Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, by Scott Sherman
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Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, by Scott Sherman
Ebook PDF Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, by Scott Sherman
A riveting investigation of a beloved library caught in the crosshairs of real estate, power, and the people’s interests—by the reporter who broke the story In a series of cover stories for The Nation magazine, journalist Scott Sherman uncovered the ways in which Wall Street logic almost took down one of New York City’s most beloved and iconic institutions: the New York Public Library. In the years preceding the 2008 financial crisis, the library’s leaders forged an audacious plan to sell off multiple branch libraries, mutilate a historic building, and send millions of books to a storage facility in New Jersey. Scholars, researchers, and readers would be out of luck, but real estate developers and New York’s Mayor Bloomberg would get what they wanted. But when the story broke, the people fought back, as famous writers, professors, and citizens’ groups came together to defend a national treasure. Rich with revealing interviews with key figures, Patience and Fortitude is at once a hugely readable history of the library’s secret plans, and a stirring account of a rare triumph against the forces of money and power.
Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, by Scott Sherman - Amazon Sales Rank: #438935 in Books
- Brand: Sherman, Scott
- Published on: 2015-06-23
- Released on: 2015-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.03" h x .85" w x 5.99" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library, by Scott Sherman Review “Gripping...a slim, smart book packed with a colorful cast of moguls, celebrities, intellectuals and Internet crusaders... Patience and Fortitude not only tells a classic 'New York story' about real estate and money, but also shines a light on why libraries, as physical repositories for books, are still crucial, even in an age when all knowledge seems just a mouse-click away."—Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air""[Sherman] passionately pursues the story...makes a convincing argument."—Sam Roberts, New York TimesA "Fresh Read" in the New York Times“A major feat of reporting and a must-read for New Yorkers."—Vanity Fair, Must-Read June Books“A pair of marble lions guards the Fifth Avenue entrance of the 42nd Street library; their names are the two virtues cited in the title of Patience and Fortitude… Scott Sherman has earned a place in their company. His reporting and analysis have helped to protect the New York Public Library from its adversaries within."—The Nation“To the names Astor, Lenox, and Tilden engraved atop the main branch of the New York Public Library, should we now add Sherman?... His fascinating story of library politics in the digital age is now a hardcover from Melville House called Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library."—New Criterion“Deeply researched but swiftly paced... Sherman’s book is certain to find appreciative readers, because it is one for readers, who desperately need an advocate once the money starts talking."—Inside Higher Ed“Patience and Fortitude, Sherman’s debut book, is a detailed and impassioned account...and a cautionary tale of what can happen when public-spirited institutions are funded by mostly private revenue."—Brooklyn Rail“The fate of one of the world’s foremost research libraries is at the center of Sherman’s rippingly-good Patience & Fortitude. The machinations of what goes on behind closed library doors, and the underdog activists who fought on behalf of literary lions, might not sound riveting. Trust an NYPL regular, at under 200 pages, Sherman’s book reads like the best of intrigue-filled political thrillers. All the Librarian’s Men."—Biographile“Chronicles the unraveling of the library's unholy deal… Sherman's most shocking revelation is how little the trustees understood the mission of the institution they claimed to be saving."—Architectural Record“Its lesson...resonates beyond those closed doors and the city they're a part of."—Maclean's (Canada)“Sherman writes battlefield reportage, not history calmly studied from afar, and in this slim, quick-paced volume he paints a fascinating, but often unlovely, picture of politics, people, power, and protest in today’s New York City."—Standpoint (UK)“[A] real-life trhiller... This cautionary tale is of interest to library professionals...bibliophiles, and citizens who want to preserve the civic and cultural life of their community."—Library Journal, starred review“Journalist Sherman meticulously re-creates the controversy, which appeared to many a clash between corporate greed and the world of high culture."—Booklist“The battle over the New York Public Library was such an important fight to win, and Scott Sherman’s reporting was an essential part of that victory."—Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight's Children“It’s very hard to produce a specific, inarguable example of the power of the press—but here’s one. Scott Sherman’s pathbreaking 2011 article in The Nation about the New York Public Library’s plans to demolish much of its headquarters building and substantially change its purpose led directly to that misguided plan’s being abandoned three years later. Now Sherman lays out the entire story, from conception to cancellation, of the Central Library Plan. It is an absorbing narrative, and more; it also gets to the heart of an urgent broader issue, the danger our most precious institutions face in the age of disruption."—Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test“A copy of Patience and Fortitude should be issued with every library card. Scott Sherman is the lion the NYPL needs—a fair reporter turned fierce advocate, who has chronicled the attempted dismantling of a beloved institution with his title's attributes, grace, and smarts."—Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers“With cool acuity, Scott Sherman details the insidious threat to one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions, and the gritty resistance that saved it. Anyone who cares about the future of books should read Patience and Fortitude.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of From the Ruins of Empire“One can read Scott Sherman's engrossing book as a critique of the New York Public Library's stumbles, or as a love letter to a priceless institution. This is a love letter, and one that assails those the author believes would have violated the library's legacy. Even those who disagree with Sherman should tip their hats to him, for his passion and rigorous reporting, as this book reveals, has aided a great and priceless institution.”—Ken Auletta, author of Googled“Scott Sherman’s fast-paced story is a nuanced, disturbing account of what happens when the age of hedge funds, metrics and management consultants meets one of our country’s great institutions of learning. Patience and Fortitude is all the more fascinating because Sherman’s journalism played a significant role in preventing a cultural atrocity.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost“When civic vandals masquerading as visionaries attempted to gut the New York Public Library, Scott Sherman's intrepid reporting in The Nation shut them down. Now he gives us the full story, a riveting activist adventure yarn written with the elegance of a cultural romantic and the gimlet eye of an investigative journalist. What I learned is that a civilization traduces its libraries—especially this library—at its peril.”—Rick Perlstein, author of The Invisible Bridge“With reportorial doggedness, narrative elan, and an unfailing eye for the lancing detail, Scott Sherman masterfully tells the story, by turns enraging and heartening, of the plight of New York’s most storied institution in an uncertain age.”—Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic“Scott Sherman’s Patience and Fortitude is a gripping, meticulously reported account of the plan to gut a world-famous research library—and the movement that sprung up to preserve it. Like Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, another provocative story about a debacle in the stacks, this riveting book shows just how bloody the fight over our cultural treasures can get."—Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book Is Overdue!“Sherman has unearthed convincing evidence that the CLP was misguided . . . A compelling exploration of the battle over 'a world-class library that lost its way in the digital age.'"—Kirkus Reviews“Sounds like a rollicking good story."—Liz French, Library Journal's Editors' Spring Picks
About the Author SCOTT SHERMAN is a contributing writer for The Nation. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Dissent, Lingua Franca, and other publications.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PREFACE: “THERE WILL NEVER BE AN END TO THIS LIBRARY”This is a book about a world-class library that lost its way in the digital age.In the late spring of 2011, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, asked if I might be interested in writing a profile of Anthony Marx, the Amherst College president who had recently agreed to lead the New York Public Library (NYPL). “Lots of unhappy rumblings about how oligarchs”—on the Library’s board of trustees—“are taking over too much of a major cultural institution as it celebrates its centennial,” vanden Heuvel wrote. She envisioned a story about a “clash of civilizations at the outpost of civilization.”The New York Public Library was an institution that mattered to me personally: as a writer, I had depended on the grand building on 42nd Street for twenty years, and had come to see how fully it embodied its nickname: “the people’s library.”It was a place for both Shakespeare scholars and shoeshine boys. When the building turned seventy-five in 1986, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had toiled as a bootblack in Times Square in the 1940s, recalled: “It was the first time I was taught that I was welcome in a place of education and learning. I would go into that great marble palace, and I would check my shoeshine box. A gentleman in a brown cotton jacket would take it as if I’d passed over an umbrella and a bowler hat.”I accepted the assignment, and soon reached out to a prominent academic librarian. Halfway through our conversation, he mentioned—rather casually—that the NYPL would soon remove the entire collection of books from the iron-and-steel stacks inside the 42nd Street building and send them to an offsite storage facility in Princeton, New Jersey. This was troubling news: the stacks’ three million books were the heart of the institution.When I asked about this project, NYPL officials confirmed their intentions: the books would leave the building as part of a “Central Library Plan” (CLP), a wide-ranging reconfiguration of services, and the stacks would indeed be demolished. The CLP had been born in June 2007 and was announced to the public nine months later at a little-noticed press conference featuring the novelist (and NYPL trustee) Toni Morrison, who called the plan “truly astonishing.” The CLP aimed to consolidate three Midtown libraries into one colossal circulating library inside the 42nd Street building, which would undergo a $300 million renovation by Norman Foster, the British architect. (Frank Gehry had been on the shortlist for the job.)The project was derailed by the recession of 2008. Fortuitously, I began my reporting as it was quietly being revived. My story, which appeared in The Nation in December 2011 under the headline “Upheaval at The New York Public Library,” launched a controversy that raged for two and a half years and resulted in more than forty stories in The New York Times alone. The debate accelerated in December 2012 when Ada Louise Huxtable, the eminent ninety-one-year-old architecture critic, excoriated the project in the pages of The Wall Street Journal; it continued to escalate after her death a few weeks later. The dispute would eventually draw in a cast that included Tom Stoppard, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sarandon, Garrison Keillor, Salman Rushdie, Malcolm Gladwell, Donna Tartt, Art Spiegelman, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. The wrangle over the Central Library Plan, wrote Publishers Weekly, amounted to “the biggest public outcry a public library project has ever generated.” The battle to save the NYPL was conducted by a small group of writers, professors, independent scholars, and historic preservationists, who viewed the institution as a sacred public trust. For these critics, the CLP was nothing more than a set of tawdry real-estate deals, a desecration of a historic building, and a betrayal of the NYPL’s founding mission. In the words of a leading activist, the historian Joan Scott, the campaign was about “saving a major institution for the public good.” On the other side were the Library’s trustees, who insisted that the NYPL had to be pruned and modernized for the digital age, when many public libraries have prioritized spaces for community engagement and coffee shops over books and bookshelves. The trustees argued that by “monetizing non-core assets”—that is, selling the NYPL’s own real estate—the plan would generate up to $15 million per year in badly needed revenue. For inspiration, the NYPL’s leaders did not look to other libraries, but to FedEx, Netflix, and Barnes & Noble; they also put their faith in Google, which was scanning millions of books from research libraries across the nation, including the NYPL. To counter the opposition, Anthony Marx rallied construction unions and Teamsters and accused the critics of “elitism”; their intent, he suggested, was to preserve the 42nd Street Library as an exclusive sanctuary for scholars and intellectuals.It was a charged battle over books, real estate, and architecture, and about the future of an institution that its former president, Vartan Gregorian, called “a treasured repository of civilization.” As Gregorian told The New Yorker in 1986: “Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity . . . endless sources of knowledge are here. We have books in three thousand languages and dialects. I can take you through here from Balanchine to Tibet. There are esoterica on synthetic fuels, neglected maps of the Falklands which were suddenly in demand at the time of the Falklands War. And Warsaw telephone directories from the years of the Holocaust, often invaluable as the only source of documentation of who lived where, in order to substantiate claims for retribution. There will never be an end to this library. Never!”In the 1890s, a group of wealthy men—bankers, corporate titans, philanthropists—came together to create the New York Public Library. These men were cautious individuals with a sense of proportion, who understood the fragility of the institution they had built. Over a century later, the CLP became a project closely tied to another wealthy man: the billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose personal friends and family members initiated it. Unlike their late nineteenth-century predecessors, these individuals lacked prudence: they applied radical, free-market solutions to complex institutional problems. In the end, elected officials in New York City had to save the NYPL from its own trustees.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful. The story behind the story of the New York Public Library’s dubious and controversial “Central Library Plan". By Paul Tognetti “What the documents do reveal, with the utmost clarity, is that the Central Library Plan, conceived in the boom years preceding the recession of 2008, was a mystifying combination of austerity and devil-may-care overreach; that it bore the fingerprints of two influential private-sector consulting firms: McKinsey & Company and Booz Allen Hamilton (whose recommendations have never been made public by the NYPL); and that it was pushed along, in absolute secrecy, not by professional librarians but by a core group of wealthy trustees from the worlds of finance and real estate.” -- pp. 73-74When the shocking details of the NYPL’s “Central Library Plan” finally began to see the light of day in early 2013 a coalition of historic preservationists, scholars, writers, library buffs and community activists joined forces to form the non-profit “Committee to Save the New York Public Library”. The stakes were incredibly high and the group was committed to use any means at its disposal to stop this plan in its tracks. Meanwhile the proponents of the plan engaged a high profile public relations firm to help push their project across the finish line. Scott Sherman chronicles the epic battle for the future of the New York Public Library in his highly engaging new book “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library”. The author grabbed my attention in the opening chapter and commanded it the rest of the way. This is a positively fascinating saga.In the opening chapters of “Patience and Fortitude” Scott Sherman provides his readers with some context by presenting a brief history of the New York Public Library. We then learn that a plan was conceived back in 2007 that would change the face of this venerable institution forever. Essentially, the trustees wanted to close two popular branches and sell the real estate to generate revenue. But there was more to it. The most controversial aspect of the CPL involved the removal of some three million books from the stacks at the library’s Main Branch on 42nd Street to a facility in Princeton, NJ. As details of this idea began to leak out over the ensuing years people were outraged and rightly so. One blogger quipped “ I halt at the problem of how to reproduce digitally the phenomenon of having a dozen physical books open to different pages at once on my work table. In the future, will I need to buy a dozen iPads?” The way the opponents of the CPL saw it one of the great research libraries in the world was being gutted, pure and simple.At the end of the day “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” is a story of mistakes made and lessons learned. By holding their controversial plans so close to the vest the trustees of the NYPL denied input from just about all of the library’s constituencies. This would prove to be an extremely costly mistake on so many levels. And yes there were heroes and villains in this tale. In my view one of the heroes was the author himself who in the December 2011 issue of "The Nation" magazine brought many of these issues to light in an article entitled "Upheavel at the New York Public Library". I commend Scott Sherman for giving us a thoughtful, engrossing and extremely well written book about a very important topic. I simply could not put this one down. Very highly recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful. Money, Power...Librarians?! By Laura Norman Scott Sherman has written an incisive and thoroughly entertaining book that reads like a thriller...and it's all true!Anyone who cares about the future of our access to treasured books, manuscripts and historical documents should read Mr. Sherman's tightly written investigative book about the secret effort to pillage the New York Public Library for profit.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Highly readable account of plan to renovate the iconic NY Public Library building By Ricki Fitzpatrick Patience and Fortitude is a highly readable account of the controversial plan to renovate the iconic NYPL building on 42 Street (known as the Central Library Plan, or the CPL) from 2007 to its demise in 2014. You can read this book in one sitting. It's well told and adeptly summarizes press reports while adding fresh reporting.At the same time, it remains a bit thin in terms of its analysis. This, however, isn't Sherman's fault. It's a recent event and many people still aren't willing to talk. Sherman mentions how much of his research was thwarted. The NYPL, for one, disregarded all of his Freedom of Information requests, and many individuals would not talk to him. NYPL trustees wouldn't even provide copies of their resumes! We can only wish for a book that could more thoroughly document the thinking behind the Central Library Plan. As we have it here, there appears to have been very little thinking, just a lot of plotting for the sake of Doing Something Big, somewhat clueless about what the library is and what it means to New York. It would have been more satisfying if the reader came away with a deeper sense of the plan's appeal to the NYPL Trustees. I'm not entirely convinced that it was all about a group of real estate moguls letting loose their imagination. After all, they had sold the idea to a wide range of scholars and academics -- such as David Remnick, Robert Darnton and Skip Gates -- who aren't real estate moguls. What, one wonders, were they thinking, and how might they have seen the plan? He tells us that Darnton had a change of heart, but it seemed pretty lukewarm to me.I'm sympathetic to Sherman's main argument, and my hunch is that he's right, but the book doesn't provide a full enough case to say that for sure. Many research libraries are undertaking schemes to get rid of their printed books, so it's not just the case that a few bad apples in New York were let loose on an old, revered institution.None of this is to impugn Sherman. I think he's done a very good job with what he had, and to write a deeper, more involved analysis would have inevitably made the book less compulsively readable. I make these comments because I would like to know more than is perhaps knowable about this controversy. In the end, I can't tell if it's just a New York story, or if there are larger implications.I do, however, have one big bone to pick with Sherman -- or with his publisher. This book lacks references of any sort: no notes, no references, no bibliography. A book in defense of research and scholarship that does not embody those values seems to me a most mixed message!
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