When I see beautiful old buildings neglected like this, it's heartbreaking to me. The only reason nobody lives there and makes a storied life of it that enriches the life of the city is because of some quirk of bureaucracy. The converse is when someone does inhabit something like this, it's criticized as a "sweetheart deal" with the implication if not the outright accusation of corruption. In Toronto, we have an island downtown with homes on 100y leases that cannot be re-sold at market rates, but also cannot be willed to heirs, and that has a pretty transparent waiting list system, which still gets periodic criticism as corrupt.
These library apartments could be revitalized to operate on a similar scheme, even though there would be huge risk of them going to the politically connected and patronage. Political classes tend not to understand that it is these exceptions that produce the stories that provide the character that makes cities desirable, and not their rules.
I lived in a historical apartment building for several years, and it has occupied a psychogeographical landmark in the culture of the city for generations, appearing in various novels and with a cast of storied occupants. They were too large and expensive and a bit out of the way for fashionable rentals, so the people there always had a reason to be oddly both transient and yet still maintaining the refinement they were used to. Society divorcees and scandalized people in transition, politicians from remote ridings, elderly widows, downwardly mobile sons of establishment families, mistresses, professional artists and musicians who needed to be in the city but could never raise enough for a down payment - these characters and archetypes form the mythology of cities, and buildings like those library apartments and other historical buildings contribute to it. The promise of hidden beauty and riches and the ability to find it is the essence of the appeal of a city. I hope they find a way to open them up again.
Part of the reason they're not occupied though is they were setup for library caretakers and have full after hours access to the library so it's kind of sketchy to just rent them out on the open market because without a lot of work the tenant would have to have the keys and security codes for the library.
IDK, considering the insane rent prices in NYC I would think that they could do something like a small division so that the person could access the apartment without direct access to the rest of the library.
It could help to support the libraries, I guess some people would even pay an "extra" because it's in there.
I would definitely pay extra to have access to the library as a tenant in the library-apartment. I mean, granted, it's just a generic neighborhood library, so it wouldn't have specialized texts, but still.
Leave the cameras on, lock the librarian's office and password-protect the computers after hours, and require the tenants to return [or check out] any borrowed material by the next morning. Realistically, you'll probably have one or two bad tenants over the next few decades who leave their trash inside the library or try to steal the crappy old library computers and it will mostly be fine.
If they accepted slightly below market rent, they could have the pick of NYU's writing instructors, or sabbatical visitors, or whatever. That is, don't rent them on the open market, but hook up with one of the many institutes with a long list of underpaid people well-vetted for reverence of books.
> If they accepted slightly below market rent, they could have the pick of NYU's writing instructors,
It doesn't even have to be below market rate: They could pair it up with a grant program where someone else is picking up the market rate rent (or the difference between market rate and what would make it attractive for scholars) for the "in residence" person.
The 'small division' would have to cut the stairs off from the rest of the library because the apartment in this building is on the third floor. It doesn't really work with the entrance, main desk and stair location where you could easily seal off the apartment from the rest of the building.
In Seoul I watched Avatar at 3 am, and the theatre was almost full. When I came out the morning crowds were already on the the move. Another night, at 1am, I wandered by an eyeglass store and they whipped me up a new pair of glasses for me in 15 minutes. Truly incredible.
> Society divorcees and scandalized people in transition, politicians from remote ridings, elderly widows, downwardly mobile sons of establishment families, mistresses, professional artists and musicians who needed to be in the city but could never raise enough for a down payment - these characters and archetypes form the mythology of cities. . .
I found this description very evocative, to the point that I was starting to imagine a story set in a building of these characters. I was very pleased to click on your profile and see that you're a writer, and are not letting that talent go to waste!
> In Toronto, we have an island downtown with homes on 100y leases that cannot be re-sold at market rates, but also cannot be willed to heirs, and that has a pretty transparent waiting list system, which still gets periodic criticism as corrupt.
Except that your “lease” can continue to your spouse or children:
> Those rules, laid out in a provincial statute that’s been in place for the past 25 years, state that specific houses on the island can only be transferred to a spouse or child.
I understand the desire for unique spaces, but this is a library that really should use all available space in ways that better the library and help the whole community.
That's difficult. Living standards are much higher than they used to be. Should they be restored as actual usable apartments? If so you're going to think about the heating, cooling, the insulation etc. etc. etc.
Should they be restored as historical exhibit? OK, sure. But then the space isn't really being used. IMO these are interesting but they're not such an important part of history that they must be preserved exactly the way they are today.
Although I'd love for them to become affordable, solid quality, art focused apartments - I think I'd be just as happy with them as well rennovated meeting rooms or work-from-home spaces.
No, you can't always by your way to the front line. Try that in a super market that's running out of toilet paper, and you'll be lynched by your fellow shoppers.
People also queue for new Apple or Nintendo devices. Those companies don't hold auctions for new releases.
And yes, you can often find new Apple devices resold for higher prices at release in gray or even black markets. But the companies discourage those. And 'scalpers' for eg medical equipment even faced felony charges in the pandemic.
And, of course, many socialist countries have flourishing black markets as well.
Nobody who actually experienced queues prefers them. Reminds me of an old joke from before the fall of communism:
A person feeling tired leans on a wall to catch his breath. Somebody notices him and stands beside. A few hours later a queue has formed. New people arriving ask "what is this for?". The original person replies "I have no idea, but I can’t leave now - don't you see I am the first in line?!"
Birkin bags and other impractical luxury goods are simply a signaling device.
Humans care about what other humans think. This is often good, as the negative formal and informal sanctions of peers is what keeps the human animals from murdering each other.
Birkin bags and luxury goods are a mostly harmless byproduct of this human desire for approval.
In writing this comment, you are signaling to your HN peers how Nobel and virtuous you are, in that you only care about things like art and writing—-hoping for internet points in return (just as we all are).
The problem is, the government does not have unlimited resources, and most of us lack the intrinsic motivation to do anything useful for others.
If given everything for free, we’d like to think we’d spend our time creating great art and inventions—-but really we’d probably spend 99% of our time on Netflix and social signaling.
> Just because in some abstract mathematical sense they're fair, doesn't mean lotteries are equitable or just in the way people care about.
On the contrary, I think most people would say that this kind of lottery is equitable and just. It's fair in a very obvious sense, which feels better than other ways of allocating things.
> Besides, the idea that it's wasted or neglected, it's crap. The government has basically unlimited resources. How much money did we borrow, how many checks did we cut in the last 7 months, and what were the implications really? It is never about making the most of a scarce resource, there is never really scarcity. And maybe it's not justice either.
Apartment space in NYC absolutely is scarce. A lot more people want to move there than there's space for; you can move numbers in bank accounts round all day and that will still be true.
The government does not have infinity resources. At the very least, they are limited by something like available total GDP.
Borrowing or taxing just lets the government control more of that GDP pile, it doesn't create any extra goods out of thin air.
(Economists have a concept of 'economic slack', that is how much extra output there could be if there was more nominal spending happening before inflation kicks in. But there are typically talking about something like 10% at most, not orders of magnitude. And a reasonably competent central bank makes sure to print enough money so that this extra spending is happening.)
You are right however, that much government spending seems extremely inefficient.
In any case, government handed out stuff ain't free. At least you always have opportunity costs.
the (federal) government has unlimited money, in the sense that it has the ability to print more when politically expedient. this is quite different from having unlimited resources.
The NYPL board has discussed renovating and re-purposing these apartments. It's a good idea, though it should be pointed out that this board has a history of foolish, reckless, and possibly corrupt dealing, as when they sold off the Donnell Branch and nearly destroyed the iconic Main Library on 42nd & 5th (the one with the lions; look up "Central Library Plan" for details).
Now we are working on a local designation. This is important because real estate developers have many of these buildings in the crosshairs. Currently, hand in hand with the NYPL and the Robin Hood Foundation, they are looking to tear down the Inwood Branch, under the guise of building a shiny new library, inside a big condo with some "affordable housing". A few years ago, they did tear down the Brooklyn Heights Branch, replacing it with a smaller library inside a large condo (there is an argument that civic works ought to be freestanding to communicate import). Before that, the Donnell Library was torn down, replaced year later with a library that is a fraction of the original and squeezed into a basement beneath a luxury hotel, the latter valued at a multiple of what the NYPL got in the deal. And for a while, the developers behind the Barclays Center were itching to tear down the Pacific Branch in Brooklyn.
These libraries are important civic spaces. Whatever your feelings about paper vs digital, there is no denying that NYC's libraries are heavily used, and that they constitute an important part of the fabric of our civic life, a place where New Yorkers of all stripes congregate and mingle.
Historical footnote: NYPL is in fact a private institution chartered by New York State, formed through the merger of the Astor and Lenox libraries, to which was added a gift from the Tilden Foundation. It serves the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, while the Queens Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library have their own systems (Brooklyn was a separate city until 1898). To further confuse matters, many of the libraries NYPL runs, including the Main Library, are owned by NYC, while others are belong to NYPL itself. Scott Sherman's book, Patience & Fortitude, provides a good, pithy history.
No reason why those groups couldn’t be putting libraries in all their new buildings. I think the public would benefit more from ADDITIONAL libraries, particularly in underserved areas, vs replacing ones that already exist!
A small detail glossed over in the article is that New York City has three separate library systems. The New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Public Library and Queens Public Library were all founded in the mid-19th century years before the creation of New York City and it's five boroughs in 1898.
The New York Public library built 30 Carnegie libraries, the Brooklyn Public Library 21 and the Queens Public Library 7.
That’s fascinating to me. Isn’t much of the point of NYC’s boroughs (i.e. purely-administrative divisions of a legally-conglomerated city) that infrastructure that makes sense to centralize/share between boroughs, can be centralized/shared, much more practically than it can under separate city corporations?
Why, then, does the distinction in library systems remain? Is it advantageous somehow? (Certainly not for the people wanting to check out a book via inter-branch loan.)
I think it's just historical inertia. There's no real advantage to combining them since they mostly serve their local borough population. Each has their own central branch which is a magnet for research on various topics. The NYPL is just so much larger in terms of collections so it outshines the others, but Queens and Brooklyn are really solid library systems on their own.
While technically a private institution, NYPL is chartered by New York State, many of its buildings are publicly owned, and the mayor, council speaker, and comptroller each appoint a representative to the board.
I spent the last half of my 20s and the beginning of my 30s living in a carriage house of an old Tudor revival mansion in New England. The building itself was purchased in the 60s and used as a research institute. Loosely affiliated with the large university in town.
I worked at there as a software engineer by day, and took care of the property the rest of the time. There was no shortage of projects. My girlfriend moved in with me eventually. We returned there after our honeymoon, and our son was most likely conceived there. I miss it often.
I still work there, but covid has kept us away. This article reminds me of that time in my life. Thanks for sharing.
Would you be willing to provide more detail either here or via email? This story fascinates me as someone in a similar situation living in New England! I am completely exhausted and done with the modern 1+4 stick slapped together "new construction luxury apartments" aka won't last 50 years.
Not op, but a good friend of mine did this. Worked in tech by day and rennovated a carriage house by night - all the way from a literal barn to a "fully rennovated" space, all done by himself and friend/family help.
Granted, he's a smart guy, and has people he can call with questions that are outside his expertise, but a carraige house is a cool project as the size is manageable, and each problem is much more suited to the scale of 1-3 people working on it.
“ But start looking at the decline of, and disinvestment in, New York’s rail lines—from the subway to commuter rails like the Long Island Rail Road—and you’ll find that those problems go back much, much further. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, they seem to lead to one man in particular: Robert Moses.”
https://ny.curbed.com/2017/7/27/15985648/nyc-subway-robert-m...
Grimy walls aren’t even close to the top of the to-do list. The subway stop where Michael Jackson filmed part of the music video for “Bad”,Hoyt–Schermerhorn, had a piece of the ceiling hanging off and almost touching the tracks last time I was there.
I love NYC and the subway but the maintenance absolutely depresses me.
Reminds me of the apartments built into London’s Palace of Westminster. (They’re for the current speakers of the House of Lords and House of Commons to live in, if they so choose.)
It seems reasonable that modern libraries should be able to provide housing like this, intended for the people who provide lessons in e.g. computer use, bee keeping, and laser cutter operation (to list a few of the options available at my local branches).
the bottom of the page has a link to a video of one of the apartments: https://youtu.be/_VfJsTKHBT4 the date says 2018 but the video looks very similar to the images so I suspect it was taken at the same time the main story was.
These library apartments could be revitalized to operate on a similar scheme, even though there would be huge risk of them going to the politically connected and patronage. Political classes tend not to understand that it is these exceptions that produce the stories that provide the character that makes cities desirable, and not their rules.
I lived in a historical apartment building for several years, and it has occupied a psychogeographical landmark in the culture of the city for generations, appearing in various novels and with a cast of storied occupants. They were too large and expensive and a bit out of the way for fashionable rentals, so the people there always had a reason to be oddly both transient and yet still maintaining the refinement they were used to. Society divorcees and scandalized people in transition, politicians from remote ridings, elderly widows, downwardly mobile sons of establishment families, mistresses, professional artists and musicians who needed to be in the city but could never raise enough for a down payment - these characters and archetypes form the mythology of cities, and buildings like those library apartments and other historical buildings contribute to it. The promise of hidden beauty and riches and the ability to find it is the essence of the appeal of a city. I hope they find a way to open them up again.