Lethem Comes Out Swinging at Gehry
Author and lifelong Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem has drafted a personal letter to Frank Gehry that appeared in Slate yesterday. Here’s an excerpt: [Your design is] a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I’d think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is…
Author and lifelong Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem has drafted a personal letter to Frank Gehry that appeared in Slate yesterday. Here’s an excerpt:
[Your design is] a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I’d think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but aesthetically—and socially—disastrous new development to Brooklyn. Your presence is intended to appease cultural tastemakers who might otherwise, correctly, recognize this atrocious plan for what it is, just as the notion of a basketball arena itself is a Trojan horse for the real plan: building a skyline suitable to some Sunbelt boomtown. I’ve been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have drifted into such an unfortunate alliance, with such potentially disastrous results.
The other zinger: “Your prestigious presence in this mercenary partnership reminds me of Colin Powell giving cover to the Cheney-Rumsfeld doctrine: If he’s on board, we’re meant to think, it can’t be as bad as it looks.” Ouch. Read on.
Brooklyn’s Trojan Horse [Slate]
What awful grammar. I guess I shouldn’t try posting after 9 p.m.
Attacks on the project’s critics doesn’t make this mess look one bit better.
Silly NIMBYs. If this project were in Brownsville, you all wouldn’t care about context and eminent domain. That’s why you all so casually say that it should be moved to Coney Island or the Navy Yard. Hopefully, once this is built, you whiners will all slither off to make way for the new Brooklyn.
Is it worth it if 5 jobs are created for $1 billion in subsidies?
more than the ZERO jobs that have been created by letting it sit there unused. construction jobs, service jobs, maintenance jobs, retail jobs, many of them long-term with opportunities for advancement. development means jobs, and yes, congestion. maybe we should create even more jobs trying to solve the traffic problem. seems like such a waste to leave it bare, and i don’t see that it’s helping anybody. i think you would see so much opposition no matter what the plan, because it’s the kind of cause that is easy and unchallenging to embrace, exactly the type of thing people who want to consider themselves activists look for. it’s so easy to say that developers are evil if they want to get rich, and that big buildings are ugly, and that anything that involves construction harms the environment. never mind the fact that the current situation, and a lack of development, just perpetuate the inequities and disparities that make life in this city such a struggle for most of the people who live here. sort of reminds me of animal rights activists– everybody likes kittens. easy cause, and then you can fancy youself a hard-core radical by getting all up in arms about it. brooklyn isn’t just a greener place for refugee manhattanites who want to own cars and pay less rent; it’s a city unto itself, full of people with very acute economic needs who, with all due respect, overwhelmingly support this project (and don’t inhabit liberal real-estate related blogs).
Exactly how many jobs are being created for all the public subsidies? Death is unavoidable, but traffic problems are not. Also, if this project was only about filling “that hole in the center of brooklyn” (Freud, anyone?) I don’t think you’d see so much opposition.
i think lethem has come a long way since his childhood on dean street, surrounded by kids growing up without any economic opportunities. is ratner’s project flawed? sure. are his motives sinister? of course. but that area was razed decades ago and nothing has happened since. in the meantime, brooklyn desperately needs the long-term jobs and housing ratnerville will bring (especially the jobs– none of the kids i know have any employment prospects at all). having a respected architect like gehry on the job is a huge bonus, and better treatment than communities like brooklyn usually get in development projects. i think having an NBA team here in brooklyn is pretty cool, too. kind of visionary, even. the traffic problems are unavoidable, but may have the result of convincing (forcing?) more people to use public transit. what i don’t understand is where all these critics with their alternative plans for that area were before ratner came sniffing around– that hole in the center of brooklyn has been lying fallow for decades. if there were such an obvious, beneficial, low-impact solution, why didn’t someone beat ratner to the punch?
There’s not much philosophical difference in the AY project and the mall. From being a development with lots of open, public spaces, Ratner has consistently winnowed that down so that streets and park area will no longer be so welcoming or public. Far from being aspace that fits in with the surrounding communities, I think AY will sit like a self enclosed island in them middle of downtown.
You people are so naive. Get ready for a new Prospect Heights and Downtown Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the remaining 90% of Brooklyn will remain the same low-rise community.