Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

(This is one in an irregular series of articles about issues that a State Senate committee might address when it holds a hearing on Atlantic Yards.) So, what to make of the forced resignation (by Gov. David Paterson) of Metropolitan Transportation Authority Executive Director Elliot (Lee) Sander, who leaves office May 22? It probably had nothing to do with Atlantic Yards. However, the widespread endorsement of Sander's integrity and performance that has surfaced, combined with reports that Sander refused to bow to a patronage-driven pol, may mean his successor will be more willing to compromise with the reported request by Forest City Ratner to restructure the $100 million it owes and the developer's  reported effort  to build a less elaborate railyard than promised. Consider that, on May 8, just before his resignation, Reuters published an article with this tantalizing quote: Asked whether the MTA's rail yards in Brooklyn would see a basketball arena next year, part of ...

If you listened to a panel on overdevelopment at the Museum of the City of New York two weeks ago, there were some curious disconnects. Everyone--the defender of the real estate industry, the developer, the community planner, the public official--seemed to make at least some sense, but it sure didn’t hang together. And there wasn’t enough time in the Q&A to tease out the tensions. Some clarity emerged when I attended a panel October 28 at the Municipal Art Society, featuring planner Alex Garvin--a mainstream figure but clearly not part of the Bloomberg consensus. (The panel, called Growing Greener Cities , took off from a new book, Growing Greener Cities: Urban Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century , to which Garvin is a contributor.) At the very least, said Garvin, in words that show some commonality with sometime antagonists like community planner Tom Angotti, we should stop relying on zoning as planning, recognize the importance of public investment, and stop expecting mega...

Is it realistic to consider another future for the planned Atlantic Yards footprint, one based on the principles of the UNITY plan unveiled last September ? That was the premise of a workshop Saturday organized by the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development , along with the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN). And while the four-hour session didn’t produce definitive solutions, it did for the first time extend beyond the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Vanderbilt Yard, the major public property in the AY site, to the rest of the footprint, now owned mostly by developer Forest City Ratner. In other words, the project, launched in 2004 as Understanding, Imagining and Transforming the Yards (UNITY), might need a revised acronym. About 40 people attended the event, held at the Belarusian Church on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill. Their conclusions were not particularly surprising: development should be contextual; major current buildings should be preserve...

At the same time last night that the legacy of noted urban thinker Jane Jacobs was being celebrated at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan, a prelude to an exhibit opening today, the much more modest Soapbox Gallery in Prospect Heights hosted a community forum introducing the UNITY (Understanding, Imagining and Transforming the Yards) plan, a much more Jacobsian way to develop the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Vanderbilt Yard. (Photos by Jonathan Barkey) The idea is that if Atlantic Yards does not get built as planned, or is scotched altogether, an alternative plan, with significant bulk but not “extreme density,” limited to the railyards and an adjacent plot, could emerge. According to a draft report issued by its organizers, planners and architects engaged under the banner of AY critics and opponents, UNITY would offer “a larger proportion of truly affordable housing, sustainable jobs and start-up businesses for local residents, improved transit, pedestrian and bi...