Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Bill Perkins, a force in Harlem politics, is dead at 74; ‘Harlem has lost a giant,’ says Mayor Adams , the New York Daily News reported yesterday: Bill Perkins, a hard-charging, reform-minded city and state lawmaker who championed equality in health care and criminal justice as an energetic force in Harlem politics across three decades, died Monday night in his home. He was 74. ...As he rose in politics, Perkins emerged as an outspoken progressive — a supporter of the Central Park 5, an early voice against the Iraq War and a backer of LGBTQ rights. He had an acute focus on health care, and was a leading voice in the passage of lead-paint inspection laws. None of the articles--including more extensive coverage in Harlem's Amsterdam News--addressed a memorable set of 2010 hearings state Sen. Parkins,  distrustful of Columbia University's expansion into Harlem, held on eminent domain. The Amsterdam News did quote what might have been a previous Perkins bio note: "As Chairma...

I call it "Atlantic Yards down the memory hole" when journalists/authors, public officials, or government entities misreport or forget details of (or promises regarding) a project that has faced many gyrations since its announcement in 2003. We shouldn't hold regular people to the same standard, but it's still a learning moment. That third picture is behind my old apartment complex, the Newswalk, which was formerly the printing plant for the NY Daily News. I think it was the only condo/apartment building inside the Atlantic Yards footprint that was spared. — Adam Zimmerman (@Adam_Zimmerman) May 16, 2022 (He later clarified that it was the fourth photo.) So why is this important? As I responded , most of that block, Block 1128, was omitted from the project footprint, rather than included and later spared. But it's not wrong to presume that the Atlantic Yards footprint would have been a rational shape, rather than one with an odd gap in the center: most of the...

I'm on a panel tomorrow discussing blight (previous coverage here and here ), and I just wanted to point to a couple of more absurdities that surfaced in the 2006 Atlantic Yards blight designation. Cracks in sidewalk The cracks in the Sixth Avenue sidewalk below were listed as indicia of blight, but, as an New Yorker knows, they were hardly exceptional. After all, as Michael D.D. White pointed out in his Noticing New York blog, the sidewalk outside Sen. Chuck Schumer's Prospect Park West home looked worse. More recently, in 2017, the city Department of Transportation issued a citation for sidewalk repair outside the B15 site, including the damaged and far more hazardous sidewalk below. But guess what: it didn't trigger eminent domain, but rather required fixing, aka abatement. Weeds at the railyard Weeds were described as part of "unsanitary and unsafe conditions." But who was responsible for that? The state punted , saying in response to comments o...

When I wrote recently  about blight, the removal of which was a purported rationale for Atlantic Yards and which is the subject of a March 6 panel sponsored by the Municipal Art Society, I neglected to point to the glaring failure to remove the "blight" of the Vanderbilt Yard, used to store and service Long Island Rail Road trains. For a project announced in December 2003, approved in 2006, and re-approved in 2009, well, it may not be done until 2035. Flashback: those reading a 4/16/12 New York Times article, Impact of Atlantic Yards, for Good or Ill, Is Already Felt , focusing on new retail, might have been led to think the issue was resolved: For Forest City Ratner, the developer of the project, which was strongly backed by many city leaders, the changes are evidence that the arena has already met its goal of transforming a dreary section of Brooklyn — the Long Island Rail Road’s rail yards and surrounding industrial buildings, which the company’s spokesman describ...

An 8/23/17 post from Shelterforce , "the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of community development, affordable housing, and neighborhood stabilization," points to the page at right and below, suggesting "Yes" as the answer to the question, "Is It Time to Bury Racially Loaded Planning and Development Terms?" A few terms are particularly relevant, even ironically so, to the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park saga. What about Blight? Shelterforce writes: “A facially neutral term infused with racial and ethnic prejudice. While it purportedly assessed the state of urban infrastructure, ‘blight’ was often used to describe the negative impact of certain residents on city neighborhoods,” according to Wendell Pritchett in “The Public Menace of Blight.” See also CityLab’s “The Meaning of Blight,” found at bit.ly/2trgqWJ. Instead say what you actually mean—high levels of vacancy, crime, substandard housing (and make sure you aren’t m...

Update from Empire State Development: "ESD is aware of the notice and it is under review." Pacific Street sidewalk hazard, east of Sixth Avenue On one level, it's a routine act of enforcement, as the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) has issued a notice of violation to a property owner regarding damaged sidewalks. The location: around the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park B15 site, at Sixth Avenue and the adjacent pieces of Dean and Pacific streets. On another level, the action raises a supreme irony: the sidewalk conditions are actually worse than the "blighted" conditions--at least on this block--used to justify eminent domain for Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park. And, as shown in the photo above right, the conditions are worse than that documented in the 2006  Blight Study  for Block 1128, Lot 4 . (Note that no government agency is designating blight today; that's my layperson's observation, comparing conditions today with those found...

Catching up on some 2011-12 eminent domain reading... The Fordham Urban Law Journal hosted a debate between NYU Professor Roderick Hills and Ilya Somin on the eminent domain decisions by the New York Court of Appeals in the cases of Atlantic Yards (aka Goldstein ) and Columbia University (aka Kaur ). Somin's 2011 article   “Let there Be Blight” , which I covered here and here , argued that these takings violated both the New York state and federal constitutions, especially, he said , because of the contrast between the court’s broad definition of  blight and the state constitutional provision limiting blight condemnations to “substandard and unsanitary areas.” Hills responded with  a critique  and Somin posted a  reply . Somin's argument I quoted Somin's argument: the New York Court of Appeals erred badly, by allowing highly abusive blight condemnations and defining pretextual takings so narrowly as to essentially read the concept out of existenc...

There's something a little ironic about the tweet at right from Pacific Park Brooklyn, touting the new condo building 550 Vanderbilt. The photo captures not just the brownish brick and large windows of the lower floors of the tower, but also the brown street sign Vanderbilt Av. A brown street sign indicates a historic district, and the small horizontal band delineates the Prospect Heights Historic Distric t, which was designated in 2009 after several years of activism. As  the map  below shows, Vanderbilt Avenue and Pacific Street, just across from 550 Vanderbilt, is the extreme upper right "finger" of the historic district, thus bookending the southeast block of the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project. And that reminds us that the historic district designation came a few short years after the Atlantic Yards site, including many properties on that southeast block, was found to be blighted, to enable eminent domain. It's not typical for blight--"substan...

Just take a look at the screenshot below from the 461 Dean web site : a "brand-new 8-acre park." Except it doesn't exist. As of early November, the best-case scenario for that "park"--actually, publicly accessible, privately managed open space--was 2025. Since then, after  unspecified project delays  were announced, who knows? And the below-grade railyard, the purported major contributor to blight, remains uncovered ever longer.

Screenshot from Oct. 2006 NY Voices/WNET interview  of Gargano by Rafael Pi Roman It was ten years ago today: in just 15 minutes, the unelected board of the Empire State Development (ESDC, now known simply as Empire State Development)  approved the Atlantic Yards project at a meeting at its 37th-floor headquarters in Manhattan. It was a strange time, and seems stranger still with ten years of perspective. Atlantic Yards had been announced three years earlier, as Brooklyn was beginning to boom and developer Forest City Ratner was scouting around for new development deals. All seemed sunny. But the ESDC was hardly an independent fact-finder, its board members with scant knowledge of the project. Chairman Charles Gargano, a political appointee, was either deluded or deflecting in his statements about eminent domain. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we also know that the ESDC did too little due diligence regarding the project. No, Atlantic Yards would not take ten...

Via YIMBY: current view in Greenpoint, house at left A 7/5/16 post by New York YIMBY, Landmarks Approves Restoration Of 218 Guernsey Street, Greenpoint , discusses the 1870-era home in Greenpoint's historic district. It includes some great architecture and some buildings that have been modified but are worth saving, because they convey the neighborhood's fabric (and thus were included in the district when it was designated in 1982). The building at issue is the modest, two-story building at left in the photo at right. About blight Note the rather unbecoming wall covering and modest size of the building, which is apparently 28 feet high . It may be built out to less than 60% of the allowable height--remember, the arbitrary blight designation with Atlantic Yards--given that  R6B zoning , at least for new buildings, requires a base height before set back between 30 and 40 feet, and the maximum height is 50 feet. The Floor Area Ratio, or FAR, allows a lot coverage of...

100 feet of blight  on Dean (2 of 5 parcels said to be blighted) In the memorable words of academic Lynne Sagalyn,  blight  is "when the fabric of a neighborhood is shot to hell." And that applies not so much to gentrifying blocks in Prospect Heights--remember the "cappuccino test"  at Vanderbilt Avenue and Dean Street? or the strip of houses magically claimed to be blighted on Dean east of Sixth?--but the South Bronx in the 1970s. Consider the following photos I shot after visiting the fascinating Museum of the City of New York exhibit, IN THE SOUTH BRONX OF AMERICA: PHOTOGRAPHS BY MEL ROSENTHAL , which continues through 10/16/16. CAPTION: Deserted, desolated buildings: "War Zone." The description: Scenes from the South Bronx, 1976-82. The 1970s marked the start of a tumultuous period of decline in the South Bronx, brought on by a loss of manufacturing jobs, reductions in municipal services, plummeting property values, a mass exodus of it...