Close reading of Can't Knock the Hustle provokes more quibbles about the Atlantic Yards/arena saga

A few things left out of my review of journalist Matt Sullivan’s fascinating new book centered on the 2019-2020 NBA season, Can’t Knock the Hustle: Inside the Season of Protest, Pandemic, and Progress with the Brooklyn Nets’ Superstars of Tomorrow.

I offered some questions and quibbles, but here want to add for the record some more granular comments that I hope will be addressed in the paperback version, so readers are not misled about some elements of the Atlantic Yards/Barclays Center back story.

(I suspect the paperback version will have a very interesting chapter/afterword on the current drama involving star Kyrie Irving's vexing resistance, thus far, to getting vaccinated, shutting him out of home games and practices, especially since Sullivan's been out front on that story.)

Setting the stage

Writes Sullivan about the arena, as of its September 2012 debut:

All the subways stopped here: the 2 and the 3...the N, Q and R... the 4/5, the B/D and the C, and Fort Greene's very own G. The damn G, slowest and slimiest of all mass transport in NYC. Exiting the station up the escalator...

This may seem like nitpicking, but Brooklynites know that the C and the G stop separately in nearby Fort Greene, so no one riding either can, as implied, take the escalator from the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station to the arena plaza.

Project success

Of the developer, the book states, as of the arena debut:

[Bruce] Ratner and Co. had promised affordable housing, local apprenticeships and seventeen thousand construction jobs and for an estimated billion dollars in private profit.

That's an appropriately skeptical take, and it may be too granular (maybe in a footnote?) to note that 17,000 construction jobs are calculated in job-years--and who knows if they will ever be counted. 

But the estimated billion dollars in profit, as calculated not just by project opponents but estimated in a 2006 New York magazine cover story, was by 2012 very much in doubt, given both delays and changes in the project configuration and timetable, and by the book's publication--given Ratner's sale of the project at a loss--untenable.

The big profit, instead, came to Mikhail Prokhorov, who sold the scarce commodity of an NBA team in the nation's media capital to Joe Tsai--and Tsai is likely to profit, as well.

A critic's timing

From the book:

By the arena's debut, as one investor put it, "the Nets are owned by a Russian industrialist, the property sold to a Chinese conglomerate, and the public officials who advanced the project are nowhere in sight."

Well, that timing is off. The Nets indeed had been bought by Prokhorov before Barclays opened, but the sale of a majority stake in Atlantic Yards to Greenland USA didn't come until mid-2014, after which Greenland changed the property's name to Pacific Park Brooklyn, typically shortened to Pacific Park.

The public officials who advanced the project were around as of 2012, including Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, but yes, they and others were gone by the time of Londell McMillan's critical comments, which cane in 2018, not 2012. 

Naming rights

The book describes Barclays as "the bank that had paid $400 million for the naming rights." 

That unfortunately repeats a common error: original reports of $400 million were exaggerated--the deal was $300 million--and then renegotiated to $200 million.

What Tsai paid

From the book:

Joe Tsai had finished buying out the Nets and their arena from the Russians... for what would be a grand total of $3.5 billion, the most ever paid for a sports franchise.

Well, it's a team plus an arena company--yes, typically shorthanded to the arena, though it's nominally owned by New York State. And $3.5 million was reported by some news outlets, though no documents confirm any prices.

But as I wrote in August 2020--not that anyone in the media chose to care--it was arguably not a record, since documents shared with investors in the Barclays Center construction bonds suggest a less impressive bottom line: the deal involved Prokhorov immediately giving up $345 million, which later translated into a Tsai rebate of about $300 million.

Appropriating gentrified Brooklyn?

Sullivan ventilates Jay-Z's deals with the Nets, the NFL, and other sports entities, adding:

But there was a difference, too, between a fading class of what [sociologist] Dr. Ameer "Left" Loggins called The Hovites--a generation of athletes who were led to believe, as the Hova [Jay-Z] lyric goes, I'm not a businessman / I'm a business, man--and the too-rare athlete who was willing to lay his personal brand on the line for bold ideas and real action in the face of oppression. "And the Jay-Z who was the hired gun to appropriate gentrified Brooklyn on behalf of the NBA," Left said, "is the same Jay-Z who became a hitman to eliminate Colin Kaepernick from the NFL."

I don't think Jay-Z appropriated "gentrified Brooklyn." 

Rather, he helped appropriate a much more amorphous, expansive entity of "Brooklyn" (as in this Charlie Rose interview), neutralizing resistance, especially in Black Brooklyn, and shouting out to Black Brooklyn icons.

The writer David Roth memorably dubbed Jay-Z the Nets' "resident Brooklyn-credibility totem."

And the extension of Jay-Z's endorsement helped neutralize or overshadow criticism, including from gentrified Brooklyn--at least the parts nearest the Atlantic Yards/arena site, that were the core of the project opposition.

In October 2012, I quoted NPR's Frannie Kelley, who observed:

The Barclays Center is fraught, but watching Jay open it was touching, and that night, I did not feel complicated about him.

Sure, arena promoters did try to appropriate gentrified Brooklyn, but only as part of a broader effort, as I wrote in a November 2012 Brooklyn Rail essay titled A Brand Called Brooklyn.

Or, as Jon Kelly, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, wrote in October 2012, The Nets and Brooklyn Deserve Each Other,:

On the other side of the metal detectors was the Barclays Center, but also something bigger: the promise of Brooklynland, that utopia of renovated brownstones, craft beer, rich people, farm-to-table restaurants, pencil mustaches, Wesleyan sweatshirts and now, its very own basketball team. In Brooklynland, the Crown Heights riots never happened, and people grow up to become Lena Dunham.

Jay-Z was deployed in a deeper way.