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February 16, 2008
Green arts complex neighbor to new Brooklyn Nets arena
Plenty Magazine
Lisa Selin Davis
On the busiest (and second most dangerous) intersection in my hometown of Brooklyn, NY—Flatbush and Fourth avenues—a mammoth development is in the works, one that should accommodate the hundreds of thousands of folks expected to migrate here in the next twenty years for our famously desirable lifestyle: the beautiful architecture, the community feel, the culture factory that is Kings County.Only problem: the Atlantic Yards’ level of influx—6,430 apartment and condominium units; 17 high-rise buildings; 336,000 square feet of office space, a 50,000-square-foot sports arena for the Brooklyn Nets (don’t worry—they’re still in New Jersey for now); 247,000 square feet of retail space; and a 180-room hotel—means the very lifestyle people are moving to Brooklyn in droves for will surely be squelched.
But Brooklyn is nothing if not resilient, and just a block away, an alternative development is forming. A 61-year-old Brooklyn native named Al Atarra—white Santa Claus beard, heavy accent—has decided to preserve his 45,000-square-foot Neoclassical building called the Metropolitan Exchange, resisting wooing developers in favor of realizing his own vision: a professional arts complex.
Only MEx, as this venture is called, is made of a very specific group of arty types: architects, urban planners, landscape architects, an architectural historian, and, sure, why not, a couple of developers, too—the good kind, who wish to ameliorate neighborhoods and not actually replace them completely. At some point, Atarra hopes members won’t just be renting office space but buying into a commercial co-op that will make the building a model for the world of real estate here.
Posted by amy at February 16, 2008 11:44 AM