Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

A 12/22/21 Inside Philanthropy post from Karen Brooks Hopkins, the president emerita of Brooklyn Academy of Music, was headlined  A Winter’s Tale: A Fundraiser Recalls an Exceptionally Chilly Reception from a Potential Donor  and concerns a trip to Siberia. (This is apparently a fifth annual holiday post, and it's taken from her recent memoir,  BAM…and Then It Hit Me .) She writes: Bruce Ratner, our former chairman, during his long battle to get the Barclays Center built on a large parcel of land very near to BAM, needed additional investment dollars, and somehow, this journey ended up taking him all the way to Moscow and Siberia, via the participation of Russian billionaire—and enormous basketball fan —Mikhail Prokhorov. Of course, when I learned that a billionaire was “moving in” next door to BAM, I made it a personal quest to get him involved. It turned out that his sister, Irina Prokhorova, was not only an accomplished publisher, but she was also running his foundatio...

The Barclays Center has gotten a lot of mileage out of its first and only collaboration over four-plus years with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which was hyped in 2011 as "three or four shows a year." On 1/21/15, I previewed the "Contemporary Color" collaboration, scheduled for June of that year, organized by David Byrne and featuring various color guard teams with an array of musicians. Now there's a film, "Contemporary Color." The New York Times review  suggests this film "could have used" the "focus and commitment coherence" of the Talking Heads (featuring Byrne) 1984 concert film “Stop Making Sense.” By contrast, Rolling Stone's review  is a rave, suggesting, "This may be one of the few rockumentaries since 'Stop Making Sense' to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental." From the review: Byrne set out to show the art...

From the New York Times,  Color Guard Is David Byrne’s New Project. Yes, Color Guard. Since Talking Heads broke up in the early ’90s, David Byrne’s eclectic projects have focused on everything from visual art and musical theater to bicycles and gentrification. His latest obsession?  Color guard . ...This summer, Mr. Byrne will present “Contemporary Color” in Toronto and Brooklyn, pairing 10 teenage color guard teams from Canada and the United States with musicians including Kelis, St. Vincent, Devonté Hynes and Nelly Furtado. ...A co-commission of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Toronto’s Luminato Festival, the show will premiere at the Air Canada Center on June 22 and 23. The show will come to Barclays Center in Brooklyn on June 27 and 28, in the Academy’s first partnership with its neighboring arena. My comment... Interestingly enough, this show--coming in the later part of the third year of the Barclays Center's operation--is the *first* example of the BAM-Barcl...

Crain's New York Business this week published its list of the  50 Most Powerful Women , several with ties to Atlantic Yards and Forest City Ratner. Notably, new Forest City CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin  was ranked 16, up from 35 in 2011: MaryAnne Gilmartin, 49, became one of the highest-ranking executives in New York real estate development when she was promoted in April to chief executive of Forest City Ratner. Among her responsibilities, she oversees the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards development project, which includes Barclays Center. Lately, Ms. Gilmartin has pushed the company in a new direction, pioneering the use of modular construction in the city. Ms. Gilmartin is hoping to not only use the time- and money-saving technique for the 15 residential buildings slated for the Atlantic Yards, but also to turn the company's growing capabilities in the method into an assembly line for developers across the city. Success would help the 2,573-employee Forest City Ratner build on t...

While Brooklynites were wondering about the 181 affordable housing units in the planned first Atlantic Yards, which begins construction later this month, on 11/28/12, a mayoral press release announced a new building nearby with 300 subsidized units, and far more larger units, though construction won't start until later next year. The press release:  MAYOR BLOOMBERG ANNOUNCES THREE MAJOR MILESTONES IN THE REVITILIZATION [sic] OF THE DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN CULTURAL DISTRICT Announces Plans to Begin Construction of 600 New Units of Housing; 50 Percent to Be Affordable Public Review Begins on New Mixed-Use Development to Create Approximately 50,000 Square Feet of New Cultural and Community Space, and a New Iconic Public Plaza RFP Issued For the Last Development Parcel in District with Plans for New Cultural and Commercial Space . Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced three major milestones in the development of the last city-owned parcels in the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural...

From the New York Times today,  Making a Fest, Keeping It Green , a suggestion that there's much more than basketball: Just as the Brooklyn Nets open their regular season, bringing professional sports to the borough for the first time in half a century, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is concluding a savvy counterprogramming offer. ...The academy also has its own sleek new room to show off in its recently opened Fisher Building : the Fishman Space , a flexible black box... that offers the potential for more intimate programming, like Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s charming dance-theater piece “red, black & GREEN: a blues.” As the primary narrator and charismatic center of this four-person show, Mr. Joseph tells a moseying story about working with neighborhoods in New York, Houston, Chicago and Oakland to build a socially conscious environmental arts festival that helps people of all classes. Performed here after stops elsewhere, the show presents a contrast, if not a subtle rebuke, ...

The Wall Street Journal reports, in Playing Ball in Brooklyn Arts , that billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov's $1 million gift (to an arts institution that backs the Barclays Center and once was chaired by his partner Bruce Ratner) can pay dividends: The owner of the Brooklyn Nets and his sister, Irina Prokhorova, have made a $1 million grant to the Brooklyn Academy of Music through the Mikhail Prokhorov Fund. The grant will be announced Thursday at a cocktail reception before the BAM 30 Next Wave Gala, as will the new artistic partnership the grant will support, the TransCultural Express: American and Russian Arts Today. The three-year program will help bring a series of modern Russian films to BAMcinématek, allow Russian scholars to participate in BAM events and support bringing U.S.-based Illstyle & Peace Productions, a multicultural dance company, to Siberia in the spring. It is the fund's first grant to a U.S.-based cultural institution... "Good neighbors" W...

We're still waiting for some more coverage on the BAM-arena plans revealed in a spoon-fed New York Times exclusive --the New York Daily News and Brooklyn Paper have yet to weigh in, though the New York Post and many others ran an anodyne AP story . But "[t]he bottom line is that you have to be suspicious of anything Ratner might be telling you," writes Noticing New York's Michael D. D. White in Cultural Circus? Mr. Ratner’s Attempt to Rechristen His Arena A “Cultural Center.” He takes off from some previous reporting, including how I pointed out that incredible claim that the Barclays Center and the Brooklyn Academy of Music would together create a new cultural district. He points out that, while "Ratner describes circuses as part of the commonplace perception people generally have of arenas from which he wants to move away,"  BAM's Karen Brooks Hopkins contradicts Ratner by suggesting performances can be "large nouvelle cirque kind of work...

"I always like to put things that are a little bit ironic together" was the money quote from Bruce Ratner in today's New York Times exclusive on the alliance in which the Brooklyn Academy of Music will bring three or four large-scale shows to fill empty dates at the Barclays Center arena. The first irony is that this was seen as big news rather than as a question mark over the event projections for the arena. Remember, they've booked 150 shows and aim for more than 200 events a year. The problem with those numbers is that a Moody's analyst in 2009 said its just-above-junk rating for $511 million in Barclays Center PILOT bonds depended in part on 225 events a year, and Forest City Ratner's  original projection of 225 events depended on no new arena in Newark, though one has since opened. Eric McClure of No Land Grab found the irony in Ratner's claims of "Jobs, Housing, and Hoops." Matt Chaban of the Observer cited , among other things...

A front-page New York Times Arts section story coming tomorrow, headlined In Alliance, Nets Arena to Offer Arts , begins: It’s been a springboard for Brooklyn nostalgia, a debate about urban design and the politics of eminent domain and, depending on your perspective or basketball affiliation, a community uniter or divider. Now Atlantic Yards , the development that will bring the New Jersey Nets to downtown Brooklyn, will also be a cultural center. The Barclays Center , the 18,000-seat arena at the heart of the project, will host performances by artists selected by the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a programming alliance between the two neighboring institutions, their directors said. The collaboration will include three or four shows a year and allow the academy to bring to Brooklyn work that would not fit into its theaters — the largest of which has 2,000 seats — with costs underwritten by the arena. Three or four shows a year? This is the Arts equivalent of the ...

There's some new money for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, but the most dramatic thing about the latest Internal Revenue Service filing from the Forest City Ratner Companies Foundation--which last April I called shadowy because of its lack of transparency--is that the total dispensed during tax year 2007, $1.89 million, exceeds the aggregate given out during the three previous years. That's a bit misleading, however, given that the single largest gift by far, $1 million, was given to the World Trade Center Memorial, a fundraising effort led by Mayor Mike Bloomberg. The mayor has been a staunch supporter of Atlantic Yards, quietly adding $105 million to the city's initial $100 million cash pledge. The New York Times reported 4/9/08 that Forest City Ratner's foundation has given $5 million to the $350 million raised for the memorial; the filing I examined covers the fiscal year through 1/31/08. Given that no previous FCR foundation gifts have been reported...

What does the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) think of the Atlantic Yards project? It would be a good neighbor, especially since Forest City Ratner CEO Bruce Ratner's been a good guy, a major donor, and--as documents show --the Forest City Ratner Foundation has been a generous donor, too. Comments filed as part of the Atlantic Yards Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) stressed the potential upside of the project without acknowledging the downside. BAM Chief Financial Officer Peter Gee testified : The Brooklyn Academy of Music is excited about the new potential audiences, donors, subscribers, and amenities that will result from residential and commercial development in the Downtown Brooklyn. [sic] The affordable-housing component of the Atlantic Yards plan will ensure that BAM audiences continue to be representative of a wide range of people with diverse cultural interests. BAM looks forward to providing programs and services for everyone. (Did he mean "Downtown Brookl...