Endangered AY
This morning the Times has a couple articles about Atlantic Yards that more or less boil down to the following: Aspects of the mega-project aside from the Nets arena are likely to be delayed or go unrealized; Forest City Ratner has not been able to lure an anchor tenant to Miss Brooklyn, his planned office…
This morning the Times has a couple articles about Atlantic Yards that more or less boil down to the following: Aspects of the mega-project aside from the Nets arena are likely to be delayed or go unrealized; Forest City Ratner has not been able to lure an anchor tenant to Miss Brooklyn, his planned office tower; and Frank Gehry’s overarching vision for AY will be severely compromised if all that’s built is the arena. In one article, Charles Bagli includes snippets of an interview with Bruce Ratner in which the developer concedes that construction of Miss Brooklyn will not begin until a tenant has been secured for the office tower; Bagli also notes that the three residential towers surrounding the arena, which are slated to have 1,000 units of housing—including many affordable units—may not happen anytime soon, since developers are finding financing harder to come by. Ratner still sounds cautiously optimistic about the first phase of AY, though. It’s not going to happen in a nanosecond, he tells the Times. I hope it’s not going to be drawn out. I’d hope that the first residential building will be done within six months of the opening of the arena, and a second one a year after that. In the second article, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff says the possibility that all we’ll be left with is a Nets arena “feels like a betrayal of the public trust.” Ouroussoff calls on Frank Gehry to walk away from the entire development: “by pulling out he would be expressing a simple truth: At this point the Atlantic Yards development has nothing to do with the project that New Yorkers were promised. Nor does it rise to the standards Mr. Gehry has set for himself during a remarkable career.”
Slow Economy Likely to Stall Atlantic Yards [NY Times]
What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn? [NY Times]
Ratner Admits Major AY Delays, Rising Arena Cost [AY Report]
Miss Brooklyn & Housing to Die as Arena Lives? [GL]
Bullet Points of Bagli Article [No Land Grab]
Photo by threecee.
Like the Bushies someone’s running this town to the mud.
Let’s see
1 Billion to Ratner for a basketball court.
800 million to Stienbrener for a baseball Field
300 million to the mats for another baseball Field
200 million to the Dolans for a Hockey rink.
30 billion to Chase Bank for nothing
And we are in a fuckin’ depression
Very astute comments, 12:56. I disagree that DDDB has succeeded, as the project is not yet dead, only delayed. But your prediction that they might have helped Ratner is very feasible. I suspect that this might buy him extra time to get this thing done right.
The main drawback is that we’ll have to endure more long-winded Norman Oder posts, silly marches, doomed lawsuits, and baseless declarations of imminent victory from the rich, stay-at-home NIMBYs.
This might of been a good thing had it happened two or three years ago. Now if the stadium is all that happens, then the area will probably be crap for awhile, and the rest of this project, or proposals for others will probably drag on for many years.
I know alot of people didn’t want this, but a half done project during a downturn is usually bad news. Really Bad News. A previous poster mentioned some nice stadium projects, but many of were built to revitalize crappy areas right? So, in that type of situation, the local government usually puts an inordinate amount of resources into building up and protecting the area. NYC is in a recession, alot of Wall Street has been / is getting / is about to get laid off, the city is cutting police presence back to early 90’s levels, I could go on.
Maybe its not good for a large central area of the borough to sit half constructed while developers figure out what/if they want to or can do anything with it for 5 or 10 years or more.
exactly 1:23 let me use my tax dollers for what I see fit. A park on stilts directly over the railyard with a batman pole smack in the middle.
the arena idea is stinks
There are a lot of Soviet-era planners on this blog. “build a pool, a park”. Who exactly will build it? The Kremlin? This ia
a private-sector economy. The parks department doesn’t have the money to even maintain historic parks such as Central Park and Prospect Park so private philanthropies have stepped in to do it for them. The State of NY is broke. Unless the sheik of Bahrain decides to move to Clinton Hill and build a large pleasure palace above the LIRR tracks, the development there will need to make money.
The new highirse will be called Miss Crooklyn.
AY is Dead! I propose a public swimming pool, an open green market, and a park for much less than $$$millions.
“I wouldn’t blame the anti-AY people for this – it is the market.”
Acutally, the strategy for all these lawsuits is to drag things out until the market changes. That was the goal from the start, and if in the end they lose the lawsuits and yet defeat the development, it will not be by accident. Blame or credit is a matter of perspective. But DDDB set out to kill the project by stalling, and succeeded.
In this case, however, they might have saved Ratner’s rear. Imagine if he had started construction a year ago and finished in a collapsing market. He’d have lost a mint.
As it is, he’ll be back to the city and state for more subsidies for the arena in exchange for giving up ownership or part of it, and the arena will be a public auditorium for which the use of eminent domain is not controversial.
The area right around the arena will be redeveloped in the next upturn.
And the rest of the site will remain available for other uses.
Not a bad outcome from Brooklyn’s point of view, unless you were a possible occupant of the affordable housing. IMHO that should have been the plan all along.
As for Newark, the Nets would be playing there now if affluent suburban Bergen County hadn’t killed the Newark arena the first time around, prompting the former owner to sell to Ratner. The state later turned around and built the Newark Arena, promising Bergen Xanadu, but it was too late. Or perhaps not. We’ll see.