It's Official: Brooklyn Heights Library to Be Swallowed by Luxury Condo Tower

Photos via Marvel Architects

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A wildly controversial plan to sell off the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) branch in Brooklyn Heights to a luxury condo developer is, as of Wednesday afternoon, a done deal.

The New York City Council approved the plan 45 to one, with three abstentions.

BPL officials will now hand over their Brooklyn Heights branch at 280 Cadman Plaza West to developers from Hudson Companies for $52 million, who will then tear the library down and rebuild it on the ground floor of a 36-story luxury condo tower.

“The City Council’s approval of the Brooklyn Heights Library project is a victory for the thousands of Brooklyn residents who rely on their public libraries for essential programs, services, and resources,” BPL President and CEO Linda E. Johnson said in a statement sent to Patch.

Citizens Defending Libraries, a neighborhood group, ramped up its campaign to block what it called “the precedent-setting proposed fire sale of a major public asset” over the past week. On Tuesday, after the council’s Land Use Committee signed off on the deal, activists chalked angry messages for Councilman Steve Levin — who presides over the land the library sits on, and negotiated the final terms of its sale with Hudson Companies in closed-door meetings — onto the sidewalk outside his office. “You betrayed community!!” they wrote.

The plan, as approved by City Council, will require Hudson Companies to:

• Build the ground-floor library out to 26,620 square feet, around 25 percent larger than in the original offer (but 5,811 square feet smaller than the current building)

• Add STEM education labs to the library

• Keep the library open seven days a week

• Build an entirely new 5,000-square-foot library in the DUMBO/Vinegar Hill/Farragut Houses area

• Build approximately 115 units of affordable housing in nearby Clinton Hill (but none within the Brooklyn Heights tower)
  

Members of Citizens Defending Libraries have argued that the city would be foolish to entrust a private developer with the safekeeping of a public asset — and that doing so in Brooklyn Heights could start a scary trend throughout greater NYC.

“There is no doubt that the deal is now fractionally better than what was proposed, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are selling off valuable public libraries or, more broadly, how bad a deal this is for the public,” the group said in a statement sent out Monday.

The NYC Office of the Comptroller has also expressed skepticism that BPL’s deal with Hudson Companies is in the public’s best interest.

“At this time, I remain concerned that the proposed sale of the Brooklyn Heights Library does not maximize public value and fails to address the ongoing capital needs facing BPL,” Alaina Gilligo, first deputy comptroller, wrote in a letter to the mayor’s office on Dec. 9.

Construction on the new library-condo hybrid is set to begin in Spring 2016 and will take up to three-and-a-half years, according to the BPL. In the interim, a small pop-up library will be constructed at Our Lady of Lebanon Cathedral at 113 Remsen Street.

UPDATE: Citizens Defending Libraries released a fuming statement Wednesday night in response to the City Council vote. “We are not safe because this heedless plundering is intended to be just the first,” the group said of the Brooklyn Heights library sale.

“It has been clear that with these library sales we have been witness to the exercise of an enormous amount of power,” the group said. “What we did not see today was the exercise by the City Council of the power that it has to protect the public.”