and librarians, along with the loss of civilization, have found themselves consigned to a forgotten dust heap.

Librarian Romney Wordsworth, played by Burgess Meredith, charged with being "obsolete"

A classic1961 episode of the Twilight Zone, “The Obsolete Man,” envisioned the prosecution of a librarian for being “obsolete” in a totalitarian state of the future.  As the prosecution commences, the statement by Mr. Romney Wordsworth, played by Burgess Meredith, that his occupation is that of “a librarian” is treated with derisive scorn and an ill-advised, defacto confession that he is “obsolete” exactly as charged.  According to the bullying Chancellor overseeing his case:“Since there are no more books, Mr. Wordsworth, there are no more libraries, and, of course, it follows that there is very little call for the services of a librarian.”  After expounding that ministers of religion are similarly seen by the state to have no function given that God has been disproved, the Chancellor goes on to tell Wordsworth (over the librarian’s interjected objections):

You are obsolete, Mr. Wordsworth. . .  You have no function, Mr. Wordsworth. You're an anachronism, like a ghost from another time.... a crawling insect.  An ugly, misformed, little creature, that has no purpose here, no meaning! . . .You're a librarian, Mr. Wordsworth. You're a dealer in books and two-cent finds and pamphlets in closed stacks in the musty insides of a language factory that spews meaningless words on an assembly line. WORDS, Mr. WORDSworth. That have no substance, no dimension, like air, like the wind. Like a vacuum, that you make believe have an existence, by scribbling index numbers on little cards. . . .Delusions, Mr. Wordsworth, DELUSIONS!! That you inject into your veins with printer's ink, the narcotics you call literature: The Bible, poetry, essays, all kinds, all of it are opiate to make you think you have a strength, when you have no strength at all!!! You are nothing, but spindly limbs and a dream, and The State has no use for your kind!!!! 

These words have a prophetic resonance for our time, as there are now those who, in the very name of futurism, seek as never before, to eliminate books and librarians from our New York City libraries.

From Wikipedia this still, apparently a publicity for use by the likes of "TV Guide," is not a shot form the episode.  Romney Wordsworth, the defender of books, never showed fear or appeared to cower in the actual episode

True, if the books are removed from the libraries, as is happening, it thereby becomes possible to argue that librarians become obsolete relics.  But, conversely, if you eliminate librarians as the defenders of books, it is so much easier to banish the books.  In the Twilight Zone episode, Mr. Wordsworth with his resolute declarations that he is a librarian and defense of the books proves himself to be a cagey hero conspicuously problematic to the state seeking to eliminate him along with books and the ideas they hold.

The Chancellor from the state, eliminating books, visits librarian Romney Wordsworth in his book-filled apartment

Defending his importance Wordsworth says:“I'm a human being, I exist....and if I speak one thought aloud, that thought lives, even after I'm shoveled into my grave.” 

Library Destruction at the Hands of Tyrants

The Twilight Zone’s opening narration sets the scene for the episode:

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super-states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace. This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. He's a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because he's built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in The Twilight Zone.

In this Twilight Zone episode libraries, books, and a thinking individual like the librarian Mr. Wordsworth are consciously being suppressed by the state because of the threat they pose to obedience.   In the episode Wordsworth awaiting his execution explains to the Chancellor the state’s concerns: “I don't fit your formuli. . . . You control order and dictate, and my kind merely follow and obey. But something has gone wrong hasn't it? I don't fit, do I?”

Indeed, the script’s dialogue makes specific reference to the facts how this state of the future is endeavoring to follow in the footsteps of Hitler and Stalin who, according to the Chancellor, “had the beginnings of the right idea” but did not go far enough.

In this vein, author David Baldacci, a self-described library rat when he was growing up, recently commented to the New York Times:

Libraries are the mainstays of democracy. The first thing dictators do when taking over a country is close all the libraries, because libraries are full of ideas.

The elimination of books is closely associated with dictatorships and totalitarianism.  Hitler’s Nazi book burnings and those of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are just two recent examples.  Interestingly, these two dictators may have presided over the elimination of books that others might have read but each, both Hitler and Pinochet, kept their own valued private libraries.

Books being burned in "The Day After Tomorrow"

From Wikipedia, book burning in Chile under Pinochet

Hitler’s book burnings were reportedly the spur to the writing of “Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury, coincidentally, like Rod Serling, host and author the Twilight Zone episode, another science fiction writer reported to be Unitarian.

In Bradbury's “Fahrenheit 451"book burning is carried out on an institutionalized basis by the government's"Fire Department."

Religions, although not Unitarians, have engaged in their fair share of book burnings over the ages, including, in essence the equivalent of Bible burning, when the many alternative gospels that were not incorporated in the official codification of the New Testament (Circa 367 AD after the AD 325 Council of Nicea) and other works like the "heretical" teachings of  Arius were banned and and intentionally destroyed.

We recently saw push-back against censorious religious belief with The New York Times media corespondent David Carr observing of the purchasing public's recent snapping up of perhaps five million copies of the recent post-murder edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine with the image of a weeping Prophet Muhammad on the cover:

the sentiment that drove the sales probably had less to do with those messages and more to do with the impulse to preserve a world in which the speech of the many cannot be held hostage by a few.

In the Twilight Zone episode and “Fahrenheit 451" the protagonist’s lives are on the line because of their book-defending stance against the state.  It’s not only a fiction that people sacrifice and put their lives at stake in opposition to libricide or biblioclasm as book burning is sometimes otherwise termed.  In 1992 during the Bosian war, when the ethnic-cleansing, anti-Muslim Serbs targeted the Bosnian National and University Library in Sarajevo with incendiary shells, citizens worked to rescue books under a hail of sniper fire.

Two scenes of Sarajevo citizens working to rescue books from the libraries, the second from a video.  Lives were lost.  Both images appeared in the documentary “The 50 Year Argument” about the New York Review of Books.

Library Destruction as a Consequence of Cataclysmic War

Burgess Meridith as Henry Bemis, another book-loving denizen of the Twilight Zone, from another episode, “Time Enough at Last”

When libraries pass out of existence in the futures science fiction imagines, it isn’t always because dictators or those in power consciously want to eliminate them.  In a sort of repertory theater style of production, the Twilight Zone anthology series often had certain actors rotate through and play different roles in a number of episodes.  Burgess Meredith appeared in four episodes altogether and two years prior to “The Obsolete Man” episode he appeared in another famous Twilight Zone episode that associated him with a book-loving character, appearing as Henry Bemis, a man who could never find enough time to read until the world is destroyed by nuclear war. That episode was titled “Time Enough at Last.” (The other two episodes Meredith starred in were “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” and the hour-long “Printer's Devil.”)

Those who have seen the 1959 “Time Enough at Last” episode will remember the famous scene where the Henry Bemis character sits on the steps of a destroyed 42nd Street Library with a stack of books to read using his ultra-thick glasses before . . .  a cruel fate befalls.

Early in the Cold War with its “duck and cover” accouterments and a few years before the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the scene of this Twilight Zone fable echoed images of the time of what nuclear war’s possible aftermath would look like, as in this drawing of a Geiger Counter being used to get radioactivity level reading outside the 42nd Street Central Reference Library in “Nuclear Dawn” (a book not available in the Brooklyn Public Library system).  In the story Bemis survives having been inside a bank vault when the bomb fell.

An image of the times: An imagined aftermath of a nuclear war, protectively clothed and measuring radioactivity outside the 42nd Street Central Reference Library in “Nuclear Dawn”

Reportedly, the steps of the post nuclear war library upon which Meredith's Henry Bemis character sits in despair in “Time Enough at Last” are the same post nuclear war library steps that were used for George Pal’s 1960 version of H. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” filming around the same time as the Twilight Zone at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio Culver City locations.  I took a drenching rain day trip to Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza Library to verify and read more about this in the BPL’s only copy of “The Twilight Zone Companion,” but my visit wasn’t fruitful.  That sole volume is now reported as lost.

Filmed about the same time, the MGM steps in Culver City city stand in for two alternative post apocalypse libraries providing seating for Yvette Mimieux and Rod Taylor in "The Time Machine" and Burgess Meridith in The Twilight Zone.

 H. G. Wells, author of the “The Time Machine,” is one of the authors that Nazi book-burners sought to eradicate.

The Twilight Zone Companion says, "`Time Enough at Last’ remains one of the best-remembered and best-loved episodes of The Twilight Zone.”  It quotes Burgess Meredith saying: “The only thing I can tell you about that particular episode, is that I heard more about that and any of [the other Twilight Zone episodes], and indeed almost more about it than anything else I've done on television. I think it must've had a great impact on people. I don't suppose there's a month goes by, even to this day that people don't come up and remind me of that episode.”

In 1970's “Beneath Planet of the Apes” we see another version of the 42nd Street Central Reference Library post-nuclear apocalypse, again featuring the lions de rigueur

Library Destruction as Through Indifference

In the 1960 George Pal “The Time Machine” it is not the nuclear war in the plot that has destroyed the library.  It is the apathetic lassitude and lack of curiosity of the Eloi who have inherited this patrimony and let it decay unused.  The Eloi who lack concern about their own fate and well-being are one of two branches into which the human race has evolved in year 802,701, the other race being the Morlocks who cannibalistically prey upon the Eloi.

In year 802,701 a portion of the library has found a new life as a sort of Eloi social center

Many scenes of the film have the Eloi traversing up or down these steps as a portion of this future library with its ignored books is used as a sort of Eloi social center where the community congregates to consume its food and drink. (This could be viewed as an ironic reflection of our own immediate potential future as we greet today's current calls for increasingly bookless libraries to “find a new life” as social centers.)

Finding himself amongst the Eloi in this community center, the time traveling protagonist of the story (H. George Wells), his curiosity being viewed as odd, questions the Eloi: “I must learn about you and your civilization.  You have books, don't you?”

A young Eloi man responds (recognizing the half-forgotten word) telling him, “Books. - Books!  Yes, we have books.”

“Yes...they do tell me all about you!” says the time traveler as the book crumbles in his hands.

Relieved, the time traveler who has been frustrated by the Elois’ lack of information about themselves says: “Books will tell me what I want to know.  Books will tell me all about you.”  But when he is taken to the shelves of the library and a volume he picks up instantly crumbles in his hands, appalling him, he reprises, “Yes...they do tell me all about you!”

In the plot the Morlocks are the descendants of those humans who retreated underground in the aftermath of the war, the Eloi the descendants of those who remained above ground.  If the Morlock/Eloi split could be viewed as a cautionary metaphor for what is happening in our current day “Tale of two Cities” culture might it be the split between the 99% and the winner-take-all 1% that economically preys on the rest of the populace?  The Eloi might be that evolving sect preoccupied with, addicted to, the distraction of our smartphones.

The 1960 version of “The Time Machine” ends with the time traveler returning to the future with plans to reestablish civilization amongst the Eloi.  His plans cryptically involve taking with him into the future three books that are noticed by his housekeeper to have vanished with his departure from his personal library.  The audience is invited to guess what three books those would have been.

In the 2002 remake of "The Time Machine" the time traveler shows up in an explicitly rendered version of the 42nd Street Central Reference library in the year 2030.

There is a now hard-to-obtain, 2002 remake of “The Time Machine” that shifts the action from London to New York and features, very explicitly, the NYPL 42nd Street Reference Library of the future.  In an imagining of what the library would be in in 2030 that coincides markedly with the dreams of the real estate-oriented crew that, in 2004, soon after the movie was made, took over the NYPL’s libraries with plans to sell and shrink them, the library is virtually bookless and manned by a robotic artificial intelligence hologram.  Superintendence by robot librarians is a path down which the libraries may now well be heading, see: Tuesday, November 25, 2014, BPL's Bklyn BookMatch- A Match For The Human Race's Book Future?: Electronic Books and Robot Librarians?

The robotic artificial intelligence librarian manning the library, played by Olando Bloom, puts time travel in the category of science fiction.

(The full version of the 2030 library scene is available on YouTube: The Time Machine (2002) Full Library Scene.  Click through to YouTube for best viewing.)

The remake tracks the original plot roughly so that again it finds a split of the human race in the year 802,701 between Eloi and Morlocks.  In the 2002 version the destruction of the modern human race has come about in a more benign, less bellicose fashion, the result of a technological accident involving the destruction of the moon by space colonists.

In 2037 the moon begins to break up in the 2002 version of "The Time Machine"

Library Destruction by Extra Terrestrial Aliens

The image of the broken-up moon of year 2077 that you see in the opening sequence of 2013's "Oblivion"

On a different diagonal, but the year 802,701 moon of "The Time Machine" and the year 2077 moon of "Oblivion" are quite similar (click any image to enlarge)

“Oblivion,” the 2013 science fiction film with Tom Cruise, also feature a future visit to very recognizable 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  In that film, too, modern human civilization has been wiped out by the destruction of the earth’s moon, this time intentionally for that purpose by aliens from the planet Jupiter.   In this film, too, there is an issue of remembering the past with the Tom Cruise character and his partner, a lonely duo, looking after affairs on earth having been subject to a “mandatory memory wipe.”  Books again invoke a beneficial connection with the past, factoring in the plot.  The Cruise character, Jack, retrieves, keeps and reads, from the library ruins, “Lays of Ancient Rome.”    “Tale of two Cities,” by Dickens is another of the books he secretly saves in a lakeside wilderness retreat. “Pickwick Papers” and “David Copperfield,” two more books by Dickens are two of the books that “book people” in the woods by the river memorize and personally “become” at the end of the Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451.”  “David Copperfield” is also a favorite of Henry Bemis in the “Time Enough at Last” episode of the"Twilight Zone"

In 2077 the ceiling of the NYPL Central Reference Library's Rose Reading Room is in even worse shape than now, but it is still around for Tom Cruise to be able to dangle from as a nice centerpiece

It’s all the more startling to see Tom Cruise hurtling down, suspended on a rope, through a gaping hole in the ornate ceiling of the Rose Reading Room and the ensuing destruction occurring there in this 2013 film now that, in 2014, the Rose Reading Room, a significant public space, was closed (and still is) when a chunk of the ceiling reportedly fell down, for real, in the middle of the night. A startling development, the incident occurred May 30th, two weeks after the NYPL was forced to abandon its plans for the consolidating shrinkage of the Central Library Plan that, among other things, involved banishing millions of books from its premises.  It occurred four days before the NYPL would announce that the Central Library plan would cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than it had previously publicized.

Mayhem in the Rose Reading Room with a robot drone inflicting most of the destruction

 Library Destruction by Climate Change and Science Deniers

A tidal wave about to hit the 42nd Street Central Reference Library

The Rose Reading Room also appears equally recognizably and transformed in another end of the world disaster film, the 2004 “The Day After Tomorrow.”  In an immensely silly plot the earth’s climate goes haywire racing into catastrophic chaos, in a matter of days battering Manhattan and the library with a tidal wave, then dropping it into a deep freeze where some of the protagonists debate which books to burn first as they warm themselves with the fire.

The Rose Reading Room again.  This production still, used to promote the film, was not from a camera shot used in the film

The voluminous Tax Code volumes are cheerily consigned to the flames; the fate that Nietzsche deserves is debated.  One Gutenberg Bible is rescued from the rare books room by a resolute librarian protector, not because he believes in God, but because it is “the first book ever printed” (in the 1450s) representing “the dawn of the age of reason” (the early 1700s) and “as far as I'm concerned, the written word is mankind's greatest achievement” and “if Western civilization is finished . . .I'm gonna save at least one little piece of it.”  In the Twilight Zone’s “Obsolete Man” episode it is a copy of the Bible that Romney Wordsworth keeps locked in a safe, his value of it inversely related to the totalitarian state’s ban of it, but Wordsworth believes in God.

Books from the Rose Reading Room being trundled into the flames.

If “The Day After Tomorrow” survivors were to arrive at the Rose Reading Room this week they would probably be chagrined to discover how few books they’d find there for fuel because the Rose Reading Room is currently empty and millions more of the library’s books have been sent off-site.

Sacrificing Western civilization in order to sustain the life of imperiled survivors is not exactly Nazi book burning.  On the other hand, it lacks the lighthearted optimism of Puccini’s “La Bohème" when Rudolpho similarly burns his own manuscript to stave off the cold he and Marcello suffer in their garret studio on Christmas Eve, the implication being that the thus warmed Rudolpho embodies his own work (a converse to “Fahrenheit’s” book people who have absorbed the work of others).  Rudolpho will live to write better plays in the future, perhaps even involving the experience of that very evening.

One reason we closely associate libraries with the future is that we think of them as helping us steer our course into it.  That’s something we are not doing well when it comes to climate change.  Although this film makes climate change the threat and climate science denial the villain, its choice to go with utterly fantastic spectacles does no favor for those endeavoring to bring recognition of real climate science to the fore.  A far better and more terrifyingly speculative film about the implications of climate change could easily have been made based on real climate science and made for far less than the $125 million that was spent making this disaster that panders with such formulaic expectations about box-office economics.

When we veer off course, money is frequently the reason for it.   Most of the public’s denial of climate change science stems from funding of that denial by the fossil fuels industry and people like the Koch brothers.  See Frontline’s “Climate of Doubt.”

Could the destruction and underfunding of libraries help contribute to our misunderstanding of climate science, tilting us toward more likely calamity?  The answer is YES, very definitely, see: Tuesday, February 11, 2014,  Libraries And Climate Change: The Dangerous Destruction of Information We May Need To Know To Survive.   

Library Destruction and Civilization Collapse

One thing these science fiction scripts get right, is that there is a high correspondence, if not quite one-to-one, between the demise of great libraries and the collapse of great civilizations. See: Books on Fire: The Destruction of Libraries throughout History, by Lucien X. Polastron (2007).  Oh, to know what the thousands of destroyed Mayan codices would have revealed!

Destruction of libraries and books by tyrants, destruction by war, destruction by apathetic indifference, destruction by aliens hostile to the human race and destruction by losing our way in the face of climate change, may seem to cover the gamut, but it still doesn’t cover all the  possibilities.

Library Destruction at the Hands of Private Enterprise

The New York Times recently ran an editorial castigating “some large hotel chains” who “want to block guests from using their own wireless Internet devices. .. a blatant attempt to limit customer choice.”   See: Brazen Attempts by Hotels to Block Wi-Fi, by The Editorial Board January 3, 2015.   Which is to say don’t under estimate private enterprise’s propensity to try to restrict and limit the free flow of what could be readily available communication and information in hopes that, through limitation, private companies can instead charge for it. 

The Times was writing about how:

the Marriott International and the American Hotel and Lodging Association are asking the F.C.C. to give hotels the green light to remotely disable the Wi-Fi devices that some travelers use to connect their laptops and tablet computers to the Internet through cellular services from companies like Verizon. This would force guests to buy the wireless Internet service provided by hotels.

The editorial notes that the F.C.C. has already fined Marriott for engaging in the practice.  It is a lot like the way that Hershey's as a profit enhancement maneuver is now curtailing the competitive sale of better-made, better-tasting chocolates Cadbury imports (link to article by same Times reporter reporting about sale of Brooklyn Heights Library).

It is interesting to note that the initiative to sell and shrink libraries in New York City originated under the Michael Bloomberg mayoral administration and that Michael Bloomberg owns a company that sells information and content.  Bloomberg donated three of his signature Bloomberg financial information terminals to the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) at 34th Street and Madison, something that may have been good advertising for his “generosity,” but the terminals, although they can, for instance, be used in short restricted sessions to find jobs in the financial sector offer to the non-fee paying library-using public the Bloomberg terminal services and information, with a twenty-minute time delay, a lower-priced edition from what is offered to those on Wall Street who will pay full price.

Writing this article, in large part about a lot of films, I was struck by how difficult it has become to get much of the content I needed as reference material.  My attention was drawn to the recent wholesale disappearance of video stores.

Not many years ago I had many engaging conversations with a cinephile colleague at work.  At home he and his would routinely organize and curate their own film festivals centered around the oeuvre of a chosen director or actor or maybe a genre.   The films were initially all rented on video tape but when DVD technology with its improved picture quality came in that shifted over.  In a similar vein, my favorite local video store downstairs in the building where I lived used to have a “dead actors special” whenever a well-known actor died, pulling out from their stacks all the films in which that actor appeared and setting them up on the counter for more prominent display.  Films could easily be watched in a broader context, not just in the urged response to recent publicity campaigns.

New York video stores, fast disappearing almost entirely, were places where staff were paid in expectation that, out of their own enthusiasm and exploration, they would watch and familiarize themselves with films and be able to make recommendations to patrons.   In a way they were curated like libraries (albeit with minimal fees involved) and, like the best libraries, the best video stories had the largest collections.  A few years ago a DVD of film like the 2002 remake of “The Time Machine” should have been easy to find in multiple video stores around the city.   Times have changed.  A 2014 article in the Observer reports:

Between 2010 and 2012, the number of video/disc rental stores in New York state went from 451 to 198 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2002 there were 885,731 in 2007.

Now the number of remaining stores is even fewer.  A 2011 article in the Real Deal, The Last of the Mohicans: How NYC's holdout video stores have hung on, September 30, 2011, by Sarah Gross, supposedly about stores that are still open is perhaps more important for the stores it features that have since closed: World of Video (closed April 2012),  Heights of Video (aka Mr. Video III, closed end of 2013) Royal Video Exchange (phone no longer in service), Alan's Alley Video (closed July 2014, BUTreopened in August off the street on the fifth floor of an office building.)
Unlike video stores, patronage of New York City libraries is way up.

885 New York City stores down to what could now be fewer than one hundred?  That’s a vast industry, many workers and owners that have disappeared.  The stores have been supplanted by Netflix and streaming.  To a certain extent libraries also competed with them and perform functions in the void they are leaving.  Originally Netflix just provided DVDs by mail, supplying conveniently much the same variety of content as video stores, but without the same immediacy or curating personal interface.  Now Netflix streams films, but as customers shift over its streaming content is rather limited as other suppliers with which it competes seeking to lock up the rights.

Experimenting, I rented for streaming the 1960 version of “The Time Machine”  It’s only available from Amazon.  The 2002 remake is not available for streaming.  The experience was not very satisfactory.   The film’s resolution was poor, probably equivalent to early VHS quality.  Once started, I was required to watch it within 24 hours before it disappeared.   I paid about as much as I might have at a video store.  Amazon has other films available for high-definition rental, more than Netflix it looks like, but the prices are alarmingly high, even if sometimes less than the cost of mass transit to and from a central library.*  It occurred to me that Amazon, without the overhead of physical video rental stores and a lock on the license to rent, pockets a fair amount of money on these rentals, money that used to flow more broadly through the economy.

(*  I went to obtain a copy of the 1960 version of “The Time Machine” that was supposed to be at the NYPL's Mid-Manhattan Branch.  It wasn't there.  It is now marked missing.  I then went to pick up the BPL's only copy of it at the Turner Classic Movie edition of it at Windsor Terrace Branch.  It wasn't there and is marked missing.  I found and borrowed the NYPL' last and only copy at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts.)

Library Destruction Through Technological Obsolescence

In 1996 the New York Times proclaimed that SIBL was the "Library of the Future."  Now the NYPL would like to argue that it's obsolete so it can sell its real estate.

In the 2002 remake of “The Time machine,” the traveler finds, improbably, that in year 802,701 the holographic librarian, Vox 144, encountered in his 2030 time stop, is still up and running.  Vox 144 must have been a very robust system and still around when the moon and civilization was destroyed in 2037, seven years later.  Seven years?: That’s a lot of Moor’s Law bi-annual doubling of computing power for Mr. Vox, the A.I. librarian, to have remained around and still be working and all the proper connectors still available.   “144" indicates that this “librarian” had previously already gone through a number of iterations in the 28 years the film posits transpired between the making of the film and the time traveler’s 2030 visit.

In 802,701 ruins Mr.. Vox 144 is found to be still operational and on the job.  What is more unlikely: That for seven years Vox edition 144 would have continued in operation, not supplanted by by multiple upgrades, or that he could `take a licking and keep on ticking' for the 800,664 years that afterwards ensued?

Blackberry declared a relic

Seven years?  In roughly that period of time we went from all the techno-geeks brandishing Palm Pilots and Blackberries to them having Apple iPhones.

Technology’s rapid rate of change has led to a new uneasy impermanence.  Science fiction tries to predict the future, but the future is not always so easy to predict.  SIBL, the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library, was opened in1996 heralded as a cutting edge technological marvel and yet starting in 2005 or 2006 the NYPL began to conceive plans to sell it and was soon heaping scorn on its design for inadequately predicting the shape the future would take.  The “library of the future” and the “library of the 21st century” said the New York Times when it opened emphasizing, “even the smell of the place, like the newest of new cars, emanates `future.‘”  Truth to tell, the library is adaptable and doesn’t deserve the scorn heaped on it for the convenience of justifying the real estate deals that were really motivating the NYPL.

The 1960 "The Time Machine" envisions a much simpler technology than Mr. Vox surviving to tell of the past: Gold rings that talk when spun.

Now library administration officials, with real estate redevelopment deals lurking in the background, are talking about how New York City libraries around the city are in need of redevelopment because they don’t have enough electrical outlets (actually a very easy upgrade) and, implicitly not enough computers. Meanwhile, SIBL the one library with a resplendent superfluity of electrical outlets, computer terminals, ethernet connections and fast wi-fi connections, everything necessary to erase the so-called digital divide for less advantaged New Yorkers, is stillbeing prioritized for sale.

Views of two small portions of SIBL (click to enlarge), an unadvertised midtown treasure, with resources galore available to "close the digital divide."  In addition to the chairs set up on the left, SIBL has auditorium spaces and multiple meeting rooms, training centers and conference center.

Two examples of how the NYPL with plans to sell off and shrink libraries has been emptying the shelves at SIBL.  The library once held over a million books; now books there number about 50,000 according to the NYPL.

Above and below floor plans of the SIBL's currently existing areas (click to enlarge).  The floor plans do not show substantial areas, now sold off, where millions of books and reference materials were stored.

In the same building as SIBL the CUNY (City University Library of New York) library's shelves are packed with books.  Once upon a time, prior to current real estate ambitions, adjacent SIBL's supply of books was supposed to act synergistically as a robust supplement to CUNY's library.

Part of the original 1960 “Time Machine’s” charm was use of the rapid advance of time for social commentary on the vicissitudes of fashion.  The time traveler is positioned so as to be able to see a stationary mannequin in the shop window across the way from his house and its costumes constantly change.  “That’s a dress?” says the time traveler disbelievingly at one point as he slows his rate of movement through time to take it in.

In homage to the original 1960 "Time Machine's" commentary on the vicissitudes of fashion (left) the 2002 remake replicates with its own set of mannequins (right) the ever-changing notions of what is modern and in "style"

Time travel stories also traffic in a sort of Rip Van Winkle charm to the extent that the traveler, like Rip Van Winkle, comes out of the past to wonder at a world, our own present, which we already know and understand the history of.

That technology has its dark, paranoia-inspiring side is a given.  This is the focus of a new British anthology TV series (available through Netflix), “Black Mirror.”   On The Media covered the series, in an interview with its creator, Charlie Brooker: the“unsettling plausibility to most of these plots” with technology serving “as the backdrop for each episode, all very dark, but in manifestly different ways.”  Repeated comparisons were made to discuss the series as “the Twilight Zone updated for the digital age.”  It’s a series of `what ifs' about now contemporary concerns.

The one Twilight Zone that gets specific mention, in the context of being “shockingly cruel” according to Mr. Brooker is the 1959“Time Enough at Last” Burgess Meredith episode ending with his Henry Bemis sitting on the steps of the destroyed library.  On the Media host Brooke Gladstone summarizes:

And you've even cited one of their dark O'Henry type episodes where a luckless bookworm wanders through the rubble following a nuclear holocaust. He thinks he's the last man on earth. Decides to kill himself. And then he sees a library nearby just as he lifts the gun to his temple. He suddenly realizes he can now read all the books he wants, uninterrupted. But when he reaches for the first book, his glasses fall off and smash on the floor, and he ends the episode weeping and alone.

Gladstone says that it reminds her of a specific episode of The Black Mirror, “The Entire History of You,” which is about a technological world of TMI (Too Much Information).  Maybe that’s The Black Mirror episode most like that Twilight Zone episode, but the episode could be rewritten into a more explicitly analogous sort of Rip Van Winkle plot.

Haven’t we all had our technology go obsolete frighteningly fast?  I may often find myself arguing for perseverance of the tried and true multi-hundred year old technology of traditional libraries, but I hardly consider myself a technological Luddite.  And sometimes that’s frustrating.

Let me give you my own litany.

Did you all transfer all your data sets from your Palm Pilots to your iPhones (it was mostly possible), or did you start entering data anew, reinventing the wheel? . . . .  I remember when I bought the media player program for the music stored on my computer and I went with the higher price version of buying the program for life with all future updates.  It turned out that “for life” meant for the life of the program which was bought by another company that ultimately decided to terminate it.  Say goodbye to whatever play lists you might have constructed! . . .  The software technology was tied in with RCA hardware that electronically broadcast the music through my home.  Goodbye, Tata! . . .  I bought a wonderful little iPad and computer app that meant I could travel and stream all my music from my home computer, listening to it as I traveled on my iPad, phone or any computer I had with me.   Not nice to discover on a long trip that the company that provided it has been bought by a company that immediately discontinued the service. . . .What if you wanted to just carry around all your music?  Storage has become a cheap commodity so that should be easy.  Apple used to have iPods with capacity to store 160 gigabytes of songs, enough to encompass the entirety of most people’s collections- But now Apple only sells dedicated players that will hold up to 64 gigs- They want you to store your music on their cloud so they can keep track of what you listen to. . . .You could buy Apple's most expensive mini-iPad and use if for a 128 gig music player, but then you wouldn’t have space on it for any of the other uses that instilled its top-of-the line price. . .Isn’t HD radio the greatest thing?  With CD quality clarity and the listing channels it broadcast it’s another substitute for carrying around your own music.  Everybody, all the best stations are now broadcasting in it.  But hope you bought your receiver a while ago, because nobody is selling them now. . . . Now I go to certain websites with my Internet Explorer browser and they tell me that my browser is out of date and the sites cannot be viewed, but when I go to Microsoft to update my browser I get message that my browser cannot be updated because the XP operating system is no longer supported and I am directed to buy a new computer as the solution! . . . Is the iPad a handy substitute for browsing the internet?  Not when its browser crashes and can’t be fixed because it is too old.  Time to buy a new one. . . . Another reason to do that?  I want to put a word processing program on the iPad, something that used to be possible, but now it can’t be done without updating the operating system- And Apple has made a choice, apparently a marketing one, not to release updates for its older models- Time to buy a new iPad. . . .  When you buy that new iPad/iPhone be ready to by the new connectors and battery chargers you will need. . . Did you like that new compact high-definition Flip video camera that was destined to take over the market?  Have you finally mastered its software?  Well the company that bought the Flip camera because it was going to take over the market quickly stopped manufacturing it because there was, they figured, no future in it.  That means you won’t be able to replace the battery, so you can throw it away. . . . And what about mastering software?  I was once ahead of everyone with my mastery of Excel, but when I bought that new computer I had to buy the new version so it suddenly takes me forever to figure again out how to do anything I used to be able to do easily. . .

The moral is that you spend a lot of time getting technological things in place and making them work and then, voilà, they’re gone.  You are expected to keep pace or technology’s magic will vanish and leave you behind.

Maybe we are mildly bemused when someone surfaces from an extended spate in prison and is flabbergasted when he suddenly has to struggle to understand a world of cell phones, where computers control the innards of our cars, people Skype on flat surfaced tablets and the internet permeates everything around you, but what if we were the ones that fell behind?

So here is the Rip Van Winkle plot with the all-too-plausible premise I propose as a “Black Mirror” retread of the “shockingly cruel” “Time Enough at Last” episode:

Techie Rip Van Winkle, has a bit of a bout with the grog.  Did his Siri/"Her" mode wake-up service fail to call him because it had been bought and dismantled by another company in the night?  At today’s accelerating pace it wouldn’t have to be too much of a bender that needed to be slept off, quite short of a full-fledged month’s long coma. . .  He wakes to find he’s totally behind in keeping his technology up-to-date, he’s missed his windows of opportunity to upgrade and now nothing is working for him.  He can’t upgrade to start keeping pace again because he has no way to connect back into the system.  Even his money to subsist is no good because he can no longer interface with his bank for his financial credits, etc.

Maybe, before this disaster, the same techie in the opening scenes had been so busy installing, fervently pursuing perfection, all his cutting edge hardware and software that he he’s actually had no time to enjoy his content, sit back and enjoy his music, watch his movies or read his books?

In 1989 Isaac Asimov, speaking to the American Booksellers Association:

made a passionate defense of the survival of the book when he asked his audience to imagine a device that "can go anywhere, is totally portable. . . . Something that can be started and stopped at will [and] requires no electric energy to operate." This dream device is, of course, the book. "It will never be surpassed because it represents the minimum technology with the maximum interaction you can have."

The above excerpt is from a comprehensive article, Libraries in Science Fiction, by James Gunn, covering the literature of the genre.

Maybe the end of this posited “Black Mirror” episode is the techie’s relief as he discovers a pile of still readable books discarded by the back steps of a library. . .    I suppose that if the episode turns “shockingly cruel” before fade out, that’s when the license of the techie’s Google Contact Lenses fails. . .

O'Henry ending of “Time Enough at Last”

On the Media’s analysis is that “Black Mirror’s” focus is ultimately one on contemporary concerns.  Certainly, science fiction has always been a lens through which to do that, but the further we look into the future the more likely our speculation is to become untethered.  The fact is that the future begins now and to consider what the “Library of the Future” or the “21st Century Library” will be, we need look no further than to what is happening and being built now.

Library Destruction From a Real Estate Industry That Banishes Books

Will we find books in our libraries?  Library administration officials in New York City based, ostensibly on speculation that the future is not one of physical books, but more likely upon the fact that books take up real estate they want to sell, are getting rid of books fast.

Millions of the NYPL’s books that used to be in Manhattan are gone.  In the case of replacing the destroyed Donnell Library with a far smaller one, the architects for the future shrunken were given no instructions or information about how many books their design should seek to accommodate.  Other architects designing new city libraries say that library officials leaned on them to reduce the amount of book shelves they sketched into their designs.  In “Re-Envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries” workshop sessions convened to showcase broad suggestions being made by the Center For an Urban Future, architects speak of “inverting the ratio” of space in libraries used for books (once the core mission of libraries) versus other uses so as to drastically reduce the space for books.

City Councilmen like Brad Lander specifically invoke futurism with phrases like “Library of the Future” and the “21st Century Library” to justify the expectation that books should be banished. . . . although Mr. Lander also envisions rebuilding such “21st Century Libraries” as disaster recovery centers to be ready as bulwarks in the face of climate change disasters (much like “The Day After Tomorrow” where the library's books were burned as they were diverted to the purpose of surviving a disaster?).

Construction of a Real Library of the Future in Austin, Texas- With Books!

Vision of the "Library for the Future"from the Austin Public Library

But that is New York.  I recently visited Austin, Texas, a city noted for its technological advancement and identity.  It’s the home of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference that focuses on tech and culture (the SXSW Film and Multimedia Conference component), including libraries and their future, in addition to the festival of music out of which the conference originated.  It’s also the home of Dell Computers its largest private employer.  Adam Dell, Michael’s brother is a partner at Austin Ventures, funding tech ventures and the city's largest venture capital firm.  Facebook and Google have moved entire divisions to Austin, where you can also find operating centers for 3M, Apple Inc., Hewlett-Packard, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, Cisco Systems, eBay/PayPal, Bioware, Blizzard Entertainment, Hoover's, Intel Corporation, National Instruments, Samsung Group, Silicon Laboratories, Oracle Corporation, Hostgator, AT&T, Flextronics (formerly Solectron), Freescale Semiconductor and United Devices.

Austin isn’t shrinking libraries or getting rid of its books.

Bigger Austin Libraries with more books

Austin is building a new grander $120 million central library.  Billed as the first"library for the future" (and/or “library of the future”) in the United States and the second in the world, it will, at 198,000 square feet and six stories, be close to twice the size of the 110,000-square-foot Faulk Central Library it replaces.  A circulating library, it will also have more books . . . 530,000 books, a nearly 25% increase over the 430,000 volumes at the current library plus it will have an additional 24,000 electronic books.

The growth will be all the more pronounced because Austin will also, at the same time, get to keep its old central library.  The 110,000-square-foot Faulk will become a Central Reference Library where archived materials (archival collections, photos, film, media, civic records) can be accessed.  The Faulk currently stands next to the Austin History Center that will expand into it with some of the expansion of space being used for exhibition of historical displays and some may possibly be used for classroom space.

Nancy Toombs, head of Public Services for the History Center, says the History Center is currently packed to overflowing with what staff assesses as 50,000 square feet of materials in a 35,000 square foot building.  In the struggle to accommodate all the material on-site they have, to date, according to Ms. Toombs, pressed into service not only basement storage, but offices, kitchens and bathrooms.

While it is no small distinction that the Austin Public Library and the History Center are keeping and expanding their materials, that doesn’t prevent them from also envisioning and planning to have the same kind of spaces and facilities that New York library administration officials conversely promote as reasons to banish books.

There will be community spaces to gather, plenty of natural light, an airy atrium, lots of computers and technology (and “electronic delivery of information” will get its focus too), event space, a dozen meeting rooms. Yes, there will even be, “a street-level café.”  See the Austin Statesman and the Austin Library’s Press Release: Designs coming into focus for Austin's new central library, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012, and Coming Soon! A New Central Library- Press Release.

There is another not so subtle distinction that emerges from the plans that may sound superficially alike.  The Austin plan’s description has in it an echo of the mantra of “flexibility” that NYC public officials harp upon as a way, Murphy-Bed-Apartment style, of having minimal shrunken down spaces serve, virtually simultaneously, for every need the New York officials profess to be adequately accommodating.  The Austin press release says its building program “incorporates flexible and blended spaces.”

But in New York where spaces are being shrunk with everything happening “flexibly”pell-mell on top of everything else with “no partitions,” New York City library administration officials are touting the idea that libraries should be “loud” (with a `non-shush' policy).  With the opening of Mariners Harbor, the NYPL's most recently designed library, we learn that it is supposed to be LOUD and NOISY!: "`We encourage noise,' said Elizabete Pata, the library manager. `I'm not the typical librarian, shushing people.'"

In Austin where they are expanding library space, they expect live music performances in its event space . . . . Still, the expanded space will, according to the officials there, have (emphasis supplied) “cozy areas for silent reading.”

The full shelves of an Austin library branch, the Manchaca Road Library.  In New York we have a City Councilman, Carlos Manacha.  The Red Hook and Sunset Park libraries for which there are controversial plans are in his district.

Austin, with a population of 842,592, has 22 libraries. Brooklyn with a population just over three times that, 2,592,149, has 60 libraries.  A spot check of an Austin library found the library full of bookshelves and those bookshelves full of books.  In New York books are disappearing from the libraries.  The Brooklyn Public Library has no copy in it of the “The Twilight Zone Companion.”  The Austin Public library, servicing a population just under one-third the size, has two copies of the “The Twilight Zone Companion.”

Example of empty shelves in two Brooklyn libraries the BPL wants to shrink.  On the left Brooklyn Heights and on the right the Williamsburg Library.  For more pictures of empty NYC library shelves see: Empty Bookshelves As Library Officials Formulate A New Vision of Libraries: A Vision Where The Real Estate Will Be Sold Off.

With its final plot twist the Twilight Zone "The Obsolete Man" episode offers up what turns out in the end to be an ambiguously trick title:  Is "The Obsolete Man" the librarian Romney Wordsworth, or the state official who would deprive the public of books and libraries in the name of his own vision of a better, purer future, limited to what they consider relevant?
New York Libraries are now used more than ever.  More people visited public libraries in New York than every major sports team and every major cultural institution combined.  There has been a 59% increase in circulation (physical books preferred despite efforts to steer the public into digital), and a 40% increase in programmatic use.  The funding of libraries costs an almost unimaginably small fraction of the city's budget. . . and the wealthy in their aeries of the sky like private libraries to be features of their luxury apartments (See: Tuesday, April 29, 2014, What's Wrong With These Numbers?: The Baccarat Tower's $60M Penthouse and NYC's Library Budget.) . . .

. . . But somehow, those with interests alien to the rest of us are have drastically cut back on the funding of the city's libraries, planning to sell and shrink them, eliminating books and librarians, consigning books and librarians to "Oblivion."  This kind of book burning and cultural eradication would figuratively subject the public to the sort of "mandatory memory wipe" sacrifice of our human race's patrimony referred to in the film of that title.  Those formulating these choices would do so ignoring what the public would choose for itself.

Eleventh hour for New York City libraries and librarians?  The countdown to elimination in "The Obsolete Man."  . . .The Chancellor tells Wordsworth how he reviles the “ many undesirables” who "eventually create a corps of resistance” and those who“clutch at the past and won't accept the new.”

Obsolete?  Oblivion?  That's the "Library of the Future"? Without wanting to give away all the plot twists of "Oblivion," it is worthwhile to caution that those in charge don't always have the interests of humanity in mind no matter what they tell you.

The closing narration of "The Obsolete Man" Twilight Zone episode wraps up to tell us that it is not the librarian defending books who is obsolete, but instead the Chancellor, as a state official who would overlook the state's citizens to ban books and, according to Twilight Zone host and creator Rod Serling:

. . so is the State, the entity he worshiped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under "M" for Mankind - in The Twilight Zone.

In the ruble of a civilization-destroying nuclear strike, bookworm Henry Bemis discerns his public library, arousing his hopes.

In simple bar graph form- The BPL is proposing to drastically shrink the size of the publicly owned space in the Brooklyn Heights Library from 63,000 feet (blue) to just 21,000 square feet (on left) of which just 15,000 square feet would be above ground.  More visuals in this article look more directly at the existing building and property to explore what the public would lose at the site in terms of the benefits it is familiar with.

Of course, it was disheartening to learn that Brooklyn Public Library wanted to take another step forward with its proposed sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library by voting to approve and announcing the selection of a developer on Tuesday, September 16th. . . .  Actually, they did it in the reverse: First the BPL announced with a morning press release and press conference that the developer selection was in place and then the BPL board voted in the evening to bless that apparently forgone conclusion. . .   

It was disheartening, but it meant that, for the very first time, key specifics were available to the public, an actual design associated with, very importantly, an identified gross sales price figure that, once paid, would give the developer, whom we now know to be the Hudson Companies, the right to buy and shrink the library. . .  With that information we can, for the first time, calculate the extent to which the public will be losing out in the transaction.

It does appear that the public will be losing out in the transaction big time, that the transaction as this irreplaceable library is sold will almost certainly be a net loss for the public.

Base of the building visual now being abandoned

With the identification of the developer we also get to see a new proposed visual for the base of the building housing the "replacement" library apparently abandoning the visual previously supplied.

New version of the building's base (interestingly squoze down) giving a faux impression of being much like the existing library.  Think it's two above-ground floors?  Probably not.  Appears to extend all the way to Ratner's One Pierrepont building? Don't press your luck.

The new visual seems as if it was meant to suggest that the new library, although vastly shrunken, would look, reassuringly, very much like the existing two-floor library, similarly stretching most of the property line along Cadman Plaza West.  But don't be deceived: Were the above-ground space of the replacement library arranged as two stories and stretched out that length, it would be the equivalent of a thin laminate onto the base of the new luxury tower, a virtual applique for visual effect, a Hollywood set, a classic Potemkin Village maneuver.

The existing Brooklyn Heights Library (to be demolished and lost?) actually two stories tall and running about 200 feet, most of the property facing along Cadman Plaza West.

The proposed "replacement" library would have just 15,000 square feet of above-ground space, a small fraction of the Brooklyn Heights Library's current above-ground space.  It would have another 6,000 feet of space underground.  The existing Brooklyn Heights Library also has underground space, far, far more than that, that holds books and though not currently visited by the public, is otherwise available to be put to what the public decides is the best use.

Stretched out as two floors along the Cadman Plaza West side of the space the existing Library building occupies, one can see what a small fraction of the existing building's current above-ground space that amounts to, significantly less than half.  The library is giving up most of its above-ground space before even considering the great deal of underground space we tend to discount.

Above- The existing two-story Brooklyn Heights Library overlaid on the real estate parcel (with boundaries indicated) on which it sits.  That portion highlighted in brighter orange would be the amount of similar above-ground space the proposed "replacement" library would take up.  Hardly enough to be functional, certainly not functional as the central, destination library it has been since it was built.

Same as above with a ruler for reference.

The existing Brooklyn Heights Library is essentially a two-story building with substantial underground space.  The is a small amount of square footage on the first floor that has no space over it on the second.  There is also some cantilevered space on the second floor with no corresponding ground floor space under it.  There is also some third floor mechanical space and stairs that leads up to it.

The visuals above show nothing for the underground space just as you can't see the underground space (quite voluminous) of the existing building. 

Aerial view of existing library from Bing maps used in the composite image above.

Boundaries of the city-owned library property that would be handed off to the developer (Hudson) for the luxury tower with the shrunken library tucked in its base.

There is another way of looking at the space, rather than consider what a thin laminate it would make along the length of Cadman Plaza West How much space would be retained measuring from the south where the adult reading room and Business and Career section of the library currently are.  Doing so (see below) allows for an easy way to describe (see below) space being lost.
If you know the library, you can now see it like the equivalent of giving up:

    •    The auditorium
    •    The Computer Center
    •    The Children's library
    •    The second floor conference room
    •    Office areas
    •    The entrance area
    •    The main administration desk
    •    The bathrooms
    •    The elevators
    •    The stair areas

OR, if you were looking at it the previous version with the library space arranged as a "laminate," what was being given up was:

    •    Parts of all the above
    •    Plus substantial portions of:
    •    - The public part of the Business and Career Library, and
    •    - The main public reading room for adults upstairs

The images also make clear how we are giving up the park space sitting area and the landscaped open areas around the library.

Above you see how much of the area alongside the library on Clinton Street and to the immediate north is publicly owned open landscape that, sold, would disappear along with the library.

The same space would disappear, replaced by the base of the luxury tower when the library is shrunk.  See below.

319 feet tall

Although the intended sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library was not publicly announced until 2013, those making decisions at the Brooklyn Public Library have known for years, since 2007 and perhaps as far back as 2005, that it wanted to effectuate such a sale.  For some seemingly inexplicable reason, the charming sitting area and park at north end of the library has been locked and made off-limits to the public for some time.  One possible explanation?: The first thing one wants to do when selling off a public asset is to run that asset into the ground and otherwise alienate it from the public's affection.  Locking up the park helps to do that.

Is this park and sitting area kept locked to ensure that the public won't use it, be attached to it and fight for it when the BPL sells it to a developer that will build on top of it?

Similarly, are there green space areas outside the library that might have been maintained and landscaped with significantly less zeal in recent years (see below) precisely because they want to sell the library off?  This is very typical behavior when institutions plan development they hope the public won't oppose.  NYU has done it and St. Vincent's was doing it before it went bankrupt in the middle of pursuing its contorted real estate machinations.

Maintained with less than appropriate zeal?  What about those visiting the library to check out books on botany?

The BPL recently paid a consultant to tell it that "economic development" should become part of its mission.  If it wants to go into sidelines, why not let those who come to the library wanting to check out books on botany further their interest and learn more by doing some community gardening on the premises.

Would the public be compensated, and adequately so, for the loss of all the library space and the surrounding property?. . .

. . . It is obvious that the BPL knows it has a problem on this score in making representations on two fronts:

    •    It wants to under-represent what is being sold, and
    •    It wants to over-represent what it is getting back in return.

Under-representation of what is being sold

In terms of under-representing what is being sold, the BPL attempted an obvious ploy in its press release announcing the sale.  It pretended to be selling less of the library than it actually is by comparing the total square foot size of the proposed replacement library to the  "square feet in the current branch that are accesible (sic) to the public."  That's hardly an apple-to-apples comparison unless the 100% of the replacement library will be "square feet" that, unlike the locked park area, are "accesible" or "accessible"  to "the public."  Heaven knows how the BPL calculated what it didn't consider "accesible/accessible" to the public.  They obviously cut a lot of space out of their consideration as being accessible to the public.  Did they exclude auditoriums?  Conference rooms where public meetings have been held?  Bathrooms?  Service desk areas?  Stairways?  Elevators?  Staff offices?  Mechanical support areas?  Bookshelf space?  Any area where books or any other library necessaries are stored?  How about entryways, hallways and stairways?

Somehow the library managed to calculate that there are only 28,000 square feet "accessible to the public."  Then the BPL wanted to disregard nearly half of this space because it is space of the Business and Career portion of the library that it "will move to the Central Library, a more central location"  where they are not adding or building any new space to house it.  A "more central location "?:  There are 11 colleges in the central business district of Downtown Brooklyn which by virtue of the central mass transit hub upon which it sits is central not only to all of Brooklyn, but residents of Manhattan as well.  What's more, because there is no new space being created for it at the Grand Army Plaza Library we may more properly think of the Grand Army Plaza Library as being the place where that Business and Career portion of the existing library goes to disappear.

We now know that the gross price the Brooklyn Public Library will receive from the developer for selling and shrinking the library is $52 million.  It is not surprising that this gross price is small given that most of the development rights for the site were transferred out to Forest City Ratner in 1986: Friday, September 20, 2013, Forest City Ratner As The Development Gatekeeper (And Profit taker) Getting The Benefit As Brooklyn Heights Public Library Is Sold.  Ratner still holds some of those development rights unused.

The next problem is that the public doesn't net the already very small gross sales price.  The BPL seems quite aware of how very little is being netted because it is estimating that the new much smaller library will cost $10 million to build, an obviously low-balled figure.  The sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library is closely modeled on the sale of the Donnell Library, a five-story central destination library in Manhattan sold for a pittance, netting the NYPL far less than its value to the public and less than it would have cost to replace it.  It was sold to net the NYPL less than $39 million while the far smaller penthouse apartment in the 50-story building going up on its former site is on the market for $60 million.

Based on the $20 million cost of building the shrunken 28,000 square foot "replacement" Donnell library (still under construction) the price of building the shrunken 21,000 square foot "replacement" Brooklyn Heights Library would come to $15 million.  The developer's proposal for the library even mimics closely the design for the Donnell Library, that in turn mimics a bookless Japanese library and a Prada store in SoHo.  See below: 

Proposal C's Donnell mimicking descending stair-step "flexible" space

Library?- The stair-step "flexible" space design to 'replace' Donnell

Bookless Japanese library as inspiration for Donnell? From A AS Architecture

The developer's proposal- A library?

That $15 million replacement estimate 's is conservative if you believe the cover of the issue of the Real Deal, stacks of which were available for free at Brooklyn Heights Library this week (see below):  "Rising construction prices hit developers."

The Real Deal: "Rising construction prices hit developers."Really?

Netting $15 million out of a $52 million gross purchase price already leaves only $37 million, but to ascertain whether the public is is coming out ahead or behind on this deal one has to tally up all its costs and everything the public is giving up.  So one should actually subtract out the cost of replacing the entire assets being sacrificed to the deal, the cost of replacing the entire Brooklyn Heights Library.  Certainly the costs of replacing just the rest of the above-ground portion of the library would be at least another $20 million.  That would leave just $17 million before netting out any other additional costs.  . . . It also doesn't consider the loss of the rest of the space that is currently underground.


But what must additionally be netted includes:

    •    The value of the library that the public will miss from the time the existing library is shuttered until the time it is replaced by the new one.  The current plan is to have a very small, 8,000 square foot, temporary library for this interim that will be paid for by the developer (essentially as a self-cancelling increment to the purchase price), but, even by the BPL’s own stingy assessment that the “replacement” library should be 21,000 square feet, that leaves the community 13,000 feet shy of having a library even the size of that shrunken library for the entire construction period.  The BPL is assuring that the “replacement” library will be supplied in no more than 3 ½ years.  In the case of Donnell the “replacement” library was also supposed to be in place in place in no more than 3 ½ years.  Donnell closed in spring of 2008, six months sooner than it was supposed to, and its “replacement” will currently not be in place until at least the end of 2015, 7 ½ years later.  Construction of the replacement has been repeatedly pushed back without consequence to the developer or recompense to the public although the NYPL had the power to insist on the same.  Similarly, government officials have gone out of their way to enforce publicly promulgated and promised time frames for the Atlantic Yards project, something that is virtually impossible to expect when developers have the political upper hand.

    •    All of the transaction costs associated with selling off the library, including all of the professionals, lawyers, real estate experts, etc., associated with the transaction.  This naturally includes the allocable amounts paid to the former Forest City Ratner Vice president who came up with the strategic real estate advice and analysis that the first two libraries the BPL should sell should be this one and another, the Pacific Branch, right next to Forest City Ratner property.  The initial payment authorized to be paid to that professional real estate consultant was just a little under $1 million.  Amounts paid to consultants should also include amounts paid to consultants and lawyers to deal with community opposition to the sale even if no lawsuit si brought by the community and all such expenditures are prophylactic.

    •    The cost, including all allocable staff time, of moving the library twice, first into the very small temporary library (and storage for what won’t fit), and then into the new shrunken library.

    •    The value of the space surrounding the library.

    •    The value of the light and air the library supplies to the neighborhood.  While some may argue for the desirability of the new density to create the luxury condominiums that will tower sufficiently over the surrounding neighborhood to gain a view of the harbor from the upper floors, it should be remembered that the library was built with urban renewal, and that many affordable housing units and commercial properties were demolished with eminent domain on the theory that creation of less density and more light and air was the most desirable thing.

    •    The historic and landmark value of the library.

What might some of these additional losses to the public amount to?

The 13,000 square feet of library missing during construction.   Sephora's is reportedly paying $140 per square foot for its commercial lease down the street, in the Municipal Building, where is is occupying space where the library should likely have been moved (without any ensuing interruption in service) if, with better planning, the library was, indeed to be sold for redevelopment.  As a comparable that might seem high, but a real estate comrade I was talking with pointed out that assembling large amounts of space on the edge of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn is difficult, so it is arguable that a premium price might be in order.   The 13,000 square feet at $140 would come to $6.37 million for a 3 1/3 year lease.  Arguably, the construction might be completed in less than 3 1/2 years so, with luck, some amount of this could be recouped upon surrendering the lease back to the landlord or some sort of very short sublease, but, because it could not be assured that construction would be completed sooner, it would be necessary to lease the space for the entire 3 1/3 years.  There is also another countervailing risk: That rather than the promised 3 1/3 years the actual expense might involve something more like the 7 ½ years it's, so far, taking to replace Donnell.

Total transaction costs.  We know that the initial payment to the Forest City Ratner Vice President was close to $1 million.  We know that there are many very highly-priced consultants already engaged by the BPL in connection with the library sales, including Booz and Co.  We know that high-priced legal talent is expensive.  We know that the transaction here is not just a sale, it is also negotiation for new space with plans to build.  Would we be conservatively underestimating to expect that all transaction costs would come to at least 10%, or another $5.2 million?

The cost of two moves.  Have you ever moved a business?  Experienced the distractions and time it took for staff to plan and figure out where everything is going to go and how it is going to go and be kept track of? The costs are not to be discounted and there are more outside professionals to pay.

The value of the space surrounding the library.  There are surely those who don't value green spaces around a dense and growing neighborhood. 

Without arguing that point we will simply note how the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” acknowledge a world where some people not appreciating the trees and trees and green that they've got act accordingly to replace them with what Ms. Mitchell’s song makes clear that, she at least, values less, paved parking spaces:

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum *
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Rather than argue the point of how valuable the green may or may not be to the public we'll use Ms. Mitchell’s song as a basis to simplify things by valuing the space around the library at what Ms. Mitchell values less: parking spaces.  In fact, some of the space around the library is now currently used for parking.

Sunday, the library sadly closed, a lone care pulls in to take advantage of the space

The space around the library might, if used entirely for parking, provide maybe about nineteen parking spaces.  See below:
What are parking spaces worth in New York City?  There are actual market figures on this.

In the summer of 2007 parking spaces were reported to be worth almost a quarter of a million dollars, $225,000.  Prices may have gone up with the New York Times reporting a parking space purchase of "$250,000 a tire" or $1 million.  See: Buy Condo, Then Add Parking Spot for $1 Million, by Michelle Higgins September 9, 2014. 

To be fair, this was one transaction "at Broome and Crosby Streets, itself the former site of a parking lot" and the Times supplied other figures, another Manhattan transaction where spaces were listed for a half million and a Boston space for $560,000 and a London space for $565,859.  It reports that the past year the average price throughout Manhattan has been $136,052.

Nineteen parking spaces at that average Manhattan price would come to about $2.6 million, but if it is assumed that the border of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn is a relatively premium neighborhood and that the value of a parking space, albeit outdoors, ought to be around $260,000, then the value of nineteen spaces ought to come to around $4.94 million.  Of course we don't know if this would make Joni Mitchell happy.

319 feet tall- But how much taller?

The value of the light and air the library supplies to the neighborhood.  We probably have already arrived at an appreciable net negative, the public suffering a loss if this proposed transaction is implemented, without attributing any further additional loss to the light and air that will be sacrificed if a luxury tower is built, but it is difficult to calculate the value of lost light and air because no version of any of the possible proposed developments showed a project with all the development rights that are available being used.  See: Monday, December 16, 2013, Tall Stories- Buildings Proposed To Shrink The Brooklyn Heights Library: Brooklyn Public Library Publishes Seven Luxury Building Proposals To Shrink Away Brooklyn Heights Library.

The value of light and air?

The historic and landmark value of the library.  The current library is at least the second most important library in the BPL system, one that everybody in the borough knows, and the building was designed by by Francis Keally, the same man who designed the Grand Army Plaza Library, the other Brooklyn library that almost everybody knows.  Keally was a former president of the once-venerable Municipal Arts Society and a head of the New York chapter of the AIA.  One might consider how nice it is that these two well-designed buildings go together providing stature and thematic linkage.

Francis Keally's Brooklyn Heights design

Francis Keally's Grand Army Plaza design

Repairs?  Are we forgetting something?  Aren't there calculations that say that the current library needs repair, perhaps $9 million?  Should these amounts be treated be weighed in favor of  shrinking the library since the replacement library would theoretically not need repair when built?  The BPL would argue this to be the case, but it should only be done if you believe the BPL's inflated estimates and to do so you would have to disregard that the BPL's own board meeting minutes indicate that the estimates were worked on by a former Forest City Ratner Vice President specifically with the goal that they become a convincing argument to sell the library.  The BPL's calculations for the Brooklyn Heights library are clearly intentionally inflated.

The BPL has been playing with its figures respecting the capital repairs it says it needs in its system's and which it argues are a reason for selling and shrinking libraries.  Often it rounds up the figure stated for the public to $300 million in what it will say are "necessary repairs."  Other times, pinned down to be more specific, they BPL gives a lower figure, $280 million and uses the weasel words "unmet repairs" allowing for more exaggeration.  In any event, these figures didn't exist at all until the BPL launched its plans for real estate deals and started building them up with deferrals while scouting for additional expenses to add into the its pretextual mix.

The developer's proposal as summarized in the materials previously furnished by the BPL about the proposals it received

114 "Affordable Housing" Units?  What about the announcement that the developer will also build "114 off-site affordable housing units"somewhere else within the boundaries of Brooklyn Community Board 2, perhaps by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  That involves a whole other set of calculations.  Those units will be subsidized with government funds that could be used for other "affordable housing" and purposes other than dismantling a library that all Brooklynites need and evicting them from an increasingly wealthy and exclusive Downtown.

"Reaction" of Brooklyn Heights Association

The Brooklyn Heights Association's behavior respecting the issue of the library has been very unbecoming.  Theoretically the protector of the neighborhood it has, instead, explicitly condoned the sale and shrinkage of the library, giving the BPL cover to sell it off.  The BHA has now “reacted” specifically to this proposal that has been before it since the beginning of last December.  Its reaction at this late date bespeaks a certain amount of play-acting as they express “concern and cautious optimism.”  The expression of “concern” is offered seemingly to certify that they are looking out for the community (which few at this point believe) and the “cautious optimism” comes as their first step toward further promotion of the sale.   See: BHA Speaks Out on Brooklyn Heights Library with "Concern and Cautious Optimism", By Homer Fink on October 4, 2014 and OPINION: BHA responds to Heights Library redevelopment plan, From the Brooklyn Heights Association's website

The BHA’s “reaction” is mostly a very mild stab at an aesthetic critique with a pretext that there is an open process going on about issues (i.e. they hoped “the developers and BPL trustees will take the time to re-evaluate their design, and engage in an open process with the broader library”):

. . . what we are seeing is a clunky condominium sitting atop generic retail space. We want to see a distinctive and welcoming public building that provides a graceful transition from the civic buildings on Cadman Plaza to the residences of Brooklyn Heights — a library that is a visual gateway to the neighborhood.

The two most substantive aspects of the BHA’s reaction are both dangerously clumsy on their part.

How far away from Brooklyn Heights and the downtown area might the "affordable" units be built?  The boundaries of Brooklyn's Community Board 2 range far.

They unfortunately seem a little too pleased that the affordable units for lower income tenants will not be in the building and thus likely outside of the neighborhood as well:

The off-site affordable housing, which must be within Community District 2 boundaries, will allow for a less bulky building on this constricted site.

The second clumsily taken substantive position?: Like the proverbial broken clock that manages occasionally to be right the BHA observes:

The decision to assign considerable square footage to an exclusive private school gymnasium does not reflect the inclusive mission of our public library system.

The BHA is right that it should not be within the mission of the library to benefit a private school by selling and shrinking libraries just as it should not be within the mission of the library system to do so to benefit a private developer, both of which are happening here.  More simply, it should not be the mission of the library to be engaged in “economic development” notwithstanding the fact that the library hired a consultant from Philadelphia to tell it that its mission should be expanded to include “economic development” in which case there could be odd arguments made for a library system to sell and shrink libraries and eliminate books and librarians.

The BHA is wrong, however, in its apparent background supposition that the gymnasium for the Saint Ann’s School was a benefit that the city or the BPL negotiated to exchange the library for, with the thought that it might now be possible to figuratively come back with receipt in hand to exchange the gymnasium for something else:

Moreover, the project can and should address broader community priorities. . . . Community or public school space is called for in lieu of a private school gym.

It might be pure doltishness on the BHA’s part to think the library was traded for a gymnasium, or perhaps this is a cynical ploy to make it look like the BHA is negotiating for something it knows it won’t obtain.  The fact is that Saint Ann’s is getting a gymnasium isn't because the city or the BPL negotiated for that. Saint Ann’s is getting a gymnasium because it is selling its development rights by joining in the same zoning lot with Forest City Ratner and library property.  By selling and shrinking the library the city makes it possible for Saint Ann’s to negotiate that benefit for itself, but Saint Ann’s is not going to sell its privately owned development rights for “community or public school space.”   Does the BHA really understand so little about this transaction that is affecting the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood so significantly?

More About Private School Saint Ann’s Interest in the Transaction
 
What is true is that private benefit that Saint Ann’s is getting by virtue of this transaction means that the private school is likely to push for the public library to be sold and shrunk just as the private condominium developer undoubtedly wants the same thing to happen.  The question is whether they will have the upper hand when dealing with our public officials, because this transaction can only happen if those public officials, including our City Council and Mayor de Blasio, allow it to proceed. 
Monday afternoon at 4:30 the Saint Ann’s faculty was treated to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation explaining how the library sale would benefit Saint Ann’s.

At the top right of the PowerPoint, the library property labeled as the BPL's, with arrows indicating what is going to be switched around where.

Getting involved in these real estate transactions apparently has Saint Ann's thinking in bigger and broader terms with other interrelated real estate projects and renovations planned as funds flow in.  During the PowerPoint presentation a pie chart was shown of some of the funds involved (below).  What exactly is Saint Ann’s thinking?  Maybe they'll say if asked.
   

The entire block, Ratner Property highlighted, showing what, with Ratner cooperation, could be treated as a single merged zoning lot to transfer development rights from Saint Ann's School to the library site

Above, Saint Ann School building with development rights that are not yet utilized.  Ratner property is in the background, literally (and metaphorically?)

Perhaps the best way to end this article is with a gallery of more pictures so that people will better understand (see below) what stands to be lost if the Brooklyn Heights library is sold and shrunk.  Or maybe it would be best to note that Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) has launched a Citizens Audit and Investigation of the details concerning the Brooklyn Public Library's secretive and strange pursuit, going back to around 2005, of converting all of Brooklyn's libraries into real estate transactions that will shrink them diminishing the respect for and availability books and librarians and the core missions of a library system.  See (last accessed 10/7/2014): Press Release: Citizens Audit and Investigation of Brooklyn Public Library- FOIL Requests and PHOTO & VIDEO GALLERY: September 16, 2014 Rally Outside BPL Trustees Meeting- BPL Trustees Vote To Hand Off Brooklyn Heights Library To Hudson Co. As Developer.

In essence, the proposal is to shrink the library to the equivalent size of just two rooms like this Business and Career Library space from which would have to be subtracted all entryway, administrative, bathroom, stairway and elevator space.

 

Adult reading room on the second floor over the Business and Career section of the library.

Is the public likely to feel more privileged with second floors window to look out as it has now rather than any additional space being stuck in the basement?

Computer room- Excess space?

The normally full children's room, right before closing, on a day just after the Library has again changed its hours ensuring confusion about when it's open and what routines will work when you plan your visits

Useless hallway space?  Where you can wait for an elevator or congregate waiting for friends, take in an exhibit in this space that graciously transitions from one room to another, buffering sound . . .

I am presently missing pictures that show the frequently used auditorium in its full glory, but this picture from the Brooklyn Eagle is from the night that the auditorium was used to announce this as the first public disclosure of plans to sell and shrink a Brooklyn public library.  The community was not happy.  (The auditorium was used for primary voting this last election.)

Here, also from the Brooklyn Eagle, a photograph of Deborah Hallen using the auditorium to ceremonially display for the record a proclamation by Borough President Marty Markowitz honoring the work of the “Friends of Brooklyn Heights Branch Library" which was then , and now, a lead collaborator in pushing forward the proposed sale and shrinkage of the library.

Edward Snowden in "Citizenfour"

What does the Academy Award-winning documentary "Citizenfour" about Edward Snowden (and possibly also the Academy Award-winning drama “The Imitation Game”) have to do with the sale and shrinkage of New York City Libraries, the elimination of librarians and elimination of books from the library shelves?

Read the new National Notice article: Sunday, March 8, 2015, Snowden Revelations Considered: Is Your Library, Once Intended To Be A Protected Haven of Privacy, Spying on You?

Family genealogy work, a sought after book with an interesting story to tell, a famous library reputedly famously guarded, and a library president cousin all make for an interesting mix

Every extended family has a family historian, that go-to person for knowledge about matters of genealogy, who spends dedicated time tirelessly scouring research books and public records tracking down the yet-to-be-discovered facts and documentation about who is related to whom, where different ancestors came from and what distinguishing, fascinating accomplishments or traits may have characterized them.  Few families also have in their ranks the president of a premier library system.  There’s one family in New York that has both: It’s the family of the current president of the New York Public Library Anthony W. Marx.  Now in a tale that may lay the foundation for years of future family discord the Marx family’s historian has embarrassed the library president when, with perseverance, she tracked down on eBay a rare volume in the hands of others that had been entrusted to her cousin’s NYPL library for safe keeping.

Thirty-six-year-old Sandy Porfiry Marx, known as “Sanz” in the Marx family and still using her maiden name, is an inveterate sleuth who has compiled reams of collected historical anecdotes and facts about the family and all its branches.  Why be obsessive about particular families Sanz is asked (Sanz also does the same kind of research about families besides just the Marx family): Sanz replies that it provides a way of seeing snapshots of history raw and unfiltered through the eyes of historians who too often think they already know the shape of the past. “You find out things you never knew, things historians neglected or forgot to write about and you see different connections about how the past transitioned into the present we know today,” she says.

The collision course with her cousin Anthony (“Tony”) Marx seems to have been set because they both inevitably deal with books.  Ironically, Sanz was working on a research project she had  intended she could deliver as something of a gift to her library president cousin and his sociology professor wife Karen Barkey.  Barkey also still uses her maiden name. . .

. .  Sanz had come across a clue that an ancestor in the Barkey line, part of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, had led a unit of men under General George Washington during the American Revolution.  This ancestor, O. Mercy Barkey, had been a printer who, printing pamphlets espousing the causes for which the revolutionaries were fighting, was sufficiently convinced by the rhetoric of the inked sheets he churned out to take up arms, committing bodily to win the war.  O. Mercy Barkey remained in the nascent U.S. after the revolution long enough to see the U.S. Constitution enacted in 1789, but then returned to Europe where he agitated again for causes, printing materials backing Republican ideals and arguing for greater equality in Poland and Lithuania.  He was said to have contributed to the Constitution adopted May, 3, 1791 by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, considered the world's second-oldest codified national constitution after the U.S,’s own.  The commonwealth was short-lived and O. Mercy himself similarly succumbed not long after its demise.

All of this was alluded to in a letter to a great-great aunt sent from Europe just before World War II that referenced it as being documented in an autobiography that O. Mercy had printed himself before he died.  Sanz was excited.  She believed that Tony Marx’s mother had known the great-great aunt to whom the letter was sent and knew that Tony Marx’s mother volunteered Monday’s at the the NYPL’s Inwood branch library, the same neighborhood where library president Marx grew up.  That’s where she hurried immediately.  Marx’s mother knew nothing about the Revolutionary War era relation-by-marriage, but she and Sanz signed onto the NYPL’s database of materials and books from right there in the branch and discovered that O. Mercy’s book was part of the NYPL’s reference collection.  This required a bit of doing because O. Mercy’s name as author was translated and spelled out in Cyrillic.

That’s when things began not going so well.  Sanz immediately put in a request for the book.  She got an indication from the NYPL that the book was off-site and would take about four days before it could be brought to the NYPL 42nd Street library from storage at an off-site in Princeton, New Jersey location.*  Because the main Rose Reading Room is out of commission due to the need for ceiling repairs identified last May, the book was going to have to be brought to another room for her to read.  Getting no notification that the book had been retrieved Sanz inquired after nine days.

(*  It is not a surprise that the book should have been one of the ones off-site because while the library once held millions of books, over at least seven million, it presently has on site only a fraction of that number, perhaps fewer than two million in all.  The central stacks around which the library was designed, created to hold three millions books, are entirely empty.)

At this point she was informed that the book was missing from the collection.  Consulting in person with the librarians at 42nd Street it was first theorized that the O. Mercy book had been lost when, in 2008, the Slavic and Baltic division, dating back to the earliest days of the library (along with two Asian and Middle Eastern divisions), was permanently shut down.  This occurred around the time that the NYPL was launching space shrinkage plans associated with deals to sell much of its most prime real estate.  That theory of the book’s disappearance did not pan out, nor did another about the book being reshuffled around the storage facility’s space when there was a backlog of materials needing to be delivered to the 42nd Street Library due to traffic during the 2013 Super Bowl.

At this time Sanz was not yet identifying herself as a relative of the library president or invoking his help, because she was still hoping to surprise him and his wife with what she was hoping to find.  Likewise Tony Marx’s mother was sworn to secrecy.

More investigation revealed the truth.  At the storage facility, the O. Mercy volume had been designated for “de-duping” (i.e.elimination as an "artifactual original") because records showed the Princeton University and Columbia, sharing books with the NYPL each had a copy of the book.  This was a mistake, however: What the records of each of those institutions actually showed was that the volume in question was available for loan to their students upon request, because, in that case, the NYPL would have sent the non-circulating volume out to the universities.

In fact, the likelihood that any duplicate volume would have existed in either institution was slim to the point of virtual non-existence: O. Mercy Barkey had printed what was essentially a vanity edition of the book that was never sold, with only a few copies being handed out to certain acquaintances. . . .  That plus the fact that his ideas about liberty, equality and republicanism posed a threat to the surrounding monarchic countries that were intent on dismantling the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth so that, even with only a few copies printed, fewer copies survived.

Others surely would have given up in despair.  Sanz was determined to find a copy of the book.  She didn’t have far to go to look.  These days it seems everything shows up on eBay.  When eliminated from the library’s catalog in the name of “de-duping” the volume was sold in-bulk with other books to a used book seller. Finding the book on eBay did not mean that it could be obtained.  Sanz had been making inquiries about the book and there were now those in the rare book market who knew about the book's rarity and had notions of its value.  It was snatched up on eBay by a hedge fund specializing in arbitraging books of rare books that quickly outpaced Sanz’s own comparatively modest bids for it.

The hedge fund, it turned out, was one of the multitudinous subsidiary operations of the Blackstone Group headed by Stephen Schwarzman.  Stephen A. Schwarzman, for those keeping track of library matters, is a trustee of the NYPL so things were seemingly coming almost full circle in a way.  The hedge fund, commissioned the volume to Sotheby’s where the talk was that it might sell for close to $100,000 or more.

What happened?  The book came back to the library, but only because Sanz approached NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman who had a serious conversation with Mr. Schwarzman about the possibility of a conflict of interest on his part.  Schwarzman, irritated that the subject had even come up, said he would simply see to it that the book was donated back to the NYPL in exchange for a tax deduction that he could take so long as any legal challenge was dropped.  He also requested as one last condition that the NYPL find yet another place to affix his name to NYPL property, his name currently appearing in five places outside the 42nd Street Central Reference Library that has been named after him. . .  Needless to say, by this time the NYPL president, himself, had to be fully informed and participate in this resolution.  He did, but, by all reports, was not so happy to be doing so, notwithstanding the pending elucidation about a his wife’s famous relative from the past.

The volume, "My Life: A Tale Beginning With The Day of My Birth," (This is the translated version of the title) when Sanz got to open it, lived up to her expectations, in every way, beginning with its opening passage:

I was born in 1741 and I conceive with some definite satisfaction that the day of my birth, the first day of the month of April, gave auspicious portent to all who would strive to know the true facts of my destiny and future accomplishment.

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 differentparsings 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, probablyunwisely.  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 leasttwo 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?

During his campaign for mayor, de Blasio on NYC libraries:"once again we see, lurking right behind the curtain, real estate developers who are very anxious to get their hands on these valuable properties."He'd joined with Citizens Defending Libraries of which I am a co-founder.

Thursday, de Blasio released his new NYC budget. Against all advice he couldn't spare a few pennies for the libraries. Instead the idea is that we have to sell off our libraries in order to have money for a rainy day.

More about why that's a big problem for him at his press conference tomorrow via National Notice here:  De Blasio’s “Progressive Contract With America”: Big Problem- It looks Like A Plan to “Progressively Contract America” When He’s Selling NYC Libraries Including The Tillary Clinton Library Next To Hillary’s Office.

Stephen A. Schwarzman sees himself on one side of a class war, where when it come to protecting the preferential tax breaks he receives the rest of us are like Hitler.

Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, has already been prominently cited in two columns by Paul Krugman, the Nobel prizewinning economist and New York Times opinion page columnist, as an example of a plutocratic class warrior who believes that the 1% must retain their supremacy over the rest of society, winning at any cost. (See: Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted, September 26, 2013 and Paranoia of the Plutocrats, January 26, 2014.)

Similarly, a recent short piece in the The New Yorker, Moaning Moguls, by James Surowiecki, July 7, 2014, focused in on the way a complaining and financially aloof Schwarzman aligns himself, class-wise, according to a we/they perception of the world:

You wouldn't think [Schwarzman would] have much to complain about. But, to hear him tell it, he's beset by a meddlesome, tax-happy government and a whiny, envious populace. He recently grumbled that the U.S. middle class has taken to "blaming wealthy people" for its problems. Previously, he has said that it might be good to raise income taxes on the poor so they had "skin in the game," and that proposals to repeal the carried-interest tax loophole-from which he personally benefits-were akin to the German invasion of Poland.

Is the bottom line that the wealthiest in society like Schwarzman should be living in fear that the political upper hand will be seized by those who will tax the rich (or simply eliminate the loopholes by which Schwarzman pays his income taxes at a preferential lower rate) to dispense “largess to the poor” or other strata of our society?  Au contraire!   While class warfare is real, is not a matter of what the wealthy might fear from the rest of us, but what the rest of us have to fear in the way of predation from the likes of Schwarzman: What do individuals such as Schwarzman do when they have the political and the economic upper hand?

Schwarzman, who has focused on profiting from buying homes of owners defaulting in the face of economic downturn, has in his role as New York Public Library trustee pushed for the selling and shrinkage of New York City's libraries, he has enthusiastically promoted investment in the environmentally costly practice of hydro-fracking with all its global-warming implications, he has invested in privatizing prisons and now, as is getting attention, we find that he has in a major, very nontransparent way been taking advantage of pension funds, including those of public employees.  Some of the pension fund handed over to Schwarzman's Blackstone were set up for the benefit of New York City and New York State employees.

Raiding Pension Funds

In “Wall Street,” the 1987 film famous for its “Greed is good” Gordan Gekko character played by Michael Douglas, a key part of the plot is the disclosure of the unscrupulous lengths to which Gekko will go in dismantling an airline company, putting its employees out of work, in order to raid its pension fund.  The mindset epitomized thereby: An economic framework that works for and benefits a larger segment of society is up for grabs to be destroyed by monied interests playing an insider game to pile up ever greater wealth.  That was the 1980s.

Stealing from pension funds?  Is it worse when the pension funds that get hit are those of public employees?  And if you are a New Yorker paying New York taxes, what if those pension funds are for New York public employees?  The politically connected Stephen Schwarzman who keeps photographs of George W. and Laura Bush and Michael Bloomberg on his office desk has, Gordan Gekko style, been accused of robbing public pension funds, to build up his own personal wealth.  The accusations are worthy of consideration for all they imply.  See Zero Hedge’s Leaked Documents Show How Blackstone Fleeces, Taxpayers Via Public Pension Funds, by Tyler Durden, May 5, 2014 passing along an article by David Sirota at Pandodaily, LEAKED: Docs obtained by Pando show how a Wall Street giant is guaranteed huge fees from taxpayers on risky pension investments, May 5, 2014

Here’s some of the Zero Hedge summing up of the situation:

The following story by David Sirota at PandoDaily is simply excellent. It zeros in on the secretive and rapidly expanding relationship between private equity firms and the public pensions that invest in them. It shows a crony capitalist love affair greased by lobbyist influence peddlers known as "placement agents", as well as non-public agreements between PE firms and public pensions chock full of conflicts of interest, extremely high fees and underperformance. Unbelievably, in many instances the trustees of the public pensions are not allowed to know what funds the "fund of funds" invest in. This makes due diligence impossible, and in one particularly egregious example it led the Kentucky Retirement Systems to unknowingly invest in SAC Capital despite the fact it was under SEC investigation at the time.

Furthermore, with the Wall Street Journal reporting back in 2011 that $37 of every $100 dollars invested in Blackstone's investment pool comes from state and local pension plans, it appears that taxpayers are once again being fleeced by the financial oligarch class.

    * * *

The chief villain in this article will be no stranger to readers of this site. It is Blackstone . .

The main point of the PandoDaily article:

An increasing number of those pension funds are being stealthily diverted into high-fee, high-risk "alternative investments" that deliver spectacular rewards for the Wall Street firms paid to manage them - but not such great returns for pensioners and taxpayers.

According to the analysis of the leaked documents obtained:   

Taken together, the documents raise serious questions about whether the government employees, trustees and politicians overseeing major public pension funds are shirking their fiduciary responsibilities under the law when they are cementing "alternative" investment deals.

Fees Sapping Fund's Prospects of Investment Growth

These pension fund investments were not performing well because of the debilitating effect of high fees. Around the beginning of 2008 Blackstone launched its hedge funds; with a “fund of funds” approach where it steered clients’ money into other hedge funds in return for an additional fee.

When the Kentucky Retirement System was looking to invest about $400 million in Blackstone's Alternative Asset Management Fund (BAAM), which is a so-called “fund of hedge funds” the PandoDaily article says the leaked documents showed:

Blackstone was guaranteed whopping fees of 50 basis points plus 10 percent of any overall profits on retirees' money. In addition, the memo estimates 1.62 percent management fees and 19.78% incentive fees to be paid on top of the Blackstone fees to the underlying (and undisclosed) individual hedge fund managers in the "fund of funds."

And:

Pension officials made the decision to invest in the fund despite Blackstone then reportedly being under SEC investigation.

The Sunday’s New York Times Business Section of a week ago featured, front page, above-the-fold, a comprehensive article that, in just slightly more tempered New York Timesian business lingo, covered much of the same ground, with a few additions, as the Pando and Zero Hedge articles from last May. See: Behind Private Equity’s Curtain, by Gretchen Morgenson, October 18, 2014.

We’ll come back to ways in which that article, illustrated with a photo of New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and featuring a quote from him, brings the question of these investments closer to home for New York taxpayers.

First, it would be worthwhile to note the way the compounding effect of `fees,’especially any accumulating proliferation of them, work to seriously gut an intended building up of retirement investments.  To say that “fees” are being charged might imply that valuable services are delivered in exchange, but, bottom line, one ought to suspect and fear the opposite.  PBS’s Frontline covered this point well in “The Retirement Gamble” (transcript is available).

If you Google images for “retirement three legged stool”

U.S. citizens have frequently been described as relying on a “three-legged stool” for their retirement, 1.) social security, 2.) presumably secure pensions, and 3.) invested personal savings that can also include 401(k) and IRAs.  Frontline covered how there has been a shift away from pensions (that covered 42% of Americans in 1972) largely to 401(k)s, originally “a corporate tax dodge” for high earners that “Nobody ever thought that this was going to apply to the rest of us.”

From Frontline's  “The Retirement Gamble”

Frontline explained the effect of fees in the context of the third category, invested personal savings that can also include 401(k) and IRAs.  One expert asserts that Americans don't know the price, quality or risk of what they are paying for when buying 401(k) retirement investments.  To lay it all out, Frontline correspondent Martin Smith talked with Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, a company that offers some of the lowest-fee products on the market. Bogle succintly offers the advice “that if you want to improve your retirement outcome, make sure to minimize Wall Street's take.” * (Starting at 23:40 on the video- ignore the investment company promo ironically inserted at the very beginning of the PBS video.):

(* If social security is ever privatized as has been proposed all these considerations will come into play with respect to social security too.)

    MARTIN SMITH: Bogle gave me an example. Assume you're invested in a fund that is earning a gross annual return of 7 percent. They charge you a 2 percent annual fee. Over 50 years, the difference between your net of 5 percent - the red line - and what you would have made without fees - the green line - is staggering.

    Bogle says you've lost almost two thirds of what you would have had.

    JOHN BOGLE: What happens in the fund business is the magic of compound returns is overwhelmed by the tyranny of compounding costs. It's a mathematical fact. There's no getting around it. The fact that we don't look at it- too bad for us.

    MARTIN SMITH: [on camera] What I have a hard time understanding is that 2 percent fee that I might pay to an actively managed mutual fund is going to really have a great impact on my future retirement savings.

    JOHN BOGLE: Well, you have to rely on somebody to get out a compound interest table and look at the impact over an investment lifetime. Do you really want to invest in a system where you put up 100 percent of the capital, you the mutual fund shareholder, you take 100 percent of the risk and you get 30 percent of the return?

Again, from Frontline's  “The Retirement Gamble”- Results of a 7% return vs. a 5% return

These same mathematical investment facts also apply to pensions of private companies and public employees although the risks and responsibilities for management of them and the costs have not been shifted over from the employers to the employers in the same way.  These mathematical investment facts apply to Blackstone and in the case of public employee pension funds, it's our elected officials like our state and city comptrollers who are responsible for making the decisions about what fees like this are to be paid to companies like Blackstone.

On the Political Inside- "Pay to Play"

That’s why it’s a problem when Blackstone and firms like it are making campaign contributions to the very same officials making those decisions.  You have heard of "pay-to-play"?  See: Do campaign contributions help win pension fund deals?,  8/28/2009.  Here from that article:

More than two dozen firms that have surfaced in a broad corruption investigation of public pension funds gave at least $1.97 million in campaign contributions to officials with potential influence over the funds' investments, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The givers included private-equity giants such as the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group and the Quadrangle Group, the firm founded by Steven Rattner, who in July resigned as the White House point man for the auto industry rescue. The contributions are legal, and the firms haven't been accused of wrongdoing related to the giving.

    * * *

Officials of the Blackstone Group have similarly contributed to pension fund incumbents and candidates. The firm's chairman is co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, a former Lehman Bros. executive. Co-founder Peter Peterson retired as Blackstone's senior chairman in 2008.

Campaign finance records show Schwarzman; his wife, Christine; and Peterson gave a combined $30,000 to three candidates who ran in 2002 to succeed H. Carl McCall as state comptroller. Hevesi, the winner, got the most, $21,000. Separately, McCall received $25,000 from Christine Schwarzman for his unsuccessful bid for governor.

Blackstone has received about $1.74 billion in private equity- and real estate-related investments from the New York pension fund since 1993 and has been paid about $20 million in fees, said Whalen, the state comptroller's spokesman.

The firm has not been accused in the New York investigation.

See also Crains New York Business: Private equity donations to politicians uncovered- Staffers of firms gave money to officials with power to steer pension funds to range of investment advisors, by Hilary Potkewitz, August 28, 2009.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has been investigating pay-to-play accusations involving the state's pension plan and various investment funds, including Carlyle, for the past year. In June, the Carlyle Group agreed to pay a $20 million settlement, and change company policy to limit employee political contributions to $300.

Blackstone has not been accused of anything as a result of Mr. Cuomo's investigations. A Blackstone spokeswoman said that since at least 2006, the company has had a policy prohibiting employees from donating to campaigns for offices with direct oversight of public pension funds. That policy also requires approval from its general counsel for any campaign contributions.

And see, Final Alternatives Hedge Fund and Private Equity News: Ex-Blackstone Employee Pleads Guilty In N.Y. Kickback Scandal, May 13 2009.

A former employee of a placement agent now owned by the Blackstone Group has pleaded guilty to securities fraud as part of the widening kickback scandal at a New York State pension fund.

Putting this again in the context of the debilitating fees already discussed, we come across this article from the New York Post that ran four years ago during the last election for state comptroller.  Harry Wilson, the Republican candidate running for office against Democrat Thomas DiNapoli (who won and is now running again) likely knew what he was talking about because he was a former Blackstone principal.  See: A pension to slash, by Josh Kosman, August 1, 2010.

The former Blackstone Group principal who is the Republican candidate for New York State Comptroller believes the state should consider decreasing its allocation to private equity in its pension funds.

Most PE firms, he said, do not outperform the S&P 500 after fees.

"I'm not a big believer in alternatives," Wilson told The Post. "I don't own a lot of alternatives in my portfolio."

"To outperform the markets is hard and then when you charge large fees on top of that it is really hard."

The article points out that:

The state as of March 31 had 9.3 percent of its $133 billion invested in private-equity funds, and another 9 percent in other "alternative investments" like real estate and hedge funds.

Idea That Pension Benefits Are Too Generous Anyway Finds Home at Schwarzman's Blackstone

Maybe candidate Wilson had a change of heart after leaving Blackstone but indications are that for those at Blackstone their heart is not in benefitting the pensioners; the job they are being paid enormous fees to do.

Blackstone’s Byron Wien, vice chairman of New York-based Blackstone's advisory group, said retiree benefits were "too generous."

"The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York, California and New Jersey but throughout the country, are very generous, too generous," Wien said in response to a question about U.S. state budget deficits during a Jan. 5 presentation of his forecast, according to a transcript. "We literally can't afford the benefits we have given our retirees in state and local governments and we have to change that."

(See: Blackstone Seeks to Appease New York City Pensions After Wien's Comments, by Cristina Alesci and Jason Kelly, May 26, 2010.)

Wein’s remarks sound very much like Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein when he said that the public was going to have to lower its expectations about “entitlements and what people think that they're going to get.  Because they're not going to get it.”  It has been suggested that Mr. Blankfein should, like Mr. Schwarzman, be made one of the trustees to whom we entrust the care of our New York City libraries.  

What did Stephen Schwarzman say in response to Mr. Byron’s remarks and the objections that consequently arose?

"Byron will play a central and invaluable role in providing direction and guidance,"

While Mr. Wien's heart doesn’t seem to be in helping pensioners, he may also lack the talent that would entitle him to take fees to do so.  See:  Byron Wien's Atrocious "Forecasting" May Have Cost Blackstone Hundreds Of Millions, by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2011.

Another Level of Asset Stripping: Pension Funded Job Losses Through Blackstone

While politically luring public pension funds into underperforming high-fee investments is one form of public asset stripping, New York’s pensioners may also be chagrined to learn that the funds they had invested with Blackstone entailed another layer of public loss, one that U.S. Senator Charles Schumer was duty bound to complain about when it came to light.  During the Democratic Convention in the 2012 presidential race Bain Capital was excoriated for jobs it was said to have destroyed in corporate takeovers.

Blackstone engages in the same sort of dismantling of jobs and companies so, by investing in Blackstone, New York’ pension funds (two New York State public employee pension funds and four New York City pension funds) were causing jobs to be lost in Fulton, New York.  A Birds Eye Foods factory was ultimately closed by Blackstone's subsidiary after the union’s and Senator Schumer’s fruitless protests.  See Bloomberg’s: Pensions Find Private Equity Bites as Blackstone Cuts Job, by William Selway and Martin Z. Braun, February 23, 2012 and the very similar, slightly truncated Pension and Investments: NY pension funds find private equity controversy as Blackstone cuts jobs, by Bloomberg, February 23, 2012.

The new owners, Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, a company held by the private equity firm Blackstone Group LP (BX), [“the world's largest buyout firm”] closed the factory and fired 270 workers. Kimber, 64, got eight weeks severance for her 12 years on the job and lives with her 37-year-old unemployed daughter in the rust-belt town of about 12,000, northwest of Syracuse.

“They just used us. That’s exactly what they did,” Kimber said. “And then they kicked us to the curb.”

    * * *
Private equity executives, including Blackstone managing director and Pinnacle Foods director Prakash Melwani, have helped stock Romney's campaign war chests.
    * * *

New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, the sole trustee of New York's $140 billion retirement fund, declined to comment. New York City Comptroller John Liu declined to comment. John Cardillo, a spokesman for New York state's Teachers' Retirement System, declined to comment.

    * * *

In January 2010, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, held a press conference with workers in Fulton, saying he would keep pressuring the company until all the jobs were safe. Schumer said he called Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chairman and co-founder, and asked him to spare the factory.

Ironically, Charles Schumer’s wife, Iris Weinshall, has now taken the position of Chief Operating Officer at the New York Public Library, where, because Schwarzman is a trustee there, she, in a sense works for him as one of her bosses.  She replaced Chief Operating Officer David Offensend who came to that position from Evercore, LLP another private equity and hedge fund firm that was spun off from Blackstone.  The universe of those exercising influence and power is remarkably small.  (So small, in fact, that Offensend's wife, Janet, wound up as a key trustee at the Brooklyn Public Library while it implemented plans tracking the NYPL's similarly selling and shrinking Brooklyn's libraries.)

As the articles note, while New York City Comptroller John Liu did not comment on this factory closing, in another situation where another private equity firm was involved in closing a factory in Cleveland over the objections of investing pension funds whose monies were being used, Liu wrote:

New York's pension funds do not wish to be investing in job loss or in a global `race to the bottom.

Fulton’s Republican Mayor Ronald Woodward, gets the concluding word in the article, putting it terms of class:

"What you're doing by doing that -- you are systematically eliminating the middle class," he said. "You're going to be rich or you're going to be poor. There's no in between."

Placement Agent Fees

Blackstone, and especially Schwarzman, was also openly going after and championing yet another level of fees that would sap pension fund investments, “placement agent fees.”  When I was in government with the state finance agencies we were confronted by firms that, with political introductions, proposed that they should be inserted as a new level of intermediary between the finance agencies and the investments they made, getting yet another set of fee for its `advice’ or `guidance.' Unable to discern any value to the proposal or actual expertise being offered we turned them away.

“Placement Agent Fees,” paid by pension funds generated considerable controversy and a challenge from the SEC.

The New York Times stepped into the fray with a business section editorial criticizing New York City Comptroller John Liu for wanting to ease a ban on placement agents.  See: Editorial: Bringing Back the Fixers, by Dealbook, February 22, 2010.  The editorial observed:

For years, the easiest way companies could get contracts to manage billions of dollars for the pension funds for either New York City or New York State was to go through the local influence peddler. It was a recipe for big corruption, especially in Albany.

Both the city and state stopped using placement agents last April after two top advisers to Alan Hevesi, the former state comptroller, were charged with corruption and violation of federal securities law relating to their "private" work as placement agents. The two pleaded not guilty and are expected to go on trial soon.

Another four fixers from the Hevesi era have pleaded guilty to securities fraud. And a California manager of a venture capital fund pleaded guilty in December to giving out nearly $1 million in illegal gifts to New York State officials to get contracts with the state pension fund.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Thursday that the ban on placement agents is working well in Albany. He said it had made the investment process more transparent and helped new and smaller firms compete.

So, The Times asks, why is Mr. Liu going in the opposite direction?

Not quite two weeks later, Schwarzman was granted space in the Times to personally respond to the editorial.  He was arguing to support the position that Comptroller Liu has taken, that placement agents should be regulated, not banned, a position that would permit Blackstone to continue to ply its trade with New York pension funds as one of the four largest placement agents. See: Another View: In Defense of Placement Agents, By Stephen A. Schwarzman, March 4, 2010.

The four largest placement agents are part of major financial institutions in New York - Credit Suisse, UBS, Lazard and the Blackstone Group - and the professionals are federally registered and the firms themselves are heavily regulated. We do extensive due diligence on any manager we seek to represent (Blackstone's Park Hill Group takes as clients about 5 percent of the managers who come to it). We also prepare marketing materials and then take them before the major sources of investment capital - private, state and local pension plans; university and foundation endowments; sovereign wealth funds; etc. - to make the case as to why these managers warrant an investment. Most of these managers could not get a start in business without placement agents.

It is probably not to Comptroller Liu’s credit that he aligned with Schwarzman on this issue.  The alignment may have also put Liu in an interesting position when, three years later in the spring of 2013, Liu stepped up to oppose the sale and shrinkage of libraries with their attendant questionable real estate deals that Schwarzman was pushing for as a trustee of the NYPL.

When he wrote his Times rebuttal Schwarzman was already on record fighting against any bans on placement agents:

The SEC in May 2009 proposed the outright banning of placement agents , which in New York, California, New Mexico and Kentucky, were the conduit for corruption in those states' public pensions. However, the Private Equity industry was able to kill this SEC proposal, I believe by getting the Obama administration to pressure the SEC to water down this ban.

Blackstone's billionaire founder, Stephen Schwarzman, personally sent a letter to the SEC opposing a placement agent ban.

(See: Feds indict public pension placement agent, By Chris Tobe, March 20, 2013.)

A Hidden World, Where With a Lack of TransparencyPension Investors Take Hit for Fund Manager Wrongdoing

Photo used by the Times to emphasize Comptroller Scott Stringer's quote objecting to pension investors being saddled with the legal loss incurred from the settlement of the charges of improper conduct on the part of the fund managers

The recent article in the Sunday New York Times business section about the inappropriateness of pension funds investing in private equity funds focused mostly on the lack of transparency with respect to those funds and how that lack of transparency can conceal conflicts of interest that benefit the fund managers at the expense of the public investors.  Case in point, the quote featured from Comptroller Stringer was his objection to the fact that there had been a legal settlement respecting alleged misconduct of fund managers where the losses incurred with the settlement were passed along to be paid by the public pensioner investors, not the managers.  Given the lack of transparency of the private equity funds the public pensioners were probably in the dark that they are responsible for these costs, because according to the Times:

Their legal obligations are detailed in private equity documents that are confidential and off limits to pensioners and others interested in seeing them.

Notwithstanding, Comptroller Stringer said that forcing the pensioners to take the loss: "violates the spirit of the indemnification clause of our contract.”

Times reporting on the $325 million settlement to which Blackstone was a party

The comptroller was speaking of a settlement of a lawsuit against Carlyle Group and a number of other equity firms, (Bain, etc.), the Blackstone Group included, accused of colluding and market manipulations to drive down the prices of corporate takeover targets.  Blackstone, K.K.R. and TPG agreed to pay a combined $325 million to settle the accusations, the amount to be divided up between them in a manner unspecified t the public (K.K.R., Blackstone and TPG Private Equity Firms Agree to Settle Lawsuit on Collusion, by William Alden, August 7, 2014) and the Carlyle Group subsequently agreed to pay another $115 million in its own settlement.  Total, all of the firm settlements reportedly tallied $590.5 million (Carlyle Deal Concludes a Lawsuit Against Private Equity, by William Alden, September 8, 2014.)

The Sunday Times article makes it clear that Carlyle passed this loss along to New York City pensioners and that Comptroller Stringer's remark applies to them. When I asked whether the Blackstone was, or might be similarly passing its loss along to New York City pensioners I was quickly informed that the investigation is ongoing so that this information could not be furnished.  I put this question to the State Comptroller’s office at the same time and have yet to receive a response.

The Times article was front page and above-the-fold of the Sunday Business section

The Times article noted more on the absence of transparency:

"Hundreds of billions of public pension dollars have essentially been moved into secrecy accounts," said Edward A.H. Siedle, a former lawyer for the Securities and Exchange Commission who, through his Benchmark Financial Services firm in Ocean Ridge, Fla., investigates money managers. "These documents are basically legal boilerplate, but it's very damning legal boilerplate that sums up the fact that they are the highest-risk, highest-fee products ever devised by Wall Street."

Retirees whose pension funds invest in private equity funds are being harmed by this secrecy, Mr. Siedle said. By keeping these agreements under wraps, pensioners cannot know some important facts - for example, that a private equity firm may not always operate as a fiduciary on their behalf. Also hidden is the full panoply of fees that investors are actually paying as well as the terms dictating how much they are to receive after a fund closes down.

A full airing of private equity agreements and their effects on pensioners is past due, some state officials contend. The urgency increased this year, these officials say, after the S.E.C. began speaking out about improper practices and fees it had uncovered at many private equity firms.

The explanation from Blackstone and companies like it for the lack of transparency?:

Private equity giants like the Blackstone Group, TPG and Carlyle say that divulging the details of their agreements with investors would reveal trade secrets. Pension funds also refuse to disclose these documents, saying that if they were to release them, private equity firms would bar them from future investment opportunities.

Public Officials Don't Bargain?

On the very questionable absence of oversight by the public's elected officials making these investments the article quotes attorney Karl Olson, a partner at Ram Olson Cereghino & Kopczynski, who has sued he California Public Employees' Retirement System, to disclose fees paid to hedge fund, venture capital and private equity managers.

"I think it is unseemly and counterintuitive that these state officials who have billions of dollars to invest don't drive a harder bargain with the private equity folks," he said. "A lot of pension funds have the attitude that they are lucky to be able to give their money to these folks, which strikes me as bizarre and certainly not acting as prudent stewards of the public's money."

Conflicts of Interest?

On the subject of conflicts of interest that hide behind the lack of transparency the Times writes:

Regulations require that registered investment advisers put their clients' interests ahead of their own and that they operate under what is also known as a fiduciary duty. This protects investors from potential conflicts of interest and self-dealing by those managers. This is true of mutual funds, which are also required to make public disclosures detailing their practices.

But, as a lawsuit against Kohlberg Kravis Roberts shows, private equity managers can try to exempt themselves from operating as a fiduciary.

Abuse and the Breaking of Laws

It quotes another attorney in the area as follows:

"On one hand they say they don't owe you the duty," she said, "but everything is so confidential with these investments that without a court order, you don't have any idea what they're doing. It's not open and transparent, and that's the kind of structure to me that's ripe for abuse."

How ripe for abuse?  With this total lack of transparency and diligent review and bargaining how quickly would we know, for instance, if there was another Madoff in this thicket?  The Times reported that although private equity firms got off to a better start in their initial years, more recently:

. .  a simple investment in the broad stock market trounced private equity. For the five years through March, for example, private equity funds returned 14.7 percent, annualized, compared with 21.2 percent for the S.&.P. 500. One-year and three-year returns in private equity have also lagged.

And given the complicated calculations about who gets what monies in transactions, with the managers first in line, the investors always waiting to find out what they finally get, how late in the game after final reckonings would one know how bad, bad news is?  You can’t always get out of a hedge fund investment exactly when you’d like and when funds face liquidity problems they sometimes restrict withdrawals.

Madoff, of course, broke laws and a fairly high proportion of his victims were wealthy.  However, as must be noted with increasing frequency in our society, when it comes to the ways that the wealthiest use tilted playing fields to their advantage at the expense of others, the crime is not what activities are against the law, the crime is what is legal.  That’s the context in which this nation’s “plutocracy” is better understood as a "kleptocracy."

Laws can change.  Practices described here are in many ways similar and analogous to the kinds of abuses with respect to credit card and consumer lending, “tricks and traps” that Elizabeth Warren and new consumer regulations are working to proscribe.

Even by the relatively weak standards of what currently isn’t outlawed, it seems that legal lines are still crossed far too often.  According to the Los Angeles Times:

In a report on the SEC's findings after a preliminary round of examinations, agency official Andrew J. Bowden described what he called a "remarkable" level of lawbreaking and cheating among the 150 private equity advisory firms inspected so far. Bowden delivered his report directly to the lions in their den, speaking at a May 6 private equity conference.

"A private equity adviser is faced with temptations and conflicts with which most other advisers do not contend," Bowden stated. "We have seen that these temptations and conflicts are real and significant."

The most striking statistic: Half of all examinations uncovered "what we believe are violations of law or material weaknesses in controls."

(See:  SEC peeks under private equity rug, finds 'remarkable' corruption, by Michael Hiltzik- May 13, 2013.)

Rebates - Fluid Rules?

The New York Times article about high fees was preceded by several months by a thorough article addressing the subject that appeared in the Financial Times apparently sparked by the SEC investigation: Private equity: A fee too far- Regulators are probing conflicts of interest and high fees charged by fund managers to the companies they own, by Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Henny Sender, July 13, 2014.

According to the article, one thing that is happening as investors and their advisors react to fees that “pump substance out of portfolio companies. . . the sort of greed you would typically see in investment banking"(quote from one advisor) is that investors are demanding, and getting, rebates of fees, on the order of 80%.  Such after-the-fact rejiggeing of the rules to fatten up a scrawny and inadequate return sounds faintly Ponzi-ish, though a crossing of that line has not been alleged on the part of any of the funds.*

(* In some fascinating articles however, questions have been raised about how, on the state official side of things, the state of New Jersey did poorly channeling monies into underperforming private equity funds,  Blackstone being one of the firms investments were handed off to, tripling fees being paid under Governor Christie while turning New Jersey into one of the nation's largest investors in hedge funds and then, and is now apparently trying to cover up "suddenly reporting higher results" . .  "a full 1% higher than previously announced".  "as if no one would notice the change."  See: New Jersey Funneling Pension Fund Cash to Wall Street Investment Managers, by David Dayen August 26, 2014 and Is New Jersey Fudging Its Pension Fund Results to Defuse a Christie Scandal? by Yves Smith, September 13, 2014.)

From the Financial Times article:

Even though these fees are increasingly refunded to investors, prominent institutions including some top university endowments are reluctant to back the most high-charging fund managers. "They have come up with a formula to enrich themselves more than their investors," says the chief of one leading US endowment.

The Financial Times article also examines ways that tax considerations contort private equity practices and funnel preferential benefits, another reason to close the kinds of loopholes that Schwarzman so watchfully protects.

Things may be coming home to roost, and there is one more sign that institutional investors, as the Times reports, are walking away from these deals more often: At the September 17, 2014 NYPL trustees meeting, home turf for Schwarzman, the trustees were told that the NYPL was implementing a shift in the last couple of years to take risk out of the portfolio, simplify and reduce fees.  Nevertheless, with 72% of its portfolio in public common stocks it still has 15% invested in alternative investments like hedge funds and 10% in private equity and real estate.

A Designated Villain?

Stephen A. Schwarzman leaving an NYPL trustees meeting March 12th outside of which demonstrators gathered to oppose the sale, shrinkage and deliberate underfunding of libraries.  Photo by Jonathan Barkey.

Are we being too hard on Mr. Schwarzman?  Are we asking too many hard, too many unfair questions?  Should we take less of a cue from, put less stock in how ostentatiously Mr. Schwarzman, himself, has declared himself to be antagonistically on one side of a class divide?

Is it just that Mr. Schwarzman sets himself up as too much of a target when he proclaims himself in superlatives, saying that Blackstone is, among other things, the world's largest real estate investment firm, the largest owner of houses in the United States, one of the "four largest placement agents," the world's largest investor in hedge funds, the "world's largest manager" (with $88 billion in 2008 and $200 billion in 2013) of "so-called alternative assets, such as private-equity, real-estate, and hedge funds-esoteric vehicles"mostly on behalf of "corporate and public pension funds, endowments of universities and other nonprofit institutions, insurance companies" with investors that included "Dartmouth College, Indiana University, the University of Texas, the University of Illinois, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Ohio Public Employee Retirement System."?

This 2008 New Yorker article's title reference's Wall Street Journal coverage of a birthday party Mr. Schwarzman threw for himself that garnered negative attention for its ultra-lavishness

How much of Mr. Schwarzman's being such a conspicuously large target accounts for a 2008 New Yorker story commencing with an evaluation that, with a sort of Gordon Gekko emblematic emphasis, Mr. Schwarzman:

. . had become the designated villain of an era on Wall Street-an era of rapacious capitalists and heedless self-indulgence that had driven the Dow Jones Industrial Average to new highs, along with the prices of luxury real estate and contemporary art, while the incomes of ordinary Americans stagnated or fell.

(See: The Birthday Party- How Stephen Schwarzman became private equity’s designated villain, By James B. Stewart, February 11, 2008.)

Are there lines that just shouldn't be crossed when making making money?  For instance, even if we believe that virtually, by definition, prisons should never be privatized and subjected to the profit-making motivations of incarcerating more people longer and for lesser infractions,* if prisons are privatized should it be off limits to invest in them?

(* Michael Moore had some ghastly fun with this in his "Capitalism: A Love Story"documentary segment running through unfortunately true facts about private prison operators kicking back money to judges to keep children in prison, the "kids for cash scandal".)

Are we too quick to hold NYPL trustee Schwarzman accountable for the debacle that was the sale of the Donnell Library or for the push for even more library sell-offs and shrinkage with the NYPL's Central Library Plan that, although the NYPL did not publicize it, would have involved public expenditures of over half a billion dollars?  Mid-Manhattan and the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business libraries were to be sold while the research stacks of the Central Reference Library holding three million books were to be destroyed.

Is it within bounds to observe that pulling back on resources like libraries helps send more people to prison?  According to Neil Gaiman:

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

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

Mr. Schwarzman is not the only plutocrat who invests in such anti-social, currently money-making activities as hydro-fracking, with all its myriad long-term pollutions, toxins, water usurpation, radioactivity, earthquakes . .   When it comes to the ravaging the entire planet for the benefit of a few with the promotion of more fossil fuel use that will significantly bump up the effects of global warming, Schwarzman isn't likely to catch with the Kochs brothers, or even just David.  Brother David lives in the same building as Schwarzman, 740 Park Avenue, now an infamous symbol of wealth, income and political inequality with assists from Alex Gibney's documentary “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream”* and the book that preceded it, "740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building," by Michael Gross.

(*  The film targets New York Senator Charles E. Schumer as "a chief culprit" in protecting the "tax break benefiting hedge-fund moguls" including Schwarzman.)

David Koch who, with his brother Charles have also been attacking universal national healthcare, seems to has his name ubiquitously on everything these days despite such other anti-social activities as financing climate science denial.  Why should we then care or consider it inappropriate that Mr. Schwarzman's name should have appeared on the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library that would have been so ruined by the real estate deal oriented shrinkage plans he supported?

I think the answer is that it isn't just Mr. Schwarzman and his activities we should be objecting to and even though we are not, per se, talking the 1%, (actually the top tenth of 1%, .01% of all Americans) where an increasing imbalance of wealth is piling up, there are multiple other individuals we should be concerned about in that elite and exclusive group. . .

. . . Maybe it can be argued that putting David H. Koch's name on ballet theaters, NOVA Science episodes, hospital centers, or new oil-black public fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (weren't we better off with the old fountains and plaza?) somehow ameliorates the fact that we are trading in our environment, probably together with the planet's future, by letting Charles and David pursue ever greater wealth in whatever manner they choose.  Maybe it can also be argued that, in this besieged world where the middle class is already being squeezed out of existence with the spoils divided up, pension funds are best off partaking in dismantling the jobs of other workers in their state to curtail losses.  (That argument is suspect, however, if these equity funds don't even keep pace with the broader stock market). . . .

. . .  Nevertheless, does it make sense for us as a society to be signing on to losing propositions that shuffle wealth upwards and then content ourselves with these booby prizes as consolation?  Unless we are all in abject surrender mode, isn't it time to remove David H. Koch's name from all those public properties to which he has affixed it and remove Stephen A. Schwarzman's name from the NYPL's 42nd Street Central Reference Library?  Thereafter shouldn't we put a halt to the anti-social activities that have financed such ill-advised public honorings whether they be Mr. Koch's, Mr. Schwarzman's or anyone else setting such lamentable examples?

Sharon L. Greenberger in government and now . . .  still selling libraries?

Sometimes coincidence seem just too frequent and sometimes it will surprise you where certain people will turn up.

Sharon L. Greenberger

Back last August I wrote a long article, the saga of the Brooklyn Public Library’s creation and pursuit of a “Strategic Real Estate Plan” to sell and shrink (“right-size”) its libraries, an article put together through the vantage of reading over ten years of the Brooklyn Public Library’s own minutes.   See: Sunday, August 31, 2014,  Mostly In Plain Sight (A Few Conscious Removals Notwithstanding) Minutes Of Brooklyn Public Library Tell Shocking Details Of Strategies To Sell Brooklyn's Public Libraries.

One of the BPL trustees who emerged as a fascinating spearhead pushing the plans to put library real estate in the hands of developers was Sharon L. Greenberger (the “L” stands for “Lee”) who was appointed to the BPL board by Mayor Bloomberg.  She was chief of staff for Bloomberg’s top development dog, Daniel Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding.

It was Ms. Greenberger who became the key designated leader of a BPL board task force created in the fall of 2008 to promote the "Strategic Real Estate Plan."  She regularly appears in the minutes pushing it forward. She is the one who introduced to the board Karen Backus, the former Forest City Ratner vice president, who was hired to create the real estate plan in 2007 and who in her task force role was responsible for coordinating with Backus and being a conduit for all board comments to her.  Greenberger’s committee in February 2009 also reviews whether to hold off on capital work that needs to be done at the Sunset Park Library, given that a secret “Revson Study” called for that library to become a “Mixed Use Real Estate” opportunity.

That “Revson Study” must be a pretty eye-opening one given that the BPL even now, years afterward, refuses to furnish it pursuant to the Freedom of Information Law as it is required to.

Revson

We’ll be back to Revson.

Back to Greenberger

February 2009 was also when Ms. Greenberg’s real estate committee is reportedly in communication with New York City’s Landmarks Commission to ensure that landmark designations don’t interfere with the real estate-related ambitions the BPL has for its multiple historic libraries.

Greenberg over time winds up in a fair number of other development and government related positions, all of which are interesting. 

Greenberger with NYU president John Sexton

For a while Greenburger was involved with NYU’s controversial expansion plan as Vice President of Campus Planning and Real Estate for New York University.  She was described as having “bolted” from it.  When she left to become President and CEO of the New York City School Construction Authority, Greenwich Village Historic District Director Andrew Berman  criticized her for her involvement in selling air rights to developers while at NYU and quipped that the same thing might now happen to NYC schools, something that ultimately proved to be a very valid concern. (See: Planning czar bolts N.Y.U. for Bloomberg schools job, By Lincoln Anderson, April 19 - 25 2006.

From the School Construction Authority Ms. Greenberger moved on to the Department of Education.  She left there in 2011 following the exceptionally brief troubled tenure and departure of Schools Chancellor Cathie Black, the Bloomberg appointee from the public relations world who had no education experience.

Greenberg wasn’t the only Doctoroff staff person to show up on the BPL’s board.  There was also Laurel Blatchford, a Senior Policy Advisor to Daniel Doctoroff before she moved on to become Deputy Commissioner for Strategy Planning, Policy, and Communications at New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).  She later was involved on the private sector side in events working towards the dismantling of the South Street Historic District.

If you read the previous longer NNY article it describes much more about how other Bloomberg operatives like Bloomberg Counsel Anthony Crowell another Bloomberg trustee and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris, also charged with overseeing real estate matters for Bloomberg, were presiding over BPL governance matters in various ways.

Greenberger and Blatchford both overlap in their BPL board tenures, interestingly with another BPL trustee, Janet Offensend.

Greenberger showed up on the BPL board in December of 2004, appointed by Mayor Bloomberg for a five year term.  This is roughly the same time that Janet Offensend makes her first appearance in the BPL's minutes (September 21, 2004).  Ms. Offensend is interesting as another key BPL trustee associated with the BPL’s library sales although she didn’t get appointed to the board until the end of 2005.  Ms. Offensend shows up in the minutes about half a year after her husband David's assumption of the position of Chief Operating Officer at the NYPL where he would oversee the sudden, secretive sale of the Donnell Library in 2007 and the Central Library Plan, another massive boondoggle involving library shrinkage and the proposed sale of the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL, the 34th Street Science, Industry and Business Library, together with the destruction of stacks at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and removal of its books.

Evercore

David G. Offensend started as Chief Operating Officer at the NYPL in the first half of 2004, coming from Evercore, a private equity and investment firm that spun off from the Blackstone Group, an investment company which has, as just one of its many lines of business, the world's largest real estate investment company, and which is headed by Stephen A. Schwarzman.  Mr. Schwarzman transferred $100 million to the NYPL when it was his understanding that the Central Library Plan would then proceed with its plans to shed valuable Manhattan real estate.  Oddly, months before the relatively contemporaneous Donnell sale was publicly known, there was weird speculation in the press that Schwarzman and his Blackstone Group would be involved in an acquisition of Orient Express, the company that it was revealed had contracted to purchase Donnell when information about the apparently bidless sale came out.

Where Are They Now?

Where is Sharon L. Greenberger now?  Yes, she has been at New York Presbyterian, SVP for Facilities Development and Engineering. . .  But she can also be found on the board of the “Charles H. Revson Foundation.”

Remember that “Revson Study” the BPL won’t release?  That study about libraries converted into  “Mixed Use Real Estate Opportunities”?

Recently the Revson Foundation was one of a principal movers and funders behind “Re-imagining New York City's Branch Libraries” that set up an orchestration of “six interdisciplinary teams to present innovative design solutions for the challenges facing branch libraries.”
More than one set of these presentations was made.  I missed the first one that borrowed Brian Lehrer from WNYC to moderate.  I was at the one at the New School’s Furman Center on January 12th early this year.  That evening's audience was informed that materials were going to be put up the web, but they decided not to put up a video of the evening.  It could have been embarrassing in some respects.

At the end of the presentation, the moderating New School host, summing up, said the following:

And again, as the final presentation has shown, and we will see again hopefully, at the end a library is real estate.  It's an integral ingredient in urban development.  I've studied libraries for years, and many design projects around the country have found it's often a nice placating gesture in a real estate development. You want to do commercial development?: Put a library in it and you win a new public that you might not have had on your team initially.  So in short a library has many fronts and functions.

The last presentation referred to above had, among other things, shown, with accompanying diagrams, how provision of libraries could be exchanged for community approval of real estate development: A better, bigger library traded for an upzoning where it is built, or the upzoning of an entire area surrounding such a library based on the exchanged assurance that surcharges on the new development would be paid into the library system’s general coffers.  Anything paid in by what was referred to as such a “surcharge,” would, theoretically, have to not be subtracted out of the city’s budget on the other end. . . . but that virtually insurmountable problem wasn’t hinted at.

Let developers upzone and get a bigger library?

Libraries as `nice placating gestures' to `win’ public approvals for development? . .

. . . Such enticement plans could hardly work if the public felt that libraries were a basic public service they were entitled to no matter what- And wasn’t such public entitlement the deal Carnegie struck with the city when he donated most of the city's libraries?  It's a deal the city is now breaking.

The only way such enticement plans work is if the public is kept starved for libraries and starved for library funding.  That, perversely, puts people hoping to use libraries as pawns for lubricating development in the camp of wanting libraries perpetually underfunded or even on the brink of extermination . . .

Such enticement plans do not work if libraries, like police, fire and sanitation departments, are looked upon as inherent public goods that pay for themselves because the cost of doing without them would be greater.

The presenters at these “re-envisioning” forums were all propounding themselves as being pro-library and pro-library funding..

The entire evening of presentations, more than three hours even in incomplete form, and even before it was opened up for audience questions, served up some good ideas.  It also served up some silly ones and some other ideas that were ominous and frightening.

The talk about having fewer books at the libraries was far too cheerful.  There was talk about libraries that would be appreciably smaller, their “flexible” spaces less committed to traditional library use with the idea of cramming in multiple competing prospective uses.  One possibility focused on: “ephemeral” small temporary storefront libraries.

As I made the point when audience questions were permitted, when evaluating all of this, what gets thrown out as a smorgasbord mix of good, silly and bad ideas is less relevant than which of these ideas gets cherry picked for actual execution by library administration officials.  The panelist presenters were loath to comment when I asked them what they thought of actual plans materializing against the background of the cloud of ideas thrown up.  The plans we have witnessed actually materializing involve sale and shrinkage of libraries and elimination of books, all of this structured to benefit the real estate industry: Selling and shrinking central destination libraries like the Donnell and Brooklyn Heights libraries,* and similarly the Central Library Plan shrinking library space and eliminating books while selling Mid-Manhattan and the Science, Industry and Business libraries.

(* The first ever hearing about selling off a NYC library, this one, will be held Wednesday, June 17th.)

The fact is that the Revson Foundation, as with the too-toxic-to-release “Revson Study” about converting libraries to multi-use development opportunities has been suspiciously in the background and suspiciously aligned with supporting these development ambitions.

The Revson Foundation has prominently backed Spaceworks, a private firm, technically a not-for-profit, comprised of real estate and political insiders that has as one of its principal purposes the privatizing takeover of space to shrink libraries.  Spaceworks targeted as one of its first guinea pig experiments the shrinking of the 7,500 square foot Red Hook Library down to just 5,500 square feet.  This was although the Center For an Urban Future in a report funded by the Revson Foundation (and promoting their redevelopment) said, somewhat at cross purposes, that New York City branch libraries should be at least 10,000 square feet or more and notwithstanding that BPL President Linda Johnson, given a high profile platform to speak unchallenged at the Municipal Art Society, said that 7.500 square feet for a library was “woefully inadequate.”

The Revson Foundation has also partnered withUrban Librarians Unite, a group that has testified in favor of selling and shrinking libraries and that also supports Spaceworks.  It donated at a total of $32,000 to that group over the years of 2012, 2013 and 2014.

To find in addition that the Revson Foundation has on its board Sharon L. Greenberger, who as a Daniel Doctoroff city development official was key in structuring the BPL’s plans to turn all its libraries into real estate opportunities, is shocking.

Looking at the Revson Foundation board, there is something else to exacerbate concern: Evercore, the firm spun off from Blackstone that David Offensend co-founded and left to work at NYPL selling and shrinking libraries. Revson Foundation board member Stacy Dick was at Evercore overlapping with for a number of years with Offensend.

Greenberger now?  She's just arriving at another institution that caretakes appreciable other assets about which the public cares.  About a month ago the YMCA announced Ms. Greenberger is becoming its new president.  She starts in July.  See: YMCA of Greater New York Announces Sharon Greenberger as New President & CEO, April 7, 2015.   

Takeover of Charitable Boards By Wall Street Financiers With Not So Charitable Values
There is new study on the increasing dominance of Wall Street financiers on charitable boards:  "The Wall Street Takeover of Nonprofit Boards," by Garry W. Jenkins at Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.  See: Wall Street's latest takeover: Charity boards, by Robert Frank, May 28, 2015.

As CNBC’s Robert Frank summarizes:

the percentage of nonprofit board members in the study who come from finance has doubled since 1989. They hold an even larger percentage of leadership positions on nonprofit boards.

From the report:

As financiers come to dominate the boards of leading nonprofits, it is not surprising that their approaches and priorities have made their way, very explicitly and fundamentally, into the governance of the nonprofit sector.

Among multiple other critiques of the pitfalls of such boards the report notes that “numerous critics have written thoughtfully about the ways in which market-based thinking and approaches applied to the nonprofit sector provide false promise, with the potential to dilute charitable values” and “undermine long-term mission focus.”

Mr. Frank wraps up:

.. as the study makes clear, simply "following the money" may not be the best long-term strategy for today's most important charities.

This report and the Robert Frank summarizing of it apparently assume the good intentions of such dominating board members, their principal concern then being that the approach of such board members will be culturally misguided and insensitive to value that cannot be expressed monetarily

A May 30, 2015 New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed, “Who Will Watch the Charities?,” by David Callahan, founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, is far more caustic and cynical.  “(W)e should end the charade that all philanthropy is somehow charitable,” says Mr. Callahan.  He cites how earlier this year “a school reform group in Philadelphia offered $35 million to help that city close a funding gap, but demanded the right to open more charters as a condition and wouldn't disclose its donors.”  He warns a big problem with modern philanthropy: “how inextricably entwined it has become with politics and ideology.”  He says:

it’s alarming how in an era of high inequality, private funders have a growing say over central areas of civic life like education and public parks, and how this influence is often wielded against a backdrop of secrecy.

Mr. Callahan says that the secrecy can’t go on, predicting that it won’t, saying that as powerful institutions in American life charities need vigilant oversight.

I am not saying that the Revson Foundation has not done many things of value.  What's more I am sad to be questioning it at all as my aunt, Kay Daly, was Vice President of Revlon in charge of advertising and a close colleague of Revlon’s founder, Charles Revson Sr. who set up the Revson Foundation.  His son, Charles Revson Jr,. his son, is also on the Revson Foundation’s board.

Revson Board

I’ll leave it to the reader to study and try to discern how and by whom influence gets exercised on the Revson Foundation’s board.  I have not yet had time to do as much deep research as I’d like.

Does it matter that Sharon L. Greenberger is really more a development operative hailing from the Bloomberg administration’s Daniel Doctoroff days, than a financier and technically from Wall Street?

Does it matter that Cheryl Effron, a real estate developer on the board, has strong ties to the Bloomberg administration (see this from 2011):

In 2009 she founded Greater NY, a public-private partnership based in the Mayor's Office to engage fifty corporate executives in two-year one-on-one strategic partnerships with non-profit executives to develop new models for social service delivery in New York City.

    * * *

She is a trustee of the Mayor's Fund for the Advancement of New York City.

Does it matter that Jeffrey Goldberg on the foundation board is one of the columnists at Bloomberg View set up in May of 2011 as the editorial division of Bloomberg News, that is“an opinion product . .   to some extent, a reflection of its creator,” Michael Bloomberg, mayor at that time.

I invite my readers to investigate more.  These `where are they now' questions are indeed interesting, but where will WE be without libraries?   Wherever we are, we’ll probably be there without many of our other public assets as well. . . Because, if you can’t stop them at libraries, where can you stop them?

PS:  If it makes you feel any better- or worse- the Revson Foundation has given a great deal of money to WNYC radio which now has on its board MaryAnne Gilmartin, the head of Forest City Ratner (a gatekeeper for one of the library sales, Brooklyn Heights) and has recently run promotional spots that are essentially advertising for Forest City Ratner.

Bill de Blasio funders: Library-purchasing developers David Kramer and Jonathan Marvel.  WNYC funder: The Revson Foundation

Here’s a link to a WNYC report: De Blasio Furiously Raising Funds, Privately, by Anna Sale. 

The article, informative and newsworthy mostly as long list of “who is helping” de Blasio, channeling big bucks to his door.  It doesn’t say who is bringing how much and you have to guess who is bringing the most.  You can make some good guesses though.

As you’d suspect the city’s heavy-hitting real estate developers are well represented: William Zeckendorf, the Sitt Family, Larry Silverstein, Fred Heller, Robert Levine and Ronny Levine, Mike Muse and Jason Muss, Ron Moelis, Gary Barnett, David Von Spreckelsen, Donald Capoccia.

A May 27th demonstration against Gary Barnett's Extell gentrifying 227 Cherry Street development that wiped out the local supermarket on the Lower East Side.

You also have people representing them like real estate lawyers Douglas Eisenberg or John Zuccotti, immortalized by having the private park from which Occupy Wall Street was evicted named after him.

There are, of course, lobbyists: Peter Vallone Sr., Sid Davidoff, Ken Fisher.

And then there are many others who may or may not have brought in that much money and who are likely on the list for reasons unconnected with real estate, in some cases perhaps because they even have altruistic hopes in common with the rest of us for Bill de Blasio’s future as mayor: Abby (Abigail) Disney, Emily Madoff, Yetta Kurland, Debbie Almontaser.

Attorney Jim Walden is on the list perhaps because in 2013 he was representing a huge public constituency hoping that de Blasio in his ascension to office as mayor would be key in defeating the sell-off of Long Island College Hospital as part of a plan to turn that facility into waterfront condominium towers.   No such luck: Mr. de Blasio wimped.

No doubt the reason that WNYC did an information dump of all these names for the public to analyze is the supposition that all these people sending money de Blasio’s way wanted him in office and to influence his decisions in office.

People that are particularly interesting on the list in one respect are the people connected to the selling off of New York City libraries, shrinking them to squeeze the best out of the real estate deals that materialize as a result.

David Kramer of Hudson Companies Development is on the list as is Jonathan Marvel of Marvel Architects.  Their fund-raising at this time was concurrent with Kramer and Marvel having a pending application in with the city to buy and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn’s central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.

This was October 2013.  Three months earlier in the campaign de Blasio stood on the steps of 42nd Street’s Central Reference Library with Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) and other activists opposing city library sales to speak of the proposed sale and shrinkage of the city’s libraries, including the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library, in harshly discrediting terms:

It’s public land and public facilities and public value 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

Eleven months after Kramer and Marvel flowed money to de Blasio’s campaign and nine month’s into de Blasio’s term as mayor, the de Blasio administration decided that the Kramer and Marvel application would be the one selected if the sale and shrinkage is approved to go forward.  The sale will entail a substantial loss to the city with library being shrunk down to one-third size.  As a technical matter the process to obtain that approval will commence with a hearing before Brooklyn Community Board 2's Land Use Committee on Wednesday, June 17th.*  The process will take at least 18 months, perhaps as much as two years, and will require de Blasio’s sign-off before it is complete.  A week ago de Blasio told one of the activists opposing library sales that he has not made his decision on the sale yet, but there are plenty who cynically believe he has already committed himself privately to the developer.

(*   This will be the first ever hearing about the selling and shrinking of a major New York City library.  No such hearings were required when the Donnell Library was suddenly and secretively sold off because, in that case, the library, not the city, owned the land.  Similarly, such a hearing isn’t required for the sale of another major destination library, SIBL, Science, Industry and Business Library at 34th Street.)

Developer David Kramer looks on approvingly as library administration officials do a sales pitch for his purchase and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Cointon Library

The developer David Kramer and I live in the same neighborhood, Brooklyn Heights, which the other day resulted in our meeting and a discussion about the proposed library sale giving a young man who was present an impromptu civics lesson.  David described Citizens Defending Libraries and its opposition to the city’s transformation of libraries into real estate deals as being part of the “checks and balances” of the system.

I continued this discussion with him May 27th at a community board meeting where the library administration officials had flogged the plan to sell and shrink the library.  I asked him what check and balance there was to the influence of his money and the money of the real estate industry when it came to library sales.  He said he hadn’t given any money and that money wasn’t a factor in the process. . .

. . .  However, here is record of $4,725.00 going directly from Mr. Kramer to de Blasio’s coffers.

Not on the list published by WNYC is any fund-raising by Forest City Ratner for de Blasio which was prolific, the Daily News reporting on Bruce Ratner and associates sending $73,000 de Blaio’s way.

Forest City Ratner is important because Forest City Ratner is positioned as a gatekeeper able to also benefit from the Brooklyn Heights Library sale.  It was former Forest City Ratner vice president Karen Backus who created the BPL’s still secretly held“Strategic Real Estate Plan” to “right-size” Brooklyn’s libraries by “leveraging” all of the system’s real estate while prioritizing for sale the two libraries next to Forest City Ratner property, the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton library being one and the Pacific Branch the other.

The rationale was to sell the most valuable libraries first, but those are also the libraries most valuable to the public.  What’s considered next most valuable will be seen as the BPL moves down the list.

WNYC’s October 2013 list did have others involved in the library sales.  Among them is Nicholas A. Gravante, Jr. a lawyer that his firm spotlights for trial victories, including “winning an acquittal for three leading New York City real estate companies indicted under the Martin Act” (that means the firms were indicted for making misrepresentations to the public).  Gravante is a board member and is now currently chair of the Brooklyn Public Library board pushing for these library sales.  Other members of his Boies Schiller & Flexner law firm were also on the WNYC list: David Boies and Christopher Boies.

Carlos Scissura (Carlo A. Scissura, Esq.) is on the list. He is currently president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce that is supporting the library sales.  Previously he was General Counsel and Chief of Staff for Borough President Marty Markowitz, who supported the library sale and shrinkage.  Working for Markowitz Scissura served as an ex-officio member of the BPL board and was there for the concocting of the still secret “Strategic Real Estate Plan.”

Lastly, Joe Sitt (the Sitt Family was on the list) is a developer who is likely to have benefitted in ways that have yet to be publicly analyzed and discussed if the part of NYPL's Central Library Plan involving the proposed sale of Mid-Manhattan Library were ever to move forward.
I wrote above that no doubt the reason that WNYC furnished the list of the names of all these people funneling money to de Blasio is the supposition that the money was intended to have influence.. . .
In one final irony as we pay attention to the proposed transformation of city libraries into real estate deals, it is distressing to note that the WNYC article about who is sending money to de Blasio appears with the following note about who is providing money to WNYC:

WNYC is supported by the Charles H. Revson Foundation: Because a great city needs an informed and engaged public

The irony?  The Charles H. Revson Foundation has been suspiciously in the background and supportive of turning New York City libraries into real estate deals.  (See:  Thursday, June 6, 2015, Where Are They Now?: Sharon Greenberger, Evercore and the Revson Foundation- Selling And Shrinking NYC Libraries.). . . . It may be one of the reasons that WNYC reporting on the sale of libraries, something that should be a very important story, has fallen quite short of the mark.

The Revson Foundation gives WNYC big money: In the years 2010 to 2015 the Revson Foundation has given to WNYC (or in one case one of its projects) a total of $1.78 million.

The axiom (courtesy here of Bill Moyers) is that “news is what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity.”

WNYC says that its news reporting is not affected by the sponsors that ‘donate’ money.  WNYC, which now has Forest City Ratner head MaryAnne Gilmartin on its board, also takes sponsorship money from Forest City Ratner, in return for which it has run what are essentially advertisements for the firm.  WNYC has regularly been a publicist telling the public volumes of what the Revson Foundation wants known about how it is spending its money.  It has not, however, reported about what is going on behind the scenes to turn libraries into real estate deals.

I am reading and now am almost at the conclusion of Scott Sherman’s new“Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library.”  It’s about the fight to save the famed 42nd Street Central Reference Library from the NYPL “Central Library Plan” that would have also sold off the Mid-Manhattan and 34th Street Science, Industry and Business libraries.

The book’s official release date is a few days from now, but ordering directly from the publisher makes it available earlier, which is the way I got copies.

I am fascinated to see how Mr. Sherman ties it all up, although I already suspect that there will be a few threads left tantalizingly hanging.  The book deserves a thorough Noticing New York review, which I hope I will get around to soon.

In the meantime, the book produces some revelations in what I already have read.  One of them involves confirmation of something that was easy to suspect but was never before reported: The Kushner family that owns the New York Observer was in on the sale of the beloved Donnell Library from the outset.

Two November 7, 2007 NY Times stories about real estate deals that turned out to be connected

Why was that easy to suspect?  As reported previously by Noticing New York, on November 7, 2007 the New York Times published two stories that reported separately (even in two different sections of the newspaper) about two real estate deals that ultimately turned out to be connected: The New York Public Library’s announced sale of the Donnell Library and Jared Kushner’s purchase, for a record-setting amount (taken home by Tishman Speyer) of 666 Fifth Avenue.  Jared Kushner is the owner of the New York Observer.

In my previous NNY reporting on these tandem sales I asked: “Did somebody know when 666 was bought that there was other potential value in the building?”  Why? Because ultimately $30.825 million was paid to the owners of 666 Fifth Avenue for `air rights’ freeing the Donnell site developer from restrictions that would have limited what could be built there.

The purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue announced December 2006 occurred in January 2007, ten months before the announced sale of Donnell.  The Times reporting that November said it was the “first major foray into the Manhattan office market, the buyer, the Kushner Companies.”

Scott Sherman’s book reveals that in 2007:

[Marshall] Rose moved rapidly to dispose of the Donnell Library.  Two bidders emerged: The Kushner family, which owns many properties in Manhattan, and a subsidiary of the Bermuda-based Orient-Express company, which owned the abutting “21" Club.

When Citizens Defending Libraries (I as a co-founder of CDL was part of the interview team) interviewed NYPL Chief Operating Officer David Offensend about the NYPL’s library sales he was evasive about the bid process that wasn’t public so it isn’t a surprise that only these two bidders “emerged.”    It is interesting that behind the scenes, the Kushners, looking to make a second major foray into the market, apparently understood the connection and what it meant in terms of the transaction that would ultimately be structured.

Certainly others understood too, but that connection was not furnished publicly at the time Robin Pogrebin was reporting about the announced Donnell sale.  She was misled by the NYPL’s description of a very different transaction involving only an 11-story hotel, not a 50-story luxury tower in which the inclusion of a luxury hotel would be only a small part.

As the Kushner deal to acquire of 666 Fifth was solidified by the end of 2006 at a then suspiciously high price, it looks all the more likely that the Kushners knew of the likeliness of a Donnell sale somewhat earlier that year. . .

. . .  That, checked against the reporting in Scott Sherman’s book, seems to mean that the Kushners knew the outlines of the deal that was shaping up before the NYPL board knew about or approved it.  Notwithstanding, the Kushners were apparently taking significant action presuming they knew how things would unfold.

2006 seems to have been an interesting year for the Kushners.  Jared Kushner acquired the Observer in July 2006.  Also, as the Times reports, his father was released from prison:

Mr. Kushner’s father, Charles B. Kushner, is a company founder and a newsmaker in his own right. A major Democratic fund-raiser, Charles Kushner was convicted last year of 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign donations. He was released from prison earlier this year.

Interesting thing about the owner of the Observer being involved in this deal?: It’s one more New York City news organ less likely to do investigative reporting about New York City library sell-offs. . .

At 53rd Street accross from MoMA, the 97,000 square foot Donnell on land from John D. Rockefeller out of stone that matched Rockefeller Center's

Mr. Sherman’s book has other revelations.  There are, for instance, revelations concerning the loss the NYPL suffered selling Donnell.   Noticing New York and Citizens Defending Libraries have previously made the point that Donnell was sold to net the NYPL less than $38 million.  It turns out the NYPL netted far less than that.  The NYPL collected a gross price of $59 million for the 97,000 square foot library, much of which had been recently renovated.  It is so far costing the NYPL at least $21 million to build the much smaller 28,000 square foot, largely bookless, largely underground library that will `replace' Donnell in 2015 or maybe 2016.

Additional losses must be subtracted.  The NYPL paid millions to professionals to tell them that its essentially stupid real estate transactions were the opposite of that.  That’s the way that you cover your ass when are doing something that you shouldn’t.

But, if the NYPL had tried to build a library that replaced Donnell full scale it would have lost money on the transaction even taking just these figures into account.

There is more information that will come out associated with the cost of removing the books from Donnell.

Books ready to be shipped off, disappearing from Donnell.  Many illions of books that were in Manhattan Libraries are not there anymore.  And there is substantial cost associated with not having them there.

Mr. Sherman’s book identifies some other costs that turned out to be huge in comparison to how little Donnell was sold for:

the outfitting of a temporary replacement library for the Donnell in a cramped space on 46th Street, which turned out to be a very costly proposition–  [NYPL President] LeClerc and Rose had inked a rental lease whose terms called for payment of $850,000 for the first year (with possible increases thereafter), but the Library also spent nearly $5 million to outfit that new temporary facility.

Ergo, even before recognizing that the NYPL would have suffered a net loss if it had to build a full-scale Donnell, the $5 million to outfit the temporary replacement means that the NYPL netted less than $33 million for selling the library and from that there needs to be further subtractions of the $850,000 annual rents for all the years since Donnell closed in spring of 2008.

Meanwhile, the penthouse apartment in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell is on the market for $60 million.  Several weeks 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.”

Having checked via the index, I know that there is one thing that Mr. Sherman didn’t report.

He reported how NYPL COO David Offensend (now replaced- not reported by Sherman- by Iris Weinshall, Senator Schumer’s wife) was a key driver of the Donnell sale and NYPL real estate plans.  Some flatteringly refer to Offensend as a `mastermind' of the plans.

But Sherman did not report that while David Offensend was engaged in such plans at the NYPL his wife, Janet Offensend was named to the board of the Brooklyn Public Library where she was instrumental in the introduction of parallel plans for the sell-off and shrinkage of Brooklyn libraries, including a sale very closely modeled on, almost exactly duplicating, the sale of Donnell: The sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library,   Brooklyn’s central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.*

(* The sale of Donnell was sudden and secretive, but the first ever public hearing about the sale of a major New York City library will be held Wednesday, June 17th, about the proposed sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights library.) 

On the left the Grand Army Plaza Library.  On the right the Brooklyn Heights Library.  Both central destination Brooklyn libraries were designed by Francis Keally, former president of the Municipal Art Society when it was a vital organization

Click to enlarge

“It’s public land and public facilities and public value 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”

That’s the mayor in 2013 as a candidate for election speaking about the tragedy of selling off and shrinking our public libraries, transforming them into real estate deals that benefit developers, not the public.  One of the libraries about which Mr. de Blasio was speaking was the Brooklyn Heights library, Brooklyn’s central destination library on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.  The Brooklyn Public Library is pushing a proposal to turn it into a luxury condominium tower.

Brooklyn Heights library, Brooklyn’s central destination library on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton

The proposal involves a vastly shrunken so-called “replacement” library of minimal size.  The current library is 63,000 square feet; the proposed “replacement” just one-third, 21,000 square feet.  The current library has about 38,000 square feet above ground, the proposed “replacement” just 15,000 square feet above ground.

This coming Wednesday, June 17th, a hearing will commence the process required to decide whether to sell and shrink the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library.  This will be the first ever hearing on such a sale because one was not required or held with respect to Donnell sold in 2007, or the now besieged 34th Street Science, Industry and Business library.  Here’s information about the 6:00 PM hearing:

Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns's Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)

I urge everyone who cares about this city to be there.  (This library is also intended to serve lower Manhattan.)

Probably because the sale does not make sense from the public’s point of view and is proceeding as a boondoggle hand-off to a developer, the Brooklyn Public Library and EDC, the city real estate development corporation that serves developers, is proceeding with an extreme lack of transparency.

This extreme lack of transparency extends even to BPL’s refusal to provide basic information about how much the public is losing and how little the BPL is selling this asset for, including all the costs that should be netted out of the sale.

There many things to consider about what is being lost if this essential amenity is transferred out to a developer looking to make millions, even including the park space and trees surrounding the building and the sale of the public’s light and air. (Urban renewal was once used to bring this site to a lower density in order to have that light and air.)  We have given some consideration to this before:  Tuesday, October 7, 2014, The Public Loss of Selling And Shrinking the Brooklyn Heights Library- How Great Will the Loss Be? Let's Calculate.

And the BPL has already been asked to identify the costs of selling the library which they have refused to do: Thursday, October 9, 2014, Open Letter To Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson and Friday, February 6, 2015, Open Letter To Brooklyn Public Library Trustee Peter Aschkenasy Re Commitment to Provide Information About Library Sale.

Now, the weekend before the hearing, it is probably time to fill in the gap and supply, in basic bookkeeping terms, some fundamental calculations of the dollar value of the asset the BPL is selling and, in dollar terms, how that sale of this asset at a pittance, netting perhaps less than nothing, will be a loss to the public.

We also have a some new information to work with despite the BPL’s efforts to be totally opaque.

The Dollar Value of Just the Library Building Itself

The Brooklyn Heights central destination library is 63,000 feet of extraordinarily serviceable (and adaptable) square feet.  That includes two half-floors of underground space that, similar to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, were set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval.  To say that the building is sturdy is an understatement: When it was built, it was built with space set aside for a bomb shelter with the thought that people could go there to be protected against a nuclear attack.

The building was built in 1962 (at a cost in today's dollars of about $20 million) and opened with a collection of 90,000 volumes.  In 1991 it was enlarged and upgraded (at a cost in today's dollars of about $10 million).  Then, additionally, a reclamation of the space people once thought might be used as a bomb shelter added even more space for books.

Downstairs space set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval

It is therefore relatively safe to say that based on these original costs the book value of the library building alone is in the approximate neighborhood of $30 million.

That’s one starting figure. . . 

What if a new library were reconstructed in the bottom of a luxury tower?  The BPL tells us that reconstructing a new, much smaller library of only one-third size (21,000 square feet) to replace the library will cost $10 million.  But previously they said it would cost $12 million.  Making these low-ball costs all the more suspect and fanciful, the BPL is proposing to sell the library, locking in this extreme shrinkage to an exact footage, without even bothering to design a new library first (let alone engage the public in determining its library size needs).

Actually, putting this vastly shrunken 21,000 square foot library in the bottom of the luxury tower for which there are still no public designs either will probably cost more than $16 million.  Yes, $16+ million.  That’s based on the costs of “replacing” (and shrinking) the slightly larger Donnell Library.  That construction has announced overruns although it still isn’t complete and may not be complete until 2016.

That would mean that replacing the Brooklyn Heights Library full-scale in a luxury tower would cost the BPL (and the public) about $48 million.  That would wipe out entirely what the BPL is being paid to sell the library.  Why?  Because the developer is only paying the BPL a gross price (before we calculate any losses) of $52 million.  And, if the library were being replaced full-scale, all of its 63,000 square feet in the bottom of a luxury tower, the developer would be paying the BPL substantially at lot less than that $52 million gross figure.  The developer would pay less because the developer would be buying less, a smaller balance of development rights, and because it would have to bear a higher cost to build the shell in which the library would build its new space.  (According figures from the BPL’s spokesperson, the developer may be spending about $10 million now.  Three times that amount would be substantial.) 

It has long been known that the NYPL’s sale of Donnell effectively amounted to a loss of millions of dollars of public library assets.  The sale of this library is closely replicates the sale of Donnell with an overlap of people involved in the planning.

Selling public assets for the benefit of developers is more expensive than everyone might immediately suppose.  Unless the BPL plays these shell games (and that involves having to shrink the library as part of the game) it quickly becomes apparent how much the public is losing.

The BPL refuses to give figures, but if the BPL were putting a full scale replacement library in the bottom of the luxury tower it would be costing the BPL around $48 million just for the rebuilding costs . . .  And the developer would also then probably be paying far less than $30 million gross price.  Result?:A very substantial loss.

There is a much better way to evaluate the public dollar value of the building that we are losing in this sale. That’s to consider the cost of erecting a free-standing building on the site today.  One reason that’s important?: Because, whatever size library is put in the bottom of a luxury condominium, that library can never be enlarged afterward.  The current library is enlargeable: Owned by the city, the city can build on the site to enlarge the library or construct for other public uses as the city grows as it and the neighborhood is doing very fast now.

If the BPL erects a free-standing 21,000 square foot replacement library at the site of library, it would cost $20 million according to library spokesperson David Woloch (at the 6/10/2015 Sunset Park Library redevelopment meeting).  Constructing a full-scale, free-standing 63,000 square foot replacement library would cost $60 million.

One might argue, as the BPL promoting the sale no doubt would, that such a library would be newer and "state-of-the art" and that the dollar value involved would not yet be subject to any depreciation to reflect any aging of the building.  On the other hand, one of the things that is thwarting the te BPL in its arguments for selling its building to a developer is that the Brooklyn Heights library was built to last.  It's a case of: They don’t build them like they used to.  As much as the BPL would like to neglect the building and drive it into the ground, fail to clean rest rooms, or make the aspects of the building superficially unappealing, the building frustrates them with its solidity.  Crazy enough, it was meant to be still standing if there ever was a nuclear war.

The BPL has fallen all over itself in silly efforts to exaggerate the building’s current needs. Principal among these efforts has been the BPL’s refusal to repair the air conditioning and its exaggerations that fixing the air conditioning could cost almost $5 million or that making the building pristine and new again could cost around $10 million.  But the BPL has refused to release the information that is available about previous assessments that contradict what they are saying about the air conditioning repair needs.

The BPL initiated plans to turn this (and other libraries) into a real estate deal with a decision that goes back to at least 2007.  Its plan wasn’t announced until January 2013, a year before Bloomberg left office.  The air conditioning conveniently went out of commission six months before the planned announcement of sale where air conditioning problems would be cited as a reason for the sale.

$30 million? $48 million? $60 million?  Those are figures for the dollar value of the library building alone.

But you can’t get a library just for the cost of building the building.  You have to also buy the land and own the development rights. 

The Dollar Value of the Land Under the Building
   
What is the value of the land under the library that we must include as part of the dollar value of the public’s ownership of the library?

The developer is paying a gross price to the BPL of $52 million so the value of the land and development rights that must be added to value of the building is surely at least that.  But the developer isn’t paying to buy all the land or all the development rights so the actual figure is higher than that.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

In addition, what the developer is paying includes a discount for other costs like the cost of demolition.  The public won’t incur any cost of demolition if it retains the library so that adds to the public value of land the public retains.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

The developer is also incurring perhaps $10 million in costs to build the shell for the shrunken replacement library, in effect an additional part of the purchase price paid to the library.   How much then to the $52 million should we add for this? $10 million?

The developer must also rent space for a tiny temporary library (7,500 square feet) for the four years or so the BPL expects it may take to build a shrunken replacement.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?  In the case of Donnell, rent for the tiny cramped interim library beginning when Donnell closed in spring 2008 was pursuant to rental lease terms calling for“payment of $850,000 for the first year (with possible increases thereafter).”  - How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

In the case of Donnell, outfitting that tiny cramped temporary library cost the NYPL, “nearly $5 million.”   One thing that is not yet clear at the moment is whether this outfitting expense would be a cost borne by the BPL (i.e. public), thus an additional public cost of the transaction, or by the developer, in which case it would be an extra factor raising the value of the land and development rights.

The developer is also incurring other costs in buying this land.  Contributions to politicians and elected officials including Mayor di Blasio should properly be considered an additional cost to buy the land and development rights.  When the developer pays his architect more so that his architect can send money in the mayor’s direction, that too should properly be considered an additional cost to buy the land and development rights.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?
  
In fact, it should not be considered that the developer is buying this as unencumbered land in the normal sense.  Because it is a library that the public values and because this deal will properly arouse anger and suspicion with the public it comes with many hurdles, many toll booths that have to be passed through paying fees to high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to sell a  narrative skewed to and paving the road for the public and their elected officials to ignore the obvious math problems associated with this shortchanging of the public.  Among other things the sale will have to go through a multi-year process where the question must be evaluated whether it is absurd to sell this public assets netting virtually nothing.  How much then to the $52 million should we add for this?

How much then is the value of the land and the development rights to the public?  The value of the land that will appreciate in the future?  The development rights that can be used for future expansion and public good?

Somewhere between $65 million and $100 million?  More?

Value of the Library Building PLUS The Library Land

The math above means that the dollar value to the public of the library plus the land it sits on with all accompanying rights is somewhere between a minimum of $95 million and a much higher figure?  That higher dollar value to the public figure could easily be $160 million or could be higher.  A higher figure won’t seem at all preposterous when you see the aggregate value for which luxury condominiums will sell.  In the case of Donnell the penthouse apartment in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell is on the market for $60 million.  Several weeks 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.”

The design for the Brooklyn Heights luxury tower has yet to be released and various statements about its final true height have been misleading but one figure given in the New York Times says it will be a 38-story tower.  The developer has spoken of having extra tall ceilings to make it seem taller and give the apartments more luxurious views.

Netting the Costs Out of The Paltry Amount the Library Is getting for selling Off a $100+ Million Asset

The BPL states that it is getting a gross price of $52 million for selling and shrinking the library.  Out of this must be netted certain costs, most immediately the $16+ million to build the as-yet-undesigned “replacement” library, bring the net cash figure for selling the library down to less than $36 million.

From than $36 million much more must be subtracted.

The reduction in space will supposedly be associated with shifting the functions of the library, business and career functions that ought better to remain in growing Downtown Brooklyn, to cram them into the Grand Army Plaza library.  Will some/all of these functions actually just disappear?  No additional space will be built at the changed location so sacrifices will have to result.  It is not that many years ago a space expansion was required at the Grand Army Plaza library.  The BPL has acknowledged that cramming the functions in will entail substantial construction costs but refuses to furnish these cost to the public. At one time the BPL president Johnson said they were irrelevant and should be ignored and another time BPL spokesperson Davis Woloch said the BPL simply doesn’t know what those costs will be.  Shrinking a library before designing it?  Selling a library before knowing the costs of doing so?  Is this lack of transparency or total stupidity?

Some of the reductions at the Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library will also have to be taken up by other BPL facilities.  Are those costs and sacrifices similarly unknown and unevaluated?

There is the cost both to the public and to the BPL of keeping books off-site and moving them around and these costs can be far heftier than the BPL acknowledges.  There is the cost of moving to a temporary library.  The cost of moving back.  The possible cost of outfitting the temporary library ($5 million like Donnell?).

There is the cost to the community of going without any sort of library for a projected four years and associated disruptions.  (Donnell has turned into possibly eight years.)

These figures which the BPL will not furnish or account for could easily wipe out the paltry $36 million remaining.  It could readily adjust the miniscule “net cash” situation taking it into deep negative territory.  That’s a problem for the BPL, which is trying a divide-and-conquer, smoke-and-mirrors strategy, trying to convince other communities that they will be benefitted by the squandering of these library assets.  The BPL is trying to convince these other communities that if a library is handed out as a prize to a developer this first time with the central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn that their own neighborhood libraries won’t similarly come up somewhere, next in a public-be-damned transaction as the BPL moves down the list in its plan that we know looks at “leveraging”all its real estate assets.

Factoring In the Smaller Library In Calculating the Loss

But to be fair, the BPL is not selling off the entirety of its assets at this site when it sells the library for this shrinkage plan.  With a new library one-third the size of what exists now it may be thought of as selling off somewhere in excess of two-thirds of its assets, not the entire asset.  In excess of two-thirds because, with the development rights transferred, this library can never be enlarged again if the community grows or if the shrinkage turns out to be the mistake that most people have judged it to be.

Math-wise, in dollar value terms, selling off more that two-thirds of the library amounts, based on the previous figures, to selling off $63+ million to $106.7+ million in assets (2/3 x $95 million to $160+ million, plus an adjustment up for selling the development rights).  For this sale the library will get perhaps zero or less.

The smaller, shrunken library, forever to be a depressing reminder of this era of rampaging privatization and plunder would, albeit, have a value.  At the high end, the building’s value would be maybe the $20 million the BPL would spend if it were building a free-standing enlargeable building.  Since that’s not what the BPL is getting maybe we should subtract from that.

Added to that $20 (or less) million building value we must add some associated dollar value for part of the land.  Using the earlier figures that would come to less than $21.7 million to $33.3 million (1/3 x $65 million and $100 million, from which must be subtracted a substantial figure for the extraction of all the development rights).

In other words we would go from having a library with a dollar value to the public of between $95 million to $160+ million, to having a much smaller library with a dollar value to the public of substantially less than, at best, $41.7 million* to $53.3 million. . .

(* This figure may seem disproportionally high because it only uses the top-end figure for new construction.  Those who care about historical and landmark value are likely to view it as coming out too relatively high in the comparisons.)

. . . The bottom line is that we would have sold off $63+ million to $160+ million in assets either at a public loss or netting virtually nothing.. . . Bottom line, in a time of increasing wealth, income and power disparities, this proposal will amount to a huge transfer of capital assets from the public realm to the private.

I believe I have not been unfair in supplying any of these numbers.  I think the unfairness is that the BPL has refused to provide such numbers.

Book ends?:  Brooklyn's two central destination libraries, the Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library and the Grand Army Plaza Library, were both designed by the same famed architect, Francis Keally.

Affordable Public Housing?

The library location of the proposed new luxury tower- Downtown and on the edge of fashionable, historic Brooklyn Heights- Beside a park and near the Promenade

One last factor in the mix?  Like the building of many other luxury towers the developer will seek to build a bigger, taller luxury tower by building, “poor door” fashion, a few “affordable” housing units (114 altogether) in very different locations in the Community Board 2 district.  It is another example of using people’s desperation for affordable housing as bait to strip communities of their assets and drive wedges between different groups.  In doing the calculus, what sort of value should be given to these units?  Good question.  But, if you want to ask that question, then you need to ask another question: Should our libraries be sold off to produce a few units of “affordable” housing?  Because, if so, there is enough need for affordable housing to start selling off all our public assets and libraries would wind up being only a small part of the total inventory of public assets that would be seized and privatized before that need was ever satisfied

"Poor Door": One location where a few "affordable" units would be built resulting in. . .

Another location where a few "affordable" units would be built

Meanwhile, in other privatizing plans very reminiscent of these attacks on libraries, the Mayor is looking to sell our public housing assets.  That includes proposing to shed 14,000 units of public housing from the inventory.  Well after we loose all those units we could pick up few again by selling all the libraries?

Who benefits from these shell games in the end?  Surely not the public.

Linda Johnson speaking to her MAS audience about libraries as real estate- Pictures of the event are up on Flicker

I used to be a member of the Municipal Art Society.  I used to routinely encourage others to become members as well.  But now. . . .

I actually had a sort of extra-specially identification with the Municipal Art Society, a “born under the same star” thing.  The Municipal Art Society, with a long venerable history, was given birth to“in the wake of the World's Columbian Exposition, when the Great White City in Chicago ushered in” a new era of expecting more and better for New York in terms of its urban design.  Those are interests of mine.  My father’s paternal grand parents, Mr and Mrs. Peter White, were key in establishing and running the Irish Village that was part of that same 1893 Columbian Exposition, and their coming to the United State to do so is how the White family arrived here from Ireland.

Mr. and Mrs. (Annie) Peter White and the Irish Village at the Colombian Exposition

I don’t know that this gives me greater or lesser rights to be irked with what the Municipal Arts Society has become, but , like many others, I am mightily riled.  As it happens, a MAS board member told me ahead of time about the 180 degree turn around that for MAS that was intended.  Not everyone has perceived it yet, but people are fast catching on to what’s happened: Once part of the fight against such abominations as Atlantic Yards, (“the poster child for what goes wrong when process is ignored. . . a poorly designed project that has polarized the community and that squanders both opportunity and public trust”), MAS now goes out of its way to give multiple bogus awards for such developer-driven blighting of the city.

MAS Puts Its Weight Behind Library Sales and Shrinkage- Somewhat Deceptively

The 63,000 square foot Brooklyn Heights central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn.  The admired base-relief murals are by C Spampintato.

At MAS’s February 26, 2015, Annual Members Meeting, MAS has continued to adulterate its its brand promoting, rather than holding to account, unbridled development, this time giving Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson a platform to pitch unchallenged for another prize currently being eyed by the development community: sale and shrinkage of libraries to transform them into real estate deals.  These deals benefit the developers they are handed out to, not the public.

As BPL President Linda Johnson spoke at the annual meeting MAS already had the Brooklyn Heights Library sale up and prominently featured on its website “Watchlist.”  There the proposed sale was advertised, not accurately, but as a developer would probably prefer to have things described to stay low on the radar screen and sidestep public opprobrium.

    •    The description says that BPL is `partnering' with a developer to build a 20-story condo building  on the site of the Brooklyn Heights Library.’  Was that correct?  No, not really.  Although something of a black box with the developer saying he is `starting from scratch'on the design and with no rendering furnished to the public showing all the available development rights being used, this building was last stated in the New York Time to be 38 stories tall, not “20-stories.”  (The release of this non applicable but apparently very multi-purpose rendering accompanied earlier statements by the Times that the building was going to be 30 stories.)

    •    The description said this joint venture will provide BPL with a more modern library “on the ground floor.”  It doesn't say that it will be a vastly shrunken library providing fewer functions, only 21,000 square feet (of which only 15,000 will be above ground- “on the ground floor” per the description) vs. the existing 63,000 square feet.  The Business and Career functions of the library will be banished from it.  Books will be exiled.

    •    The description said that the sale will provide the BPL with “an additional $40 million,” a figure only achieved by deliberately low-balling and not disclosing all the costs and public losses that need to be netted out.  In actuality, in selling the library and shrinking down this $100+ million asset to one-third size to benefit the developer, the BPL is likely even losing money when all is considered.

    •    The description said that the money netted from the sale will be “put towards maintaining and restoring other libraries in the borough.”    In actuality, the money from the sale goes to the city and there is no assurance that it would ever be returned to maintain and restore other libraries. The only obligation to do so would be a moral one, and since the city's current unprecedentedly low funding of the libraries is already immorally low there is no assurance such moral suasion would work.  Quite the contrary, since the current low funding levels go back to the introduction of plans for low funding to justify such self-cannibalizing funding schemes, if low funding leads successfully to the sales that real estate industry salivates for there will actually be an inducement to continue such low funding level to provoke more such sales in the future.

Here is the complete language of the MAS-published pitch for the project:

Brooklyn Public Library
BPL has partnered with Hudson Companies to build a 20-story condo building on the site of the current branch library at Cadman Plaza. This joint venture will provide BPL with a more modern library on the ground floor, as well as an additional $40 million to be put towards maintaining and restoring other libraries in the borough. This innovative project is part of broader trend of leveraging development to pay for civic assets.

BPL Linda Johnson Presumes When Speaking To the MAS Audience She Should Be Talking Real Estate

Johnson, in her calibrated pitch to the MAS meetings audience began, right off the bat, with an assumption that real estate was the most important part of what she was going speak to them about:

I am pleased to be here. I feel sometimes that I'm speaking more about real estate these days than I am  about literacy, . . . 

And was careful, continuing, to assure that other concerns were driving her focus on real estate (announced to her board as her top priority when she started at the BPL):

. . . but we need to actually address the real estate issues in order to deliver the services that the library is striving to do.

Attentive to the Fact That Size Matters

Ms. Johnson later similarly soothed the audience about how she cares about adequate library size when she explains that libraries built during the Lindsay era that are "on average 7500 square feet which is woefully small."  Ms. Johnson doesn't tip her hand to the audience to say that one of contradictory priorities was to shrink such a "woefully small" 7500 square foot library in Red Hook down to just 5,000 square feet in a privatizing handing off 2000 square feet of the library to Spaceworks in a scheme that deserved and got a lot more scrutiny from the local community than Ms. Johnson wanted.

Ms. Johnson indicated that she is attentive to the concept that "because of the way neighborhoods have changed"there are "libraries that are over-served and under-served" as a result.  That principle enunciated in the abstract may have lulled the her hearers when she got around to saying that she was going to be shrinking down to one-third size a key destination library, the downtown Brooklyn Heights Library in one of the fastest growing neighborhoods and business districts of the city's fasted growing borough.

A Plan For One Million Square Feet of Real Estate

Before she actually tells the gathering about the Brooklyn Heights library deal she acknowledges something ominous: That the BPL made a deal with the Bloomberg administration (now being carried out by the de Blasio administration) with respect to "over 1,000,000 square feet of real estate" used by the library ("It's actually owned by the city of New York The library is its custodian").  She says:

We said to the city if you give us this kind of money [capital funding], this kind of funding, we'll do our part as well.  And we will do the best that we can to use the assets that have been entrusted to us to take care to take care of them, in other words, try and leverage the properties that we have to the full extent.

Of All Things To Tell a Municipal Art Society Audience! 

Book ends?:  Brooklyn's two central destination libraries, the Downtown Brooklyn Heights Library and the Grand Army Plaza Library, were both designed by the same famed architect, Francis Keally.

That's when she progresses to the subject of selling the Brooklyn Heights Library and progresses to an assertion quite ironic for her to state before an assembly of Municipal, Art Society patrons:

The Brooklyn Heights library which has been in the press a fair amount recently . . . was built in the early 1960s and it's an aging library that's no longer really doing the kind of job that it should be. There is nobody that I have heard yet who has argued that this is a building which is architecturally important or historically significant.

No one has argued that "this is a building which is architecturally important or historically significant"?  The Library was designed by Francis Keally, who designed the borough's other esteemed central destination library at Grand Army Plaza.  Francis Keally was also, in his time, the president of the Municipal Art Society.  Keally was not only an admired architect; he fought for preservation of valuable, beautiful older buildings and their neighborhoods.  As MAS president, he fought for the passage of the laws that eventually would protect them.  Landmarks historian Anthony C. Wood writes in his 2008 book, "Preserving New York":

Francis Keally stressed that what was at stake "goes far beyond Washington Square and the Village."  He asked his audiances to imagine a New York where a skyscraper had been substituted for the Church of the Ascension, or where the south side of Gramercy Square was built up "to smother the sky."  Noting the loss of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas, he paints a picture of a New York where Trinity, St. Paul's, St. Bartholomew's, St. Patrick's, and St. Mark's-in-the-Bouwerie have all gone "the same way."

Keally's concern about building up on the "south side of Gramercy Square . . . to smother the sky"makes one think of Ms. Johnson's assertion that one good reason to tear down Keally's library to build a tower (perhaps 38 stories) that will loom over Brooklyn Heights from its edge is to "improve the skyline."  When the first Landmarks Commission was appointed pursuant to the law that Keally had been instrumental in passing, Keally was on Mayor Wagner's nominating committee to suggest the appointments.  The commission was appointed in 1962 the same year the library opened.

Ms.Johnson posing at the MAS event with Vin Cipolla, a successor as MAS president to Francis Keally who helped usher in era of preservation.  Cipolla that night gave Johnson a platform to advocate for the destruction of Keally's library.

Landmarks and Libraries

Contrary to Ms. Johnson's dismissiveness of Keally's architecture for the design of his second destination library in Brooklyn, both the New York Times and the New York Herald instantly pronounced the library as "handsome" when it opened, the Times saying it was a "clean-lined limestone building of two stories, with book sacks below ground" and the Herald describing it as "limestone-and-red granite." 
The admired "sculptured figures at the glass-pannled entrance" are  "the work of C Spampintato."

Further, although Ms. Johnson ventured to quickly tell the MAS assembly the building was not "historically significant," a good precaution if you suspected that any of the MAS old-timers might be around, behind the scenes the BPL had already engaged in measures to prevent the Landmarks Commission from recognizing as historic any libraries it wanted to transform into real estate projects and this library was a top such target on the BPL's and Johnson's list.  According to BPL minutes from February 2009, in a rather frank acknowledgement that the system works in ways we often pretend it doesn't:

Landmarks informed BPL that they had completed their survey of our branches and found that we have 8 branches that are potentially eligible for designations as landmarks.  The Committee [Capital Planning & Oversight Committee, co-chaired by Sharon L. Greenberger and Alice Fisher Rubin] recommended that in response to Landmark's request to prioritize these branches, the Library will respond that we are conducting a comprehensive analysis of our real estate portfolio and would like to wait on any decisions on landmarking individual sites until the Board has reviewed and approved the findings of the analysis.

Ms. Johnson, the BPL and Landmarks have been less than transparent about this.  Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) have requested via Freedom of Information (and basic transparency precepts) the communications between the BPL and Landmarks about these libraries: It is just one of many things the Johnson and the BPL have refused to make public.

A Sturdy Library With a History
The Keally library is 63,000 feet of extraordinarily serviceable (and adaptable) square feet.  That includes two half-floors of underground space that, similar to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, were set up to hold books for easy on-the-spot retrieval.  Echoing the 42nd Street library, an “automatic conveyor belt” helped deliver books more efficiently.  To say that the building is sturdy is an understatement: When it was built, it was built with space set aside for a bomb shelter with the thought that people could go there to be protected against a nuclear attack.

The air-conditioned building was built in 1962 (at a cost in today's dollars of about $20 million) and opened with a collection of 90,000 volumes.  In 1991 it was enlarged and upgraded (at a cost in today's dollars of about $10 million).  Then, additionally, a reclamation of the space people once thought might be used as a bomb shelter added even more space for books.

The library was built intending to serve all of Brooklyn and, being the only library addressing certain business needs and functions (“the only library in the city” for such needs), was intended to draw patrons not only from all of Brooklyn but Manhattan, including lower Manhattan’s Wall Street right “across the river.”  As well as accommodating staff according to earlier, kinder standards the BPL does not now want to meet, the building has rooms used as conference rooms and more rooms that could be similarly used.  Its construction involved “special workrooms for business researchers,” including cubicles.  Wanting to give the library over to development (secretly since about 2007) the BPL has not adapted or made these spaces available for the kinds of uses the public would likely appreciate.
When it opened, the library's “collection in depth” included books “dating from 1786.”  In one irony- I'll explain below- one of the antecedent libraries that was combined to become this library opened “in 1823 with a wheelbarrow load of books” and when “General Lafayette laid the cornerstone of the building” Brooklyn resident Walt Whitman, a child then, “was present and was kissed by the general.”

 To read more of the articles from which the above quotes come, see New York Times, Brooklyn Library, Open Today Is rich In Business Information, by Sanka Knox, June 1, 1962 and New York Herald Tribune, In handsome New Home- Brooklyn Business Library Opening, by William G. Wing, June 1, 1962.


Urban Renewal and Some Unfortunate Ironies

The 1962 library was built using urban renewal to lower the density of this area of Brooklyn Heights and the border of Downtown Brooklyn.  That same urban renewal bull-dozing destroyed Walt Whitman’s print shop on Cranberry Street.  What remains now is the vague attachment of a name, “Whitman Close,” to some urban renewal townhouses near that spot. While it's strange the way these untethered names can float away from history, there is another example: Johnson told her captive MAS listeners that by selling off the $100+ million* Keally library the BPL hoped to have just a few dollars to spend on other libraries in its system, naming as one of them, the “Walt Whitman Library,” less than a mile’s walk of about 15 minutes away.

(*  Johnson told the audience that "The value of the property was not clear to us at the time, but through an RFP process we determined that it was worth over $50 million."  The problem is that out of that $50 million the BPL is likely to net virtually nothing or less, and what price a developer will pay for the land in this kind of process in not representative of what the value of the buildingandthe land is to the public.) 

This citing of other libraries that will supposedly benefit is a divide-and-conquer strategy on the part of the BPL as it tries to push through its destruction of the Keally library.

The “Walt Whitman Library,” which is near the Navy Yard serves those living in the surrounding projects who also regularly use the Brooklyn Heights Library to a very great extent.  One of the insidious little secrets behind shrinking the Brooklyn Heights Library is that there are those who view the shrinkage as a way of making it a library just for the increasingly upper-crust Heights and disinviting visitors from other neighborhoods who are not desired.  See: Tuesday, May 14, 2013, A Consideration of Race, Equality, Opportunity and Democracy As NYC Libraries Are Sold And The Library System Shrunk And Deliberately Underfunded.

Plan To Move On To Other Libraries

Part of the lack of transparency on the part of the BPL is its refusal to release the “strategic real estate” plan, the formulation of which involved hiring a former Forest City Ratner vice president, Karen Backus, who then prioritized for sale two libraries adjacent to Forest City Ratner property, the Pacific Branch and the Keally Brooklyn Heights Tillary Clinton Library.   The plan deals with all the BPL real estate, which they say they want to “leverage”all of, but one thing its secrecy means is that, again in divide-and-conquer strategy, the public doesn’t know which libraries are next.  Ms. Johnson frequently denies that there is a list of libraries to move down, the most valuable at the top.  But she gave the MAS listeners (who probaly thought sale of the Keally library as she described sounded great) a clue that the BPL would be moving down the list, saying that the Heights Library sale and shrinkage is:

a model now that we are taking and looking at how we can tweak it to see if there are other examples in the borough which might benefit.

ULURP Starts Wednesday

She explained that the BPL was hopefully going to “get to ULURP soon” with the plan“in the works.”  The start of ULURP is the commencement of process required for public review and to obtain approval if the library, owned by the city as public property, is to be sold and shrunk.  She was speaking in February.  ULURP (Uniform land use Review Procedure), likely an extended process, is now scheduled to begin for this proposal this Wednesday, the 17th.  See:

Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns's Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)

Libraries as Spear Points To Push Development

Is there any extreme to development that MAS would still oppose?  Some, maybe, it seems.  In his presentation that night Justin Davidson asked about super-super tall towers: Who owns the sky?

Meanwhile, in discussions, forums and reports that Ms. Johnson has praised as consistent with her aims, the provision of new or better libraries has been described as bait, or `placation,' to induce communities to accept upzonings to accommodate development.  Consider for example the Clinton Hill Library.

One plan to convert a library into a mixed-use development opportunity that was flushed out after I wrote about it here last August in Noticing New York is a plan for the Sunset Park Library.  Ms. Johnson spoke specifically about it next.  The BPL plans to make the Sunset Park Library. larger, in part because the community demanded it if there is to be any redevelopment.  It is planning to make this library on the R Train line 20,600 square feet or bigger, close to the same 21,000 square feet that it wants to shrink the Brooklyn Heights Central Library down to.

I’d like to consider that this proposed larger size for the Sunset Park Library is also because of the sunlight and focus that Noticing New York and Citizens Defending Libraries brought to the process.  As for what the original redevelopment plans for Sunset Parks were, going back to at least 2009, the BPL won’t release them indicating some embarrassment.

Libraries That Can't Grow With the City

Unfortunately, part of what the BPL is doing is saying, divide-and-conquer fashion, that the Sunset Park enlargement will theoretically be paid for out of selling the valuable central downtown Keally library.  Also, unfortunately, like the Brooklyn Heights Library, the proposed new Sunset Park Library will be in the base of a residential building and can never be enlarged afterward.  Involving long closures both libraries are susceptible to bait-and-switch with the BPL already probably underestimating the cost of building the Sunset Park Library.

The need for future growth is one reason why, if libraries are ever provided in the future as part of a multi-use development program, they should be in the base of commercial buildings where (unlike residential buildings) the city publicly owns more of the building for future expansion.

Population in Sunset Park has recently surged 19%.  Upzonings were pushed through not long ago, but building to take advantage of it has largely not yet occurred.  There are new city proposals, essentially additional upzonings, whereby buildings permitted to be 8-stories on Fourth and Seventh Avenues could become ten stories tall if certain kinds of units being considered are provided in the process.

Bows to Mayor's Development Deputy

MAS president Vin Cipolla and Deputy Mayor for Development Alicia Glen at the event

Also featured at the MAS annual meeting was Alicia Glen, late of Goldman Sachs, New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Development.  Ms. Johnson made reference to Glen’s presence and how redevelopment libraries would be part of the mayor’s plan to provide “affordable” housing units. That’s a stated reason for the BPL’s redeveloping both the Sunset Park Library and the Heights Library for 50 units and 114 units respectively, the latter being done “poor door” fashion far away from fashionable, historic Brooklyn Heights.  MAS president Vin Cipolla, interviewing Glen that night, similarly proclaimed that MAS was behind the mayor’s focus on full steam development to produce “affordable” units although many others worry about how Mayor de Blasio assured the Real Estate Board of New York that virtually all the rules could be thrown out to make developers happy in the process.  That involves throwing out a lot of what MAS fought for in the past.

Ms. Johnson had many captive ear to hear her unchallenged pitch for why selling and shrinking libraries is good

Ms. Johnson concluded her address circling back to the real estate-not real estate theme with which she started: 

So libraries are, in fact, not only about real estate, but also mostly about the people, about the great work that our libraries do inside the buildings, and about literacy as it relates to our communities in the way we work today.

Unchallenged, Ms. Johnson left the appreciably-sized MAS audience with a very skewed view of what she and the BPl are up to.  Let’s hope that the MAS audience was far less gullible than Ms. Johnson would like to believe.

Here are some new images, released in an information dump just before Wednesday’s Hearing (the 17th) on whether the public should approve the sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn's central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at Tillary and Clinton.

Guess what?:  The new tower is not the 20-story tower or the 30-story tower previously reported about in the press.  It seems to be 36 stories (perhaps, with super-high ceilings, the equivalent of a taller building) with leeway in its zoning envelope to grow

Here, below, from the slick developer presentation the Brooklyn Heights Association choose to, and waited to be, a conduit of:

Here's a crop a little more in-between.
Here’s more information about Wednesday's hearing.  If you care about libraries and/or want to stand up to rapacious developers expecting our elected representatives to do their biding, not ours you should come, because you can make a difference:

Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee June 17, 2015: ULURP Hearing- First Hearing About Whether To Sell & Shrink Downtowns's Brooklyn Heights Library (Tillary & Clinton)

Meanwhile, quite relevant to what’s unfolding, there’s an article in the Brooklyn Heights Blog about Saint Ann’s, a private school, and its transfer of library development rights to this development.  Saint Ann’s is taking cash and no longer taking any property for its involvement in this transaction. 

What is reported in the Blog does NOT mean that Saint Ann's won't be benefitting from the deal, or that the benefit to Saint Ann's won't continue to HELP DRIVE this deal: Saint Ann's, selling its development rights, will still be getting very substantial cash (with which it could even subsequently buy that cultural space condominium Mr. Kramer, the developer, offers in the Blog article)- This information comes out just days before FIRST EVER hearing this Wednesday.  That hearing starts the process to decide whether public approval should be given to sell and shrink a major NYC library, this one.

Previously it appeared Saint Ann’s was getting cashandproperty for its development rights.  That property could have been a 20,000 square foot student theater.  Based on these calculations, that theater (of "the an absurd public rip off") might have had a value of about $41.7 million.  So what is Saint Ann’s now getting?: That ($41.7 million) plus more cash?  Maybe $50-$55 million free and clear?  While the Brooklyn Public Library nets considerably below $30 million?  Perhaps effectively less than ZERO? 

If these guesses about who is really getting the most benefit, a private school or the public, seem unfair, remember that this is information that Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) has asked be disclosed by the BPL.  The BPL devoted to its infinite lack of transparency has refused to provide the information. 

Here is more recent relate NNY coverage of the library sale:

•    Sunday, June 14, 2015, Selling a $100 Million Plus Library For What? A Pittance! More Transparency Please.

•    Monday, June 15, 2015, Municipal Art Society, Once Venerable, Becomes Platform For Disseminating Misinformation Promoting Development, In this Case Backing Library Sales and Shrinkage

•    Saturday, June 6, 2015, WNYC Reports Mayor de Blasio's "Furiously Raising Funds"- Including From Developers "Lurking Behind The Curtain" of Library Real Estate Sales- And WNYC's Money?

•    Saturday, June 6, 2015, Real Estate Deal Revelations In Scott Sherman's New "Patience and Fortitude" About NYPL Central Library Plan Fight: Observer-Owning Kushner Family In At Outset of Donnell Sale

October 29, 2014, Jon Stewart takes on the Koch's when they advertise on his show.

This October when the Koch Brothers ponied up $$$$ to muscle in on the Daily Show (broadcast on a commercial network- Comedy Central) to gain influence through paid-for advertising spots, Jon Stewart pushed back scathingly with a brilliant “adjusted” version of the Koch's own commercial, torpedoing the Koch ad by sinking it in proper context, i.e. the pertinent facts of what the Koch’s are actually up to.  (See: Democalypse 2014 - South by South Mess: Ad of Brothers, October 29, 2014.)

Bravo!

A Model for Public Broadcasters, Maybe WNYC Public Radio?

That raises the question of what happens when similarly objectionable sponsors hope their money plus messages will hijack the public’s reliance on the integrity that people expect from public broadcasting, integrity we expect partly because so many of us ante up our own contributions so that such broadcasting will be paid for largely by our own listener dollars.. . .   The fracking industry has been paying public radio to run its pro-fracking “think about it”campaign. David H. Koch, a heavy funder of climate science denial, sponsors, with mysterious intention ,“Nova,” a premier PBS science program. And David Koch has been put on public broadcasting boards!  Where is Stewart’s spirited, contextual, integrity-regaining push-back against such sponsorships on these non-commercial public networks?

Similarly, what does public radio station WNYC do when $$$$$ is flashed by an objectionable and powerful entity intent on selling fictions about itself?  Do they perhaps put that entity’s Chief Operating Officer on its policy-setting board and send out a press release that spiffs up that CEO’s reputation, if that, in fact, is the very least they do?  (Would that be a poor attempt to follow in the steps of the Daily Show to evoke laughter?). . .

. . .  At least $$$$$$ is the presumed reason that people believe that MaryAnne Gillmartin, the CEO of our local real-estate-subsidy-pursuer Forest City Ratner, was recently appointed as a WNYC trustee, because people can see no other explicable reason for her appointment other than $$$$$ and see lots a reasons why she should definitely not have been appointed to such a position.   See: Sunday, November 16, 2014, Is Forest City Ratner, As Victor, Writing Our History?- WNYC's Press Release on Appointing Forest City Ratner's MaryAnne Gilmartin to Its Board of Trustees and  Tuesday, November 18, 2014, Was Forest City's Gilmartin appointed to WNYC board because of "passion for public radio" or fundraising help?

The Message to Send Back

How does one push back effectively?


For the Daily Show the vehicle was humorous satire, but the“adjusted” Koch brothers commercial the Daily Show crew created provides a model for what to do when someone comes knocking at your door seeking to buy what will be perceived as true.  Such a response doesn’t necessarily have to be couched in satire. . . . And the essence of the Daily Show’s tactical response applies quite well to the ways that Forest City Ratner can be outed when it lies about itself.

The `adjusted’ Koch brothers commercial, with some helping emphasis from Stewart’s bantering introduction to it, let us know:

    •    Who the Kochs are really are behind this offered veil, a not so friendly giant that’s far too eagerly controlling far too many aspects of our environment.
    •    That their commercial is the facile purchase of a cheerily false veneer of happiness, a virtual “smile factory” to generate a “how bad could they be”message.
    •    That, in a shadowy way, they deploy a spider web of dark money that buys our elections and politicians.
    •    That the ad is far more important for what it leaves out than for what it includes.
    •    The ad has a 180 degree from the truth message: We are making your (the listeners’) lives better, instead of, in actuality, destroying much of the essential environment and natural ecosystem around you.
    •    There is a scary ubiquity, omnipresence, inescapable dominance on the part of the sponsor, relegating or exiling the rest of us to potential non-entity status.
    •    That even our thoughts and basic understanding of the truth is at risk as these entities work to indoctrinate all, even our innocent children, to believe their manufactured falsehoods and seek to commandeer and rewrite our sources of knowledge.
    •    That, in their view, everything, every aspect of us, is up for their monetizing grabs.
    •    That they are unfair to the average worker they employ, offering low wage jobs.
    •    That they are: “The next generation of robber barons bending the democratic process to our will.”

(While the description above is generated from viewing the Daily Show segment about the Kochs, the hyperlinks are all set up to document the similarities to the Forest City Ratner organization.)

Another Choice Video, Another Model for WNYC


(Above: Democalypse 2014 - South by South Mess: Ad of Brothers, October 29, 2014, click through to Daily Show for best viewing).

If you haven't already watched this four-minute Daily Show segment I highly recommend that you do and I don't think that my analytic summary above will subtract from your chortles or appreciation of what an exquisitely structured piece it is.  . . .

I have another choice segment of exquisitely constructed video, 22 minutes, that I am going to urge you to watch that I will discuss here as a second model for where WNYC should want to head in dealing with Forest City Ratner and the New York City real estate industry in general.  This one is from another broadcaster, Bill Moyers.  I specifically cited it as such an example in an email I sent to WNYC president Laura Walker in follow-up to talking with her after the last WNYC trustees meeting.



(Above: Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy, November 28, 2014- transcript available at this link- click through to Moyers & Company for optimal viewing.)
 
First let me set the scene a bit.

WNYC Community Advisory Board Meetings

November 18, 2014 WNYC Community Advisory Board meeting.  Attendance of New Tech City's  Manoush Zomorodi (facing, far right) was featured.

Some of us who considered absurdity together with danger to be inherent in Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment to WNYC’s policy-setting board went to the last two WNYC Community Advisory Board meetings (October 20, 2014 and November 18, 2014) to comment and object.  By the second of these two meetings the advisory board was beginning to weigh and think about our objections.  Unfortunately, the advisory board is no more than advisory; it doesn’t run things and can only relay to the board of trustees that does run things the feedback gotten from the public.  Unfortunately, the Community Advisory Board’s reports to the WNYC trustees board are only annual.   The next report including these objections won't go to the trustees until October of 2015!

At the October 20, 2014 Community Advisory Board meeting there was a presentation about sister station WQXR's aspirations/ambitions

December 3, 2014 WNYC Trustees Meeting

December 3, 2014 WNYC Trustees Meeting

No matter, some of us then went to the December 3, 2014 WNYC trustees meeting, the first trustees meeting held since Ms. Gilmartin was placed on the board. Ms. Gilmartin sat in a seeming position of honor right next to Laura R. Walker, board member, President & CEO of WNYC who conducted most of the meeting.  Ms. Gilmartin sat somewhat sullenly without speaking, probably aware that objections had been raised about her appointment.  When I spoke with President Walker afterwards she said that, because seating at the meeting was not assigned, nothing should be inferred from who was sitting where, but she refused to say who sat next to whom first respecting Ms. Gilmartin and herself.

Second and third from left, Walker and Gilmartin seated next to each other

While the WNYC board apparently hadn’t heard from the Community Advisory Board, a number of the members, Ms. Walker included, were expecting us and knew why we were there.  Even so, apparently not all the members were similarly aware and the Noticing New York’s article about Ms. Walker’s appointment had not been distributed to all the trustees.

An opportunity for public comment was not part of the meeting, but Ms. Walker noted that the public could approach and speak with the trustees who lingered after the meeting's executive session (during which the public had to exit the room).  Returning afterwards is when I spoke with Ms. Walker and an assisting staff member.

I was told that Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment had been in the works for more than a year.  Although I pressed for an answer, Ms. Walker would not say whether anyone had raised the obvious likely objections to Ms. Gilmartin’s appointment other than to let me understand that there had been discussions about Ms. Gilmartin's qualifications.  I asked, and Ms. Walker said that she had known Ms. Gilmartin for a number of years.

At the meeting, and outside of it afterwards, there was discussion about a gala (including what to wear) and, outside the board meeting room, there was also some discussion about how there was a lot of money in the borough of Queens, as in Flushing, that was not and ought to be represented on the NYC board.  As we were there to say that representation of actual people and listeners ought to be represented in the composition of WNYC’s board, not Forest City Ratner’s money, I was sensitive to the phraseology that there was “money” in New York City that needed to be represented on the board.

This dispersal of board members after the meeting was rapid.  I did not get to have much in the way of conversation with very many, but one of the board members who said he was aware of the controversy about the Gilmartin appointment said that he did not have any problem with it because he thought that Ms. Gilmartin and her interests should be represented on the board as part of representing the interests of “all New Yorkers.”

My Noticing New York point of view is that WNYC and public broadcasting is intended to be an alternativeto the relentless expression of commercial speech and is not supposed to be setting up a he-said/she-said balance on its board between all of the city’s commercial interests and those of the public.  There is also concern that with any such `balance' it will shift inexorably in the direction of the commercial interests represented.

Kurt Andersen Interview of  Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl

Left Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl.  Right Studio 360's Kurt Andersen

As if to emphasize the intersection of NYC's coverage of news and culture in New York with governance and politics, a centerpiece of the publicly held  portion of the trustees meeting was a half hour interview of NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl.  He was interviewed by Kurt Andersen, known for his "Studio 360"program broadcast in prime slots in the station's line up.  Andersen quipped that without the editing and typical winnowing of a typical "Studio 360" interview (talking for an hour but getting the best ten minutes) he and Mr. Finkelpearl were not going to sound nearly as good as what usually goes out on the air.  It was, indeed, odd to hear Mr. Andersen's familiar voice associated with a face I might not have guessed went with it.  Present in the room with him, he didn't sound quite so perky.  If you'd like to listen to Mr. Andersen, "Studio 360" did an absolutely brilliant, recently rebroadcast, 2013 hour about the Disney Company parks that included discussion of urban planning issues, but not in ways that would relate those issues obviously to NYC.

Agenda for Trustees meeting

Commissioner Finkelpearl, a pleasant, erudite fellow may be familiar to our readers as he has gone to bat several times to speak on behalf of "Spaceworks."  Noticing New York views the Spaceworks very differently since the private Spaceworks firm, formed at the end of the Bloomberg administration (and not covered by WNYC yet) albeit "nonprofit," seems to have a decided real estate bent and has declared as one of its primary missions the acquisition and shrinkage of New York City Library space as "underutilized."

The Finkelpearl/Andersen interview discussing how culture and economics interrelate generally got around to discussing real estate, specifically Hudson Yards, which, as it is a thematic sister to Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards, should have been reason for Ms. Gilmartin's ears to perk up.  Conversely, might Mr. Finkelpearl's perception of Ms. Gilmartin have gotten an adjustment from sitting across from her that morning?  Hudson Yards is fewer acres and in many ways not as bad as Atlantic Yards, but similar vintage, both being mega, single developer projects sired under Bloomberg.

The discussion of Hudson Yards came up in the context of the millions of dollars the city is spending in terms of "partnerships" with cultural institutions and how culture, in the likely form of a governmentally assisted institution ($75 million), could be integral to moving the huge, single-developer Hudson Yards project along.

Back to David Koch

Concluding the Finkelpearl session, trustees were able to put their own questions to the Commissioner and the first as about whether Mayor de Blasio cares sufficiently about the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Mr. Finkelpearl said this was not true, recounting that the department was actively involved with the Met and that he police commissioner had gotten involved with the issue of food cart vendors outside of the Met.  The issue has been exacerbated by the opening of the new (publicly protested) David H. Koch plaza outside the Met and is one that David Koch, living nearby, is speculated to be one he takes a personal interest in. Koch thought the old fountains outside the Met were "crummy" and  says of the replacement scheme"I suggested the whole project," reportedly getting into the "micro-details" of it.  We heard Mr. Finkelpearl explain that the Met gets $24 million a year from Cultural Affairs plus often getting "large capital investments."  City schools get $22 million yearly from the department.

Mention here of David Koch provides an opportune segue to discuss the Bill Moyers segment I recommend and the email I sent about it to Ms. Walker.

The Koch brothers represent the essential epitome of the fossil fuel industry and its outsized power.  In my email communication to Laura Walker about omissions that weaken WNYC’s coverage I cited, by example (you see how I detailed this in the actual email I sent below), the new episode of Moyers & Company that addressed itself to the outsized power of the real estate industry in New York City.  One point made during the Moyers show was the equivalency of the real estate industry  vis-à-vis New York City to the overbearing influence of the oil and fossil fuel industry nationally.

Putting Ms. Walker on the Spot

Compensation information for WNYC president Laura Walker from station's 2012 990 IRS filing

You may perhaps observe that my questions in my email below put Ms. Walker very firmly on the spot.  Before feeling too sorry for her consider that she is paid big bucks for these decisions and presumably to take the heat for it.  WNYC’s most recent IRS 990 forms on file with the Guidestar service (signed 05/14/2014) show that Ms. Walker’s reportable compensation for 2012 was $559,838 in addition to which she received from WNYC that year another $98,178 in the category of deferred compensation and non taxable benefits, for a total compensation package back in 2012 of $658,016 for her estimated 35.5 hours of work per week.  (Her salary, $486,688 in June 2007, was last noticed by Gawker in 2009, so it’s been going up a bit.)


In point of reference, talk show host mainstays Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer were paid for that reported year, $236,211 and $287,084, respectively (plus, respectively, $25,219 and $31,900 in the category of deferred compensation and non-taxable benefits).

My Followup Email to Ms. Walker

From Noticing New York's December 24, 2013 coverage (like Moyers) of the plutocratic towers casting shadows on Central Park- Slide promoting Skyscraper Museum Show-"View of Central Park from One57"

Here is my email to Ms. Walker:

Dear Ms. Walker,

When we talked after the WNYC board meeting yesterday you said that if there were ways I thought that WNYC could be doing a better job covering and addressing issues that I believe need to be addressed in this city I should let you know and that you would relay my thoughts to the WNYC editorial board assuring me that, notwithstanding the recent appointment of Forest City Ratner CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin as a trustee to WNYC's policy-setting board, that the listeners of WNYC will get the coverage of important issues that is deserved.

In that regard, I call to your attention a new episode of Moyers & Company: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy, Aired: 11/28/2014.

Although Moyers & Company is an independently produced nationally syndicated program that deals with issues of national importance I think you will observe that the entirety of this particular 22-minute program focuses on a series of connected concerns that are all local New York City issues, the kind that it would be the natural province of WNYC, our city public radio station, to cover.

This Moyers & Company episode, in a connecting-the-dots fashion showing the interrelationships, zeros in and seamlessly addressees all of the following issues:

    •    Increasing wealth inequality in NYC with the ascension of a privileged elite buying power to create an increasingly unlevel playing field that's being taken advantage of to create more power and wealth inequality.  (i.e. the  "dark shadow of plutocracy")
    •    The invasion of a significant public commons with its sacrifice to privileged private interests.  In this case that public commons is specifically, but also somewhat symbolically, the example of Central Park.  It is important to remember that WNYC similarly represents a significant public commons.
    •    Reminders of how our collectively shared commons represent the experience of democracy and its effective functioning.
    •    An elucidating equation of the power of the real estate industry in NYC with the all too influential national oil industry centered in Texas.
    •    How this disequilibrium translates into bad urban design and degraded living conditions for the average New Yorker with developer greed driving that detriment.
    •    An analysis of how the "Swiss bank account money" fueling these subtractions from the public good (per New York Magazine's "Stash Pad" cover story) likely doesn't pull its weight in contributing to the local economy, notwithstanding former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's defense of the super-rich and his political urging that the NYC economy be channeled in this direction.
    •    That, because of political machinations and dodgy deals in Albany linked to questionable campaign contributions, democracy and the public interest is being sold out in these regards, which means that these wealthy luxury apartment owners who very frequently don't pay local income taxes also very dramatically escape a proper shouldering of their fair share of real estate taxes.
    •    How the Moreland Commission, set up to investigate abuse and corruption in Albany politics, was focusing on these exact city real estate industry issues when it was dismantled by Governor Andrew Cuomo as it got too close to his own conduct in regard to these particulars.
    •    How the imbalances in the way we are managing our public resources is resulting in a less diverse, increasingly exclusive city with the needs of significant sectors of the population being insufficiently or completely unsupported.
    •    Some thought about what makes for effective public protest and countering political actions in the face of these things.

I doubt that you would disagree that all of these concerns plus the way that they are interconnected are of vital interest to New York City's populace and WNYC's listeners.  I therefore invite you to submit this Moyers episode to your editorial board and ask them when WNYC has covered these issues and their interrelation with similar comprehension and vigor.  I also ask you and the editorial board to identify when WNYC has subjected the Forest City Ratner organization and its activities that very much affect the city to the same kind of careful scrutiny.

I recognize that pieces of much of the above have been covered in fits and starts from time to time by various WNYC programs.

Brian Lehrer, for example, has (almost unavoidably) independently covered such topics as "stash pads" and the luxury towers casting shadows into Central Park, and has also had some excellent discussion about Governor Andrew Cuomo's dissolution of the Moreland Commission. Still, given that WNYC intends to be a station that prides itself on long-format, in-depth and analytical, in-context reporting, where is the kind of in depth reporting from WNYC that, like the Moyers story, pulls these things together, interrelating them for the kind of comprehensive overview that begs to be made?

I've covered much of what the Moyers episode addresses in Noticing New York, routinely making most of the same connections, and I do so because it has been my priority to deal with what I believe is most critically in need of being addressed in terms of New York City development, governance and politics.  That NNY coverage has been possible despite the fact that financially Noticing New York is essentially a shoestring, zero-budget operation.  So it doesn't take money.

Yesterday I repeated to you the suggestion made by one of the public attendees at the last WNYC Community Advisory Board meeting, that if comes to a question money (one of the CAB members suggested money was at the root of certain practices in question) that WNYC should simply consider "doing less with greater integrity."

A side note before concluding:  I realize that in holding out to you the Moyers work as an example, I may be undermining arguments I have recently been making because: 1.) It involves commendable actions recently taken by the Municipal Art Society although I have criticized MAS to the extent to which they, with board changes of their own, have abdicated- or reversed- much of the core mission MAS once pursued, and 2.) the broadcast came to New Yorkers via WNET Public television which I have criticized for not covering the the real estate industry issues that beset the city.  Quite true, but: A.) MAS could hardly ignore the magnitude of the issue (even if it is interesting that after the 1980s TimeWarner building construction battle precursing this more recent tower shadows issue was not completely won, MAS appointed that questionable building's architect as its board chair), and B.) As a nationally syndicated program the Moyers show bypassed the local editorial board, and was not a product of it.

I am thankful for WNYC's coverage of such local development issues and associated politics whenever it is clearly good, which it can be, but I am taking you up on your offer to communicate what needs and ought to be better, gaps that need to be filled.   Please let me know and direct my attention accordingly, if I have overlooked WNYC coverage that would match up to the story that Moyers & Company just produced.  Likewise, do let me know if you think that there has been rigorous coverage of Forest City Ratner that is comparable.  If that's not the case, I'd be delighted to hear that you are communicating to the WNYC editorial board that there are standards toward which they yet need to strive with the expectation of beneficial results to follow.

Thank you for your attention.

Above and below from the Moyers report

 "Masculine" vs. "Feminine" News, What's Most Important To Cover

Years ago, I heard on public radio (I was traveling and I am not sure it was WNYC and cannot retrieve more facts) a fascinating speech by a prominent national female news anchor of the time.  I am guessing that the speaker might have been Diane Sawyer and that this was in the 1990s.  She spoke about what is perceived as  “male” or “masculine” news, which was considered “hard” news and more important than what was considered “female” or “feminine” news.  Political news was generally viewed as falling into the “masculine” news category that also frequently preoccupied itself with headlines about crises that might be covered with relatively short spans of attention from the media.  Conversely, “female” or “soft” news, often dismissively viewed, tended to focus on the very intricate texture and meaning of our daily lives, often in ways that might help foreshadow or help us comprehend and prevent crises.

I remember coming away from hearing the speech with a very deep respect for the importance of this deeper, more contextual, background kind of news often viewed as “feminine” and inferior.

Fluffy News to Put You to Sleep?

That being said, I am beginning to wonder whether there has been a programming shift at WNYC to the less substantial, less meaningful, the kind of stuff that life-style commercial networks already cover with more than sufficient adequacy.  I asked Ms. Walker what she thought the purpose was of including Ms. Gilmartin in a July 15, 2014 Brian Lehrer segment about how to get a better night’s sleep.  At the time that of that broadcast Ms. Walker and her board were obviously, based on what she said, considering honoring Ms. Gilmartin with an appointment to the WNYC board.  Ms. Walker did not really have an adequate answer, except to say that Ms. Gilmartin was just there as another female executive although I pointed out that her appearance in that segment alongside Arianna Huffington, head of the Huffington Post and AOL was obviously burnishing for Gilmartin’s reputation.

Background IS Indeed Important News

I actually view politics as being deeply imbued in the fabric, texture and background of our lives, what might be considered the feminine, often dismissed side of the news cycle.  Ergo, Ms. Gilmartin’s appearance in the context of that segment has political meaning.  Similarly, the background urban environment in which we live and the meaning it gives our lives is important, part of what we pay attention to and the decisions we must make when we govern ourselves.  For instance: Aren’t landmarks an important part of the way we feel and emotionally connect to the city in which we live?  It appeared the real estate industry had inveigled the de Blasio administration to do a massive, wholesale “de-calendering” of all of the landmarks now before the city Landmarks Commission to preserve, a total of about 100, jettisoning years of work by preservationists. . . New York Times architectural critic Michael Kimmelman posted to Facebook that it was “a sop to the real estate industry and the opposite of transparent, especially without a public hearing.”  

Indeed, done en masse under the vague “housekeeping” rubric, attested to an intention to hide exactly who was intended to be benefitted by whatever the juiciest handouts were in the group, but it was a safe bet that there were at least several really juicy ones, one of them perhaps the intention to build yet one more in the parade of supper tall towers south of the park at the site of the 57th and 5th Avenue’s Bergdorf Goodman!

. . . The Brian Lehrer show didn’t get around to covering the potential disaster but, thankfully, the plan was set aside after massive opposition anyway.  The Leonard Lopate show got around to it after the fact, almost too late.

Moyers Watching Stewart

Moyers commenting favorably on Stewart's treatment of his Koch sponsors

Will Jon Stewart’s bite the hand that sponsors you by assembling appropriate truth-telling adjustments catch on with public media?  Stewart’s push-back apparently did catch the eye of one public broadcasting veteran, none other than Bill Moyers himself.  Days after the Daily Show segment aired, the Billmoyers.com website put up a post with a link back to the Daily Show observing how Stewart had meted out his  honest helping of justice for the Kochs’ “series of treacly, feel-good commercials touting all the wonderful things the company does to make our lives better.”

The Goldman Sachs commercial that pops up links to more video promotion for Goldman, including its involvement with huge real estate projects in New York City.

There’s work for Moyers to do in this regard because the efforts of $$$$$ to encroach are everywhere. . .  It’s ironic, but when I clicked to watch “The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy” what I got first before it started to play was a “treacly, feel-good commercial” for Goldman Sachs and company “touting all the wonderful things the company does to make our lives better.”   As written about previously here in Noticing New York, Goldman, including a subsidy-abusive real estate manipulation to build its own NYC office tower, was squarely targeted by Moyers in at least one previous Moyers broadcast.

Does this go in the “you just can’t win” category?  I’d like to think that Moyers has dished out far better than he has been subjected to, that his integrity is as mightily intact as it appears to be, and that at this point he is miles ahead of those who spend to piggy-back on his message, hoping to neuter the truth he offers. . .  That he, like Jon Stewart, may still be thought of as setting a good example for WNYC.

PS:  Something for Noticing New York to do next?:  Look more carefully at the composition of the rest of the WNYC board to consider whether we can expect there to be adequate checks and balances to the kind of influences that come with appointments like Ms. Gilmartin's.

Click to enlarge if you dare- The Library-squashing tower that would benefit Saint Ann's private school and a developer if built, but not the public.

Do you know that in the 1990s, not so very long ago at all, New York City substantially augmented its library resources by spending to create more library space at two major central destination business libraries simultaneously?  And, if you rewind the clock, looking at one of those libraries, the Brooklyn Heights Association was in the thick of things fighting for more library space. . .

. .   Now, as fate (or the real estate industry) would have it, both of those central destination business libraries are besieged by those who would sell them, hand them out as juicy deals.

. .  And, for reasons that seem suspicious, the Brooklyn Heights Association now finds itself on the other side, advocating to shrink the library it once fought to enlarge.

The First Ever Hearing On Selling and Shrinking a Public Library- Running Into the BHA

Wednesday June 17, 2015 was the first ever hearing about selling and shrinking a NYC library, the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn's central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at Tillary and Clinton, was held before the Land use Committee of Brooklyn’s Community Board 2.

Patrick Killackey, president of the Brooklyn Heigts Association now favoring the sale and shrinkage of Brooklyn's Brooklyn Heights Library.- From the Brooklyn Eagle

At the end of the hearing I approached Patrick Killackey, the new president of the board of the Brooklyn Heights Association, and told him the BHA was long overdue in following through to reconsider and change the position it took in favor of selling and shrinking the library, a reconsideration Killackey’s predecessor, Alexandra Bowie, said publicly the BHA might be willing to entertain when I questioned her as a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries at the February 24, 2015 annual Brooklyn Heights Association meeting:

"I will take that up with our library committee, which is how we operate, and if the library committee feels that it wants to revisit the question, then I will take it to the full board," Bowie said.

Bklyn Hts Blog: Who do you support?

The BHA’s original decision to support the sale and shrinkage of the library was rushed, secretive, lacking in public input and suspect in a number of ways.  We have asked the BHA to change course from the start, including at the previous, 2014 BHA annual meeting.  Back then, as well, it was very clear that public sentiment was strong on our side.

The last time I approached Mr. Killackey entreating that the BHA finally reconsider its position was at the May 9, 2015 annual Brooklyn Heights Association house tour where a majority of those on the tour wore our Citizens Defending Libraries “Don’t Sell Our Libraries” buttons.  Mr. Killackey told me then he was “off duty.”

I am sure Mr. Killackey believed I came on strong as I approached him after the hearing, and I probably did as I was very annoyed that at the hearing the BHA had just delivered inane testimony in favor of selling and shrinking the library Ms. Bowie herself standing to read it into the microphone.  Mr. Killackey may also have felt beset upon under the circumstances, because the hearing that had just concluded was packed with people.  Setting aside those people whose salaries (via the real estate industry or closely analogous situations) depended upon the testimony being in favor of a library sale and shrinkage, the hearing testimony was virtually unanimously opposed to selling and shrinking the library, leaving the Brooklyn Heights Association an odd outlier.
People told me they left the hearing more passionately opposed to the library sale and shrinkages than when they arrived.  This was after listening to Brooklyn Public Library president Linda Johnson protest to a groaning audience that “the BPL is not in the real estate business.”  And it was after hearing the developer refuse to say what Saint Ann's school is being paid as a result of the library’s sale and shrinkage because, he averred, “it's a private transaction” . . .  even though it is driving a public one!

I told Mr. Killackey that the BHA should be meeting with Citizens Defending Libraries and that we could educate the BHA about what was wrong with their position and the way that it had been reached.  Mr. Killackey seemed insulted and told me that I didn’t know anything about him or what he already knew about the library sale.

Fighting To Properly Fund Libraries

We then got into a discussion where Mr. Killackey made the point that NYC libraries have always been underfunded and have always had to fight for funds.  I have had a number of discussions with various people recently and it seems to me that this is a talking point that people arguing for the sell-off and shrinkage of libraries are now using to contradict what we have made a point of saying: NYC libraries are being underfunded at an unprecedentedly low level as an excuse to sell them off.

The explanation for library underfunding!  It's easy to see: The generation of deals like this, the 50-story building replacing the Donnell library.  And the proposal to replicate the Donnell sale swindle with a 38-story building replacing the Brooklyn Heights Library.

If you see things the way we do then what seems to be a very hard thing to explain becomes easy to explain: You ask “why should a `progressive’ mayor be engaged in an unprecedented underfunding of the libraries in a time of plenty?” - Then you look at the huge luxury condominium tower proposed to replace the Brooklyn Heights Library, shrinking it down to one-third size, and you say that’s the answer staring me starkly in the face!  And the answer is all the more obvious when you realize that the real estate development team “lurking right behind the curtain” to build it is sending money to the mayor.  See:  Saturday, June 6, 2015, WNYC Reports Mayor de Blasio's "Furiously Raising Funds"- Including From Developers "Lurking Behind The Curtain" of Library Real Estate Sales- And WNYC's Money?

We Used To Fight For Funds To Expand Libraries: Business Libraries As Case In Point

Mr. Killackey is correct that there is a history of libraries needing to fight for their funds from the city, just as every department or entity seeking city funding fights to justify its case for funds.  But the libraries never before had to fight for funds so that underfunding wouldn’t be a reason to sell and shrink libraries.  Au contraire, in the past, libraries were fighting for funds to expand.  And fighting for funds to expand vs. fighting for funds not to sell and shrink libraries is  hardly an apples to apples comparison.

Two central destination libraries (the Downtown Brooklyn heights Library and SIBL) that were both funded at the same time, both with a special focus on business.  The facilities for library patrons were thus mightily expanded, an embarrassment of rishes.  And now both may vanish at the same time?

Example?: A really good one is this very library that Killackey’s BHA is advocating be sold and shrunk.  In June of 1992 Crain’s New York Business was reporting about the expansion going on at this library.  The point of the article was that the BPL’s fight to fund the library was going to be more uphill because of competition as the city simultaneously went forward with another expansion of library space,  plans for the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) at 34th Street in the former B. Altman’s building:

The usually subdued leadership at the Brooklyn Public Library is peeved that Brooklyn’s pre-eminent business library is being cast aside as city and state officials build a library that may duplicate work already done by Brooklyn Public.

Not to worry: Both central destination business library expansions were fully funded and completed in the end.
The BPL spent $5 million, the equivalent of nearly $10 million in today’s dollars, on its central destination Brooklyn Library.  Opened in 1962 with 90,000 books its collection was by then up, substantially, to 130,000 volumes, plus periodicals and other resource materials.  The library reopened Tuesday, October 12, 1993 in a no-cost-overrun renovation.  The library added new second floor space over two of its wings.  It involved a substantial gutting for the installation of upgraded mechanical, wiring, air conditioning and heating (an automatic system), energy efficient lighting, while providing and adding space for on-line computer services recognizing the “technological revolution.”  It alleviated what had been “a cramped atmosphere.”  (See: Heights Press: Library Reopens Next Tuesday, by Roanan Geberer, October 7, 1993 and Library Renovation is Moving Along, by Roanan Geberer, July 23, 1992.)  The Building (now 63,000 square feet) was thereby expanded “by nearly a third.” (See: The Phoenix, Expansion Work To Close Branch For 12-16 Months, Michael Armstrong, May 2-10, 1991.)

In Manhattan, SIBL moved forward to completion, opening in the spring of 1995.  It’s 160,000 square feet of new additional library space cost $100 million (consider adjusting that for an equivalent in today’s dollars).

Reverse Course On Both Business Libraries- Simultaneously?

The Crain’s June 1992 article discussed to what extent these two libraries competed with each other, duplicating services, but what library patrons got was investment and expansion of such services at both sites simultaneously.  Now, with a proposed concurrent sale of both libraries, library patrons would lose services at both locations simultaneously. . .

. .   In fact, part of SIBL has already been sold.  In 2012 the NYPL quietly sold off 87% of SIBL’s space for just $60.8 million.  What it sold off was space where books could be stored and readily retrieved from.  With the sale books disappeared from the site, most of what in the 1992 Crain’s article NYPL president Timothy Heally described as SIBL’s “overused . .  business and science collection” of 2.5 million volumes.  Librarians tell us many of these volumes now take appreciable extra time to retrieve for patrons because they are in Chicago.  According to Crain’s, SIBL was also “a depository for patents and government documents from not only the United States, but nations of the European Community.”  Similarly, the Brooklyn library enlarged in 1993 was a designated Federal Depository (and still is).

The unsold portion of SIBL that’s threatened by the NYPL’s announced intent to sell it, constitutes, just as it is all by itself, a very valuable viable library notwithstanding that so much of its book storage space has been sold off.  That’s even though SIBL now has far fewer books than the 90,000 volumes the Brooklyn library had on premises when it opened in 1962.  By contrast, in Crain’s in 1992 the NYPL bragged that SIBL’s book count was “20 times that of Brooklyn’s” and that it had “60,000 periodical titles.”

Visit SIBL at 34th Street and Madison and see what you find there.  It continues, in beautifully designed fashion, to have every imaginable resource that a library intended to provide a platform for and to work with computer resources is supposed to provide.  Although SIBL’s book count has been devastatingly diminished, it has expanses of currently empty shelves that could be refilled, this at a time when library circulation is up about 60% with almost all of that increase being physical, notdigital books.

Knowledgeable About The Turnaround?

Mr. Killackey's thus-it-has-ever-been-so assertion that libraries have always had to fight for their funding with his accompanying implication that we are not now facing a new threat as their sale is blames on that underfunding, ignores that fact that throughout the Giuliani administration we were expending public funds to expand libraries.  It was only when the Bloomberg administration came in, also looking at selling off other public assets (schools, public housing, etc), that we made a 180% turnaround.  It ignores how the BPL’s minutes document that before the BPL was planning to sell libraries there was no backlog of capital library expenditures.  It ignores how the minutes of the BPL document that when the plans to sell libraries were being launched the BPL agreed with the city to defer and build up those capital repairs rather than fund them and that this was done in tandem with an effort to “strengthen the argument for” its “strategic real estate plan” to sell and shrink libraries.  All of this had been documented in Noticing New York, but Mr. Killackey seems unaware (.Sunday, August 31, 2014, Mostly In Plain Sight (A Few Conscious Removals Notwithstanding) Minutes Of Brooklyn Public Library Tell Shocking Details Of Strategies To Sell Brooklyn's Public Libraries.)
As Mr.Killackey says, I don’t know what he knows, but what he knows seems to ignore how, at approximately the same time, just after Bloomberg got his third term, he dramatically started cutting funding to libraries even as library use was increasing greatly.  The de Blasio administration, proceeding with library sales, has not restored those cuts.

When The BHA Fought For a Bigger Library and Smaller, More Contextual Buildings

too "bulky" said BHA

The expansion of the Brooklyn Heights library with the 1991-1993 construction effected an increase to the library’s space for which the Brooklyn Heights Association had been fighting for a number of years.  In 1985 when the Brooklyn Heights Association was fighting Forest City Ratner’s huge new One Pierrepont Plaza building planned for erection next to the Brooklyn library as too “bulky,” a deal was reached allowing the Ratner building greater height in exchange for cutbacks at its top and Ratner’s promise to give 12,000 square feet in the building to the library for it to expand into.  This sweetener was intended to deal with the overcrowding at the library’s adjacent site.  (See: Pact on Brooklyn Tower Reached, By Josh Barbanel, October 25, 1985.)  Ratner’s building was completed in 1988.

Library Space Promised to Sweeten Deals For Bigger Development- Not Delivered

Ratner’s 1985 offer of library space as a sweetener to induce approval for a bigger development is reminiscent of how in discussions of transforming libraries into mixed-use redevelopments there has been crass frankness about the manipulative offer of libraries as a “placating gesture” to get the public to approve greater development.  More recently, Two Trees Development offered the public 15,000 square feet of new library space in its BAM South luxury tower as sweetener for a substantial increase in the size of the permitted building, a deal handed out to it from the city by the Bloomberg administration that, like the 1985 Ratner deal, was given away without a bid.

Interestingly, Ratner apparently was never required to make good on its 1985 pact for the libray space sweetener.  Similarly, on May 27, 2007 BPL spokesman David Woloch quietly confessed to CB2’s Youth and Education Committee that instead of providing the 15,000 square feet of library sweetener space in the BAM South project once promised, Two Trees would be giving just 2,500 square feet, one-sixth of what was originally promised.  (See: Friday, February 1, 2013, City Strategy Of Withholding Basic City Services To Blackmail Public Into Accepting Bigger Development.)

The proposed luxury condominium tower that would squash the library down to one-third size dwarfs the adjacent1988 Ratner tower and has no cutbacks.

At a June 10, 2015 BPL presentation to Brooklyn's Community Board 7, Mr. Woloch assured members of the Sunset Park Community that if its library is torn down for redevelopment into a mixed-use facility there will be no bait and switch, that what is promised will be built.  The Sunset Park plans were first disclosed here in Noticing New York with the BPL catching up to give out information afterwards.  In a sense there has been a victory in that for the first time since Citizens Defending Libraries has been on the scene a library being sold is proposed to be enlarged, in this case to 20,600 square feet, virtually the same size the central destination 63,000 square foot downtown library is proposed to be shrunk to.

Illusory Promises- One Reason the BHA is Wrong
 
Unfulfilled and unenforceable promises provide a perfect segue for talking about more of what is wrong with the Brooklyn Heights Association’s position to back the sale and shrinkage of the library.  A top reason the BHA gives for selling and shrinking the library is that, “proceeds from the sale will go to the BPL, which will use them to renovate other branch libraries.”

This is wrong on a number of counts:

    1.    As one of the CB2 Land Use Committee members noted there is no way to assure that net funds, if any, would actually go to such funding of other libraries.  There is no way to track it through or assure that New York City, to whom the money would go, would actually give more money to the libraries as a result.  The city could actually just give less overall to the libraries.  There is only the vaguest idea that morally money ought to come back to the libraries, but the libraries are already funded at an immorally low level, below what was compacted with Andrew Carnegie when he gave libraries to the city.  What's more, if low funding translates this way into hand-offs to real estate developers, we are only apt to see more of this kind of low funding in the future.

    2.    The BPL is being totally untransparent about how there will be virtually no net proceeds from the sale of the library.  It may wind up with a negative cash result.  The BPL is disguising, underestimating and refusing to acknowledge the costs that must be netted out of the transaction.

    3.    The proposed self-cannibalizing sale of this library doesn’t generate resources for the library; it involves a huge loss of library resources.  It would cost $60 million to rebuild the library building.  The building together with the land there and the rights to expand for additional public uses there mean the dollar value fo the library to the public is well over $100 million, probably around $120 million. . . and yet the BPL would net virtually nothing from a sale, perhaps less than zero.  (See: Sunday, June 14, 2015, Selling a $100 Million Plus Library For What? A Pittance! More Transparency Please.)

More On Why the BHA is Off Track, Including The Saint Ann's Problem

The BHA’s testimony also includes a reference to the private Saint Ann's School in weirdly suggesting with rather out-of-the-blue belatedness that perhaps there should be some negotiation for a larger library:

Given the recent announcement that Saint Ann's School will not purchase the space originally assigned to them, we urge the Brooklyn Public Library to consider negotiating with Hudson for additional space in the building. In the event that the underground space is unsold, we welcome Hudson's plan to excavate less of the site.

If the reverse-course shrinkage of this library is truly the colossal mistake most people think it is and the library should therefore be larger, or if in the future it's determined the library should be larger because the city, borough, central business district and surrounding residential neighborhood are all growing fast (which they all are) there is a problem: Stuck in the bottom of a residential luxury tower, the library can never be enlarged afterwards.*  Yet the BHA suggests negotiating for a larger library, but is ready to just shrug if those negotiations don’t work out?  Come now!  How contradictory can you get?

(* Sunset Park has a similar problem where a no-bid. behind-the-scenes process now puts that library on track to be put in the bottom of a residential, not a commercial, building, and also precluded the use of anther better site for the expanded library.)

Perhaps more important, the BHA’s mention of Saint Ann’s School in its testimony is deceptive.  It makes it sound like Saint Ann’s was paying for the space it was getting in the building rather, than as was the case, being paid with the transfer of that space for its development rights.  Remember the developer refusing to say how much Saint Ann’s is being paid?   The BHA’s wording also makes it sound like Saint Ann’s School was no longer going to be involved in the transaction, a misleading impression the developer and BPL apparently tried to foster right before the hearing.

If fact, it must be recognized that private Saint Ann’s School is getting a substantial pay day due to the fact that because the library, a publicly owned asset, is being sold and shrunk, Saint Ann’s can sell its development rights free-and-clear without the nuisance and cost of having to demolish and reconstruct its own building.

Who were the BHA’s library deciders, that core to the BHA committee that passed its judgment that the library should be sold and shrunk in this developer-pleasing transaction?

BHA board member library deciders conferring at the June 17th hearing- Both on the BHA's library committee- Right Alexandra Bowie who delivered testimony- Left Erica Belsey Worth high-end architect and Saint Ann's parent.

Alexandra Bowie, who operated with great secrecy at the beginning, was one of them.  Some years ago when Ms. Bowie was still President of the BHA and Mr. Killackey was still an unelevated board member, my wife and I tried to express concern about what Ms. Bowie had said to us about the users of the library that came to the library from the nearby projects.  Mr. Killackey was dismissive of our concerns.

Architect and Saint Ann's parent Inger Yancey- “The Yancey's were an early founding family of Saint Ann's School.”

Other BHA board members who are library deciders for the BHA and therefore for the entire neighborhood that the BHA is suppose to represent?:  Erika Belsey Worth and Inger Yancey.  Both are architects.  Both are Saint Ann’s parents.  Ms. Belsey Worth designs for those with a more refined taste who can afford it. As for Ms. Yancey, reading the Brooklyn Eagle it is apparently a point of pride that:  “The Yancey's were an early founding family of Saint Ann's School.”   

Frankly, this is unfair and lacks proper process.

A Dead-locked CB2 Land Use Committee and A Declared End To Public Hearing Input While The Developer Continues To Lobby

After the hearing the CB2 Land Use Committee deadlocked and did not vote to approve the library sale and shrinkage.  One reason expressed by committee members was the lack of any true assurance that any funds, net or otherwise, from the sale and shrinkage would actually go back to the libraries.  That concern took hold despite the fact that the BHA blithely ignores that problem.  Another reason expressed was that the committee had previously voted not to approve any big new developments until the infrastructure problem of local school PS8, at 140% over capacity is attended to. .  It was recognized that voting to approve the transfer of the public land to build this tower would have overridden this stance established by the committee’s previous vote. . .

. . .  What we see is a worsening imbalance as we try provide the public infrastructure necessary to keep up with development as privatization of once-public assets accelerates with transfers such of these.

The deadlock was apparently unexpected, the BPL and the developer having timed their progress in requesting a vote to their belief that with behind-the-scenes lobbying they had locked up the votes they needed.

Hopefully the committee was also influenced in its vote by: The public testimony; the BPL’s total lack of transparency with respect to this and other proposed library sales; and the value of the asset being sold versus the insanely low price for which it would be sold off.

As the CB2 Land Use Committee debated its vote there was kibitzing from the some public in attendance calling attention to the fact that two of the CB2 Land Use Committee members are salaried employees of the BHA.  It was asserted that these two members should recuse themselves and not vote.  That’s an interestingly hard call to make because at that very moment those two  members seemed to be doing the right thing and making the right points about why the proposal to sell the library was a problem.  But if the two members who are employees of the BHA were to recuse themselves it could wind up in essentially the same place because a majority of affirmation votes is required for the committee to approve the sale and shrinkage and recusals, like negative votes or abstentions would all similarly subtract from that required total.

The CB2 Land Use Committee is going to be asked to vote on the proposed library sale and shrinkage yet again. 

June 12, 2015 CB2 Executive Committee meeting

At the June 12, 2015 CB2 Executive Committee meeting, CB2 Chair Shirley McRea announced that approval of the proposed sale and shrinkage of the library was being sent back to the committee referring to “an email from the board office.”  Chair McRae said that July 6th was being looked at for the date for the new committee meeting, but that they were having difficulty setting it up. Following the committee meeting she said it was planned that the full CB2 board would take up the matter July 15th.

Ms. McRae told the room:

Now the follow-up meeting to last Wednesday’s meeting, and everyone needs to be very clear on this, the public hearings are closed, There are no more hearings on the BPL.  It’s over.  It's done with.   It was done on Wednesday.  When this committee meets next it will be to do what they were supposed to. .  What should have taken place, what should have taken place at last Wednesday’s meeting without having sat there for three, four, five hours and then trying to come to some decision.  I just want everyone to be clear on that: It is not a repeat of the public hearing.  This is for the committee now to come together and do the business of the committee.

Maybe the “hearing” is technically over, but that Wednesday the 17th, immediately the hearing, the developer was lobbying the committee members to change their votes, so it is not as if the CB2 land Use Committee isn’t still hearing things from the developer.  Hopefully, they will also still be hearing things from the public and it would be nice if one of the things they hear was the Brooklyn Heights Association admitting their decision was seriously flawed and wrong and admitting to the position that we should not be selling and shrinking a valuable library for a pittance.

The BHA we should stand up with us and the rest of the community against these deals that don’t benefit the public, but do benefit private parties with private interests antagonistic to the public’s, a developer sending campaign contributions to the mayor and a private school.

Two Tom Otterness sculptures at the 14th Street Station on the A-Train.  Which way will the library struggles turn out? With book lovers on top?  Or with all our public wealth transferred to the monied interests who will dispense a few pennies as handouts?

Three strikes and you're out?

The Brooklyn Heights Association has now taken three solidly self-contradicting positions as it digs in to argue for what's an obviously absurd stance for it to be taking in the first place: its promotion of the sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn's central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.

 • First, the BHA now arguing for the shrinkage of a library that it previously advocated be enlarged and which was, in fact, thereupon enlarged and considerably upgraded at appreciable public expense and inconvenience, reopening in the fall of 1993.

. .  Calling for the shrinkage of a library the BHA had previously called for the enlargement of?. .

. . . That's inconsistency Number 1.

 • Then, how is it that when Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) asked the Brooklyn Heights Association to call for proper funding of New York City libraries so that the Brooklyn Heights, Mid-Manhattan, SIBL and Pacific Branch libraries would not be sold, the BHA refused to call for proper funding, saying such funding was NOT a neighborhood concern?. . . BUT NOW---  The Brooklyn Heights Association is calling for the Brooklyn Heights Library to be sold because (supposedly) the sale and shrinkage would mean that libraries in other neighborhoods would get better funding? . . . Actually, that is such a treacherously false belief about funding as to be patently silly, because there is no guarantee that money would actually go to libraries, this library is being sold off at a huge public loss in a transaction that may net less than zero cash, and selling off libraries to developers as a self-cannibalizing funding program may simply foster more underfunding.

Switching from saying that proper funding of NYC libraries is not a BHA or neighborhood concern to saying that it is an important enough BHA and neighborhood concern so that it's a reason to sell off the Brooklyn Heights Library is inconsistency Number 2.

 • Now you can read on the BHA's website that the BHA is opposing new buildings in Brooklyn Bridge Park because:

Public school overcrowding will be exacerbated by the additional development. PS 8 is already operating at more than 140% capacity and turning away local kindergarteners for this Fall.

Right!  . . . But tearing down and shrinking a library supporting educational pursuits and consequently the school system isn't a similar problem, or an even greater exacerbation of it?

That's inconsistency Number 3! . . .

. . . Three strikes and you are out?

Why then might we theorize the Brooklyn Heights Association wants to be so terrifically, consistently inconsistent when it comes to wanting to see the library sold?

Click to enlarge if you dare- The Library-squashing tower that would benefit Saint Ann's private school and a developer if built, but not the public.

Here is Noticing New York coverage where you can read about two things to which we must unfortunately give connected consideration:

• How at the June 17th Brooklyn Community Board 2 Land Use Committee hearing about selling and shrinking the library the developer refused to say what Saint Ann's school is being paid as a result of the library's sale and shrinkage because,"it's a private transaction". . . He said that even though this private transaction is driving a public one!

• How Saint Ann's-connected people are deciding for the Brooklyn Heights Association that the BHA should promote the sale and shrinkage of the library.

Friday, June 26, 2015, Embarrassment of Past Riches!: Augmentation of NYC Book Space At Two Business Libraries Simultaneously- Only Recently The Brooklyn Heights Association Fought For Larger, Not Smaller Libraries.

Brooklyn Hts Blog: Who do you support?

Who then do we want to trust on this?  Do we want to trust the consistently inconsistent Brooklyn Heights Association?  Or as the Brooklyn Heights Blog asked after the 2014 Brooklyn Heights Association annual meeting: Who do you support, the BHA or Citizens Defending Libraries?

I think it's pretty clear: If the Brooklyn Heights Association wants to truly represent the community and the public interest, as is its responsibility to do, it's time for the Brooklyn Heights Association to contradict itself just one final time, changing its position to oppose the sale and shrinkage of the library, and the BHA should do so now while doing so can still have a beneficial effect on the process. . .

It would be the most consistent thing it could do and the thing most consistent with the public's interest.

Wednesday, June 17th, the FIRST EVER public hearing about the proposed sale and shrinkage of an important New York City library, was held before Brooklyn Community Board 2's Land Use Committee.

The proposed sale and shrinkage is of the Brooklyn Heights Library, Brooklyn's central destination library in Downtown Brooklyn on Cadman Plaza West at the corner of Tillary and Clinton.

In recent years New York City library administration officials proposed to sell, or actually sold, other libraries, but no public hearings were required, because unlike this present situation, even though those libraries were funded mostly and very heavily by the city, those libraries, the Donnell Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL (the Science, Industry and Business Library) were not owned by the city.  The latter of these two proposed sales were supposed to be part of the NYPL's Central Library Plan.  It would have also destroyed the stacks for the 42nd Street Central Reference Library's research books.

No hearings were required because, as noted, the city didn't own the land being sold, but it would have been far better if public hearings had been held when those other sales were proposed because the transactions, handing out juicy deals to the real estate industry, did not stand up to scrutiny.

The November 2007 sale and shrinkage of the 97,000 square foot Donnell Library on 53rd Street across from MoMA, one day supposed to be "replaced" by a 28,000 square foot, largely underground, largely bookless library is now universally recognized to have been a colossal mistake, even sheepishly by library administration officials.  The sale, a huge loss to the public and even shrinking the library down to less than one-third size, netted the NYPL considerably less than $30 million while the penthouse in the fifty-story building replacing it on what was documented to be the highest value block in Manhattan is being marketed for $60 million.  The NYPL would have been deeply in a financial hole, suffering a significant cash loss from the sale if it had endeavored to replace the Donnell Library with a full-scale equivalent of the library sold rather than shrinking it down to a fraction.

The de Blasio administration ultimately defunded the Central Library Plan involving the sale of Mid-Manhattan and SIBL in what was a similar drastic downsizing of publicly owned library space and assets, selling off over 400,000 square feet of library space to cram it into just 80,000 square feet.   Only after the Central Library Plan was derailed was it revealed that this shrinkage and divestiture of assets was going to cost the public over one-half billion dollars.  Exactly how much more we still don't know but that half billion figure is hundreds of millions more than what the NYPL was previously publicizing to be the plan's cost.

Why the discrepancy?  Why were these deals so bad for the public, so almost inconceivably worse for the public than could be imagined in ways that were not openly represented by library administration officials to be the case?

The best answer is that they were really being done as favors for the real estate industry for whom the deals were very beneficial.

Now CB2 finds itself with another such library deal, the proposed Brooklyn deal, that's closely modeled to replicate the Donnell sale, another luxury tower squashing down an important library to just one-third size.

CB2's Land Use Committee members raised important questions about the proposed transaction on the 17th after hearing public testimony that spotlighted multitudinous concerns.  Three of the committee's top concerns:

1.)   Brooklyn Public Library administration officials are supposedly proposing this hand-off to a developer in order to bring in funds for libraries.  The problem with tha is that this pretense doesn't bear scrutiny because, as CB2 committee members noted, there is absolutely no assurance any funds from a sale and shrinkage would go to the libraries. . .  for two reasons, actually: a.) because any funds would go to the city that now displays a tendency to withhold funds from the libraries and there'd never be a way to trace the funds or assure they had actually come back, and b.) when you do the math and pierce through the BPL's lack of transparency on the subject, the amount of cash netted with the BPL incurring this huge public loss, like Donnell, is a paltry sum and perhaps less than zero.

2.)  The committee, taking note of the imbalance of what is now fast-paced development in the area with the provision and maintenance of public infrastructure, previously voted that it should not approve any huge new developments while severe overcrowding at PS8 continues unaddressed.  PS8 is currently at 140% and soon faces worse.  Approving the sale of the library for more development would amount to overturning the committee's previous vote.

3.)  In order to obtain a bonus and build a bigger building while also trying to generate public support for the selling off the library's assets, the developer is proposing to build so-called "affordable" housing units at two other sites. Committee members noted that with a sort of quintessential"poor-door," in-your-face bravado the developer is choosing to put these units in a far less desirable location than increasingly fashionable Brooklyn Heights, where the units in the luxury tower replacing the library would be marketed.  The result would be various forms of gentrification:  Those wanting to curtail the many visitors coming to the vicinity of Brooklyn Heights when they use the downtown neighborhood would achieve their aim, plus a high-end luxury building would be built on the Brooklyn Heights border . . .   any lower income residents would get settled at a far remove.

Facing these and other concerns the Land Use committee deadlocked, refuse to recommend the BPL's proposed sale and shrinkage. 

"Poor Door": One location where a few "affordable" units would be built resulting in. . .

Another location where a few "affordable" units would be built

Click to enlarge if you dare- The Library-squashing tower that would benefit Saint Ann's private school and a developer if built, but not the public.

Other things are also on the minds of CB2 members.  Ultimately the entire CB2 board will be asked to vote on the sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights library the BPL officials are recommending.

At a meeting where the BPL presented the proposed sale and shrinkage to the CB2 Youth and Education Committee one member asked why so much of the proposed "replacement" library had to be underground.  The answer?:  Money.  Unless the library is shrunk way down and as much as is currently proposed to be underground, is put underground, the nominal amount of  money (if any?) the library is netting when it sells off this significant asset would be so little as to be laughingly imperceptible when presented as the supposed justification for the sale.

Also on the mind of one of that committee's members:  Sometimes when you visit the library you find people who are observable as probably homeless and, for some people, that's depressing.  From canvassing and talking with users outside the library (I am a co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries) we know that there are also a fair number of users of the library, people impeccably dressed and groomed as they look for jobs, that you would never suspect to be homeless, but, in Will Smith-"The Pursuit of Happyness" fashion, they are.  Yes, and there are also people with low incomes who's could be in danger of becoming homeless without support they get from the library.  Frankly, a full range of people use the library, myself included.

As for the conundrum of how best to treat the perceptibly homeless:  That's a management question.  Swapping the existing library for a smaller one or one that has new surfaces and furniture has nothing to do with what decisions are made when that kind of management challenge is grappled with.

Another CB2 member suggested that our Citizens Defending Libraries opposition to the sale and shrinkage of the library should focus more on the value of the existing library to the public (it has a dollar value to the public of well over $100 million) and how little the BPL is proposing to sell the library for, perhaps netting less than zero.   Conversely, this CB2 member suggested that it is not important or relevant that Saint Ann's, a private school, will be getting a huge payday if the library is sold. This is because, if the library is sold and shrunk Saint Ann's will be able to get paid for transferable real estate development rights, walking away with a free-and-clear amount that may exceed the cash the city is netting when it sells the library.

This CB2 member told us that we should not begrudge Saint Ann's its payday, because the school is entitled to benefit by selling what it owns and that we should not be concerned if Saint Ann's is working hard behind the scenes to lobby local politicians for the sale and shrinkage of the library.  `You can lobby elected officials against the sale,' this CB2 member told us.  We can do it behind the scenes if we want and we can wine and dine elected officials in the process he said.  There is truth to some of this analysis, but mostly we disagree.  Among other things, we probably don't have the same kind of access, nor can we reach deeply into our purse believing that any war chest expenditures will be more than replenished by a coming payday.

The fact that we know this CB2 member to be a significantly close confidante and advisor to one of our more important elected officials makes us wonder whether this is advice that has been given to that elected official and whether it is reflective of the kind of lobbying that Saint Ann's is doing behind the scenes condoned at least by some.

Certainly, if nothing else, the influence that Saint Ann's has had with respect to Brooklyn Heights Association relating to this proposed transaction is improper.  And the Brooklyn Heights Association has, indeed, taken a very odd position supporting the transaction that would benefit Saint Ann's.  That matters a lot.

One example of how it matters?:  The Daily News printing its editorial defending this real estate transaction prominently advised its readers of the BHA's support.  In the editorial it seemed as if the Daily News was working hard to ridicule those opposing the sale and shrinkage of libraries and wanted to suggest that those doing so don't have that right.

So these are just some of the things the CB2 members are considering as maters of concern when debating this transaction.  There are a good many more for them to think about as well.  The BPL is not being transparent about what it is doing.  That includes not releasing documents like its "Strategic Real Estate Plan" (dating back to 2007) and "The Revson Study," both of which would help the public to know which libraries the BPL will target as real estate deals next.

The BPL also worked with the developer to cynically release hundreds of pages of withheld environmental documents (along with all sorts of other documents) in an information dump two days before the hearing on the 17th and those documents have some startling revelations.

NOTICE TO HUMMINGBIRDS!

Mayor Bloomberg cautions
sugary drinks can be bad
for your health and cause
diabetes- Take SMALL SIPS
ONLY . . . No large takeaway
bottles!

But do you remember that BEFORE Mayor Bloomberg was AGAINST sugary drinks he was FOR THEM and he was PUSHING THEM on New York City residents and school children. . . and in New York City libraries?

Do I have your attention?  Would it intrigue you to know that this Bloomberg's pushing of sugary drinks relates to the way that New York City Libraries are being sold and shrunk, handed off to developers with an inside track as real estate deals?

There is a pretty good story here, but it is surprising how hard it can be to get the media to pick up on some pretty good scoops in this area and disconcerting how selectively the news media is choosing  to report certain news. . .

 . .  The Daily News has a Juan Gonzalez article up today reporting that Queens Library head Thomas Galante is likely to be dismissed from his position Thursday night by a newly reconstituted Queens Library board of trustees.  See:  Queens Library chief likely to be suspended in upcoming meeting- Close the book on this one. Thomas Galante, the library's $392,000-a-year president and CEO, who has held the post since 2003, will see his fate decided by a new board of trustees on Thursday night, according to board sources, September 10, 2014.

You may think that Juan Gonzalez is an investigative reporter who delves into things, one that’s going to give you the whole story, everything you need to know.  But do you know what Gonzalez hasn’t bothered to report yet?- What hasn’t been reported at all by the Daily News or the rest of the press as its focuses full bore on this story? . .

. . .  It’s not just that these news stories consistently skip over reporting that Galanate’s salary, the main source of contention in the scandal making abject claim on their focus, is lower than the salaries at the NYPL. .

Do you know that the Queens Library had a long history of standing up to Mayor Bloomberg?

Did you know that The Queens Library system has been expanding its libraries while the BPL and NYPL have been shrinking and selling libraries to hand off as real estate deals?

Did you know that just before Bloomberg left office there was a knock-down, drag-out fight concerning the Queens library board, about what real estate development oriented high-ranking aide the departing Bloomberg would leave as a trustee on the board in violation of the library’s bylaws? . .

. . .  That big board fight was immediately prior to the one now playing out. And the last time Albany stepped in to alter a library board via legislation, as was just done here, was to give Bloomberg greater control over the BPL board, clearing the way for those in Bloomberg’s inner circle who were readying to sell and shrink libraries, handing them off as real estate deals.

Did you know that the Queens Library has resisted efforts to merge operations of all three library systems resisting so-called "cost-saving": changes that might actually cost the public extra?

Read about the way the Queens Library stood up to Bloomberg repeatedly in different ways, starting with the "Snapple" fiasco (the sugary drink connection first mentioned) in Noticing New York: Sunday, August 31, 2014, Mostly In Plain Sight (A Few Conscious Removals Notwithstanding) Minutes Of Brooklyn Public Library Tell Shocking Details Of Strategies To Sell Brooklyn's Public Libraries.  You'll get a fuller and more complete understanding of what is likely going on at the Queens Library than just reading Juan Gonzalez's retransmission of the superficial story that several anonymous "board sources" are handing out as if it is, provocatively, the inside, insight-providing story it isn't.

That Noticing New York article is chock-full of scoops (highlighted here) about the mismanagement of our libraries, including how library administration officials seem to think that it is just fine and dandy to run libraries as if they were economic development agencies . . .  What’s even worse is that they also seem to think that “economic development” means handing off deals to connected developers in crony capitalism fashion.

Properties not very far away from each other  in Brooklyn, city-owned Medicaid office and adjacent Pacific Branch library, and, 11 minutes away, Junior's

Just this last June it was announced that the city-owned Park Slope Boerum Hill Medicaid Office building on Fourth Avenue had been sold to a mysterious developer.  It's the building next to the Pacific Branch library.

Park Slope Boerum Hill Medicaid Office building- 35 4th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

This sale was noted by Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) in the course of reporting on June City Council budget hearings about the libraries (see below).  The reason to note the sale of the property next to the library is that Brooklyn and NYC libraries are being turned into real estate deals, and it has long been suspected that the Medicaid building would be sold to a developer focused on folding the library real estate into its plans:

As was expected by those reading the development tea leaves, the city is now selling the property immediately adjacent to the library, “one of Brooklyn's few Medicaid offices.”  (See: Park Slope Medicaid Office Building With Lots of FAR Sells for $25,000,000, by Rebecca of Brownstoner, 06/05/14)

Air rights could easily be sold and utilized on that adjacent site without incurring the expense of tearing down (or replacing) the landmark building.  But this doesn’t mean that the library would remain a library unless the community asserts itself.  As it is, Citizens Defending Libraries is getting reports that this summer the BPL is shuttling down programs at Pacific Street and refusing to do proper maintenance.

One has to wonder whether the $25 million that the Medicaid building sold for wasn’t rather low.  In a few weeks we will probably see what the sale of Junior’s site, a few blocks away, brings in for comparison.

(See: Report on Tuesday, June 3rd-9th City Council Hearing On Budget For NYC Libraries Plus Testimony of Citizens Defending Libraries.)  - Note the building is, indeed a de facto "landmark," but has never officially been been designated as such by the city despite community urging and a partially successful lawsuit to bring that about.

This week in the New York Times we have the awaited update on the value of the Junior's property, the site of the "legendary" cheesecake restaurant.  The update does make it sound like the amount the city sold the Medicaid building for was, indeed, rather low.  Despite the fact that the Times article reports that Junior's property will now no longer be sold, as was previously the plan, the story zeros in on what was likely to have been paid for the property:

Offers to buy and build an apartment tower poured in from Brooklyn, Manhattan and abroad. The highest bid: $450 per buildable square foot, well over the previous high for Brooklyn of $350, for a total of $45 million in cash.

* * * *

When Mr. Rosen, 45, put the site up for sale in February, he said he would insist that the buyer bring Junior's back to the ground floor of any new building. . .

* * * *

The $45 million offer would not have accommodated a ground-floor Junior's.

Mr. Rosen said he also received offers worth half that amount that would have allowed the restaurant to return, but after receiving disappointed calls from customers and talking it over with his longtime employees, his wife and his 81-year-old father, Walter Rosen, who still walks around the dining room some mornings, he decided he could not give it up.

* * * *

Robert Knakal, the broker on the not-quite-sale. . . . said he was consoling himself with the prospect of a couple of properties that would "probably" break the $500-per-square-foot barrier.

(See:  N.Y. / Region- Junior's, Legendary Restaurant, Is to Stay in Brooklyn- Owner of Junior's Rethinks a Move, by Vivian Yeesept, September. 8, 2014.)

So the figures from the story to work with are "$450 per buildable square foot" if the new owner can do whatever it wants with the site, half that, $225 per buildable square foot, if there were restrictions involving the owner taking back ground or lower floor space, or $500+ per buildable square foot if Mr. Knakal's boosterish ambitions could bear fruit.  Given that the city is apparently selling the Medicaid building free and clear of any restrictions that would lower the price, the "$450 per buildable square foot"is the comparable that should therefore apply.  If the mysterious developer believes that it has an inside track with the city to also buy the Pacific Branch or air rights from it, then there'd be reason to pay a premium for the Medicaid office building, raising the price even a bit higher.

Did the mysterious 35 Holdings LLC, buying the Medicaid office property get any kind of a bargain?  If Brownstowner is correct in reporting that the property has "up to 108,000 square feet in development rights" (being a "18,000-square-foot property") then the $25 million the buyer paid for the property means it paid about $231 per buildable square foot.  Yikes!  That only about half what the Junior's property was being valued at!

Walk from Junior's- 386 Flatbush Avenue Extension, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Maybe the low price can be explained?  Although prices are supposed to be shooting up in Brooklyn, maybe the Medicaid office location, just a few blocks and eleven minute walk away from Junior's (see above), is terrifically less desirable?  To be more specific, the library and the Medicaid office are yards away from the Ratner/Prokhorov so-called "Barclays" arena.  The library, itself, stands directly across the street from the Ratner Atlantic Yards footprint.  Does this short shift in distance depress prices that much?  Or, alternatively, could it theoretically depress prices to be so close to Ratner's mega-redevelopment?

Above, below: Pacific Branch (25 Fourth Ave. at Pacific Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217), down the street, yards away, the Ratner/Prokhorov "Barclays" arena

Wasn't the arena supposed to be giving a boost to the value of the properties next door?  Maybe not. See:  Wednesday, August 22, 2012, The arena effect or the "Brooklyn" effect? Top broker suggests the latter is more important.  Still, on the other hand, while the existing Junior's location is already notably close to the Ratner arena, the Junior's owner when contemplating his sale options considered establishing another Junior's even closer to the arena. 

Atlantic Yards footprint (PC Richards on left) and arena: Is it desirable to be located near them?

Why should an exceptionally low price for the city's sale of the Medicaid office attract our scrutiny?  Because it could be a strong indicator of a crony-capitalistic deal where property is being handed off to someone with an inside connection, shortchanging  the public of the value it deserves . . . just like the neighboring Atlantic Yards mega-monopoly itself, where public and eminent-domain-seized property property was handed off to Forest City Ratner without bid and at an apparent fraction of its true value.

And if the city's Medicaid office sale reflects a crony-capitalistic shortchanging of the public, then there is every reason to believe that any sale of the Pacific Branch library or its real estate development rights by the city likely to fold into that transaction, would similarly reflect such a crony-capitalistic shortchanging of the public.  What's more, when crony-capitalism drives deals there is never assurance that any of the underlying reasons for proceeding with such transactions make any sense at all, no assurance that such sales are undertaken intending to true public benefit in any way.

With two photos side-by-side you can see, left to right, Ratner property in Atlantic Yards (now euphemistically "Pacific Park") footprint across from library, the arena, Pacific Branch and adjacent Medicaid office.

Is the Times article declaring that the original Junior's will not be moving and will be preserved, its intact value recognized, just publicity for a playing-hard-to-get ploy?  Would the Junior's owner really leave millions on the table and walk away?  The Times article article doesn't carefully parse all the options, but maybe one is that Junior's, remaining at this location to which the owner explicitly wanted to bring it back in the end, would remain in place, its historic heritage undisturbed, while selling its air rights to neighboring property owners.  The Times article doesn't say so, but that would be `a have your cheescake location and eat it too' option that could still scoop up most of the money now on the table. . . .

. . . .One thing is certain: Whatever deals are made, the property owner who might have sold Junior's is looking out for his own and his business's best interests.  That protection of the seller's interest is not at all assured (quite the opposite) when it comes to those in hurrying to sell off our public assets.

(Note: Additional photos added 9/12/2014.)

In simple bar graph form- The BPL is proposing to drastically shrink the size of the publicly owned space in the Brooklyn Heights Library from 63,000 feet (blue) to just 21,000 square feet (on left) of which just 15,000 square feet would be above ground.  More visuals in this article look more directly at the existing building and property to explore what the public would lose at the site in terms of the benefits it is familiar with.

Of course, it was disheartening to learn that Brooklyn Public Library wanted to take another step forward with its proposed sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library by voting to approve and announcing the selection of a developer on Tuesday, September 16th. . . .  Actually, they did it in the reverse: First the BPL announced with a morning press release and press conference that the developer selection was in place and then the BPL board voted in the evening to bless that apparently forgone conclusion. . .   

It was disheartening, but it meant that, for the very first time, key specifics were available to the public, an actual design associated with, very importantly, an identified gross sales price figure that, once paid, would give the developer, whom we now know to be the Hudson Companies, the right to buy and shrink the library. . .  With that information we can, for the first time, calculate the extent to which the public will be losing out in the transaction.

It does appear that the public will be losing out in the transaction big time, that the transaction as this irreplaceable library is sold will almost certainly be a net loss for the public.

Base of the building visual now being abandoned

With the identification of the developer we also get to see a new proposed visual for the base of the building housing the "replacement" library apparently abandoning the visual previously supplied.

New version of the building's base (interestingly squoze down) giving a faux impression of being much like the existing library.  Think it's two above-ground floors?  Probably not.  Appears to extend all the way to Ratner's One Pierrepont building? Don't press your luck.

The new visual seems as if it was meant to suggest that the new library, although vastly shrunken, would look, reassuringly, very much like the existing two-floor library, similarly stretching most of the property line along Cadman Plaza West.  But don't be deceived: Were the above-ground space of the replacement library arranged as two stories and stretched out that length, it would be the equivalent of a thin laminate onto the base of the new luxury tower, a virtual applique for visual effect, a Hollywood set, a classic Potemkin Village maneuver.

The existing Brooklyn Heights Library (to be demolished and lost?) actually two stories tall and running about 200 feet, most of the property facing along Cadman Plaza West.

The proposed "replacement" library would have just 15,000 square feet of above-ground space, a small fraction of the Brooklyn Heights Library's current above-ground space.  It would have another 6,000 feet of space underground.  The existing Brooklyn Heights Library also has underground space, far, far more than that, that holds books and though not currently visited by the public, is otherwise available to be put to what the public decides is the best use.

Stretched out as two floors along the Cadman Plaza West side of the space the existing Library building occupies, one can see what a small fraction of the existing building's current above-ground space that amounts to, significantly less than half.  The library is giving up most of its above-ground space before even considering the great deal of underground space we tend to discount.

Above- The existing two-story Brooklyn Heights Library overlaid on the real estate parcel (with boundaries indicated) on which it sits.  That portion highlighted in brighter orange would be the amount of similar above-ground space the proposed "replacement" library would take up.  Hardly enough to be functional, certainly not functional as the central, destination library it has been since it was built.

Same as above with a ruler for reference.

The existing Brooklyn Heights Library is essentially a two-story building with substantial underground space.  The is a small amount of square footage on the first floor that has no space over it on the second.  There is also some cantilevered space on the second floor with no corresponding ground floor space under it.  There is also some third floor mechanical space and stairs that leads up to it.

The visuals above show nothing for the underground space just as you can't see the underground space (quite voluminous) of the existing building. 

Aerial view of existing library from Bing maps used in the composite image above.

Boundaries of the city-owned library property that would be handed off to the developer (Hudson) for the luxury tower with the shrunken library tucked in its base.

There is another way of looking at the space, rather than consider what a thin laminate it would make along the length of Cadman Plaza West How much space would be retained measuring from the south where the adult reading room and Business and Career section of the library currently are.  Doing so (see below) allows for an easy way to describe (see below) space being lost.
If you know the library, you can now see it like the equivalent of giving up:

    •    The auditorium
    •    The Computer Center
    •    The Children's library
    •    The second floor conference room
    •    Office areas
    •    The entrance area
    •    The main administration desk
    •    The bathrooms
    •    The elevators
    •    The stair areas

OR, if you were looking at it the previous version with the library space arranged as a "laminate," what was being given up was:

    •    Parts of all the above
    •    Plus substantial portions of:
    •    - The public part of the Business and Career Library, and
    •    - The main public reading room for adults upstairs

The images also make clear how we are giving up the park space sitting area and the landscaped open areas around the library.

Above you see how much of the area alongside the library on Clinton Street and to the immediate north is publicly owned open landscape that, sold, would disappear along with the library.

The same space would disappear, replaced by the base of the luxury tower when the library is shrunk.  See below.

319 feet tall

Although the intended sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library was not publicly announced until 2013, those making decisions at the Brooklyn Public Library have known for years, since 2007 and perhaps as far back as 2005, that it wanted to effectuate such a sale.  For some seemingly inexplicable reason, the charming sitting area and park at north end of the library has been locked and made off-limits to the public for some time.  One possible explanation?: The first thing one wants to do when selling off a public asset is to run that asset into the ground and otherwise alienate it from the public's affection.  Locking up the park helps to do that.

Is this park and sitting area kept locked to ensure that the public won't use it, be attached to it and fight for it when the BPL sells it to a developer that will build on top of it?

Similarly, are there green space areas outside the library that might have been maintained and landscaped with significantly less zeal in recent years (see below) precisely because they want to sell the library off?  This is very typical behavior when institutions plan development they hope the public won't oppose.  NYU has done it and St. Vincent's was doing it before it went bankrupt in the middle of pursuing its contorted real estate machinations.

Maintained with less than appropriate zeal?  What about those visiting the library to check out books on botany?

The BPL recently paid a consultant to tell it that "economic development" should become part of its mission.  If it wants to go into sidelines, why not let those who come to the library wanting to check out books on botany further their interest and learn more by doing some community gardening on the premises.

Would the public be compensated, and adequately so, for the loss of all the library space and the surrounding property?. . .

. . . It is obvious that the BPL knows it has a problem on this score in making representations on two fronts:

    •    It wants to under-represent what is being sold, and
    •    It wants to over-represent what it is getting back in return.

Under-representation of what is being sold

In terms of under-representing what is being sold, the BPL attempted an obvious ploy in its press release announcing the sale.  It pretended to be selling less of the library than it actually is by comparing the total square foot size of the proposed replacement library to the  "square feet in the current branch that are accesible (sic) to the public."  That's hardly an apple-to-apples comparison unless the 100% of the replacement library will be "square feet" that, unlike the locked park area, are "accesible" or "accessible"  to "the public."  Heaven knows how the BPL calculated what it didn't consider "accesible/accessible" to the public.  They obviously cut a lot of space out of their consideration as being accessible to the public.  Did they exclude auditoriums?  Conference rooms where public meetings have been held?  Bathrooms?  Service desk areas?  Stairways?  Elevators?  Staff offices?  Mechanical support areas?  Bookshelf space?  Any area where books or any other library necessaries are stored?  How about entryways, hallways and stairways?

Somehow the library managed to calculate that there are only 28,000 square feet "accessible to the public."  Then the BPL wanted to disregard nearly half of this space because it is space of the Business and Career portion of the library that it "will move to the Central Library, a more central location"  where they are not adding or building any new space to house it.  A "more central location "?:  There are 11 colleges in the central business district of Downtown Brooklyn which by virtue of the central mass transit hub upon which it sits is central not only to all of Brooklyn, but residents of Manhattan as well.  What's more, because there is no new space being created for it at the Grand Army Plaza Library we may more properly think of the Grand Army Plaza Library as being the place where that Business and Career portion of the existing library goes to disappear.

We now know that the gross price the Brooklyn Public Library will receive from the developer for selling and shrinking the library is $52 million.  It is not surprising that this gross price is small given that most of the development rights for the site were transferred out to Forest City Ratner in 1986: Friday, September 20, 2013, Forest City Ratner As The Development Gatekeeper (And Profit taker) Getting The Benefit As Brooklyn Heights Public Library Is Sold.  Ratner still holds some of those development rights unused.

The next problem is that the public doesn't net the already very small gross sales price.  The BPL seems quite aware of how very little is being netted because it is estimating that the new much smaller library will cost $10 million to build, an obviously low-balled figure.  The sale and shrinkage of the Brooklyn Heights Library is closely modeled on the sale of the Donnell Library, a five-story central destination library in Manhattan sold for a pittance, netting the NYPL far less than its value to the public and less than it would have cost to replace it.  It was sold to net the NYPL less than $39 million while the far smaller penthouse apartment in the 50-story building going up on its former site is on the market for $60 million.

Based on the $20 million cost of building the shrunken 28,000 square foot "replacement" Donnell library (still under construction) the price of building the shrunken 21,000 square foot "replacement" Brooklyn Heights Library would come to $15 million.  The developer's proposal for the library even mimics closely the design for the Donnell Library, that in turn mimics a bookless Japanese library and a Prada store in SoHo.  See below: 

Proposal C's Donnell mimicking descending stair-step "flexible" space

Library?- The stair-step "flexible" space design to 'replace' Donnell

Bookless Japanese library as inspiration for Donnell? From A AS Architecture

The developer's proposal- A library?

That $15 million replacement estimate 's is conservative if you believe the cover of the issue of the Real Deal, stacks of which were available for free at Brooklyn Heights Library this week (see below):  "Rising construction prices hit developers."

The Real Deal: "Rising construction prices hit developers."Really?

Netting $15 million out of a $52 million gross purchase price already leaves only $37 million, but to ascertain whether the public is is coming out ahead or behind on this deal one has to tally up all its costs and everything the public is giving up.  So one should actually subtract out the cost of replacing the entire assets being sacrificed to the deal, the cost of replacing the entire Brooklyn Heights Library.  Certainly the costs of replacing just the rest of the above-ground portion of the library would be at least another $20 million.  That would leave just $17 million before netting out any other additional costs.  . . . It also doesn't consider the loss of the rest of the space that is currently underground.


But what must additionally be netted includes:

    •    The value of the library that the public will miss from the time the existing library is shuttered until the time it is replaced by the new one.  The current plan is to have a very small, 8,000 square foot, temporary library for this interim that will be paid for by the developer (essentially as a self-cancelling increment to the purchase price), but, even by the BPL’s own stingy assessment that the “replacement” library should be 21,000 square feet, that leaves the community 13,000 feet shy of having a library even the size of that shrunken library for the entire construction period.  The BPL is assuring that the “replacement” library will be supplied in no more than 3 ½ years.  In the case of Donnell the “replacement” library was also supposed to be in place in place in no more than 3 ½ years.  Donnell closed in spring of 2008, six months sooner than it was supposed to, and its “replacement” will currently not be in place until at least the end of 2015, 7 ½ years later.  Construction of the replacement has been repeatedly pushed back without consequence to the developer or recompense to the public although the NYPL had the power to insist on the same.  Similarly, government officials have gone out of their way to enforce publicly promulgated and promised time frames for the Atlantic Yards project, something that is virtually impossible to expect when developers have the political upper hand.

    •    All of the transaction costs associated with selling off the library, including all of the professionals, lawyers, real estate experts, etc., associated with the transaction.  This naturally includes the allocable amounts paid to the former Forest City Ratner Vice president who came up with the strategic real estate advice and analysis that the first two libraries the BPL should sell should be this one and another, the Pacific Branch, right next to Forest City Ratner property.  The initial payment authorized to be paid to that professional real estate consultant was just a little under $1 million.  Amounts paid to consultants should also include amounts paid to consultants and lawyers to deal with community opposition to the sale even if no lawsuit si brought by the community and all such expenditures are prophylactic.

    •    The cost, including all allocable staff time, of moving the library twice, first into the very small temporary library (and storage for what won’t fit), and then into the new shrunken library.

    •    The value of the space surrounding the library.

    •    The value of the light and air the library supplies to the neighborhood.  While some may argue for the desirability of the new density to create the luxury condominiums that will tower sufficiently over the surrounding neighborhood to gain a view of the harbor from the upper floors, it should be remembered that the library was built with urban renewal, and that many affordable housing units and commercial properties were demolished with eminent domain on the theory that creation of less density and more light and air was the most desirable thing.

    •    The historic and landmark value of the library.

What might some of these additional losses to the public amount to?

The 13,000 square feet of library missing during construction.   Sephora's is reportedly paying $140 per square foot for its commercial lease down the street, in the Municipal Building, where is is occupying space where the library should likely have been moved (without any ensuing interruption in service) if, with better planning, the library was, indeed to be sold for redevelopment.  As a comparable that might seem high, but a real estate comrade I was talking with pointed out that assembling large amounts of space on the edge of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn is difficult, so it is arguable that a premium price might be in order.   The 13,000 square feet at $140 would come to $6.37 million for a 3 1/3 year lease.  Arguably, the construction might be completed in less than 3 1/2 years so, with luck, some amount of this could be recouped upon surrendering the lease back to the landlord or some sort of very short sublease, but, because it could not be assured that construction would be completed sooner, it would be necessary to lease the space for the entire 3 1/3 years.  There is also another countervailing risk: That rather than the promised 3 1/3 years the actual expense might involve something more like the 7 ½ years it's, so far, taking to replace Donnell.

Total transaction costs.  We know that the initial payment to the Forest City Ratner Vice President was close to $1 million.  We know that there are many very highly-priced consultants already engaged by the BPL in connection with the library sales, including Booz and Co.  We know that high-priced legal talent is expensive.  We know that the transaction here is not just a sale, it is also negotiation for new space with plans to build.  Would we be conservatively underestimating to expect that all transaction costs would come to at least 10%, or another $5.2 million?

The cost of two moves.  Have you ever moved a business?  Experienced the distractions and time it took for staff to plan and figure out where everything is going to go and how it is going to go and be kept track of? The costs are not to be discounted and there are more outside professionals to pay.

The value of the space surrounding the library.  There are surely those who don't value green spaces around a dense and growing neighborhood. 

Without arguing that point we will simply note how the lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” acknowledge a world where some people not appreciating the trees and trees and green that they've got act accordingly to replace them with what Ms. Mitchell’s song makes clear that, she at least, values less, paved parking spaces:

They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum *
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Rather than argue the point of how valuable the green may or may not be to the public we'll use Ms. Mitchell’s song as a basis to simplify things by valuing the space around the library at what Ms. Mitchell values less: parking spaces.  In fact, some of the space around the library is now currently used for parking.

Sunday, the library sadly closed, a lone care pulls in to take advantage of the space

The space around the library might, if used entirely for parking, provide maybe about nineteen parking spaces.  See below:
What are parking spaces worth in New York City?  There are actual market figures on this.

In the summer of 2007 parking spaces were reported to be worth almost a quarter of a million dollars, $225,000.  Prices may have gone up with the New York Times reporting a parking space purchase of "$250,000 a tire" or $1 million.  See: Buy Condo, Then Add Parking Spot for $1 Million, by Michelle Higgins September 9, 2014. 

To be fair, this was one transaction "at Broome and Crosby Streets, itself the former site of a parking lot" and the Times supplied other figures, another Manhattan transaction where spaces were listed for a half million and a Boston space for $560,000 and a London space for $565,859.  It reports that the past year the average price throughout Manhattan has been $136,052.

Nineteen parking spaces at that average Manhattan price would come to about $2.6 million, but if it is assumed that the border of Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn is a relatively premium neighborhood and that the value of a parking space, albeit outdoors, ought to be around $260,000, then the value of nineteen spaces ought to come to around $4.94 million.  Of course we don't know if this would make Joni Mitchell happy.

319 feet tall- But how much taller?

The value of the light and air the library supplies to the neighborhood.  We probably have already arrived at an appreciable net negative, the public suffering a loss if this proposed transaction is implemented, without attributing any further additional loss to the light and air that will be sacrificed if a luxury tower is built, but it is difficult to calculate the value of lost light and air because no version of any of the possible proposed developments showed a project with all the development rights that are available being used.  See: Monday, December 16, 2013, Tall Stories- Buildings Proposed To Shrink The Brooklyn Heights Library: Brooklyn Public Library Publishes Seven Luxury Building Proposals To Shrink Away Brooklyn Heights Library.

The value of light and air?

The historic and landmark value of the library.  The current library is at least the second most important library in the BPL system, one that everybody in the borough knows, and the building was designed by by Francis Keally, the same man who designed the Grand Army Plaza Library, the other Brooklyn library that almost everybody knows.  Keally was a former president of the once-venerable Municipal Arts Society and a head of the New York chapter of the AIA.  One might consider how nice it is that these two well-designed buildings go together providing stature and thematic linkage.

Francis Keally's Brooklyn Heights design

Francis Keally's Grand Army Plaza design

Repairs?  Are we forgetting something?  Aren't there calculations that say that the current library needs repair, perhaps $9 million?  Should these amounts be treated be weighed in favor of  shrinking the library since the replacement library would theoretically not need repair when built?  The BPL would argue this to be the case, but it should only be done if you believe the BPL's inflated estimates and to do so you would have to disregard that the BPL's own board meeting minutes indicate that the estimates were worked on by a former Forest City Ratner Vice President specifically with the goal that they become a convincing argument to sell the library.  The BPL's calculations for the Brooklyn Heights library are clearly intentionally inflated.

The BPL has been playing with its figures respecting the capital repairs it says it needs in its system's and which it argues are a reason for selling and shrinking libraries.  Often it rounds up the figure stated for the public to $300 million in what it will say are "necessary repairs."  Other times, pinned down to be more specific, they BPL gives a lower figure, $280 million and uses the weasel words "unmet repairs" allowing for more exaggeration.  In any event, these figures didn't exist at all until the BPL launched its plans for real estate deals and started building them up with deferrals while scouting for additional expenses to add into the its pretextual mix.

The developer's proposal as summarized in the materials previously furnished by the BPL about the proposals it received

114 "Affordable Housing" Units?  What about the announcement that the developer will also build "114 off-site affordable housing units"somewhere else within the boundaries of Brooklyn Community Board 2, perhaps by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  That involves a whole other set of calculations.  Those units will be subsidized with government funds that could be used for other "affordable housing" and purposes other than dismantling a library that all Brooklynites need and evicting them from an increasingly wealthy and exclusive Downtown.

"Reaction" of Brooklyn Heights Association

The Brooklyn Heights Association's behavior respecting the issue of the library has been very unbecoming.  Theoretically the protector of the neighborhood it has, instead, explicitly condoned the sale and shrinkage of the library, giving the BPL cover to sell it off.  The BHA has now “reacted” specifically to this proposal that has been before it since the beginning of last December.  Its reaction at this late date bespeaks a certain amount of play-acting as they express “concern and cautious optimism.”  The expression of “concern” is offered seemingly to certify that they are looking out for the community (which few at this point believe) and the “cautious optimism” comes as their first step toward further promotion of the sale.   See: BHA Speaks Out on Brooklyn Heights Library with "Concern and Cautious Optimism", By Homer Fink on October 4, 2014 and OPINION: BHA responds to Heights Library redevelopment plan, From the Brooklyn Heights Association's website

The BHA’s “reaction” is mostly a very mild stab at an aesthetic critique with a pretext that there is an open process going on about issues (i.e. they hoped “the developers and BPL trustees will take the time to re-evaluate their design, and engage in an open process with the broader library”):

. . . what we are seeing is a clunky condominium sitting atop generic retail space. We want to see a distinctive and welcoming public building that provides a graceful transition from the civic buildings on Cadman Plaza to the residences of Brooklyn Heights — a library that is a visual gateway to the neighborhood.

The two most substantive aspects of the BHA’s reaction are both dangerously clumsy on their part.

How far away from Brooklyn Heights and the downtown area might the "affordable" units be built?  The boundaries of Brooklyn's Community Board 2 range far.

They unfortunately seem a little too pleased that the affordable units for lower income tenants will not be in the building and thus likely outside of the neighborhood as well:

The off-site affordable housing, which must be within Community District 2 boundaries, will allow for a less bulky building on this constricted site.

The second clumsily taken substantive position?: Like the proverbial broken clock that manages occasionally to be right the BHA observes:

The decision to assign considerable square footage to an exclusive private school gymnasium does not reflect the inclusive mission of our public library system.

The BHA is right that it should not be within the mission of the library to benefit a private school by selling and shrinking libraries just as it should not be within the mission of the library system to do so to benefit a private developer, both of which are happening here.  More simply, it should not be the mission of the library to be engaged in “economic development” notwithstanding the fact that the library hired a consultant from Philadelphia to tell it that its mission should be expanded to include “economic development” in which case there could be odd arguments made for a library system to sell and shrink libraries and eliminate books and librarians.

The BHA is wrong, however, in its apparent background supposition that the gymnasium for the Saint Ann’s School was a benefit that the city or the BPL negotiated to exchange the library for, with the thought that it might now be possible to figuratively come back with receipt in hand to exchange the gymnasium for something else:

Moreover, the project can and should address broader community priorities. . . . Community or public school space is called for in lieu of a private school gym.

It might be pure doltishness on the BHA’s part to think the library was traded for a gymnasium, or perhaps this is a cynical ploy to make it look like the BHA is negotiating for something it knows it won’t obtain.  The fact is that Saint Ann’s is getting a gymnasium isn't because the city or the BPL negotiated for that. Saint Ann’s is getting a gymnasium because it is selling its development rights by joining in the same zoning lot with Forest City Ratner and library property.  By selling and shrinking the library the city makes it possible for Saint Ann’s to negotiate that benefit for itself, but Saint Ann’s is not going to sell its privately owned development rights for “community or public school space.”   Does the BHA really understand so little about this transaction that is affecting the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood so significantly?

More About Private School Saint Ann’s Interest in the Transaction
 
What is true is that private benefit that Saint Ann’s is getting by virtue of this transaction means that the private school is likely to push for the public library to be sold and shrunk just as the private condominium developer undoubtedly wants the same thing to happen.  The question is whether they will have the upper hand when dealing with our public officials, because this transaction can only happen if those public officials, including our City Council and Mayor de Blasio, allow it to proceed. 
Monday afternoon at 4:30 the Saint Ann’s faculty was treated to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation explaining how the library sale would benefit Saint Ann’s.

At the top right of the PowerPoint, the library property labeled as the BPL's, with arrows indicating what is going to be switched around where.

Getting involved in these real estate transactions apparently has Saint Ann's thinking in bigger and broader terms with other interrelated real estate projects and renovations planned as funds flow in.  During the PowerPoint presentation a pie chart was shown of some of the funds involved (below).  What exactly is Saint Ann’s thinking?  Maybe they'll say if asked.
   

The entire block, Ratner Property highlighted, showing what, with Ratner cooperation, could be treated as a single merged zoning lot to transfer development rights from Saint Ann's School to the library site

Above, Saint Ann School building with development rights that are not yet utilized.  Ratner property is in the background, literally (and metaphorically?)

Perhaps the best way to end this article is with a gallery of more pictures so that people will better understand (see below) what stands to be lost if the Brooklyn Heights library is sold and shrunk.  Or maybe it would be best to note that Citizens Defending Libraries (of which I am a co-founder) has launched a Citizens Audit and Investigation of the details concerning the Brooklyn Public Library's secretive and strange pursuit, going back to around 2005, of converting all of Brooklyn's libraries into real estate transactions that will shrink them diminishing the respect for and availability books and librarians and the core missions of a library system.  See (last accessed 10/7/2014): Press Release: Citizens Audit and Investigation of Brooklyn Public Library- FOIL Requests and PHOTO & VIDEO GALLERY: September 16, 2014 Rally Outside BPL Trustees Meeting- BPL Trustees Vote To Hand Off Brooklyn Heights Library To Hudson Co. As Developer.

In essence, the proposal is to shrink the library to the equivalent size of just two rooms like this Business and Career Library space from which would have to be subtracted all entryway, administrative, bathroom, stairway and elevator space.

 

Adult reading room on the second floor over the Business and Career section of the library.

Is the public likely to feel more privileged with second floors window to look out as it has now rather than any additional space being stuck in the basement?

Computer room- Excess space?

The normally full children's room, right before closing, on a day just after the Library has again changed its hours ensuring confusion about when it's open and what routines will work when you plan your visits

Useless hallway space?  Where you can wait for an elevator or congregate waiting for friends, take in an exhibit in this space that graciously transitions from one room to another, buffering sound . . .

I am presently missing pictures that show the frequently used auditorium in its full glory, but this picture from the Brooklyn Eagle is from the night that the auditorium was used to announce this as the first public disclosure of plans to sell and shrink a Brooklyn public library.  The community was not happy.  (The auditorium was used for primary voting this last election.)

Here, also from the Brooklyn Eagle, a photograph of Deborah Hallen using the auditorium to ceremonially display for the record a proclamation by Borough President Marty Markowitz honoring the work of the “Friends of Brooklyn Heights Branch Library" which was then , and now, a lead collaborator in pushing forward the proposed sale and shrinkage of the library.