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Title: They’re closing libraries in London and New York
Source:
markcrispinmiller.com
URL Source: http://markcrispinmiller.com/2013/0 ... raries-in-london-and-new-york/
Published: Jun 9, 2013
Author: Carolyn McIntyre
Post Date: 2013-06-18 09:42:05 by GreyLmist
Keywords: New York City, London, libraries, public property plundered
Views: 3511
Comments: 23
What do New York City and London have in common? Both are eliminating their public libraries against the will of the public and replacing them with luxury housing, using secretive, deceptive tactics. Budget cuts resulting in extremely profitable deals for . . . . whom exactly? Here are excerpts from the New York Review of Books Article called The Northwest London Blues by Zadie Smith [sic] Compare that to Michael D. D. White’s article on the sale of Donnell Library posted on Noticing New York [sic] Here is a quote from his article It is almost as if the authors of the London and NYC articles copied each other and substituted different libraries, one from London, the other from NYC. 2. In 2008 Bloomberg gets elected mayor of London and with arm twisting from Quinn, gets elected mayor of New York City by exceeding term limits. 3. In London and NYC extremely wealthy people are sometimes idolized to the point of that some assume they are smarter and more worthy than anyone else simply because they have a lot of wealth. It is a problem if their word counts for everything, the rest count for practically nothing. We say everyone is worthy, no one is more worthy then anyone else. We recognize talent and respect it, at the same time having more or being smart does not entitle one to be able to take property or publicly owned assests from others. Also from the London article, “British libraries received over 300 million visits last year. In North West London people are even willing to form human chains in front of them. People have taken to writing long pieces in newspapers to “defend” them. Just saying the same thing over and over again. Defend our libraries.” And what does Citizens Defending Libraries say, Defend Our Libraries! So you have a choice. Most New Yorkers still don’t know that public libraries are being sold off, not because the city cant afford them, (the city is wealthier than ever), but because a few people want to take the valuable property, build high rises that will make a few enormously wealthier even though they are stealing from the public to do it. [sic] I hope you join us in showing that we want to stop the sell offs of public buildings and resources, it is demeaning to the public service professionals and other hardworking employees who dedicate their lives for our good and to the public who uses them and pay for them. Thank you for caring, Carolyn McIntyre Poster Comment: Mike Rivero's commentary on the article at whatreallyhappened.com Last night, the original 1975 version of "Rollerball" starring James Caan came on one of the cable movie channels. When it first came out, it was one of my favorite films, portraying a world run not by civil governments answerable to the people, but by large corporations answerable only to their investors. The entire society is structured to brainwash the people that individual effort is meaningless and that only mass obedience to the corporations keeps society going. The James Caan character, Jonathan E, by becoming a superstar in a game designed to kill those who stand out, undermines the authority of the corporate executives. But one of the most interesting side-plots is that in searching for more information about his world, Jonathan discovers that all real libraries have been closed down. Yes, you can get a corporate-approved summary of any corporate-approved reading material, but all the real on Earth books have been destroyed and the contents are saved on a single giant computer called "Zero", not unlike that huge NSA data center in Utah. Jonathan E visits this computer with all the world's books transcribed into it to ask some basic questions of how the world came to be dominated by corporations, only to find that Zero, in trying to evaluate all of the data stored in it, has gone quite mad (and lost the entire 13th Century in the process). That may be the fate of all that data in the NSA data center as well; simply too much to derive any meaningful answers from, especially since it relies on a most unreliable source of raw material, the public's often exaggerated self-portraits in social media! …”first heard of the council’s intention to demolish the library centre along with the bookshop and the nineteenth-century turrets … To be replaced with private luxury flats, a greatly reduced library, “retail space” and no bookshop.”
“offered a smaller library (for use by more patrons from other libraries Brent has closed), an ugly block of luxury flats— and told that this is “culture?” Yes. That’s all really happening. With minimal consultation, with bully-boy tactics, secrecy and a little outright deceit…Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them.” See below article. . . “the building that housed Donnell has been sold to make way for a hotel and a much smaller public library. . (w)ith the proposed library having less than half the space for public services as the old Donnell . . . questions remain about the location of some of the collections. . . More importantly, the breakup of the collections diminishes the role of Donnell as a central library . . . The decisions . . . [were] communicated to staff (and in the case of Donnell, to the public) largely after the big decisions have been made.”
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#1. To: GreyLmist (#0)
It has literally been decades since I've been in a public library.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
I stop by once a week or so. It is usually quite well attended, in fact, they expanded it about two years ago - I attended the re-opening ceremony.
Public Libraries are - here's a surprise - sustained by tax money. New Yorkers - here's another surprise - do not like to pay taxes. With very pressing economic concerns (such as repairing bridges that have long been held together only by a coat of paint), and an unwillingness on the part of the taxpayers to be bled any further, and, I might add, steadily declining public usage of the public libraries (in favor of Googling at home), municipal govts are trimming back on the public libraries. For years - at least two decades - the public libraries in many cities have been anemic. They've been forced to cancel subscriptions, to forego purchases of new materials, to postpone repairs and upgrades, and, finally, they've been forced to trim their staffs and their hours of service. At the same time, most of the same cities have never been generous about facilities for the homeless or the elderly, so in a lot of instances, during the day the public libraries turn into outpatient waiting rooms, where the homeless, the lonely, and the demented simply stay dry and warm. That further discourages serious readers from coming. In the case of the Donnell Library on 53rd Street in NYC, it's already been shuttered tight for nearly FIVE YEARS. That's five years in which it got no magazines, no new books, no nothing. If it flung open its doors today it would still be mostly useless. But it's very valuable real estate, close as it is to Lincoln Center; the city could get a pretty penny for it - maybe use some of that money to help the remaining libraries.
When a city goes brown, it loses its libraries.
"Mr. Prime Minister, there is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive." -- Leonid Brezhnev to James Callahan
Honestly, Shoonra, would you have argued all that the same if the topic was taxpayer funded Holocaust Studies facilities/museums being converted to high priced real estate? I think not, even though more people might choose to Google from home than go to one. I could be wrong but don't think the public was even given the choice to vote on whether or not they wanted to continue maintaining their financial and cultural investments in these public library properties. Seems to me you are claiming that public owned property should be made private for the benefit of the few who are much more financially endowed -- forfeited to maintain instead the plutocratic-oligarchs' decrepit money-system monstrosity that is the actual problem of disrepair and uselessness for the downtrodden masses of society, not their libraries. Take whatever time you need to re-evaluate the situation, if you care to, and then get back to me on this when you can. Perhaps your perspective might be less Scrooge-like if you looked at it from a more public and cultural point of view than that of plundering profiteers.
------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
Most municipalities have opportunities for the public to express itself on such matters as library support. What has happened in the NYC area - I know from friends who work in the NYC Public Library system - is politics, a good deal of it racial politics. For example, the public libraries in some black neighborhoods are spectacularly underused - sometimes because it's worth your life to walk a few blocks in that neighborhood, sometimes because hardly anyone (even kids) has any free time to spend at the library. It would make sense to close down an underused library and just hope that the few enthusiastic readers in that neighborhood will take the bus or subway to the nearest surviving library. But no, the NAACP and some other pressure group will play the race card; the fact that library building itself might not be safe doesn't matter - that library must be kept open -- close down some other library, which means one that actually gets more use and possibly in a white neighborhood. Even if enormous crowds show up to keep a library open for the hearing on libraries, an even more enormous crowd will show up at other hearings to oppose any tax increase, to advocate for budget-cutting, etc. Which means that the library must be trimmed back (shorter hours, smaller staff, fewer new books, etc.) no matter how much demand there may be for its services. I know of one county (at least) where the public library budget is handled by the School Board; the available money goes first to all the schools, what little is left is allowed to the libraries - and sometimes only if they promise to buy books that the schools ought to have bought. The public libraries are put at the very end of the line of public services with their begging bowls.
I agree with you, Shoonra, about the dismal state of public libraries in NYC. ( It's not too different in California cities). Racial politics and the library department being the low man on a city's budget distribution totm pole are in play and the fact that taxpayers are tired of and frankly, angry about any new increases in taxes to support public sector salaries and bloated pensions. In SoCal it made the news that a retired public librarian was earning a $225,000 annual pension - are you friggin' kidding me? Also the ease and speed and reasonable prices of buying books from online stores either in print or digital format makes a trip to a public library unnecessary. And the current "culture" one often finds hanging out at public libraries these days - like the mentally ill, homeless, and the weirdos using the libraries' computers to watch porn - is a turn off for families. I used to love going to the public library in years past but not the last 10 years - primarily because of the user culture and lack of new books and limited hours of opening.
With e-books and so much current information conveniently available on the Internet it's a waste of time having to go to a public library. In Canada, Edmonton is still building new libraries and all readers are being offered a free (anniversary) library card, free e-book downloads and free computer use for an hour. Might be better to instal computers in coffee shops and let proprietors run them.
I visit the library about once a week and sometimes twice. It has been a godsend for some hard to find books and I was able to watch every one of Jeremy Brett's marvelous portrayals of Sherlock Holmes (done as Conan Doyle wrote him). Tonight I am going to watch a movie I checked out of the library today.
The sense of peace one get from the library is quite unique. I loved to Hang at the Central Montreal library until they closed it and moved it's content away to a new location, it was quite a shock... it went from this to this Frankly, going to the library is not a lost art. When your kindle runs out of juice, gets into an accident, the screen cracks, tossed in the wash... Nothing beats a good ole book, especially when it is a first edition! ebooks are fine, practical when you want to go to bed and read while laying on your back, the pad is lighter than a book. Beyond that, can't really leave an e-book in the subway or the bus for someone else to pick up and read. Quite sad for the residents of the city of NY The 25 Rules of Disinformation 18. Emotionalize, Antagonize, and Goad Opponents. If you can’t do anything else, chide and taunt your opponents and draw them into emotional responses which will tend to make them look foolish and overly motivated, and generally render their material somewhat less coherent. Not only will you avoid discussing the issues in the first instance, but even if their emotional response addresses the issue, you can further avoid the issues by then focusing on how “sensitive they are to criticism”.
Thanks for your input, SilverStorm. You came closest to Mike Rivero's film commentary about digitized data being vulnerable to loss. That could be a bigger downside than just a temporarily lost e-book inconvenience; even if not on such a massive and critical scale as the entire history of the 13th century vanishing, like he described as having happened in the Rollerball movie by super-computer malfunction. :-/ The article mentioned London, as well, so I think it's also sad for them and New Yorkers to be dispossesed of their libraries. Why aren't philanthropists stepping in to help fund those facilities, as they do for other projects of less educational and cultural value, I wonder. The pics you posted are grand. Could you, though, reduce the size of the 2nd one, please, through the Edit option so that readers won't have to scroll back and forth to see the spillover text? Just add: width="350" to end of the url path with a space before that addition, then the usual > ending-symbol. TIA if you see this in time to do that before the Edit option closes. ------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
4 Library proponents: Me, Fred Mertz, Original_Intent, SilverStorm 3 Opposed: Shoonra, scrapper2, Tatarewicz 2 Neutral (but maybe leaning either way): Lod, Prefrontal Vortex 2 Posters here who have recently needed to access the 4um from a Library: BTP Holdings, purplerose (possibly others) On the issue of a Librarian's pay scale in California: Don't know why but I was told that they have to go to college for 8 years or more. Some issues of importance, imo, that have been sidetracked are: 2. The worth of community libraries to people being discounted as of lesser value than high-priced real estate development for the wealthy. 3. Voting to tax people for libraries but no official voting process to dissolve and privatize those properties that they've invested in for their use. 4. The home-Googling option and comparatively low numbers of visitors at other places like art museums, Holocaust museums, etc., which aren't being closed because of that or deemed of low societal value and too expensive to retain for the public. And Shoonra, that was some mighty fancy footwork you did there by moving the issue from the prime real estate takeover to the "beggar bowl" district and NAACP pressure groups. I guess if the downtown "underclass" can't travel uptown to the library on account of them being demolished there to build pricey quarters for the "upperclass", about the only logical place left in your opinion to keep a library open for the public is a middle class suburb -- or maybe boats and traveling bookmobiles, yes? Edited for formatting, grammar and rewording of #4. ------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
Meant to include you in the ping list for the previous post as being mentioned in opinion poll that I compiled at the top of it but forgot to do so before it was sent.
------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
I too, dig libraries. I prefer they run themselves since they can rather than being state sponsored but still it is nice to have many repositories of knowledge. Alexandra should of taught us all the value of having multiple libraries. ______________________________________ Suspect all media / resist bad propaganda/Learn NLP everyday everyway ;) (It's a more positive message)
I propose that library be kept open. If more people spent time reading than in beer bars we would not have such a high illiteracy problem. When I was doing legal research of federal cases in L.A., I spent more time downtown L.A. in the library than I did in my local library because of the accessibility of law books including tax appeal cases that I was working on behalf of a friend. When I was in that downtown library, I observed a mixture of blacks, whites and some hispanics using it.
A friend suggested I take an audio CD book, if that's what they're called, the next time I take a long road trip which I do at least a couple times a year. I did it once about a dozen years ago but the audio version was much longer than my trip and the subject was a bit complicated. I'll try to pick out a winner at the local library for my next road trip.
Your putting people into columns of for/against libraries is simplistic and inaccurate. The issue at hand is a discussion of why libraries are being shut down in 2 large cities in the world - NYC and London. Some of us - Shoonra, myself, and Tatarewicz - are simply pointing out the possible reasons for why this is happening. We are not Nazi storm troopers wanting this done across the USA and Britain. As for your passing comment justifying a public librarian's annual pension on the taxpayers' hard earned dime @ $225,000 being A-OK because of 8 years of college (like medical school?), your irrational position indicates a personal interest in this topic which is clouding your judgement.
Gee, I think I will ask them here at the library how much their pensions are deemed to be by the County Board. Since they are all payrollers, I'm sure they get something, but it is not known just how much. Who knows, maybe they do not get any pension at all here since they do not have the money to build an addition. Pensions are, however, figured into the budget as a part of their regular payroll. Don't forget the book "Farenheit 451", which is the tempurature that paper burns. This was a novel written many years ago. ;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Sad to tell you but the U.S. Government IS a corporation spelled in all capital letters, UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. This law was passed in 1871. So, it seems they have been doing this to us for far too long. It's long past time to get out from under it. I have already done so by filing my Security Agreement. This is a sure thing in a world in which there are far too many variables.;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Les bibliothèques sont un délice.
One of the local Librarians out here told me that they get no pension here. The Library Board is a subsidiary of the County Board. ;)
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
That's quite a trick. A Bachelor's degree is a mere four years, and an MLS (Master of Library Science) is about 18 months fulltime. I don't see how this can be stretched into 8 years unless we're talking night school.
BTP Holdings: Sad to tell you but the U.S. Government IS a corporation spelled in all capital letters, UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT. This law was passed in 1871. So, it seems they have been doing this to us for far too long. It's long past time to get out from under it. I have already done so by filing my Security Agreement. This is a sure thing in a world in which there are far too many variables.;) Replied at Post #16 of 4um Title: Keiser: The Collapse of the Current Bankster Regime is Upon Us. See also Post #17 there for further info. Edited sentence 1 + added sentence 2. ------- "They're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time." -- Col. Puller, USMC
#2. To: Lod (#1)
#3. To: GreyLmist (#0)
#4. To: GreyLmist (#0)
#5. To: Shoonra (#3)
#6. To: GreyLmist (#5)
I could be wrong but don't think the public was even given the choice to vote on whether or not they wanted to continue maintaining their financial and cultural investments in these public library properties.
#7. To: Shoonra, GreyLmist (#6)
What has happened in the NYC area - I know from friends who work in the NYC Public Library system - is politics, a good deal of it racial politics....Even if enormous crowds show up to keep a library open for the hearing on libraries, an even more enormous crowd will show up at other hearings to oppose any tax increase, to advocate for budget-cutting, etc. Which means that the library must be trimmed back...
#8. To: GreyLmist (#0)
#9. To: Lod (#1)
#10. To: (#0)
(Edited)
#11. To: SilverStorm (#10)
#12. To: Shoonra, Lod, Fred Mertz, Prefrontal Vortex, scrapper2, Tatarewicz, Original_Intent, BTP Holdings, purplerose (#6)
(Edited)
1. The actual problem of ridiculous costs to maintain a dysfunctional financial system rather than maintenance costs of public libraries being made the distraction from that.
#13. To: SilverStorm (#12)
#14. To: GreyLmist (#13)
#15. To: GreyLmist (#12)
#16. To: GreyLmist (#12)
#17. To: GreyLmist (#12)
(Edited)
#18. To: scrapper2, GreyLmist (#17)
(Edited)
As for your passing comment justifying a public librarian's annual pension on the taxpayers' hard earned dime @ $225,000 being A-OK because of 8 years of college (like medical school?), your irrational position indicates a personal interest in this topic which is clouding your judgement.
#19. To: GreyLmist (#0)
(Edited)
portraying a world run not by civil governments answerable to the people, but by large corporations answerable only to their investors.
#20. To: SilverStorm (#10)
#21. To: GreyLmist (#11)
#22. To: GreyLmist (#12)
I was told that they have to go to college for 8 years or more.
#23. To: BTP Holdings (#19)
(Edited)
Mike Rivero's commentary at the opening post: portraying a world run not by civil governments answerable to the people, but by large corporations answerable only to their investors.
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