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March 12, 2009
In Memoriam, Robert Guskind
Gowanus Lounge
Gowanus Lounge published a comprehensive obituary yesterday recounting the life of GL founder Bob Guskind, who died last week at the age of 50. Guskind reported frequently on Atlantic Yards.
Gowanus Lounge and its large community of readers, admirers and friends mourn the loss of founder and editor Robert “Bob” Guskind. Dubbed by some “Brooklyn’s Blogfather,” Bob was a talented journalist, author, photographer and editor whose deep interest in urban issues took root, right out of college, at the National Journal. Bob’s abundant journalistic gifts flourished throughout the 1980s and 90s at Journal, the Washington Post and other periodicals, and were reincarnated, in this decade, through the “revolutionary” (his word) form of blogging — where his own “personal newspaper,” which he started almost exactly three years ago, quickly stood out for the quality and seeming ubiquitousness of its coverage.
...Though Atlantic Yards was not his focus, Bob wrote forcefully about Brooklyn’s most controversial development. In a GL Analysis published last December, on the day of the project’s five-year anniversary, he observed, “A quarter century from now, when the planners analyze what went wrong in Brooklyn in the early 2000s, they will have a lot to say (and none of it good) about the chain of events that started on December 10, 2003, when developer Bruce Ratner, flanked by a beaming Marty Markowitz and other public officials announced a magnificent plan called Atlantic Yards.”
At the end of the month, he presciently predicted that “Developer Bruce Ratner will have difficulty obtaining financing for a nearly $1 billion Gehry arena and the arena will either be scraped or a new version from an off-the-rack firm for $500 million will be built.”
Less than ten days later, word emerged that the developer was trying to drastically scale back the arena’s cost.
NoLandGrab: While we here at NLG feel a deep personal loss, the effect of Bob Guskind's death on Brooklynites as a whole will be even more profound — he was a damned good journalist who uncovered many stories that rarely got covered elsewhere. And Rupert Murdoch's purchase this week of The Brooklyn Paper threatens to make the void that much greater.
Posted by eric at March 12, 2009 10:53 AM