Between looking after the kids and trying to work on the house, we never have a second on the weekends to read the paper. Which is why we missed this editorial by John Manbeck, a historian who wrote a couple of pieces for the Brooklyn Standard early on but who professes complete neutrality and is critical of both sides of the Atlantic Yards debate:

Just as we’ll always have developers, community activists and environmentalists will invariably seek to check their greed and broaden their foresight. The tension between these two groups can be a creative one – except when it leads developers to exaggerate their ambitions and activists to simply obstruct them.

That’s where we are with Forest City Ratner Companies’ plan to build a sports arena surrounded by 17 imposing high-rise buildings on the Atlantic Avenue railyards. The plan is overkill, for which public officials are partly to blame. But the community’s response to it – a mix of not-in-my-backyard rejection and idealized nostalgia – is overkill as well.

We suspect that even the project’s most ardent supporters wouldn’t be disappointed to see things scaled back a bit.
The Project That Ate Brooklyn [NY Times]