Ratner Cans Gehry For Good
Yesterday Forest City Ratner made official what everybody already knew: Architect Frank Gehry, his name having been prostituted to sell a sham project to the public, will have nothing to do with the design of any of the buildings in the Atlantic Yards footprint. We do not anticipate that Mr. Gehry will be designing any…
Yesterday Forest City Ratner made official what everybody already knew: Architect Frank Gehry, his name having been prostituted to sell a sham project to the public, will have nothing to do with the design of any of the buildings in the Atlantic Yards footprint. We do not anticipate that Mr. Gehry will be designing any of the individual buildings, said Joe DePlasco, a spokesman for Mr. Ratner. Jettisoning Mr. Gehry is expected to generate $200 million in savings for the developer. But don’t cry any tears for Gehry: The Times reports that he’s already been paid “tens of millions of dollars” for his work up to this point.
Gehry Is Out as Designer of Project in Brooklyn [NY Times]
Photo by Tracy Collins
Snark,
Would you award BrooklynGreene the blue ribbon in the Urban Planning Haiku division already? Although I don’t know how many syllables ****** has.
“Community” bought
Project in the bag, they thought
All might come to naught
Today’s much coveted and richly deserved STFU award goes to wine lover.
I’ve said this before. Whether or not you support or oppose AY, there was simply no way that this wasn’t going to be heavily litigated. Certainly anyone with as much experience in NYC RE development as the folks at FCR could have seen it coming. Between the scale, proximity to several affluent and architecturally rich neighborhoods, and lack of public planning process, no way this was going to get built without significant and lengthy legal challenges, regardless of the legal merits. Nothing that has happened since the project was announced should be at all surprising to FCR or its supporters. The costs of these delays should therefore have been in the business plan. FCR was either incredibly stupid in failing to foresee the costs of litigation-related delays, or Gehry’s release is due to the economic downturn, not anticipated litigation delays.
Poor Bertha Lewis…
Lumpenproletariat…
Money walks **** walks!
I told you two years ago that the NETs would play in Newark NJ and everyone laughed at me! No work in the pit since August ’08, Carlton Ave bridge is out, blight all over the place and Ratner has run out of money and time. Give it a fucking rest already nothing will be built here for a generation!
Ratner is trying to find a tenant to occupy the Circuit City space and the top floors are empty. Commercial Real Estate and Atlantic Yards is dead…
The What
Someday this war is gonna end..
Completely agree with MM, Brooklyn red and DDDB. AY has been baiting and switchig since it started. I’m sure DDDB can remember this better than I can, but didn’t Ratner promise public greenspaces for the community and then it got bumped up to an arena rooftop park, first to be for the public and then switched again to project residents? This while absorbing a section of Pacific St. and closing it off.
I really don’t know that Ratner initially knew he would fire gehry at some point, but Gehry’s name on his project certainly added cachet and that is a selling point to politicians who love that sort of thing. Makes them feel cultured and enlightened while they decide how to spend taxpayer money for us lumpenproletariat. Whatever the situation now, I do think Ratner originally had some lofty plans and probably wanted to overcome his reputation as a developer of banal or poorly designed projects.
I’m always cynical of people who prate the “we’re helping the community line” and trot out the figureheads at press conferences to show they really mean it. Even worse are the community activist who fell for it and sold out. Some of them were simply naive to think Ratner would keep his promise. He didn’t give them any guarantees about when and where he would build low income housing, and the agreement forbids them to speak negatively about AY and FCR. Now, if he had nothing to hide, why would he need that? He wouldn’t, unless he never planned to follow through. And no matter how I feel about Bertha Lewis’ astonishing metamorphosis into Uriah Heep, I don’t think families earning 130,000 qualified in her book as needy or low income. But she accepted the income breakdown as p[art of the deal.
Wine lover displays
Institutional racism
Trash is from Ratfink
But this WAS a ruse!
Wine lover, where’s the “ghetto”?
You are wrong, young man.