By Anindita Dasgupta
Battery Park City’s decade-long battle to get a library suffered a setback at the end of last month when it was left out of the city budget.
Construction on the core of the space is already underway but without additional funding workers will not be able to start building the library’s interior at the end of the year.
“Construction [will be] delayed until we receive additional funding from the city,” said Herb Scher, a New York Public Library spokesperson.
N.Y.P.L., a privately managed nonprofit corporation that also gets city funding, is working on the exterior space with a $3.5 million grant from Goldman Sachs, which is building its headquarters nearby. Councilmember Alan Gerson tried to get $1.75 million in the city budget to complete the fitout of the library including the desks, carpeting, and computers.
“It’s sad,” said Angela Benfield, a Battery Park City resident. “There are residential buildings going up all over the place and we can’t get something as simple as a library?”
Gerson said he was hopeful he could either get the money in a budget modification in November or December or convince the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to fund the project. He said there were other places to go if the city and the development corporation said no.
“I’m determined to keep that library on schedule and I’m confident it will be between Goldman Sachs and the possibility of funding through L.M.D.C. and if we need it, the possibility of a capital budget modification,” Gerson said in a phone interview this week. Such a modification could come in November or December. “It’s not a question of if they will get money, it’s how.”
He said he made a “strategic” decision, as there were other Downtown projects that were “ready to roll.” Gerson allocated part of this year’s budget to various discretionary items like Manhattan Youth, Mercy Core, and Battery Park’s new SeaGlass Carousel.
Library officials did not even mention the B.P.C. library at a public ceremony celebrating the opening of a Soho branch in May.
The library will be located in the Riverhouse condo building at 1 River Terrace. Also planned to be in the building are the new Poet’s House, World Hunger Education Center, and City Bakery.
Many B.P.C. residents say the neighborhood needs a library. Maria Ouranitsas said she takes her three children to a library in Queens when she visits family living there. “As soon as we get there, they immediately have a stack of books and are ready to go!” she said. “I grew up going to the library — it was just a normal thing.”
Percey Corcoran, a Battery Park City resident, started the fight almost 10 years ago with the help of other community members. “We need it very badly,” she said. “I want to borrow books and I want to see my neighbors when I go to the library and look at a bulletin board and not a lamp post. A library is like a village square in a lot of respects.”
There have been many setbacks along the way, but when Goldman Sachs agreed to contribute a total of $4.5 million for a library and a community center in Tribeca as part of the deal to build its new headquarters in Battery Park City two years ago, the fight seemed to be over.
Downtown residents feel the library is long overdue. “What struck me about this whole Battery Park City construction was just that it seemed to have been conceived without concern for the kinds of physical structures that I consider public amenities,” said Marti Cohen-Wolf, a Battery Park City resident who was one of the first to join the fight. “What’s more basic than a library?”
