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August 31, 2007
Art attack: City to evict art space for … art space!
The Brooklyn Paper
This is the third land grab we've heard about under the Downtown Brooklyn plan, the other two being Duffield St. and Track Data.
This one is particularly ironic because an arts organization is supposed to be displaced for ANOTHER arts organization.
The city wants to use its power of eminent domain to push out an almost-finished arts venue in Fort Greene to make way for a Manhattan-based dance troupe and 150 new housing units that comprise the centerpiece of the so-called BAM Cultural District.
“Our goal was to create a live music-and-arts venue,” said Todd Triplett, one of the three friends behind the Amber Art and Music Space, which is being built in a former liquor store at Fulton Street and Ashland Place.
Lured by the promise of the burgeoning “Lincoln Center of Brooklyn” that the city envisions for the area around BAM, Triplett and his partners invested more than $1 million, and spent a year and a half turning the run-down, three-story space into a performance venue, recording studio and an arts non-profit.
That grand idea was shattered on Aug. 21, when Jack Hammer, the director of Brooklyn Planning for the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, informed the three partners that the agency wants to seize the site by eminent domain to make way for the Dancespace Project, a Manhattan-based dance group.
“We were four weeks away from completion, and we get this letter. The city is f—king us,” said Triplett, who has already gotten a liquor license and booked musical acts into 2008. “I’ve never seen anything this egregious. This is in the tradition of Robert Moses.”
NoLandGrab: Ya think the City could find someone else to hand out eminent domain letters, someone not named "Jack Hammer."
A lesson for ALL New Yorkers living and doing business in a neighborhood undergoing rezoning: if your plans for your property do not conform to the EXACT goals of the rezoning plan, then you could be the next to get screwed.
Triplett could just as well have said that this is in the tradition of Mike Bloomberg.
Posted by lumi at August 31, 2007 8:10 AM