Public Libraries as the City's Largest Arts Venue

WASHINGTON — Free programming reaches audiences no box office does. That, at least, is the version of events that officials were prepared to describe this week. The fuller account, drawn from a decade of municipal filings reviewed for this article, is more complicated, and it begins several years before anyone in New York thought to call it news.

The immediate facts are not in dispute. Over the past eighteen months the question at the center of this story has moved from a technical file in a municipal office to a matter argued at length in public meetings, in the columns of this newspaper and on the sidewalks of the neighborhoods most affected. What has changed is not the underlying problem, which is old, but the willingness of the parties involved to describe it plainly.

"Nobody here was surprised," said Dr. Samuel Weiss, an economist at a city university who studies the question. "We have been saying the same thing at the same meetings for years. What is different now is that somebody wrote it down and somebody else had to answer for it."

That answer, when it came, arrived in the form of a plan: staged over several years, funded partly by money already appropriated and partly by money that has not yet been identified, and subject to review by at least three bodies whose calendars do not align. Supporters describe it as the most substantial commitment of its kind in a decade. Critics, including several who otherwise agree with its goals, note that the commitment is heaviest in the years after the current officials leave office.

The numbers are worth stating carefully, because they are frequently stated carelessly. Roughly 71 percent of the projected cost falls in the first two years. The remainder depends on a funding stream that has met its projections in four of the last seven years. Officials say the variance is manageable. Independent analysts who reviewed the same figures for this article said the plan would survive one bad year and not two.

For arts & culture in this region, the significance extends beyond the immediate dollars. Decisions of this kind set precedents that outlast the administrations that make them, in part because the institutions involved — agencies, contractors, community organizations, courts — adapt their own planning to whatever was decided last. That is how a temporary arrangement in New York becomes a permanent feature of civic life, and it is why the details being negotiated now will be read back for a long time.

We judge progress now by what we can see from the window.

Not everyone reads them the same way. Elaine Duffy, a librarian who tracks the paperwork for her neighbors, argued that the framing itself is wrong. "The debate assumes we are choosing between two options that somebody else put on the table," she said. "There were other options. They were cheaper and slower, and slower was politically impossible, so here we are."

Officials reject that characterization. In a written response to questions from this newspaper, a spokesman said the approach was chosen after comparative analysis, that community input shaped the final structure in several material respects, and that the agency welcomes the scrutiny that has accompanied the process. Asked whether that analysis would be released, the spokesman said portions would be made public "at the appropriate stage."

Independent observers offer a more measured assessment than either side. The design is sound in outline and vulnerable in execution, three specialists said in separate interviews. The pattern in New York has rarely been failure of ambition; it has been the slow attrition of a good plan through procurement delay, staffing shortfalls and the quiet expiration of political attention. Each of the specialists said the same thing in slightly different words: watch the second year.

There is precedent for both outcomes. A comparable effort in the late 1990s was declared dead twice and is now regarded as a success that no one wants to relitigate. A better-financed effort a decade later is remembered mostly for its consultants. The distinguishing factor, in retrospect, was neither money nor design but whether anyone with authority kept asking about it after the announcements were finished.

Meanwhile the practical business of the neighborhood continues on its own schedule. Stores open, buses run late, children are walked to school past the fencing, and the people most directly affected by public Libraries as the City's Largest Arts Venue organize their weeks around conditions that officials describe as temporary. Several residents interviewed for this article said they had stopped tracking the announcements and now judge progress by what they can see from their own windows.

The next formal step is a hearing scheduled for later this month, where testimony will be taken and, by the calendar's own logic, no decision will be made. A vote is expected before the end of the fiscal year. Officials have promised a public reporting mechanism — quarterly, with figures — and this newspaper intends to publish those figures each quarter alongside what was promised, so that readers in New York can perform the comparison themselves.

Until then the story remains what it has been: a serious attempt at a durable problem, undertaken by institutions with a mixed record, in a city that has learned to withhold its applause until the work is finished. "I want to be wrong about my doubts," Dr. Samuel Weiss said, standing at the corner where the first phase is supposed to begin. "I have been wrong before. I would enjoy it this time."