Why Sunday Story Hours Are Coming to the Whitney

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at why the Whitney Museum of American Art will have “story times” with librarians from the New York Public Library, starting on Sunday. We’ll also find out about a push to ban 24-hour shifts for home health care workers.

The Whitney Museum of American Art will have monthly “story times” for children, starting on Sunday.

The Whitney’s holdings include the world’s largest collection of paintings by Edward Hopper and major works by Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns, Louise Nevelson and Georgia O’Keeffe, among many others. That is art to be seen, not read.

A read-along session is not what an art museum usually schedules for a busy weekend day. So why are three story time sessions — at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. — on the Whitney’s calendar?

Officials of the Whitney saw a gap they could fill when Sunday story times at libraries in New York City disappeared.

Sunday hours at libraries were doomed by budget cuts that Mayor Eric Adams announced in November to offset the unexpected cost of managing the migrant crisis.

The city’s three public library systems — the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library and the Queens Public Library — immediately announced that libraries would no longer be open seven days a week. (In January the mayor said that libraries would not be subject to additional rounds of belt-tightening in the current fiscal year. But the funding that was taken away in November was not restored, so the libraries remain closed on Sundays. The library lists dozens of story times at branch libraries on other days.)

Officials at the Whitney were already planning to drop admission charges on the second Sunday of each month. “We want to provide more pathways to reach new people,” Scott Rothkopf, the director of the Whitney, told me in December.

Hosting Sunday story times fits that goal, and Brian Bannon, the director of branch libraries and education for the New York Public Library, said that officials from the Whitney had approached the library about a collaboration. But he said the library’s initial response was, “We’d love to do this, but we can’t. We don’t have anyone working on Sundays anymore.”

Then the Whitney offered to pay library staff members who volunteered for story times at the museum. “This is not something we can offer any other way,” Bannon said.

The Whitney said the funding came from the Art Bridges Foundation, which had given the museum a three-year grant to make free admission possible on the second Sundays of each month. (The Whitney also began Free Friday Nights and Free Second Sundays in January, dropping what had been a pay-what-you-wish admission policy.)

As for the New York Public Library, Bannon said it was facing a $58.3 million reduction, even though more people used libraries last year than in 2021 or 2022, according to figures in the mayor’s preliminary management report released in January. In the 2023 fiscal year, 1.03 million people attended programs at branches of the New York Public Library, almost twice as many as in fiscal 2022. The same branch libraries registered 407,167 people for new library cards in fiscal 2023, up from 295,448 in fiscal 2022.

He called the story times at the Whitney an experiment. The Whitney is, after all, not a place where books can be checked out. But it is a place where people know books about art.

Cris Scorza, the Whitney’s chair of education, recalled that when her daughter was 2, “we used to read ‘Uncle Andy’s: A Faabbbulous Visit with Andy Warhol’ over and over again.” The book, by James Warhola, Warhol’s nephew, made an impression: “Whenever we went to museums and saw a Warhol painting, my daughter would be able to spot it from a mile away and say, ‘That’s my uncle.’”

Weather

Enjoy a mostly sunny day in the low 50s. The evening will be mostly cloudy, with temperatures dropping to 40.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until March 24 (Purim).

The latest New York news

Home health aides fight to end round-the-clock shifts

Home health care is one of the fastest-growing industries in New York — and is also one of the lowest paying, with often grueling hours. A bill introduced in the City Council on Thursday would ban 24-hour shifts.

My colleague Stefanos Chen writes that home care aides have been allowed to work such shifts because of a longstanding interpretation of state law that assumes they should only be paid for up to 13 hours of the day. Industry regulations are built around the idea that workers get three hours of meal time and eight hours of sleep, including five hours of uninterrupted rest.

Workers and labor groups say that is rarely, if ever, the case because of the all-hours nature of the job. Opponents of the bill say that banning 24-hour shifts is misguided and could drive up the cost of round-the-clock care. A ban could also force home care agencies, which are supported by state and federal funding, to spend more per patient, potentially creating gaps in coverage for the neediest residents.

It is unclear how many home care aides work 24-hour shifts. But there were 17,780 New York City residents who received Medicaid-funded, live-in care in 2019, according to 1199SEIU, a large union representing health care workers. Replacing 24-hour shifts with two 12-hour shifts — effectively doubling the total number of hours paid — could cost an additional $645 million a year in New York City, according to an analysis by the union.

Since the pandemic, no other industry has added more jobs to the city’s economy than home health care. It also remains one of the lowest-paying fields in the city, with an average salary of about $32,000, or close to minimum wage, according to James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Nearly 90 percent of home care workers are women, according to Kezia Scales, the vice president of research and evaluation at PHI, a national research and advocacy group for direct-care workers. They are often immigrants, and more than half are over 45 years old. Almost 10 percent are 65 or older.

Rendy Desamours, a spokesman for the City Council, said the effort to ban 24-hour shifts was misdirected, because home health care is funded primarily through Medicaid, which is managed at the state level.

“It has been counterproductive and harmful to mislead people into believing that this can be resolved at the city level,” he said in a statement. He added that Adrienne Adams, the Council speaker, planned to introduce a bill to urge the State Legislature to improve working conditions for home care workers.

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