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March 14, 2008
Another Ratner lie! Gehry was not ‘born in Brooklyn’
The Brooklyn Paper reports on Ratner's latest lie, one that was originally exposed by Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report:
Gehry’s birthplace would not be all that newsworthy were it not for the fact that Ratner touted Gehry’s supposed Brooklyn origin as evidence of his 16-skyscraper project’s outer-borough roots.
But Gehry was born in Toronto. In Canada.
The lie was hiding in plain sight on Ratner’s Atlantic Yards Web since at least 2004. The Web page — www.atlanticyards. com/html/ay/gehry.html — said that Gehry was “born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929.”
...
Journalist Norman Oder said the lie “can’t be an honest mistake,” citing architecture critic D.J. Huppatz, who once pointed out, “the born-in-Brooklyn connection [is] a fabrication designed to further make the Gehry design palatable to the local community.”
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn spokesperson Dan Goldstein makes a good point:
“If they manipulate basic, easily proven facts, it’s not hard to imagine what they do with more opaque, easily manipulated facts like their convoluted financing scheme, ‘affordable housing’ plan, and their overall claims about the project’s ‘public benefit.’”
Here's Forest City Ratner spokesperson Loren Riegelhaupt's best defense:
Forest City Ratner spokesman Loren Riegelhaupt admitted the error, but said, “The reality is that it was simply a miscommunication between his office and ours. He evidently lived in Brooklyn briefly at one point, but was not born here. We apologize for any confusion and have corrected the Web page.”
NoLandGrab: The irony is that Ratner promotes someone who had lived in Brooklyn for around a year as a baby as being from Brooklyn, while Atlantic Yards supporters consider someone who has lived in Brooklyn two decades, a newcomer.
Back in February, we dared Ratner to tell the truth about something, anything! The offer still stands.
Posted by lumi at March 14, 2008 5:11 AM