Brooklyn Heights resident & “Noticing New York” blogger Michael White weighs in Sunday on all the latest regarding the potential closure of the Brooklyn Heights Public Library’s Cadman Plaza branch. In his post titled “The Petition To Save The Libraries Is Working: Confirming Petition Points BPL Head Linda Johnson, Library Officials Trip Up Defending Plans,” he notes:
* The BPL library plans a 50%+ shutdown of the Brooklyn Heights library with a “redeployment” of staff in a few months that will probably continue until it is then torn down. Afterward, temporary or permanent, that means there is much less library. “In other words the downsizing comes now.”
* The BPL is declaring that its objective is to get a deal inked that hands the library to a developer before the end of Mayor Bloomberg’s term and before public review of the deal. This is similar to the NYPL’s intent to start ripping out stacks at the main research library to make things there irreversible along about pretty much the same schedule.
* It contains the BPL head statements that these (system-wide per strategic plan) real estate deals (essentially the same as what’s going on in Manhattan) are being looked at as prototypes for the rest of the city.
* It confirms that deals are being pushed forward without knowing whether there will be benefit to the BPL—or what that benefit might be.
* And White’s golden nugget: “What could Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein have to do with the plan of the trustees of the Brooklyn Public Library to sell off and shrink libraries, the Brooklyn Heights Library and others, in highly finagled real estate deals benefitting developers?”
There’s a lot more in White’s 1,600-word post (intellectual, yes; brevity, not so much).
