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October 26, 2007
Big step forward for Downtown
The Brooklyn Paper
Editorial
Downtown Brooklyn is taking a step forward to counterbalance the totally predictable urban-planning faux pas foisted on the neighborhood by Bruce Ratner's 16-acre Metrotech high-rise office campus.
The long — and as yet unfulfilled — hope for a lively Downtown Brooklyn took a huge step forward this week when the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership called on the city to put stores in the ground floor of the dour Municipal Building at the busy corner of Court and Joralemon streets.
By calling the corner “dead space” in our Page 1 article this week, Partnership President Joe Chan has done more than show support for an underutilized corner of an under-retailed part of Brooklyn. He also sent a message — a long-overdue one — to real-estate developers who have ignored what is the most-basic rule of development in a highly populated, well-trafficked area: make sure there is ground-floor retail.
It was the violation of this common-sense rule that led to the “dead space” at Bruce Ratner’s Metrotech complex between Jay Street and Flatbush Avenue Extension.
It’s not that Ratner didn’t build storefronts into his office towers there. He did. But he’s refused to rent much of the space for retail use — and has even replaced retail tenants to make room for more office space.
As a result, the Metrotech campus — which to this day is cited as a model by our Ratner-loving elected officials — is a walled-in fortress that mocks what a Downtown should be. After business hours, when Ratner’s office workers go home, Metrotech becomes barren. And even during the day, when those workers get a break and could go shopping or grab lunch, the sterile campus actually encourages them to stay put in their buildings or leave the campus entirely.
NoLandGrab: Like Metrotech, Atlantic Yards is rife with planning problems that are entirely foreseeable. To acquiesce to Bruce Ratner again and leave these problems to the next generation of planners to fix, as is being done in Downtown Brooklyn, is either wholly negligent or plain crazy.
Posted by lumi at October 26, 2007 9:01 AM