The architects, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, founders of WORKac, designed a joyful, tiny masterpiece.Īdults congregate at tables below the factory’s original 10-foot-tall windows and timber beams. The Adams Street Library, as it’s called, caters to Dumbo’s gentrifiers but also to residents in nearby Vinegar Hill and the Farragut Houses, especially parents with young children. The money also helped seed upgrades to Brooklyn branches in Fort Greene, Greenpoint, East New York and Sunset Park.Īnd it subsidized the third library I visited, a 6,565-square-foot branch on the ground floor of a former 19th-century torpedo factory turned recycling facility in Dumbo. As part of the deal, Hudson agreed to underwrite the construction of dozens of new subsidized apartments offsite. The sale of the property occupied by the former branch to Hudson, in 2014, raised some hackles but also more than $50 million for the Brooklyn Library system. The Brooklyn Library paid to build out the space and owns it. The developer, Hudson, bought the site from the Brooklyn Public Library system, tore down the former branch, erected the high-rise and donated empty space in the tower’s base for the new branch. Brooklyn Heights Library, as it’s called, occupies the base of a new wedge-shaped high-rise by Marvel Architects, constructed on the site of an earlier Brooklyn Heights branch. In Brooklyn Heights, I stopped by the three-story branch that Taryn Christoff and her colleagues at the mega-firm Gensler designed. Residents in the underserved district had lobbied beforehand for a larger library, but the pocket-size Macomb’s has become a popular community hub, and no wonder: Making the most of tight quarters, Michielli + Wyetzner have designed an efficient, sunny, multipurpose space that nods to the building’s architectural history and that functioned as a welcoming sanctuary during Covid. Michielli + Wyetzner Architects oversaw the conversion of seven defunct little storefronts at a landmark public housing development from the 1930s. A private donor paid the $2.1 million construction costs. In Upper Manhattan, I toured the compact, 3,500-square-foot Macomb’s Bridge branch. I visited three of them - each one a boon for its neighborhood, and money well-spent. That said, if you don’t find the current political conversation shortsighted, you might want to do what I recently did and check out some of the library branches that have opened since the start of 2020. The sheds need regulation and the city budget needs to be cut by perhaps $3 billion. The Covid-19 pandemic was another reminder: For quarantined New Yorkers, parks, outdoor dining sheds and reopened libraries became lifelines.īut now Mayor Eric Adams wants to slash funds for parks ( $46 million) and for libraries ($13 million this fiscal year, more than $20 million next), and the City Council is debating the dining sheds. A city is only as good as its public spaces.
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