The Illuminator Takes on the NYPL Renovation Plan: Suggests de Blasio should turn down ‘deal drunk one percenters'

In recent weeks, everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Jonathan Lethem have argued the developer friendly NYPL ‘renovation’ plan is ill conceived.  The only one's who benefit from the plan gut the NYPL is developers who profit.

Why is real estate calling the shots on library policy? we asked at our last flash mob against the NYPL renovation plan in December. Save our stacks, we declared.  

As the Citizens Defending Libraries recently pointed out:

 

Wall Street Journal says NYPL board is an example of nonprofit governance emerging crisis: board policies imperil institutional mission- NYPL guts magnificent Beaux Arts Fifth Avenue research institution to, exiling books

—the mission of the institution they are charged to oversee and protect.

"The New York Public Library wants to gut its magnificent Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue and change it from a research institution to, as Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in this newspaper, `a state-of-the-art, socially interactive, computer-centered' circulating library, with fewer books, a good number of them moved off-site."

With all this in mind a few of us joined the Illuminator last night to send a message to the NYPL, projecting a simple message along its wall. 

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This afternoon Library Lovers will converge on the NYPL at 42nd Street for a Rally at 5 PM to send a message to the NYPL Board of Trustees during their meeting. 

Library Lovers message to the NYPL Board.
Photo by Library Lovers

PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY

Hi all -

You've probably heard about the NYPL's plan to demolish the historic, seven-story 
book stacks at the 42nd Street Library and send 1.5 million books to storage in central New Jersey, and sell the Mid-Manhattan Library. Several people on this list have been working hard to fight this project, and we may be close to winning! Please take 30 seconds to send an email to Mayor de Blasio asking him not to spend $150 million of taxpayers' money on this destructive and wasteful plan. Click here:
www.savenypl.org/email-the-mayor

Also, please