Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Markowitz (l.) at a re-opening of Fairway; photo K. Kirk "You could raise all the issues you want—the people in Brooklyn know me," Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz famously said in October 2011 in response to a belated New York Times investigation of his use of charities to support popular initiatives and burnish his brand. "You don’t understand that. They know me.” “I think he’s wonderful,” a Brooklynite says in a profile of Markowitz in the new webmagazine BKLYNR. "He's totally for Brooklyn." Except they don't really know him. Nor do they know exactly what "for Brooklyn" means. And those are troubling thoughts on the day of Markowitz's final State of the Borough address , held at his beloved Barclays Center. Markowitz honors Youth Poet Laureate; photo K. Kirk They know Markowitz is energetic and entertaining, a Brooklyn enthusiast and arena booster, a perpetual presence at block parties and official dinners. The...

Regular readers of this blog know that I've been tough on the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park coverage by the "notorious Stephen Witt."  He now runs the admittedly pay-for-coverage-sometimes Kings County Politics, which I've  criticized   multiple   times  (without rebuttal) for posting Maimonides Medical Center news releases as news stories, without links to the original press release. Last year I tweeted about KCP judicial profiles that were not labeled "sponsored content," though in a separate email the candidates were listed as advertisers, though the disclosure did not follow FTC guidance. Now, a day before the primary election, check out the softball profiles on candidates Gina Levy ,  Ingrid Joseph , Steven Mostofsky , and Loren Baily . As of the pre-primary spending deadlines, I have not seen spending from the following relevant campaign committees: GINA FOR CIVIL COURT JUDGE, FRIENDS OF INGRID JOSEPH, and COMMITTEE TO RE-ELECT LOREN BAILY. ...

The March/April issue of City Limits, Defining Brooklyn , is out, with a few pieces on the web, and offering a challenge : What does it mean to be "Brooklyn?" No borough in the city—perhaps no other urban place in America—has the kind of name recognition that Brooklyn enjoys. From Neil Simon plays to Jay-Z songs, Brooklyn has long had a prominent cultural profile. And in the past 10 years, Brooklyn has embodied New York's boom, from the boutiques that dot once-gritty Red Hook to the luxury high-rises of Fort Greene. But does Brooklyn's cultural mystique—or the view from Red Hook or Fort Greene—reflect reality throughout the borough? The answer, you might expect, is no, as indicated by the few articles posted. (While the cover references the coming Nets arena, the articles posted so far barely mention Atlantic Yards.) The limits of the image The first chapter, Lunch At Junior's: Reputation & Reality In Today’s Brooklyn , offers this passage: So the image of the...

Well, Forest City Ratner yesterday announced plans for Building 2, a 32-story, 350-unit tower with half subsidized apartments--the world's tallest modular tower--and the press piled on. They just didn't answer all the questions. Why were the renderings released yesterday? No report explained that. There's no financing for the first building. The modular plan isn't final. I'd bet that the release was strategized to deflect any lingering attention from the lawsuit filed two days earlier by construction workers charging they didn't get promised jobs and union cards after going through a selective training program mandated by the Atlantic Yards Community Benefit Agreement. And to put pressure on construction unions. Remember, Ratner stopped building the Beekman Tower (aka 8 Spruce Street) midway to renegotiate with the unions. What kind of pressure? Well, Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building Building and Construction Trades Council, said, in a s...

I have an essay in the online section of the urban-policy magazine City Journal , The Barclays Center’s Media Enabler: From the start, the New York Times was reluctant to challenge Brooklyn’s new arena . An excerpt: [The sanitized story] again signaled the paper’s inability to get tough on Forest City Ratner, the  Times ’s  partner  in the New York Times Building in midtown, which  opened  in November 2007. Atlantic Yards has involved nearly $300 million in direct subsidies from the state and city, substantial tax breaks, and an inside track (and discount) on public property for the developer, along with the state’s use of eminent domain to deliver purportedly blighted land for Ratner to warehouse. All of this presented ample opportunity for scrutiny. ...Ratner has enjoyed heavy-duty support from New York’s political class since announcing the project nearly a decade ago. That left the press as the only potential counterweight. The  New York Daily...

When I saw the headline on an WNYC article today, Atlantic Yards Construction Tests Patience of Residents , I thought that maybe they'd drawn from the ongoing Atlantic Yards Watch articles and incident reports on the impact of construction, such as the recent Trucks at Atlantic Yards continue to violate site protocols, obstructing a public street . Nah. The article is a remarkably uninformed, "View from Nowhere" hodgepodge. It's annotated below. The opening Construction continues on the developer Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. Disruption is worse at night, especially for Prospect Heights residents. That’s when work crews spill onto Flatbush Avenue and snarl traffic. The work is testing some residents' patience. Christine McCoy lives nearby and shops at was the Pathmark supermarket located across the street from Atlantic Yards, which will include Barclays Arena, the new home for the Nets NBA basketball team. “The traffic...

A "crowd" along Dean Street on the path to the arena. Yes, the sidewalks around the Atlantic Yards project site are quite narrow, and that could be a problem. Atlantic Yards Watch has compiled some thorough research, illustrated with a video and photos (by David Power) on how  Overestimated sidewalk widths may spell trouble for arena patrons and residents alike . (I wrote about the Dean Street Squeeze in June 2010, pointing out how it was clear the sidewalks were too tight for crowds, but AY Watch has done much more analysis.) In the Daily News The Daily News got the exclusive,  boiling down the findings in  Sidewalks around Atlantic Yards project too narrow for Barclays Center crowds, report finds: Advocates measure sidewalks and find they're not as wide as state claims : They say the narrow sidewalks in a residential neighborhood will make the crowding problem worse than around an arena like Madison Square Garden. The report found that half of the si...

The gap between journalists and bloggers is increasingly porous, and Scott Rosenberg's new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters , offers a useful chapter on the question of Journalists vs. Bloggers , excerpted below. The New York Times's City Room blog only includes news from the three dailies, plus other "professional" publications, so its "Morning Buzz" round-up of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's June 24 vote excluded my more comprehensive report (like, um, which had video ). (My report did make Blogtalk , along with several pieces on biking.) The gatekeepers of Google News, which deems "news" anything produced by an official, multi-employee news organization, no matter how secondhand (right) or boilerplate (below). So my blog has been rejected from appearing in Google News. I understand the challenge. A blogsearch on "Atlantic Yards" invariably turns up blogs that sim...