The Mid-Manhattan Library on Fifth Avenue at 40th Street, which will be refurbished.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

The New York Public Library’s revised renovation plan — to upgrade the Mid-Manhattan Library and create more public space in its flagship Fifth Avenue building — is expected to cost about $300 million, according to library officials who outlined new details of the project in interviews.

The anticipated budget matches what the library had originally suggested its previous plan — to insert a circulating branch at its main library at 42nd Street — might cost.

But officials, for the first time, revealed that the original plan, mostly scrapped last month in large part because of questions about the price tag, would actually have cost more than $500 million, according to independent estimates they commissioned last June.

Critics of the original plan had suggested that the price tag would most likely escalate well beyond the original estimates and, as a mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio was among several officials who called for a more thorough review of the project’s cost.

Library officials are hopeful that Mr. de Blasio, as mayor, will agree that $150 million, already in the city’s executive budget to finance the old plan, can be spent on the new one.

“The administration will remain in close discussions with the library on this project as well as on its other initiatives in support of the mayor’s agenda,” said Marti Adams, a spokeswoman for the mayor. “We are pleased that the library ultimately shared the mayor’s goals in developing its revised plan.”

Anthony W. Marx, the library’s president, said the historic stacks in the main building, whose removal was a disputed element in the original plan designed by the architect Norman Foster, would be kept, but not returned to service as a storage area for books....Continue Reading

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