A footnote on that street photographer at Barclays; author says original 2008 plan concerned Brooklyn street basketball, but "the Ratner money ran out."

Hey, remember the book by ex-footprint resident and street photographer Jeff Mermelstein, Arena, in which he had four years to take photos at the Barclays Center?

There's a lot more back story than the one cited originally in April 2019. The New York Times then wrote:

Mr. Mermelstein earned the assignment the hard way: his loft had to be torn down to make room for the arena. From this fraught start began a longstanding friendship with the arena’s chief developer, Bruce Ratner, who commissioned Mr. Mermelstein to do his stuff, no strings attached.

My observation at the time: "Bruce Ratner, art patron and champion of free expression? Not necessarily; remember those gag orders requiring apartment sellers to play nice?"

Different strings

Well, there were different strings, at least attached to an earlier iteration of a Mermelstein project, as explained by author (and basketball player) Thomas Beller in his collection Lost in the Game : A Book About Basketball, published last November.

Beller writes:

In April 2008 I got a call from the well-known street photographer, Jeff Mermelstein, who was working on a project about basketball in Brooklyn. We would go around to different playgrounds and gyms, he said, and he would take pictures and I would write something to accompany them. The resulting project, for which I would get paid, would be displayed inside the fantastic future home of the Brooklyn Nets. There was a catch, though. The project’s patron was the real estate developer Bruce Ratner, the man who brought the Nets and the Barclays Center to Brooklyn via a massive real estate development for which basketball was a kind of Trojan horse.

Beller had qualms about being a "a collaborator against the citizens of Brooklyn," but ultimately embraced the opportunity to "roam the basketball courts of New York, or at least Brooklyn." 

He describes visiting courts on Tillary Street in Brooklyn, near the housing projects where NBA players Bernard and Albert King grew up, and then to a tournament in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he observed a faded college star who'd succumbed to the streets.

"It was a promising start for the project," writes Beller, "but the Ratner money ran out, and it was discarded along with the Frank Gehry designs."

It's interesting that the project would even have been funded as of April 2008, when by November of that year Ratner had concluded that the larger, more expensive Gehry-designed arena wouldn't work.

A truncated project

So, it looks like Mermelstein's interview with the digital projection company DMB regarding his project "Basketball in Brooklyn" refers to photos he took for that abortive project, which appeared in Issue 05 of PYLOT Magazine (not online).

Relevant excerpts:

We used to live in a loft building, a converted old Spalding Factory in Brooklyn that was eventually torn down to make way for the building of a basketball arena, the Barclays Center. When we learned that we would need to leave our home for the building of this arena the subject of basketball began to glow in my mind. Around the corner from our loft is the Dean Playground where during the Summer months there is great activity of street basketball

...I always was intrigued with the excitement and cultural diversity and the physicality of the players and the spectators. The particular electric colors of the synthetic culturally emblematic clothing and the throbbing of music and street chatter. My eyes and emotions were filled with excitement that put me into a spell of respect, curiosity and love. I was galvanized by the challenge of gaining trust and access with these ball players and was thrilled to do so. It opened up a new side of me as a picture maker being a street photographer who rarely speaks to his subjects, being more of a hit and run artist.