When Mayor Eric Adams announced his fiscal 2025 budget almost two weeks ago, librarians citywide breathed a sigh of relief. Instead of reducing hours or services further, libraries were spared in this round of budget adjustments and will not be forced to drop to a five-day service schedule.
This means that libraries will continue to be closed on Sundays — but they won’t have to contort their services further, for now.
“The Brooklyn, New York, and Queens public libraries are grateful that Mayor Adams, a longtime champion of our mission, spared libraries from additional cuts to our FY24 and FY25 operating budgets," a spokesperson from the Brooklyn Public Libary told the BK Reader in a statement. "We deeply appreciate the administration’s recognition of the value of libraries and of how much New Yorkers rely on them.”
This relief arrives on the tail of a string of bad news for city libraries. In November of 2023, Adams announced mid-year budget cuts — to better serve the migrant crisis — and slashed funding for all city services by 5%. As a result, libraries citywide were forced to shutter on Sundays.
However, the lack of Sunday services still frustrates many New Yorkers.
Lauren Comito, the executive director at the nonprofit Urban Librarians Unite, organized a vigil that drew both librarians and local patrons who wanted to mourn the closure of Suday service.
“We're all frustrated,” Comito told BK Reader. “[As librarians,] we're in this because we want people to have free and easy access to information so that their lives can be good — we want our neighbors to have good, meaningful, well-resourced lives. Being closed on Sunday takes that away from a lot of our neighbors.”
As the mayor announced his budget to the public, patrons at the Central Library were still indignant that funding cuts fell on the libraries in the first place.
Brooklyn native Laurence Leff lives in Illinois now, but when he's in town, he uses the library nearest his house as a warm place to access the daily news and print documents.
“Closing on Sundays is going to have an impact on anybody who doesn't have a stable place to work, for whatever reason,” he said.
Brooklynites Alejandra Estigarribia and Marco Castino come to BPL with their child at least once a week; Castino also uses the library to work. They lamented that the library won’t be open daily for the foreseeable future.
“It’s a pity and it’s a shame,” Castino said. “[The library] is such a springing of democratic expression. It's like the underpinning of society. What these people do here — not just including the base, the space, infrastructure, but even the books, what people do here for work, the services they offer — it's so democratic.”
“There’s a lot of money for other things, for war — it’s very sad,” Estigarribia added.
