Library Plan Pits de Blasio Pledge Against Mayoral Role

While running for mayor last year, Bill de Blasio joined demonstrators on the steps of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue to denounce a $300 million renovation of the marble edifice as a dramatic alteration of a crown jewel.

Now in City Hall with the power to stop the project, as he implored his predecessor to do, de Blasio hasnt made a decision on the plan, said Marti Adams, his spokeswoman. The mayor kept $151 million in his preliminary budget for the remodeling, with his final spending plan due next month.

The proposal seeks to draw more people to the iconic main branch while saving more than $7 million a year by shutting down two nearby library buildings. It would consolidate their operations inside an 80,000-square-foot atrium created by ripping out a seven-level book stack, hailed as an engineering marvel in a 1911 cover story by Scientific American magazine.

Opponents trying to preserve the stacks say the Beaux Arts temple of culture will no longer be the worlds pre-eminent free research institution when about 40 percent of its 9.9 million hard-to-find volumes must be retrieved from repositories more than 50 miles away. Neighborhood activists say the money earmarked for the renovation would be better spent on the systems 88 overused and underfunded local branches.

One of pair of pink-marble lions guards the front steps of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in New York. Close

One of pair of pink-marble lions guards the front steps of the New York Public Library... Read More

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One of pair of pink-marble lions guards the front steps of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in New York.

Were trying to improve a masterpiece, and none of the people involved are Michelangelos and da Vincis, said David Levering-Lewis, a historian who researched his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of early civil rights champion W.E.B. Dubois at the library. He was paraphrasing architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, who denounced the plan in the Wall Street Journal in December 2012, a month before she died.

Anthony Marx, 55, president of the library since 2011, says hes listening to the opposition and taking into account de Blasios questions about the librarys future. He holds a vision, he says, of a more democratic institution welcoming more people than the current 2.4 million who use it now. About 30 percent of the current space is open to the public, he said.

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Library Plan Pits de Blasio Pledge Against Mayoral Role