Voices of Support

The humans of New York seem to be rousing themselves to a collective understanding: that the great public institutions they boast of and rely upon can’t be entrusted to the stewardship of real-estate developers, corporate synergists, media barons, and other ostensibly well-intentioned, deal-drunk one-percenters. Instead we need to tend our own commons, large and small -
individual libraries, and the city itself.

Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem
National Book Award-winning novelist and MacArthur Fellow

I got my real education from the New York Public Library. I spent my broke youth curled amidst the stacks of Mid-Manhattan. It was a paradise where you could learn anything. To me, this is what the NYPL is — the place where the aspiring but not particularly monied can study Latin and apply for jobs, borrow video games and discover their ambitions and loves. Every library closure is a wound on the city.

Molly Crabapple
Molly Crabapple
Artist and writer

For some time, a hypothesis that dared not speak its name has reigned over the NYPL debate: that the sale of the seven-story Mid-Manhattan Circulating Library and its air rights on Fifth Avenue at 40th is a developer’s dream, as was the greatly regretted sale of the Donnell Library across from MOMA.

David Levering Lewis
David Levering Lewis
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. DuBois and 2002 Library Lion

As a longtime, devoted user of the NYPL—I’ve researched my own books there, borrowed books and books on tape, taught workshops for the Office of Adult Services—I am against any plan to decimate what has been a way in and up for generations of New Yorkers. Please add my LOUD voice to this protest!

Hettie Jones
Hettie Jones
Distinguished poet and acclaimed memoirist
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Pulitzer Prize Winners
  • Junot Diaz
  • Frances FitzGerald
  • Margo Jefferson
  • David Levering-Lewis
  • Edmund Morris
  • Annie Proulx
  • Art Spiegelman
  • Annalyn Swan
Community Leaders
  • Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, President, The Islamic Leadership Council of Metropolitan NY
  • Luis Garden Acosta, President, El Puente
  • Barbara Bowen, President, PSC-CUNY
  • Dan Cantor, Executive Director, Working Families Party
  • Hector Figueroa, President, 32BJ SEIU
  • George Gresham, President, 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East
  • Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah
  • Ruth Messinger
  • Ana Oliveira
  • Susan Sarandon
  • Rev. Donna Schaper, Senior Minister, Judson Memorial Church
  • Rev. Al Sharpton
  • Gloria Steinem
  • Javier Valdes, Co-Executive Director, Make The Road New York
Prominent Writers
  • Peter Carey
  • Lydia Davis
  • E.L. Doctorow
  • Amitav Ghosh
  • Hettie Jones
  • Jonathan Lethem
  • Mario Vargas Llosa
  • Colum McCann
  • Roxana Robinson
  • Salman Rushdie
  • Witold Rybczynski
  • Luc Sante
  • Tom Stoppard
  • Colm Tóibin
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