From CommonEdge, Revisiting Brooklyn’s Barclays Center—a Telling Landscape:
The lead of my article:
On Sept. 25, 2012, Brooklyn writer Andrew Blum tweeted the photo above left of the new Barclays Center arena, three days before its opening, with a series of concerts by Brooklyn native son Jay-Z. In her review a few weeks later, Philadelphia Inquirer critic Inga Saffron called Barclays a “glam, gritty architectural success,” quoting tweets from Blum about “the speed with which it has been absorbed into the neighborhood.”
Well, sort of. The arena didn’t cause the “carmageddon” some feared, in part because fans of the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, which moved to Brooklyn, stopped following their team, and new fans took the convenient subway or even walked.
But the 22-acre project dubbed Atlantic Yards when it was announced in 2003 and renamed Pacific Park in 2014, has grown haltingly and uneasily around the arena, signaling unfulfilled promises. No wonder the website HellGate recently called it the “Bad Vibes Barclays Center.”
Meanwhile, the scene around Barclays, visible from my re-creation of Blum’s photo (above right) has grown notably more commercialized, a reminder that sports teams are businesses, not public trusts.
For the rest of the article, go to CommonEdge.
Comments
Post a Comment