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October 19, 2007
Tale of 2 cities: Newark arena closes key streets; Yards next?
The Brooklyn Paper
By Michael McLaughlin
Three days after Newark residents learned that two streets around that city’s new glass-walled sports arena would be sealed off on game nights, residents near the Atlantic Yards footprint called on state officials to admit that the same frustrating scenario will likely happen in the heart of Brooklyn.
The Frank Gehry–designed arena that is a part of Bruce Ratner’s $4-billion mega-project bears striking similarities to Newark’s Prudential Center — similarities that opponents seized on at Sunday’s walkathon against the project.
“The Prudential arena is a wake-up call,” said Jim Vogel of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods. “We cannot allow the security questions about the arena to continue unanswered.”
Like the Prudential Center, Gehry’s “Barclays Center” sits at a major public transportation hub. And like the future home of the New Jersey Devils, the future Brooklyn Nets arena is lined on all sides with glass — which Newark officials have concluded makes it so tempting a terror target that they’ll need to close two streets around the arena when games are being played.
If the same security protocol was put in place at Atlantic Yards, Dean Street — and parts of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, which also face the arena’s glass walls — would be closed, causing major traffic disruptions.
...
“There is a reasonable expectation on the part of the public that they be informed,” said Robert McCrie, a security management professor at John Jay College“If the public is going to be inconvenienced, they should know, in advance, what is anticipated — and that they have an opportunity to voice their feelings.”
NoLandGrab: There is likely a perfectly simple explanation for why City officials and developer Bruce Ratner can't talk about security measures — any public disclosure will cost Ratner millions of dollars, and perhaps make the project financially unfeasible.
REDESIGN
On the one hand, conventional wisdom among security experts would dictate a total redesign of the arena, which at Frank Gehry's rates could run tens (maybe hundreds) of millions of dollars in design and delay costs...
TRAFFIC & THE EIS
...or, if the arena complex were not redesigned, standard security measures like street closures would significantly increase traffic, which could jeopardize the validity of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), perhaps requiring a new one. Like a redesign, a new or amended EIS could bog down the project for another year or so, costing Ratner tens of millions of dollars.
ONCE AGAIN, RATNER'S INTERESTS ARE PLACED ABOVE THE PUBLIC'S
Therefore, it's in Ratner's self-interest to build the arena first and ram additional security measures down our throats later (probably at the taxpayers' expense), at which point no one could complain, because it's unpatriotic to speak out against "security."
Posted by lumi at October 19, 2007 9:32 AM