![]() “I think it looks really beautiful," said Frank Wu, the president of Court Square Civic Association, a group in Long Island City that tries to encourage smart development. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times called it “among the finest and most uplifting public buildings New York has produced so far this century.” The headline last week to Justin Davidson’s gushing review in New York Magazine unapologetically read, “The Hunters Point Library Was Too Expensive, and Is Worth It.”īut following the library's official opening last week, which drew more than 1,300 visitors, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, some members of the public have raised pragmatic issues with its fetching and costly design, namely that of accessibility. ![]() “With all the money they spent and all the years of delay, it struck me as strange," he said.īy all accounts, Hunters Point Library has been an unmitigated success of architectural design on a municipal level. How would elderly library patrons looking to peruse the fiction shelves negotiate all those stairs? To Bachner, the design seemed like an obvious flaw. “If you can’t walk, you can’t go through that area,” he said.īecause although the Hunters Point Library has an elevator, it does not stop at three fiction sections, which are tiered on three separate levels above the lobby. ![]() At 67, he has a bad knee, but it's not bad enough to have kept him from climbing the library's much talked about staircase, which stands against the building's carved-out windows and guides visitors through the maze-like interior.īachner, who is an avid photographer, was impressed by the views, but as he found himself walking back and forth across the fiction aisles, which were as of yet unlabeled, something else occurred to him. He was eager to experience all of the building close up. A Jackson Heights resident, he was well familiar with the library’s backstory - 15 years to complete (20 by some estimates) at the hefty price tag of $41 million. On Tuesday, Joe Bachner made a trip to the newly opened Hunters Point Library in Long Island City.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |