Monday, March 13, 2023

MAYOR OF DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED SANCTUARY CITY WANTS TO CUT LIBRARY FUNDING AS JOE BIDEN'S ILLEGALS COST THE BIG APPLE $5 MILLION DAILY

 

Don't go north, young man

We hear that the migrant crisis is costing New York City $5 million a day.  That's more than the Yankees and Mets are paying their rosters.

We also hear that Canada is getting a little frustrated because the buses are now crossing the northern border, from Texas to Manhattan to Quebec!  Check out Saturday's Dallas Morning News editorial:

For those who live in places where mass migration isn't a problem, it's easy to take a tone of moral superiority and look down on those who have to balance humane treatment with security.

But when the problem lands on their doorstep, it's surprising how quickly that tone changes and the attitude that something must be done takes root.

We saw that when Gov. Greg Abbott sent migrants by bus to cities like New York, Chicago and Washington. Now, it seems, Canada is having second thoughts on illegal border crossings.

Certain Canadian leaders have preened about their nation's welcoming spirit. In 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadian television that "I always sort of laugh when you see people who are — not many of them, but — intolerant or who think, 'Go back to your own country.'… No! You chose this country. This is your country more than it is for others because we take it for granted."

Fast forward to this week. Trudeau is pushing the Biden administration to stem "the flow of irregular migration into Canada," Bloomberg reports.

Why? Because unauthorized migrants are actually showing up to take part in the life Canada offers.

So Canada is saying "no more" in English and French.

The issue here is chaos, not immigration.  I understand that orderly immigration can complement a country's economy.  For example, nearly a million Cubans, like my case, or Vietnamese came to the U.S. and settled into productive and law-abiding residents.  The big reason is that we were able to support ourselves immediately.  My father had a job within two weeks of arriving in the U.S.  We did get some help from a church, but that was to get us off the ground

However, simply allowing people to walk in creates problems.  One of the biggest challenges is that many of these people cannot work or support themselves.  So they have to rely on charity or simply get into the underground economy and survive. 

Who knew that Governor Abbott's buses would have this impact on the national immigration debate?

PS: Check out my blog for posts, podcasts, and videos.


THESE FIGURES ARE WAY OFF! CA ALONE HANDS ILLEGALS $40 BILLION YEARLY ON THE STATE LEVEL WITH COUNTIES HANDING THEM MORE. LOS ANGELES COUNTY'S LA RAZA WELFARE COST THAT COUNTY $1.5 BILLION AND THE NUMBERS ONLY GO UP.

Illegal Immigration Costs American Taxpayers Billions Every Year

migrant
Spencer Platt/Getty
2:59

Illegal immigration costs American taxpayers and hospitals billions of dollars in medical costs every year, the Federation for American Immigration Reform pointed out

Last year, when over 98,000 illegal aliens were encountered in the Yuma, Arizona, border sector, the local hospital found itself providing $26 million in uncompensated care to illegal migrants.

CEO of Yuma Regional Medical Center Robert Trenschel pointed out at a Congressional hearing that many migrants come to America with “significant disease,” and often require major medical treatments, ranging from dialysis to heart surgery. 

This strain put on the American healthcare system is by no means limited to Arizona, however. Texans paid up to a whopping $717 million on healthcare costs for illegal immigrants, which was administered by public hospitals, in 2021 alone. 

One 2018 study found that Americans were spending as much as $18.5 billion a year on health care for illegal migrants.

Meanwhile, some migrants come to America specifically to access healthcare. Monsi Contreras’s family, for example, came to America illegally so that her mother could access “more advanced treatments” in America after suffering a stroke. In Mexico, her father was a banker and her mother was a journalist.

In another instance, a family crossed the Rio Grande at night with one woman who was confined to a wheelchair. 

The $18.5 billion annual cost is likely significantly higher now, five years later. FAIR points out that “These must now be considered low-ball figures, given the soaring costs of health care and sharp increases in illegal immigration under the Biden administration.”

In fact, a report from FAIR found that roughly 1.3 million illegal immigrants were released into America in just the first year of President Biden’s administration. The figure is larger than the population of San Jose, California, which had the tenth largest population of any American city in 2022.

But in addition to those who were released into the United States, there were also roughly one million “gotaways,” which leads FAIR to estimate that “Approximately 2.3 million illegal aliens successfully entered the country.” This adjusted figure is larger than the populations of Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose, the fifth through tenth most populated cities in America.

“Taxpayers may expect migrant healthcare costs to keep climbing along with the unabated surge in border crossings,” the organization also notes. 

Spencer Lindquist is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach out at slindquist@breitbart.com

Each Migrant Costs NYC $10,000 a Month

The cost for the “asylum seeker crisis” could double to $2.8 billion

Want to know why Mayor Eric Adams is panicking? The numbers are ugly. New York City has no shortage of social problems, but Biden’s open borders crisis is really taking a bite out of the Big Apple.

Each illegal migrant costs NYC, over $10,000 a month.

New York City on average spends about $363 a day on each asylum seeker household receiving services in city shelters and emergency relief centers and is on track to spend a total of $1.4 billion by the end of the fiscal year in June, Office of Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said during a recent City Council hearing.

The cost for the “asylum seeker crisis” could double to $2.8 billion in the next fiscal year, Iscol told the panel during a hearing last week. He said the city cannot maintain that support.

That could be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2% of the city’s budget, but it piles on top of innumerable social problems that are already draining a city whose tax base is fleeing.

More than 30,000 newly arrived migrants are staying in city-run facilities. If those numbers continue to worsen, they’ll eat up even more of the budget.

City Councilmember Julie Won said, School principals complained to her of disease outbreaks after migrant school children didn’t receive necessary vaccinations.

American children suffer so Biden’s open borders can boost Democrat numbers. That’s what this is about.


Already, Biden’s DHS is using a little-known parole program to mass-release hundreds of thousands of border crossers into the U.S. interior every month. At current estimates, the Biden administration has released 1.6 to two million border crossers into American communities since February 2021.


“We have millions of our own American citizens without health insurance and receiving SNAP benefits, as well as hundreds of thousands sleeping on the streets at night,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), who has filed the identical version in the House, said. “Instead of making it a priority to find our own citizens homes, meals, and health insurance, Joe Biden continues to exacerbate the issue. [Emphasis added]

“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.  DANIEL GREENFIELD / FRONT PAGE MAGAZINE 

Report: Eric Adams Plans to Use Taxpayer Funds to Send NYC Migrants to College

NYC sanctuary
E. McGregor, P. Ratje, Y. Iwamura, M. Tama, Q. Weizhong/Getty; M. Altaffer/AP
3:56

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) plans to send some asylum-seeking migrants to college for a year using taxpayer funds, according to a report. 

On Tuesday, Adams unveiled his plans to establish the Office of Asylum Seekers Operations (OASO) in New York City. The office will “focus on resettlement and legal services, as well as a new 24/7 arrival center for asylum seekers,” per a press release. 

The New York Post reported Friday that the OASA would oversee a pilot program, providing educational services and room and board, to up to 100 migrants for a year. They will attend SUNY Sullivan Community College and The Center for Discovery, a special education entity in Sullivan County.

“By spending New Yorkers’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars on college classes for migrants, he is incentivizing and rewarding illegal immigration simply to export the crisis of Democrats’ own making out of New York City,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) told the Post.

Rep. Elise Stefanik  (R-NY) speaks to members of the media at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, May 14, 2021. (Andrew Harnik/AP)

The program could run taxpayers $1.2 million, the Post estimates, based on SUNY Sulivan Community College tuition rates for two semesters. However, the city has not disclosed the actual cost. 

Since April 2021, some 50,000 migrants have arrived in the Democrat-run sanctuary city, with more than 30,000 still in the city’s care. Tens of thousands of migrants have lodged at one of 85 Big Apple hotels on the taxpayers’ dime, and landlords are raking in the benefits, as Breitbart News reported. 

Adams announced late last month that the Wingate in Long Island City, which runs tourists $600 a night, was to make 144 rooms available for migrants. Adam’s office has confirmed that taxpayers are footing the bill — about $5 million daily — to subsidize the migrants. 

“New Yorkers know that the asylum seeker of today is the citizen, the leader, and the innovator of tomorrow, and I’m proud that New York City is leading the way, turning a crisis into an opportunity for progress for the entire country,” Adams declared in a statement announcing the OASA. 

“New York City is trying to spread the burden throughout the state,” State Sen. George Borrello (R) told the Post. “Adams has an accomplice with Gov. Kathy Hochul [D]. They are basically covering for Biden’s failure to control the southern border.”

In January, Adams implored President Joe Biden to “fairly distribute” immigrants across all U.S. cities and towns while speaking at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His comments included “six main points,” as Breitbart News noted: 

 A dedicated point-person whose sole focus is overseeing and coordinating our national asylum seeker response, a decompression strategy at the border that establishes a plan for each migrant’s arrival — and creates a system to fairly distribute newcomers regionally, congressional funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to implement that strategy in the places of greatest need, expedited right to work options for asylum seekers who are allowed to enter the country, congressional legislation that provides a clear pathway to residency or citizenship for those who enter this country legally, and nationwide leadership that takes an all-hands-on-deck approach by bringing together nonprofits, the faith-based community, and the private sector, alongside state and local government to meet this challenge. [Emphasis added]

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated 5.5 million migrants illegally crossed the United States’ southern border under Biden’s watch in Fiscal Years 2021 and 2022. 


Senate Republicans Seek to End Biden’s Welfare-Dependent Immigration

Scott Heins/ISAAC GUZMAN/AFP via Getty Images
Scott Heins/ISAAC GUZMAN/AFP via Getty Images
3:52

Senate Republicans are seeking to end President Joe Biden’s welfare-dependent legal immigration inflow to the United States after former President Trump had written new regulations to make it more difficult for welfare-dependent foreign nationals to secure green cards.

In early 2020, the Trump administration finalized a federal regulation known as the “public charge” rule that made it less likely for foreign nationals to secure green cards if they had previously used welfare programs like food stamps, Medicaid, or taxpayer-funded housing.

Nearly immediately after taking office, Biden threw out the finalized public charge rule imposed by Trump, blowing open the door for welfare-dependent immigration to the United States, for which American taxpayers will ultimately foot the bill.

Jack Knudsen / Breitbart News
0 seconds of 39 secondsVolume 90%

Led by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS), the group of Senate Republicans has reintroduced a resolution to return the public charge rule to its prior version.

“… it is fair and sensible to favor prospective new citizens who will not be reliant on government benefits,” Marshall said in a statement.

“We have millions of our own American citizens without health insurance and receiving SNAP benefits, as well as hundreds of thousands sleeping on the streets at night,” Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), who has filed the identical version in the House, said. “Instead of making it a priority to find our own citizens homes, meals, and health insurance, Joe Biden continues to exacerbate the issue. [Emphasis added]

Sens. Ted Budd (R-NC), Mike Braun (R-IN), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Mike Lee (R-UT), James Risch (R-ID), and Rick Scott (R-FL) are cosponsoring the resolution.

Reps. Mike Johnson (R-LA), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Andy Ogles (R-TN) are cosponsoring Nehls’ House version of the resolution.

When Trump first issued the public charge rule in 2019, polls found that the policy was overwhelmingly popular with Americans. About 6 in 10 Americans said they supported ending welfare-dependent legal immigration, including 56 percent of Hispanics and 71 percent of black Americans.

In 2017, the National Academies of Science noted that state and local taxpayers are billed about $1,600 each year per immigrant to pay for their welfare and revealed that foreign-born households consume 33 percent more cash welfare than native-born American households.

A similar study from Center for Immigration Studies found that about 63 percent of non-U.S. citizen immigrant households use at least one form of public welfare, while only about 35 percent of native-born American households are on welfare. This means that nearly twice as many non-U.S. citizen households use welfare as native-born households.

Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies

Every year, the federal government rewards about 1.2 million foreign nationals with green cards to permanently resettle in the United States while another 1.4 million foreign nationals secure various temporary work visas to take American jobs.


BLOG: 15.5 MILLION ILLEGALS IS NONSENSE! THERE ARE THAT MANY IN CA ALONE!

This massive legal immigration inflow, opposed by the majority of Republican voters, is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who are annually added to the United States population. The latest estimate puts the nation’s illegal alien population at 15.5 million, costing taxpayers more than $150 billion every year.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here

Mexican President Celebrates ’40 Million’ Mexicans in the U.S.


Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) thanked President Joe Biden for halting the construction of border wall along the United States-Mexico border at a North American summit on Tuesday.

“The Democrats had abandoned their working-class base to chase what they pretended was a racial group when what they were actually chasing was the momentum of unlimited migration”.            DANIEL GREENFIELD   

 

A DACA amnesty would put more citizen children of illegal aliens — known as “anchor babies” — on federal welfare, as Breitbart News reported, while American taxpayers would be left potentially with a $26 billion bill.

 

Additionally, about one-in-five DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least one-in-seven would go on Medicaid. JOHN BINDER

THE NEW PRIVILEGED CLASS: Illegals!

This is why you work From Jan - May paying taxes to the government ....with the rest of the calendar year is money for you and your family.

Take, for example, an illegal alien with a wife and five children. He takes a job for $5.00 or 6.00/hour. At that wage, with six dependents, he pays no income tax, yet at the end of the year, if he files an Income Tax Return, with his fake Social Security number, he gets an "earned income credit" of up to $3,200..... free.

He qualifies for Section 8 housing and subsidized rent.

He qualifies for food stamps.

He qualifies for free (no deductible, no co-pay) health care.

His children get free breakfasts and lunches at school.

He requires bilingual teachers and books.

He qualifies for relief from high energy bills.

If they are or become, aged, blind or disabled, they qualify for SSI.

Once qualified for SSI they can qualify for Medicare. All of this is at (our) taxpayer's expense.

He doesn't worry about car insurance, life insurance, or homeowners insurance.

Taxpayers provide Spanish language signs, bulletins and printed material.

He and his family receive the equivalent of $20.00 to $30.00/hour in benefits.

Working Americans are lucky to have $5.00 or $6.00/hour left after Paying their bills and his.

The American taxpayers also pay for increased crime, graffiti and trash clean-up.

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/californias-privileged-class-mexican.html

As New York Weighs Library Cuts, Three New Branches Show Their Value

Facing a giant budget deficit, Mayor Eric Adams proposed cuts to New York libraries. But they play an outsize role in the city, offering services and safety.

Adults and children in a room of a library with bookshelves, an orange light in the ceiling and an orange wall.
The Adams Street Library in Dumbo, Brooklyn, has a children’s space with hues reminiscent of a Creamsicle.Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
Adults and children in a room of a library with bookshelves, an orange light in the ceiling and an orange wall.

6 MIN READ

Headway  Explore the world’s biggest challenges through the lens of progress. We'll send you the next Headway story as soon as it is published. 

A city is only as good as its public spaces. The Covid-19 pandemic was another reminder: For quarantined New Yorkers, parks, outdoor dining sheds and reopened libraries became lifelines.

But 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. The sheds need regulation and the city budget needs to be cut by perhaps $3 billion. 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. I visited three of them — each one a boon for its neighborhood, and money well-spent.

In Upper Manhattan, I toured the compact, 3,500-square-foot Macomb’s Bridge branch. A private donor paid the $2.1 million construction costs. Michielli + Wyetzner Architects oversaw the conversion of seven defunct little storefronts at a landmark public housing development from the 1930s. 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.

In Brooklyn Heights, I stopped by the three-story branch that Taryn Christoff and her colleagues at the mega-firm Gensler designed. 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. 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. The Brooklyn Library paid to build out the space and owns it.

NIMBYs and preservationists opposed the sale and demolition of the early 1960s branch, in no small measure because they opposed the tower. Library officials said they had determined that renovating the old branch would be too costly and a waste of money. They were looking at a multimillion-dollar tab just to fix the air conditioning, they said.

Image
Adults and children gather in a well-lit children’s room in a library that is filled with bookshelves. One child sits on a color-blocked rug, drawing.
The children’s room at the Macomb’s Bridge branch in Upper Manhattan; below, the entrance and canopy outside refer to the original landmarked architecture.Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
Adults and children gather in a well-lit children’s room in a library that is filled with bookshelves. One child sits on a color-blocked rug, drawing.
Image
A glassed in entryway into a library, with two people sitting on ledges inside it.
Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
A glassed in entryway into a library, with two people sitting on ledges inside it.
Image
An entrance to a brick building with metal lettering that reads "Macombs Bridge Library.
Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
An entrance to a brick building with metal lettering that reads "Macombs Bridge Library.

The new library became an instant attraction. Christoff and her Gensler team listened to neighbors and included a community room (I happened on a sewing circle one afternoon); a teen space on a mezzanine; a children’s library, and (this was more symbolic than logical) enough book stacks to hold as many volumes as the demolished library housed.

The main reading room is a little overstuffed with stacks, obscuring the grand, handsome space that Christoff has created and filled with elegant, bespoke furniture. A semicircular amphitheater for public readings negotiates a four-foot change in grade on the west end of the building. Relief sculptures salvaged from the old building decorate side rooms. Christoff has also devised a terrific place to read in the prow of the library, where tiered reading tables, arrayed under a spectacular hanging sculpture by Jean Shin of an upside-down tree, look onto Cadman Plaza Park through big windows.

Image
A large open room of a library with two levels and many light-colored bookshelves.
The main reading room of the Brooklyn Heights Library; above, from left, the help desk, a children’s space and Jean Shin’s sculpture.Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
A large open room of a library with two levels and many light-colored bookshelves.

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. As part of the deal, Hudson agreed to underwrite the construction of dozens of new subsidized apartments offsite. The money also helped seed upgrades to Brooklyn branches in Fort Greene, Greenpoint, East New York and Sunset Park.

And 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. 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 architects, Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, founders of WORKac, designed a joyful, tiny masterpiece.

Adults congregate at tables below the factory’s original 10-foot-tall windows and timber beams. Andraos and Wood exposed the ceiling and brick walls to recover some of Dumbo’s industrial grit. A forest of white columns support a canopy that hides mechanicals and lights, to show off the timbers.

Toddlers occupy a Creamsicle-colored room-within-the-room: an eye-popping, thick-walled pod with a ’60s vibe, swathed in maple. The pod’s floor is a bouncy orange carpet of recycled rubber. Ramps lead into the pod. Carved openings, one shaped like drawn curtains, give children elevated views of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge.

None of the three new libraries was built by the Department of Design and Construction, the agency ostensibly in charge of erecting New York’s public works. The Brooklyn and New York Public Library systems opted to oversee construction themselves. During the Bloomberg years, a rejuvenated focus by City Hall on the quality of public architecture produced dozens of new and refurbished firehouses, parks, emergency medical stations, police precincts and, perhaps most conspicuously, public libraries, many in long-neglected neighborhoods. The city also instituted a program called Design and Construction Excellence to entice gifted New York architects willing to suffer the city’s bureaucratic swamp, squabbling agencies, broken procurement processes and notorious late payments.

But then Michael Bloomberg’s successor, Bill de Blasio, made clear he had little or no interest in design excellence, leaving the city only with its morass. Mayor Adams has just appointed a public realm officer, which is a good sign, but he is meanwhile proposing budget cuts to libraries and parks. The mayor ran for office in 2021 promising to double the Parks Department’s budget and plant 20,000 new trees a year. Now facing a possible $3 billion deficit, he has explained that it would be “irresponsible” for the city not to slash park and library spending while cutting education and health.

That sounds sensible, but the city now spends only 1 percent of its roughly $100 billion budget on parks (some $600 million) and libraries (some $400 million), arguably a pittance considering the outsize roles they play in public health and safety, real estate and economic development, and the welfare of millions of residents, as the pandemic reiterated. It’s a question of recognizing value.

This may be the usual political theater: New York mayors sometimes cut funds for libraries and parks knowing City Council members will restore the funding, so everyone can take a victory lap. But Mayor Adams’s intentions remain a mystery.

New Yorkers rely on library branches not just for books, but also for access to computers and free broadband, employment services, English-language courses for immigrants, after-school programs for teens, de facto child care, havens during extreme weather, free events and safe spaces for latchkey children, the unhoused and older adults.

I mentioned dining sheds, a subject for a different article, which also brought quarantined residents out of their apartments and helped revive neighborhoods and empty streets during Covid. Suffice it say that there’s an opportunity now for the city to rethink curbside real estate in general. The curbside lane is public land, after all, not the private property of car owners or restaurants, and it takes up a not-insignificant portion of the city, which could be reimagined to improve truck deliveries and trash pickup, widen sidewalks — as well as generate tax revenues from more limited outdoor dining establishments that comply with new design guidelines. New York’s leaders don’t seem to be thinking holistically about this aspect of the public realm, either.

Image
A yellowish structure with a carved out space for books that offers a view into a children’s orange room.
The children’s pod at the Adams Street Library; below, from left, seating under the original factory’s timber beams and cutouts in the children’s area provide views of the Brooklyn Bridge. Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
A yellowish structure with a carved out space for books that offers a view into a children’s orange room.
Image
A view of the children's room with a table and chairs, bookshelves and a stool with a plant on it.
Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
A view of the children's room with a table and chairs, bookshelves and a stool with a plant on it.
Image
Bookshelves in a room with windows, brick walls and an exposed tinder ceiling.
Credit...Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
Bookshelves in a room with windows, brick walls and an exposed tinder ceiling.

With the pandemic seemingly in the rearview mirror but the city still seeking its new normal, New York’s recovery depends on fortifying, not diminishing, tent-poles like parks, streets and libraries. The mayor might want to reconsider what library branches like the ones I saw deliver — and why their design has ripple effects.

The success of Macomb’s in Upper Manhattan, for example, has helped pave the way for the renovation of the Roosevelt-era low-rise housing project the library occupies, called Harlem River Houses. The renovation is a Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, project: It’s being done by a cohort of private developers, in concert with the New York City Housing Authority. Harlem River Houses was the first federally funded public housing project built in the city. A Black architect, John Louis Wilson, Jr., was on the original design team.

The 1930s architecture — simple, dignified, four- and five-story buildings with big apartments and community spaces, organized around courtyards — took its cues from the Amsterdam School of the 1920s. Dutch architects back then were turning out high-quality, low-cost housing for the working classes distinguished by Expressionistic masonry, turrets and balconies, and stylish art glass, ironwork and sculptures.

The architects of Harlem River Houses updated the decorative details, giving entrances Art Deco canopies and tall modernist windows; courtyards, elaborate fountains, benches and trees. Storefronts with bay windows flanked the public avenue that bisected the complex.

Michielli + Wyetzner removed the bearing walls between the former stores and finessed a change in elevation to create a single, open space, exploiting a setback to install clerestories and bring more light into the children’s area. They restored the bronze lintels and pink granite along Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. The library now serves as a kind of gateway to Harlem River Houses.

Something similar is happening at the Dumbo branch: WORKac enlisted Linked by Air, the Brooklyn graphics firm responsible for the mural with the word “LIBRARY” in giant white letters that appears across the former factory’s exterior, a cheeky nod to the old signage that animated the bygone industrial waterfront. Like the rest of WORKac’s architecture here, the gesture reinforces a basic message, that the Brooklyn library bridges the city’s past and present.

Here’s hoping city authorities don’t shortchange its future.

Image
An old brick building with many windows has a lower level with the word “Library” painted in giant white letters on a red background.
For the Adams Street Library, the architecture firm WORKac enlisted Linked by Air, the Brooklyn graphics firm responsible for a mural painted across the former factory’s exterior that features the word “LIBRARY” in giant white letters.Credit...Bruce Damonte
An old brick building with many windows has a lower level with the word “Library” painted in giant white letters on a red background.

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic. While based in Berlin, he created the Abroad column, covering culture and politics in Europe and the Middle East. He is the founder and editor-at-large of a new venture focused on global challenges and progress called Headway. @kimmelman

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2023, Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Even Amid Deficits, Libraries Are PricelessOrder Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

No comments: