NYPL Shelves Plan to Gut Central Library

In November 2011, The Nation revealed the details of a radical plan conceived by the board of trustees of the New York Public Library: the removal of 3 million books from seven levels of historic book stacks beneath the Rose Reading Room, the subsequent demolition of those stacks and the insertion therein of a modern computer library designed by the British architect Norman Foster. How would the NYPL pay for such an undertaking? By selling two of its nearby libraries to private interests. It was a Bloomberg-era scheme conceived in absolute secrecy by the trustees, with assistance from McKinsey & Co. and Booz Allen, which was paid $2.7 million. The NYPL’s librarians were almost entirely excluded from the process; and not a single public meeting preceded the creation of the plan in 2007.

Save the New York Public Library!

"There is no more important landmark building in New York than the New York Public Library.... Yet it is about to undertake its own destruction." So wrote architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable in her final essay before she died (at the age of 91) on January 7. That essay, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal, was one of two luminous pieces of criticism published in the winter concerning the NYPL's Central Library Plan. Huxtable decried the library's lack of transparency: three phone calls she made to the institution this past August were not returned until a powerful city official intervened on her behalf. As for the CLP, Huxtable arrived at a stark conclusion: "After extensive study of the library's conception and construction I have become convinced that irreversible changes of this magnitude should not be made in this landmark building.... You don't 'update' a masterpiece."