Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Much in the Atlantic Yards saga, I suspect, has been strategized in Forest City Ratner's offices at 1 MetroTech. Consider the 12/10/03 press conference at which public officials praised the project, and continue through exclusives bestowed on news organizations, For example: the 7/5/05 release to the Times of new Frank Gehry designs ( Instant Skyline Added to Brooklyn Arena Plan , which, alarming readers with its visuals, backfired somewhat) and Bruce Ratner's 5/4/08 op-ed in the New York Daily News ( Atlantic Yards dead? Dream on ), which was, to say the least, factually challenged). But some episodes have been truly orchestrated , a term I'll reserve for a sequence in which community or political leaders provide (or are said to provide) cover for something the developer likely wanted to do all along. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's attempt to play architectural adviser is only the latest. But it is the least effective, given that the public and press hav...

We know Atlantic Yards isn't dead, because things still keep getting brutally weird . The Courier-Life's Stephen Witt, who brought us the story of "the real land-grabbers," this week suggests that the real manipulators in the political system are the volunteer groups opposing a bailout for Forest City Ratner. (Click to enlarge) And the victim of the "counter lobbying offensive" is developer Forest City Ratner, which is paying uber-lobbyist Al D'Amato in an effort to get federal stimulus money for the Atlantic Yards project. But the signers of the latest letter are not, as the headline suggests, "Yards opponents;" some are simply watchdog groups concerned with prudent infrastructure spending like the Straphangers Campaign and The Open Planning Project , as well as Good Jobs New York , notable for its scrutiny of subsidies, and the consultant Majora Carter. As DDDB points out , the statement that a letter to Governor David Paterson was "ob...

The "brutally weird" block party scheduled for yesterday--on a to-be-demapped AY footprint block--by Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) signatories was canceled without public explanation yesterday. Apparently Forest City Ratner and its surrogates recognized that 1) it was bad form and 2) block parties usually involve residents celebrating their block, and there weren't any of them. (Image from DDDB .) Well, there was some largesse distributed. As told to DDDB and to me by an eyewitness, CBA signatory BUILD (Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development) and Forest City Ratner representatives "were out in front of the [homeless] shelter at 603 Dean handing out pizza, drinks and Nets tote bags to shelter residents." The shelter is on the block just below the block where the party was to be held. Another eyewitness says the FCR rep acknowledged that the party idea was inappropriate. However, since party planners had put flyers up in the shelter promising food...

Perhaps the most brutally weird moment in the trailer (below) for the documentary-in-progress Battle of Brooklyn comes at about 2:48. "This is a great project," declares Sen. Chuck Schumer, at the 2004 State of the Borough address, which, as the Brooklyn Paper reported , focused on Atlantic Yards. "But you know what really enervates me about this? 10,000 jobs." The filmmakers follow that with an implied rebuttal from City Council Member Charles Barron, who points to the "jobs" mantra as a cover for eminent domain. Battle of Brooklyn Trailer by rumurtv Footnotes needed But the Schumer segment deserves its own footnotes. Let's put aside the fact that the Harvard-educated lawmaker doesn't know the difference between enervate and energize . More importantly, the figure of 10,000 jobs was bogus from the start . There was no market for that many office jobs. Forest City Ratner overstated the number of jobs that could fit in the four tow...

New York Post columnist Steve Cuozzo is giving the Courier-Life's Stephen Witt a run for his money in brutally weird interpretations of Atlantic Yards. In a column headlined 'NET' LOSS IS DEVASTATING: DREAM PROJECT DEAD WITHOUT GEHRY , Cuozzo laments Forest City Ratner's decision to trade architect Frank Gehry's magnificent design for the Nets arena" for a design he likens to a "Dumpster" in comparison to Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. [Here's DDDB's response : NY Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo writes an Orwellian column, where it is Develop Don't Destroy that has been the "Orwellian-titled," "well-financed," "bullying", "liars." Not Ratner with his billionaire Cleveland backers, his orchestrated bullying disruptions of public hearings by his surrogates and partners, and his—yes we'll use the word—lying (see: Gehry, Frank, still "our lead architect"). ] Conclusory la...

Permits for block parties in the city must be acquired 60 days ahead of time, so let's assume that the Atlantic Yards Community Benefits Agreement BLOCK PARTY! was scheduled well before the Supreme Court decision Monday not to accept the AY eminent domain appeal. Still, the event was not announced until late Monday afternoon. That's curious. Stranger still, and brutally weird , is the location of the party: Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues in the AY footprint, opposite the under-demolition Ward Bakery, where a stop-work order exists and where the handful of residents left are, as far as I know, plaintiffs in the eminent domain case or their relatives. As Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn comments , "Call us crazy but we thought block parties were thrown by PEOPLE LIVING ON THE BLOCK." In other words, the "community" celebration is on a block scheduled for Phase 2 of the project, without start date or deadline, threatened by "con...

No, The Bilbao Effect , Oren Safdie's highly entertaining satirical play, isn't about Frank Gehry, even though the title takes off from the well-known phenomenon of enlisting a starchitect to create a signature civic building, like Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. After all, the protagonist is arrogant Swiss starchitect Erhardt Shlaminger, a man convinced of his own genius, while Gehry can get self-deprecating and defensive. Nor is it about Atlantic Yards, though it is clearly inspired, in part, by the project. After all, the official blurb that states it "tackles controversial urban design issues that New Yorkers have recently encountered in Brooklyn as a result of the hotly-debated plans to redevelop the Atlantic Yards [sic] into an architecture-star mega-development." Architecture on trial The play, staged appropriately at the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village, takes the form of a mock trial of Shlaminger, held by the American Institut...

The Daily News editorial today cites "a new basketball arena for Brooklyn." But the arena wouldn't be for Brooklyn . Forest CIty Ratner would get the naming rights and the revenues. Brooklyn would get a chance to buy tickets. Pinamonti predicted it Brutally weird ? Well, John Pinamonti predicted it, in "The Burrow" : Makes me sad, yea it's such a pity They're trying to rename Brooklyn "Forest City"

I wrote a letter June 15 to the Courier-Life chain complaining about unfounded criticism of me; rather than publishing it in the first issue possible, the newspaper has waited until the fifth issue, with a similarly unfounded response from reporter Stephen Witt. The letter: Stephen Witt's article, "Daughtry slams Yards critics," giving Atlantic Yards supporter the Rev. Herbert Daughtry a platform to argue unrebutted, is sloppy, irresponsible, and unfair. While Rev. Daughtry claims elected officials like City Council Member Letitia James and State Senator Velmanette Montgomery are "captured" by a small minority of anti-Atlantic Yards constituents, he ignores the fact that his longtime ally, City Council Member Charles Barron, has long opposed the project. Witt quotes Daughtry as touting benefits from the project, including a health center and an intergenerational center. Neither acknowledge that developer Forest City Ratner has 12 years to build Phase 1, which w...

The Atlantic Yards battle has produced its share of strange moments, and one of the weirdest-- brutally weird , in fact--emerges from the legal papers filed in the appeal of a state judge's decision to dismiss a challenge to the Atlantic Yards environmental review. In the brief from the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), amid a dispute over whether a "civic project" must be publicly owned or leased to an entity with a civic purpose, the state agency strains credulity with a posture of baffling obtuseness: Finally, Appellants labor to fortify their argument by calling the Arena the ‘Barclays Center.’ There is no record evidence that this name will be used, although this name has been reported in the press. In any event, the name of the facility does not change its civic character. The New York State Theater at Lincoln Center will not cease to be the cultural facility it has been since its creation simply because a captain of industry recently purchased the nami...

So, Forest City Ratner helps orchestrate a counter-protest last Saturday and the Courier-Life chain--or, to be specific, reporter Stephen Witt--finds a novel and bizarre angle: it’s all the fault of the people who bought condos in repurposed industrial buildings. It's "brutally weird." (For the record, the Courier-Life chain gives its staffers a long leash. The same issue this week contains a completely promotional article in the arts section, headlined "Rocking and rolling against Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan," about a fundraising concert sponsored by Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn.) 40,000 jobs in the footprint? The article on the rally (not online), headlined "Yards foes called ‘real land-grabbers,’" begins: Anthony Taylor sat on a metal folding chair in the St. Bartholomew's Church cafeteria, 1227 Pacific Street, and recalled the days when several buildings in the Atlantic Yards footprint held jobs, "We lost 40,000 jobs back the...

Brutally weird. The most extensive recent coverage of Forest City Ratner's astounding attempt to gain $249 million in financing by essentially selling green cards to Chinese millionaires (under the EB-5 visa program) comes via a manufactured flap over political correctness. The New York Post, in Atlantic Yards' foot-in-mouth veep , reports: A top official overseeing Brooklyn’s $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project is being accused by one of its biggest supporters of making insensitive comments about a green-card program being used to raise funds for the cash-strapped plan. Former ACORN boss Bertha Lewis — who was largely responsible for garnering key grass-roots support for the planned Prospect Heights development that includes an NBA arena – told the Post yesterday that she wants developer Forest City Ratner’s vice-president MaryAnne Gilmarten to apologize for comments reportedly made at a recent Manhattan public event. "As citizen Gilmarten, I’m not sure how I feel about i...

In the Daily News, columnist Errol Louis has to write tight, sometimes simplistically so. He just doesn't have much space. In his "Commerce and Community" column in the twice-monthly Our Time Press , he's got more column inches, but he usually breaks up his effort into two or even three items. Louis devotes his latest Our Time Press column (reproduced below, in full) to Atlantic Yards. That allows him to stretch stylistically before he resolves his chords, as always, into a familiar Atlantic Yards song. But he still doesn't bother with much research. It's quite a performance, notably his mangling of history and his casual dismissal of the question of subsidies. It sure makes you wonder: this is the guy recently honored by the North Star Fund for "help[ing] us to see alternatives that are rooted in our democratic ideals"? The problem is... hipsters? Under the headline Chronicle of a Defeat Foretold , Louis begins by citing a speech given by noveli...

Given the pressures on the news industry, it's not surprising that Brooklyn Paper publisher Ed Weintrob might have put his weekly newspaper chain on the block, and it's not shocking that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which already controls the Courier-Life chain, might have decided to make the purchase, as the New York Observer reported yesterday. (Graphic by Lumi Rolley of NoLandGrab .) What is surprising-- brutally weird , actually--is that Brooklyn Paper editor Gersh Kuntzman, a New York Post alumnus would tell the Observer, "They don’t want the product to change. And they love the product. And the product is fantastic." Well, um, why wouldn't the News Corporation seek, as they say in the biz, efficiencies and synergies in Brooklyn news coverage and ad sales, given that both papers publish editions for neighborhoods like Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Fort Greene? (There are areas with less overlap.) DDDB calls it Monopolyn . For how long...

Maybe it doesn't qualify as brutally weird, but it's sure rather odd. Apparently--as the Twitter exchange at right suggests--the notorious Stephen Witt , former Courier-Life journalist and self-published author, pitched an article to the Daily News about how his Atlantic Yards roman a clef, The Street Singer , was picked up by a publishing house run by Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner's sister Ellen Ratner. The Daily News reports: In 2011, the developer emailed Witt about the book after read a Daily News story about the coming novel. “He said his sister has a publishing house,” Witt recalled. And before long his novel, which he initially planned to self-publish, was being sold in mainstream bookstores. Nice of Ratner to help out a friend/ally, I guess. Maybe he remembers the hug he got from Witt . The Daily News says Witt "wrote glowing pieces about the project for local papers" and that he has "frequently been criticized by opponents wh...