Remember those plans to rip out the stacks in the landmark New York Public Library building at 42nd St. and Fifth Ave., transforming it into a world-class circulating library, while selling off the dingy Mid-Manhattan branch across the street?
Remember the beautiful, light-filled renderings commissioned, for $ 9 million, from famed British architect Sir Norman Foster? Remember how fantastic it was all going to be, as indefatigably touted by NYPL boss Tony Marx?
Remember the long and bitter fight, in which the very future of this great institution was supposedly at stake?
It’s over. In a stunning about-face, the NYPL just folded — insisting, after third-party cost estimates came in higher than anticipated, that it had discovered a better and cheaper way to open up the Main Branch to the public and fix Mid-Manhattan, all while saving the books.
Now they tell us.
As a result, 88 miles of cast-iron and steel bookshelves will someday soon hold nothing but cobwebs, once books move to new underground storage. The library can’t live with them — because they aren’t properly climate- and humidity-controlled — and it can’t remove them. Because, well, that’s apparently just too complex and pricey.
On paper, the creative plans for transformation, announced in 2008 , had great merit, because the status quo is unacceptable.
At the Mid-Manhattan Library, trying to research job postings, browse the internet or just check out a book is a miserable experience. Meanwhile, at the Main Branch, the stacks are slowly, softly killing the books.
And more than three-quarters of the beautiful edifice’s floor plan is off-limits to the general public. It functions as a museum — no, a mausoleum — more than a real library.
Now, we’re told, the central building can be wonderfully pried open to the public, and Mid-Manhattan magically revived, and the books preserved in a underused facility beneath Bryant Park, without the complex and controversial removal of the stacks. And for far less dough. Oh.
Was the sudden turnabout because of change-resistant protesters who absurdly howled that the renovations were an attack on scholarship?
Was it because of four lawsuits?
Because Bill de Blasio, who has been deeply skeptical of the plan, became mayor?
Or was it because of fatally shortsighted planning by the library that failed to take rising costs into account?
Couldn’t be. Couldn’t be because of that.
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via Great Local News: New York http://ift.tt/1iZiLP1
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