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About New York

Denying New York Libraries the Fuel They Need

Hsia Jian Li of Queens browsed at the Bayside library branch in 2011.Credit...Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Suppose you guess where people spend at least some of their time in the city.

For instance, what attractions draw the most visitors?

A. Major museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum or Museum of the City of New York.

B. Libraries, including the neighborhood branches and research centers.

C. Performing arts, like those at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, City Center and Snug Harbor.

D. Sports teams like the Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Nets, Rangers, Jets and Giants.

E. Natural-world attractions: the botanical gardens, Wave Hill, the zoos and aquariums.

Lots of people buy tickets for sports, even if they don’t always show up. Last year, the Yankees listed attendance as 3.4 million; the Mets, 2.14 million. At Madison Square Garden and the Barclays Center, the two basketball teams and the Rangers hockey team brought in a total of 2.2 million. The two professional football teams in northern New Jersey drew 1.3 million.

Those hefty numbers add up to about nine million. How about attendance at museums, live performances and zoos? “Approximately 21 million New Yorkers and other visitors attended the 33 city-owned museums, performing arts centers, botanical gardens, zoos and historical sites,” the mayor’s office reported in September.

But wait.

The city’s libraries — the fusty old buildings, and a few spiffier modern ones, planted in all five boroughs — had 37 million visitors in the last fiscal year, said Angela Montefinise, a spokeswoman for the New York Public Library, which runs branches and research centers in Manhattan and the Bronx and on Staten Island. The Brooklyn Public Library and the Queens Library have their own extensive systems.

So the city’s libraries have more users than major professional sports, performing arts, museums, gardens and zoos — combined.

No one who has set foot in the libraries — crowded at all hours with adults learning languages, using computers, borrowing books, hunting for jobs, and schoolchildren researching projects or discovering stories — can mistake them for anything other than power plants of intellect and opportunity. They are distributed without regard to wealth.

Over the last decade, they have not gotten anywhere near the kind of capital funding enjoyed by sports teams.

From the 2006 fiscal year through 2014, the city budgeted at least $464 million to build new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets, and $156 million for the Barclays Center. That’s $620 million for just those three sports arenas — a sum more than one-third greater than the $453 million that the city committed for capital improvements to the its 206 branch libraries and four research centers, which serve roughly seven times as many people a year as attend baseball games. (The budget figures were provided by the city’s Independent Budget Office; the teams are getting an additional $680 million in subsidies spread over 40 years.)

For decades, the libraries have served a single function in the city budget process: hostages. Mayors say they have to cut library hours to make the financial books balance. The City Council rises up in outrage. During the negotiations, hours are ultimately restored, usually swapped for something else that the mayor actually wants.

Despite these annual rescues, library hours in New York “trail behind cities throughout the nation,” according to a study by David Giles published this month by the Center for an Urban Future.

Now the libraries are on a campaign for more money to build or rebuild branches that are run down, although some people suggest we don’t need libraries now that all the information in the world can be gotten on smartphones.

“Our research suggests that this couldn’t be further from the truth,” Mr. Giles wrote in a 2013 study, “Branches of Opportunity.” The report documented increases in attendance that would be the envy of any sports teams. The branches, it said, “are a key component of the city’s human capital system.”

That has been their historic role in New York.

One day in 1933, a 12-year-old boy named Joseph Papirofsky, a son in a house of immigrants where only Yiddish was spoken, arrived at a public library in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He browsed the drama shelf.

“If I had to pay, it is doubtful I would have read the plays of Shakespeare,” he said decades later.

By then, he had changed his name to Joe Papp, and was known as the creator of the summer custom of Shakespeare plays staged in city parks, and as the founder of the Public Theater. His journey, a subplot in Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” traces him from a boy who wore cardboard in his shoes to his reign as one of the 20th century’s most influential directors and producers.

Joe Papp’s library visits were the creation of “human capital” before the term was invented: books borrowed, then returned over and over.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: Denying a Major Attraction the Fuel It Needs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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