NYPL Announces $1 Billion Makeover

The New York Public Library (NYPL) on March 11 announced a $1 billion transformation plan, sparked in part by a $100 million gift from private equity fund billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman, that involves new hub libraries, an expansion of digital resources, and a dramatic change at its physical core. NYPL will sell the aging Mid-Manhattan Library, one of the central libraries of its branch system, and use the proceeds to fuel a major renovation of the flagship Humanities and Social Sciences Library across the street to accommodate the popular lending and other functions from Mid-Manhattan.

Under the five-year plan, which follows on the OneNYPL strategy that consolidates the Research Libraries and Branch Libraries under one director, David Ferriero (see News, LJ 11/1/07, p. 12), NYPL aims to double the number of unique users who borrow materials, attend programs, and otherwise use the library in person or online. Already, NYPL said, in FY07, the library experienced more than 16 million visits to its 89 locations, a growth of two million over the previous year.

NYPL estimated that it would cost $300 million to renovate the Fifth Avenue library, which opened in 1911 and is known for the lions Patience and Fortitude guarding its entrance, into “a vast, state-of-the-art lending library alongside its existing research divisions.” The general research collection will be moved from the original stacks—seven levels beneath the Main Reading Room—to high-density shelving under Bryant Park, thus allowing a renovation “to create a multilevel, light-filled new library that overlooks the park.” Many collections and services now at both the Donnell Library Center and the Science, Industry and Business Library will be relocated as well.

The six-story Mid-Manhattan Library, which encompasses about 150,000 square feet, is built to less than half its available development rights, according to the web site Property Shark, which means that a building more than twice as large could be constructed on the site. (At $400 per buildable square foot, a price not uncommon in Midtown Manhattan, the site could be worth more than $127 million.) NYPL spokesman Herb Scher said the amount of new public space for the lending library would be comparable and there would be popular materials and services on the ground floor of the Fifth Avenue facility. Still, some NYPL insiders wondered to LJ whether the classic building would remain “too forbidding.”

NYPL, which in 2006 debuted the popular Bronx Library Center, plans to spend $80 million to build two new hub libraries, one in Northern Manhattan and one on Staten Island; $130 million to renovate branch libraries throughout the system, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island; and $40 million for the build-out of a new Library Services Center in Long Island City in Queens. Another $130 million would be spent on technology, online expansion, collections, education, and staff. “NYPL.org will be the most used online resource in the world, one of expanding information and cultural power,” NYPL president Paul LeClerc said at the press conference.

The library also seeks to add $300 million to its endowment funds for acquisitions, processing, and preservation; educational outreach; staff scholarships; and general operations.

The gift from Schwarzman, chair, CEO, and cofounder of the Blackstone Group and an NYPL trustee since 2001, is the largest single donation in the library's history and the largest “outright, unrestricted gift by an individual to any cultural organization in New York City,” NYPL said. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library will be renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Schwarzman, the son of a linen and curtain store owner, grew up in Philadelphia and credits access to the Free Library of Philadelphia as a youth to his success. A longtime New Yorker, he declared, “The New York Public Library is a passport to the American dream for lower- and middle-income Americans and immigrants from around the world.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke at the press conference along with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who declared that NYPL “is the place where only the best is good enough for the least of us.”