Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Well, the management of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center, both owned by Joe Tsai, seem to be planning for a potential ten-week hiatus related to the coronavirus. An announcement yesterday (in full below) states: With the aim of helping Barclays Center staff get through this difficult time, we commit to provide relief to hourly employees for the paychecks they would have earned if Brooklyn Nets regular season games and non-Nets events were to continue as originally scheduled. The plan will cover the period from now until the end of May unless the events are rescheduled before that. We will work closely and expeditiously with our partners, including service contractors, event promoters and unions to implement this plan. That will be a hit to the bottom line for both, but Tsai is a multi-billionaire. Several other team/arena owners/operators are making similar pledges, according to CBS , though this is one of the more comprehensive. (Workers, according to the Daily News , learned...

The Brooklyn Nets web site leads off with A LETTER TO OUR VALUED FANS , dated 3/13/20, from Oliver Weisberg, CEO, Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center, indicating plans for refunds or credits for fans: As you know, the NBA recently announced that the 2019-20 season will be suspended for at least the next 30 days. This decision impacts all Brooklyn Nets and Long Island Nets games for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, per New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s directive prohibiting gatherings of 500 people or more, Barclays Center will be closed and the events to be held at Barclays Center will be postponed. We will honor tickets already purchased for any rescheduled games. If games are not played or played in an empty arena, fans will have the option to receive a credit for a future game or a refund. We will be in touch as soon as we have additional information on the status of future games. We want you to know that your health and safety is our first priority. As such, we are clos...

It's a new day, and the city and state and sports leagues, if not the federal government, are taking the coronavirus very seriously, as are museums and other large buildings. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced  that, as of today at 5 pm, gatherings with 500 people or more will be banned in New York State. Additionally, for facilities with an occupancy of 500 or fewer, legal capacity is being reduced by 50%. It's unclear how long that will last--here's the press release . But Mayor Bill de Blasio, who declared a state of emergency, had some estimates. “This is for over 500 people, and so they’re never going to have events at those places under 500 people," he said , citing venues like Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center. "It’s not a binding commitment, but we’re saying, our estimate is, this will go through September. That’s six months. I think that’s the right way to think about it right now.” No one's said so, but I could imagine large venues being r...

"Gotta Go to Mo's"? Not no mo'. Modell's Sporting Goods , one of the two stores at Site 5 in the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park footprint, is heading for closure after the chain filed for bankruptcy. A liquidation sale starts today, according to the  New York Times , and could take up to 7 weeks. Modell's (140 Flatbush Avenue, across from the Barclays Center) was a tenant of original developer Forest City Ratner, and thus could not object to plans to build on that site: as approved in 2006, a 250-foot building with nearly 440,000 square feet or, as floated since 2016, a giant two-tower project that would incorporate bulk from the unbuilt B1 tower planned for what is now the arena plaza. The roadblock for now is P.C. Richard, which owns its store and was awarded, in a lower court decision, promised replacement space in the future tower. (That's under appeal.) Separately, it's facing eminent domain, which hasn't yet moved forward. Via G...

It's a little surreal--or, rather, something we will be getting used to. As coronavirus concerns ramped up, NBA teams and cities made a decision that went halfway: Due to escalating concerns about the spread of the coronavirus, and in consultation with the City and County of San Francisco, tomorrow night’s game vs. the Nets at Chase Center will be played without fans. Fans with tickets to this game will receive a refund in the amount paid. pic.twitter.com/DMpO71ocvg — Golden State Warriors (@warriors) March 11, 2020 But that plan was upended when Rudy Gobert of the Utah Jazz tested positive for the virus and his game was postponed, just before tipoff, and the entire NBA season was put on pause: The NBA "will use hiatus to determine next steps moving forward," league says. https://t.co/tWoRO8pbfT — Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) March 12, 2020 There's nothing on the Brooklyn Nets' web site as of now--the home page is hawking tickets for next year, with an image o...

Just before Atlantic Yards was even announced, anthropology graduate student--and now professor-- David Vine --was raising some very important issues in The Brooklyn Rail, with his Winter 2003 article titled  Billions for Brooklyn—No Questions Asked . His wise bottom line was that affordable housing should've been required. The emerging projects he described did not include Atlantic Yards, which had been floated but not officially announced. But clearly much was brewing, as he wrote: On the Brooklyn waterfront, a $150 million Brooklyn Bridge Park is under construction, with plans for recreational, commercial, and cultural installations. At MetroTech Center, the last office tower in the more than one billion-dollar development is going up. Just down the street in Fort Greene, the 15-story Atlantic Terminal retail and office tower complex soon will be home to everyone from Target and the Gap to the Bank of New York and Starbucks. And across downtown, while the Brooklyn Law School...

It's a ten-year anniversary, more or less, of three events, one of which gained far more attention than the others. Ten years ago tomorrow, on 3/11/10, those building the Barclays Center held a triumphant groundbreaking--here's my coverage of what I dubbed "Team Hype." A day before the groundbreaking, on 3/10/10, state Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman dismissed challenges to the project's 2009 re-approval by Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC, now ESD), which estimated a ten-year buildout despite evidence, notably in the renegotiation of the deal to buy development rights the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard over 21 years, that it would take much longer. Friedman was scathing: the ESDC's ten-year time frame was supported "only minimally," she wrote, but "the court cannot ignore the [ESDC's] deplorable lack of transparency." Staff memoranda, she noted, didn't detail the MTA deal. Though one could "disagree strongly ...

This is the fourth of four articles on the 3/3/20 Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Quality of Life  meeting , held by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority overseeing/shepherding the project. The  first  concerned timing for the platform and other project elements. The second concerned the faulty elevator at the Barclays Center. The third concerned construction progress. Neighbors again expressed frustration with traffic backups caused by the fraction of events at the Barclays Center that generate significant use of personal vehicles or car services/limos--and again got nowhere. Jurassic Park, which attracted families with kids, "was not as nightmarish as we thought" it would be, given previous Disney on Ice snags, "but Celine Dion was crazy in terms of traffic," said Cathy Iselin of the North Prospect Heights Association. Such concerts attract older crowds and drivers. That concert prompted traffic backups on Bergen Street to Vanderbilt Avenue, as ...

Well, the Brooklyn Nets' era of "Markinson"--General Manager Sean Marks and Head Coach Kenny Atkinson--is over, after a surprising, even shocking, announcement yesterday that the coach and team had mutually "parted ways," widely seen as a firing. The back page: AXEDKINSON https://t.co/OHKdQWldNu pic.twitter.com/0Ib6dbH7g2 — New York Post Sports (@nypostsports) March 8, 2020 It was the Markinson team that created the culture that led the Nets to overachieve, turning unheralded plays into stars or solid role players, positioning the team to recruit the superstars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant last summer. He got a contract extension last year . With Durant out on injury rehab this year, and Irving playing (and dazzling in) only a fraction of games, the Nets in many ways overachieved this year, albeit with some puzzling performances. Hence some sardonic takes  about the Nets' purported exceptionalism. NetsDaily quoted Marks: “Kenny is brutally h...

This is the third of four articles on the 3/3/20 Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Quality of Life  meeting , held by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority overseeing/shepherding the project. The  first  concerned timing for the platform and other project elements. The second concerned the faulty elevator at the Barclays Center.  The  fourth  concerned Barclays Center-related traffic issues. Block 1121, highlight added The revamped Vanderbilt Yard, used to store and service Long Island Rail Road trains, is fully operational in Block 1121, between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues, said Scott Solish of Greenland USA. He said some minor punchlist and repair work is ongoing, so it's not considered final completion according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, "but we are substantially complete." The presentation embedded below, and the screenshot excerpted at right, show part of that block. I've added a blue square to highlight what m...

This is the second of four articles on the 3/3/20 Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Quality of Life meeting , held by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority overseeing/shepherding the project. The first concerned timing for the platform and other project elements.  The  third  concerned construction progress. The  fourth  concerned Barclays Center-related traffic issues. For several years, advocacy groups have pointed to the often out-of-service elevator at the Barclays Center plaza--which leads to Brooklyn's busiest subway complex--as a sign that privately-managed elevator offer subpar service. Elevator mezzanine level 3/5/20 At the meeting three nights ago, a representative of the arena said they had recently switched vendors. "So it's something that we are actively trying to fix," said Mandy Gutmann, Senior VP, Communications. "It requires a bit of an overhaul. And we are working to get full approval. To do that, we have to work for the city...

This is the first of four articles on the 3/3/20 Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Quality of Life  meeting , held by Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority overseeing/shepherding the project. The  second  concerned the faulty elevator at the Barclays Center. The  third  concerned construction progress. The fourth concerned Barclays Center-related traffic issues. The meeting was brief (some 40 minutes, of two hours allocated), lightly attended (no news expected, right?), and pretty much uneventful. But we did get some updates, including a belated confirmation that yes, the next "quarterly" Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AY CDC) meeting would be held March 18. Announcement coming re platform As at the previous Quality of Life meeting , Lee Warshavsky, a Prospect Heights resident and appointee on the AY CDC, asked about progress on building the first phase of the platform over the Vanderbilt Yard, between Sixth and Ca...

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had the scoop about a huge project at Sunnyside Yards,  New Queens Project to Include 12,000 Affordable Apartments . Or, as the website proclaims , accenting the most politically enticing feature, "A once-in-a-century opportunity to bring 12,000 affordable homes and a regional rail hub to Western Queens through the creation of new public land." It's far more than that, with 140 acres, including 115 acres of new land created by decking, including a planned: new regional rail station 60 acres of new public open space—over 40 percent of the Plan 30,000+ construction-industry jobs 12,000 affordable homes 7,000 permanent new jobs 10-12 new schools 2-3 new libraries 30+ new child/healthcare centers 1 new subway station on future new subway line 1 new bus rapid transit (BRT) line There are huge questions about funding, feasibility, and more--see this exchange --and I hope to look deeper. Given the need for new "land," i...

So, Vanderbilt Avenue is having its restaurant/nightlife moment. Again. Upscaled. Let's recap. Remember Time Out, 2/13/08, 'Bilt to last , by Joshua M. Bernstein: A decade ago, Prospect Heights’ Vanderbilt Avenue was little more than an automotive speedway lined with liquor stores and barbershops. “There was nowhere to go after dark,” says Anatoly Dubinsky, owner of the pioneering Soda Bar. But since Dubinsky’s saloon opened in 2002, this street—only eight blocks long, from Atlantic Avenue to Grand Army Plaza—has blossomed into a bona fide destination.  Well, not quite from Atlantic. As Eric McClure wrote on NoLandGrab: "Bona fide destination?" But what about the blight? According to the Atlantic Yards Environmental Impact Statement, one-eighth of this sizzling stretch — the blocks on the west side of Vanderbilt between Atlantic Avenue and Dean Street — suffers from irreparable blight, and as such, is slated to be razed to make way for Bruce Ratner's megap...

Update 3/3/20: yes, it's confirmed. More than eight months since the last meeting, and more than three month since the last meeting was scheduled but postponed, the board of the advisory  Atlantic Yards Community Development Corporation (AY CDC)--which is supposed to meet quarterly--should meet on Wednesday, March 18 at 3 pm. But that's not confirmed. The initial notice came not from the AY CDC or the parent Empire State Development (ESD) but rather from the newsletter of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC), one of whose board members, Gib Veconi, also sits on the AY CDC board. I got the newsletter on Friday, Feb. 21 (and another a week later). On Tuesday, Feb. 25, I queried ESD asking if the meeting would be on March 18. I was told no announcement was ready. Perhaps we'll get an official announcement soon. The delay, and the issues The lack of meetings makes it tough for the board to fulfill even its limited power of oversigh...

It began with a scoop by (and/or leak to) a friendly journalist, Newsday editorial writer Randi Marshall, who two days ago posted  Sources: Cuomo expected to announce Isles playing next season at Coliseum . And the announcement from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, always ready to play munificent leader, came yesterday. After an awkward plan to split home games and playoffs between the Nassau Coliseum and Barclays Center during the expected three seasons of Belmont park arena construction--which turned into 28 home games in Nassau and 13 in Brooklyn in this, the second year--the Isles will play all playoffs this year and next, and all home games in Nassau. That's a relief for players, who live (and practice) on Long Island, and avoid an awkward commute that began with the 2015-16 season and a purported "ironclad" 25-year move to Brooklyn.  And it's good for the heart of the team's historic fan base on Long Island (who enjoy tailgating in the parking lot), though frustrati...