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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.


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  1. My advise to Dan Goldstein and others who are perenially disappointed is that if they wish to live in a quiet, never-changing environment where things always remain as they have always been, they should move to rural Maine or to the western tier of New York State.
    New York City will always disappoint because everything is always changing here. It has been that way for three hundred fifty years and it shows no sign of let up. If you don’t like boats, do not live in Venice. If you do not like change and large modern buildings, do not live in New York City.

  2. I’m a little late to the party, here, but I just want to point out that the arena needs eminent domain to happen. Dan Goldstein’s apartment sits right about where center court would be. So there’s no such thing as having the arena sans eminent domain, unfortunately. Not that I want the arena to happen anyway.

  3. The real problem with AY was not that ratner wanted to build, but the size and the scale. I’m sorry but anyone with half a brain would have foreseen that a project of this size was way way too much, and if someone like myself could see big financial problems for this 2 years ago, how come the big muckety mucks in the government and finance didn’t?

    12:15- I’m sure you’re right about buildings that share incomes but Ratner promised affordable housing which also covered true lower income levels, and would have been subsidized housing. Acorn and the Rev. Daugherty were not fighting for people making 113,000 a year (and frankly if someone needs housing subsidies on that kind of money, they need a reality check) but for people making far less. That block of affordable housing he set aside was a real disappointment to the community activists who put themselves on the line for AY. I don’t feel too sorry for them- they blew their credibility. And the reality is AY was to have been a community- architecturally speaking, intentionally or not, it was designed to close itself off from the surrounding community, and that is a very different dichotomy from luxury buildings in Manhattan which are mostly single buildings or a group ranged along a block. Of course there are exceptions- tudor City is a fabulous place but I don’t know if it is mixed income or not.But AY would have been a ring of huge buildings, with interior spaces. I don’t see CEOs walking home at night through them on a hot summer night when everyone is outside, playing ball and boomboxes. Ratner promised public park space- luxury tenants demand security. Unless he was making AY a gated community, how was that going to work? Have its own, publically subsidized police force? Sorry- i just don’t see how it could work.

  4. John Ife, you can go fuck yourself. You’re the one who jumped all over some poster some months ago who alerted readers to structural problems with an open house pick. What a fool. We need more people like that poster on this blog and fewer like you. You’re an asswipe.

  5. The bond and stock markets are closed; schools are closed; opposite side of the street parking is suspended etc… Not many folks in front of their computers – that may be why it’s so slow.

    Monday is going to be a freak show on here – bloggers will be back needing a fix badly….

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