President and CEO of the Queens Public
Library Dennis Walcott
www.qns.com I LIC COURIER I MARCH 2020 23
DBY MAX PARROTT ays before the Court
Square Library was
set to shut its doors,
Long Island City
Councilman Jimmy
Van Bramer led a fiery oversight
hearing on the branch’s closure on
Wednesday, Feb. 12.
During the hearing, an exasper-ated
Van Bramer, chair of the City
Council’s Cultural Affairs, Libraries
and International Intergroup Relations
chair and a former librarian himself,
grilled Queens Public Library Presi-dent
and CEO Dennis Walcott for not
doing enough to prevent the library’s
closure.
While Walcott insisted that he did
his due diligence to find a new location
for the branch after he learned that its
lease was set to expire, Van Bramer
refused to let him off the hook.
“What you had to fundamentally do
was keep this library functioning for
this community. That is what you had
to do,” said Van Bramer.
The Court Square branch has been
located in the Citigroup Tower — pay-ing
a yearly rent of just one dollar — for
the past 30 years, according to The
City. Though its sublease with Citi-group
expired in August, Van Bramer
pointed out that library officials had
known that this was likely to happen
since Spring of 2018.
“We could have started four years
ago and we would have been in the
same place. We are caught in a vice of
looking for space and the price point
being extremely high — being con-scious
of the budget going forward,”
Walcott said.
Walcott added that the library is
currently in talks over several differ-ent
locations for the branch, some
which would involve building out an
existing property. As a result of these
negotiations, he said he could not give
a definitive timeline, but he hoped to
have the library ready for business by
the end of 2020, and a lease agree-ment
by the end of March.
Part of Van Bramer’s frustration
stemmed from his belief that the library
system is a hub for social services,
where the public service should get
priority over budget considerations.
“It was always the ethos of the public
library system in Queens that we would
never strand a library,” Van Bramer said.
“Attendance in public libraries and partici-pation
in public programming in libraries is
habit-forming. People get into a routine.”
Van Bramer asked if the QPL con-sidered
a temporary trailer for the
branch while it was closed or if they
had started a fund-raising campaign
specifically to help afford a lease.
Walcott responded that he simply did
not think these options were practical.
In his questioning, Bronx Coun-cilman
Mark Gjonaj asked how the
dissolution of Amazon HQ2 affected
the search for a new location, a thorny
issue for Van Bramer, one of the proj-ect’s
chief opponents.
Amazon was slated to rent a large
swathe of Citi Tower temporarily while
it built its own new building nearby.
Gjonaj asked if the QPL had a “done
deal” with Amazon to keep the branch
in place, hinting that fallout from the
abandoned project delayed the pro-cess.
Walcott said they had been talk-ing
to Amazon but no such deal was
reached.
“I’m not going to allow that to be
the narrative,” Van Bramer responded
to the line of questioning. “This is not
an Amazon HQ2 hearing.”
Van Bramer’s assessment was bol-stered
by Meghan Cirrito, president of
the Friends of Court Square Library. In
her testimony, she said she rejected
the notion that Amazon was the cause
or potentially the savior of the library’s
closing.
“Vital community services like public
libraries surely do not close because a
private company is no longer a tenant
in a shared building,” she said.
Max Parrott
Community News
Long Island City councilman condemns Queens Public
Library president for closure of Court Square branch
Courtesy of Silvercup Studios
LIBRARY
DRAMA
/www.qns.com
/www.qns.com
