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June 11, 2009
Brooklyn Daily Eagle lays blame on "The Spoilers" and "carpers and cranks"
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Missing Real Culprit in Arena Debacle
Ignoring the fact that developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards plan was never viable to begin with (hence, Ratner's demand for even more public subsidies) and his track record of banal architecture, Senior Editor Dennis Holt blames Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn for "ordinary things."
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Spoilers
Henrik Krogius passes over Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn and lays blame on everyone else who by "going beyond the concern with their local interests they fail to appreciate what may be good for a greater Brooklyn outside the confines of their home precincts" and "have been unable to grasp the huge potential of Atlantic Yards."
The first-tier group would not have had their “success” were it not for a kind of reflex anti-development sentiment infecting the various brownstone neighborhoods surrounding downtown. The Cobble Hill Association, for instance, even though its neighborhood is considerable distance away from Atlantic Yards, lent encouragement to the opposition. Cobble Hill and Community Board 6 have on the whole taken a carping view toward new development, in some cases justified but in others verging on plain obstructionism. The Brooklyn Heights Association, still farther removed from the site, took a negatively-tinged wait-and-see stance on Atlantic Yards. What is so disappointing is that so many Brooklynites jumped immediately to a hostile view of the project rather than seeing it for the brilliant proposal it was. Some sensational local papers abetted the hostility. The literary and intellectual set, which might have been expected to respond to so imaginative and idea, tended instead to retreat to a sentimental preservationism (preservation of what?!), as manifested by such as the author Jonathan Lethem and the children’s performer Dan Zanes. There was even a purported “documentary” film created to fight the project.
Atlantic Yards Report, OK, we get it: It's all BrooklynSpeaks's fault (and other Brooklyn Eagle misreadings)
Norman Oder actually takes time to parse through and analyze Krogius's screed.
Posted by lumi at June 11, 2009 5:20 AM