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January 2, 2007
The "What if" challenge...
What if columnist Errol Louis hadn't called Norman Oder "The Mad Overkiller?" That really set the bar quite high, and Oder has been trying to live up to his new moniker ever since.
Let's take the challenge and imagine, "What if Norman Oder hadn't assigned himself to the Atlantic Yards beat?"
- Maybe The NY Times shoddy coverage would not be so well documented.
- The Times might still be misleading readers by printing that "Atlantic Yards" is being built over a railyard in Downtown Brooklyn.
- The Times might not have run any corrections, including this astounding rowback correction.
- No one might have started comparing Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan with other enormous housing projects, and found that Atlantic Yards is more than twice as dense as any residential housing project in the
CityNATION. - Who would have noticed that around a half-a-billion dollars just disappeared between the draft and final versions of the General Project Plan?
- Though Bruce Ratner no longer contributes to political campaigns, his brother Michael Ratner and sister-in-law Karen Ranucci would still be operating under the radar as the Forest City Ratner political slush fund.
- Perhaps no one would have even noticed that Ratner commissioned a wind study, but didn't release it right away, because... well, because Miss Brooklyn's much-touted front stoop would be wind-swept (uh-oh!).
- Since the mainstream media didn't care to check, the proof that Ratner presented "scaleback" options to the Department of City Planning as early as January, 2006 would probably still be shrouded in secrecy.
- Would anyone have noticed that there were three towers hidden in plain sight over the Atlantic Center Mall in a model of the Atlantic Yards project shown at a press conference in May, 2006?
- OK, we'll come clean... the fact is that if Norman Oder wasn't on the beat, NoLandGrab would have nothing to post on those many days that the mainstream media ignores the biggest boondoggle in Brooklyn, ever (except for our occasional silly photo editorial of Bruce Ratner).
Posted by lumi at January 2, 2007 10:01 AM