Opponents Sue to Block New York Public Library Renovation Plan

Some opponents of the New York Public Library’s plan to renovate its Fifth Avenue headquarters, which will involve removing its research stacks, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court to stop the project.

The suit, filed by the nonprofit group Advocates for Justice on behalf of five preservationists and scholars who include the historian David Levering Lewis, accuses the library of violating its charter and the state’s Constitution by dismantling seven floors of stacks and removing books from the site. It also says the library failed to conduct an environmental impact review. — The New York Times, July 4, 2013

My comment: YES!!!

I guess it’s up to me to point out that ever since that rotter Stephen Schwartzman gave the NYPL a fortune, i.e., he bought the naming rights to the great library over which this lawsuit has been filed, the library has been:

• Making all kinds of destructive plans to eliminate a lot of branch libraries;
• Announcing plans to spend heaps of money in destroying parts of the library system;
• And very very aggressively demanding that I donate money to “save the library!”

My response is: why are you coming to me when your fund-raising has reached high into the glittery towers of NYC’s amoral financial business world?

And do not, I repeat NOT ask me for money to support the Stephen Schwartzman Library, oops, I mean the New York Public Library, don’t I? — when this is the same Stephen Schwartzman about whom DealBook in the New York Times wrote this in August 2010, during the last presidential campaign:

Stephen A. Schwarzman is well-known for being an outspoken éminence grise on Wall Street. But the Blackstone Group chairman and chief executive has an unfortunate history of sometimes using inapt analogies.

In speaking recently about the Obama administration’s crackdown on finance, Mr. Schwarzman appears to have done it again.

At a meeting of a nonprofit’s board last month, according to Newsweek, Mr. Schwarzman compared the administration’s plans to raise the carried interest tax rate to war. Then he elaborated: “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter reported the reaction among some attendees was not quite simpatico. “A little over the top for a proposal to make hedge-fund managers pay their fair share in taxes,” one is quoted one as saying.

Mr. Alter didn’t identify the nonprofit in question, and while DealBook has confirmed that Mr. Schwarzman made the comments in question, we haven’t yet learned the name of the organization.

Mr. Schwarzman is a member of a number of nonprofit organizations, so the list of possibilities includes:

• The Council on Foreign Relations
• The Business Council
• The New York Public Library …

Yeah, so. You call this creature an “éminence grise?” I call him a vile, tea-party pandering, amoral, greedy, stupid racist.

Here’s the whole piece: Opponents Sue to Block New York Public Library Renovation Plan – NYTimes.com.

P.S. Can I join the lawsuit to get Schwartzman’s name stripped from my public library?