BHB: The Walt Whitman Library in Fort Greene.
Johnson, BPL: I love that library. It needs work though. We put a new roof on it, and now it’s leaking through the windows. It’s so frustrating. (BHB – Mention of Whitman’s serving the Farragut, Ingersoll and Whitman NYCHA communities) It is really important. You know, one of the things you asked, about accomplishments—I would not have wished for Sandy [massive Superstorm from November 2012] because it really hurt us badly, it set us back almost a year in terms of the progress we were making on the strategic plan—we have a Red Hook branch right by the NYCHA housing there, and it’s amazing what kind of work we were able to do to help those communities that were hit so badly.
BHB: The imminent sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library and opposition to the sale.
Johnson, BPL: I think it’s a small group of opponents—I don’t mean to be cavalier about it because I know they’re passionate about [their opposition]—the same, very noisy group. I think that the bigger risk would be to do nothing and to just continue pretty much business as usual, to ask for public money to fix a failing building with failing infrastructure, knowing that the funding could take place over a period of years, that you spend an inordinate amount of money to fix a problem because you’re dealing with it only when it’s an emergency, as opposed to at the outset when it could be preventative or at least at a point when you can manage it better. This is what’s been happening at Brooklyn Heights for 10 years. You’ve got a piece of property that has an extraordinary amount of value and has close to $10 million dollars of infrastructure needs, including a new HVAC system that now has us opening from 8:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon because it’s too hot after 1:00 for patrons and obviously for our employees as well. That for me just isn’t a solution.
In Brooklyn Heights, you have a very literate community that deserves a world-class library. I think by everybody’s standards, anybody that has gone into that library, that uses that library will tell you that despite a fabulous staff—we have really great people in there—that it is not a good library. There’s a lot of wasted space; it was built in ’62, and there’s a very wide staircase and most of the square footage is underground. There’s really not architectural significance or historical value to the building. Yet it’s got all of this value. At the same time there are libraries like Walt Whitman all over the borough that don’t have that kind of value and that have an extraordinary need, and how are we going to take care of that? This project gets the library out from under the capital need of the building, so that’s $10 million dollars, it gets the library a core and shell, which means that the developer will deliver to us everything—we’ll have to deal with the paint-in, but that’s all. I’ll build a new library for a lot less than it will take me to fix what’s there today, and it will have the kind of flexibility that you need in the 21st century to deal with not only the technology we’re using today but whatever’s coming down the pike and then—the rate of change is so rapid—that it’s hard to even imagine what in 10 years [patrons] will be using. They’ve got built spaces that can handle what’s coming down the pike in addition to what’s in use today.
I’m very excited about what we can do in Brooklyn Heights, and I’m equally excited about what we can do in other libraries all over Brooklyn with the money that we pull out of the project.
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