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February 2, 2009
Atlantic Yards Security: What did they know, and when did they know it?
Revisiting the Atlantic Yards security timeline
When the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods and several elected officials held a news conference on November 29, 2007 questioning security plans for the proposed Atlantic Yards arena, Forest City Ratner reacted with indignation.
Neighborhood residents and their representatives alike were concerned by the recent news that Newark police officials were ordering the closure of streets adjacent to that city's new Prudential Center arena before, during and after games, because the Newark arena was set back just 25 feet from those streets. Forest City had quietly revealed to The New York Times just a few days earlier that the Barclays Center would lie even closer than that — just 20 feet — from Brooklyn's hyper-busy Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.
Forest City, of course, was quick to put their public relations machine in motion, telling the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that their security consultant had spent thousands of hours working on safety plans and had met five times with NYPD counter-terrorism officials. NYPD spokesman John Kelly told the Eagle that Forest City had done "everything we have asked" and that they didn't anticipate any need for street closures, sidewalk widening or bollards.
Local elected officials and activists were unconvinced, however, calling for an independent review of those alleged security plans. No one, of course, was asking that security blueprints be made public, as Forest City would have had us believe, but rather that elected officials representing thousands of constituents in the immediate area be given a briefing on the security measures being planned. Or that the public be told, generally, how the arena would be secured — for example, "yes, it's going to be just 20 feet from the street, without any bollards to prevent a truck from plowing directly into the glass wall of the arena, but that glass has been safety-tested and everything will be fine." They refused to give us that much.
Then today, we learn from the Daily News that such blast-proof glass for the planned arena would cost an astronomical $625 per square foot, likely making it prohibitively expensive. And we learn a little bit more about the security timeline:
The Police Department, the New York State Office of Homeland Security and Forest City Ratner met to discuss security at the arena in early 2008, a Homeland Security spokeswoman confirmed.
Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that the five alleged meetings between Forest City and the NYPD prior to the November 2007 release of the true arena setbacks didn't happen (though the Homeland Security spokesperson makes no mention of earlier meetings), but it does call into question how thorough any of the prior security review might really have been. If, as Forest City spokesperson Bruce Bender then told the Eagle, "our security plan has been vetted and approved by the NYPD and the best anti-terrorism experts in the city," had the Department of Homeland Security, the ultimate arbiters of what is and isn't safe, not already been consulted? Did Forest City not already know at that point that bomb-proofing the glass would potentially make the arena, as designed, too expensive to build? Did they already know when they were getting indignant with security-meddlers that a glass-walled arena would have to be scrapped in favor of Marty Markowitz's "brownstone Brooklyn" architecture?
As is all too frequently the case with the Atlantic Yards project, too much is left unexplained, despite Forest City Ratner's claim that:
“When it comes to sharing information with the public and governmental bodies, there’s no such thing as too much, as far as we are concerned."
Sure.
Posted by eric at February 2, 2009 11:34 AM