"Ambitions Rekindled at Public Library
The New York Public Library on Wednesday rekindled its ambitious $1 billion plan to overhaul its branches and renovate its Fifth Avenue flagship.
The plan, which will now involve selling two of the system’s best-known libraries — the Mid-Manhattan branch and the Science, Industry and Business Library — was announced in 2008, when it was expected to be substantially completed by 2014. But the plan languished because of the economic downturn and changes in the library’s leadership.
On Wednesday, though, the board gave the British architect Norman Foster approval to proceed with the next stage of designing a new circulating library inside the main branch to replace the Mid-Manhattan operation. It would be built below the Rose Reading Room, overlooking Bryant Park.
The board also approved a pilot program to expand educational programming at branch libraries.
“We are ready to re-engage toward executing our plans,” said Anthony W. Marx, who became the library’s president in July.
Plans for two new libraries, one in Upper Manhattan and one on Staten Island, which were to cost $40 million each, have been abandoned. But the overall cost of the project still hovers around $1 billion, which includes increasing the endowment.
About $300 million will go toward renovating the main branch; $150 million will come from the city and the rest from donations and the sale of properties, including the Mid-Manhattan branch on Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, the business library on Madison Avenue at 34th Street, and the Donnell branch on West 53rd Street, which closed in 2008.
The library has already agreed to sell five floors of office space it used in the business library building, a former B. Altman department store. Now it plans to also sell its library space on the first and lower levels.
Mr. Marx said the collections and services from the business and Mid-Manhattan libraries would be incorporated into the main branch and neither building would close until that reconfiguration was done.
The library in July sold the Donnell site to Tribeca Associates and Starwood Capital Group, which will build a hotel and condominium designed by Enrique Norten to include a library.
The plan has raised concerns among librarians about their jobs and among library patrons, who fear that creating a circulating library in the main branch, now a noncirculating research library, would result in fewer books being available.
There are two main storage areas in the main library. There will still be 1.5 million books in the stacks underneath Bryant Park, library officials said. The more than two million items in the noncirculating stacks, built in 1911 under the main reading room, will be moved elsewhere in the building or into storage in New Jersey. Mr. Marx said that any book requested from New Jersey would be available at the main branch within 24 hours by scanning or delivery.
“We’re going to have to make hard decisions about what should be kept there,” he said, referring to the main branch. “We want to ensure our unique and priceless collections are accessible.”
With the expansion the main branch will become the largest circulating library in the United States, Mr. Marx said, with publicly accessible stacks. “We need to provide the opportunity to browse for books at a time when bookstores are closing,” he said, adding that “scholars and researchers should be able to enjoy the serendipity of what they find on the shelf.”
But some patrons fear crowding at the main branch, where annual attendance is expected to rise to perhaps 4 million, from 1.5 million. “It won’t be O.K.,” said Donald Jones, 55, a Manhattan resident who uses the computers at the Mid-Manhattan branch several times a week. “One problem I already have is crowding with the computers.”
The plan also calls for turning second-floor offices in the main branch into workspace for as many as 400 writers and researchers and for keeping the library open until 11 some nights. (The latest it stays open now is 8 p.m. two days a week.) “We want this to be Writing Central for New York,” Mr. Marx said.
Some trustees had questioned the viability of such an expensive plan in an economic downturn. But now most seem comfortable with it. “I’ve never been more confident,” said Marshall Rose, chairman emeritus and a co-chairman of the building committee.
To some extent the project was also stalled by a changing of the guard — the departure of Paul LeClerc as president in July and Catherine Marron as chairwoman in September. Mr. Marx, though, said the timetable was not affected by his drunken-driving arrest in November, four months into his tenure. When he was arrested Mr. Marx was driving a library-owned car on a Sunday afternoon in East Harlem. He pleaded guilty in December, was fined $500, had his license suspended for six months and was ordered to enroll in counseling.
Library trustees say that Mr. Marx retains their full support.
“We’ve certainly all put it behind us,” said Neil L. Rudenstine, a former Harvard president who became the library’s chairman in September. Mr. Marx, he added, “is one of the best people I’ve ever worked with.”
Mr. Marx said he had visited 82 of the system’s 89 branch libraries and was enthusiastic about plans to expand their services.
“I grew up using the branch libraries,” said Mr. Marx, who was reared in the Inwood section of Manhattan. “They are a passion for me.”
The branches are at the heart of the library’s mission, Mr. Marx said, as places where people can read, study and use computers free. That is why he is spearheading the educational pilot program to increase English and computer classes, after-school tutoring and homework help.
Mr. Rudenstine said the library hoped to bring its online catalog into public schools in a partnership with the city’s Department of Education; about 50 schools already have access through a pilot program.
Statistics show that more people go to public libraries in New York City than visit all sporting events and other cultural institutions combined. But Mr. Marx said, “We’re not satisfied that we’re meeting the needs of all New Yorkers.”
The library wants to hear “what New Yorkers want their library to look like in the future,” he said. To that end, starting Thursday the library is soliciting comments and suggestions on its Web site (nypl.org/yourlibrary).
Stephen A. Schwarzman, a trustee who donated $100 million to the library in 2008 (the main branch now bears his name), said he was glad to see the undertaking back on track. “The whole project has got enormous vitality,” he said. “When it’s completed, people are going to be dazzled.”
