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December 22, 2009
Love it or hate it, here's our look back at 2009
The Brooklyn Paper via NYPost.com
To some, it was the worst year in decades. To others, it was merely mildly horrible. But for us at The Brooklyn Paper, 2009 will go down in history as another 12-month period when lots of interesting, important, newsworthy, exciting, traumatic and Atlantic Yards things happened.
Here’s our gimlet-eyed view on the year that was.
...
JuneGehry canned: Whatever your opinion about Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards, most people liked architect Frank Gehry’s original, ambitious design. So there were howls when Ratner fired Gehry to supposedly save money. Opponents to the mega-project piled on Ratner after the announcement, saying that the scaled-down arena was proof of the developer’s financial instability. Later in the year, Ratner releases a new arena rendering that either looked like the future of American architecture or a George Foreman grill, depending on whom you asked. Ratner would end the year with a spate of good news, including a couple of big court wins, a deal with a Russian billionaire to buy 80 percent of his money-losing Nets, and a slam dunk sale of hundreds of millions in bonds that will pay for construction of the arena.
December
Bonds away: Bruce Ratner sells $511 million in tax-free bonds, putting him on decent enough financial footing to beginning construction on Atlantic Yards, his supposedly $4.9-billion arena, residential and office complex. Only the arena and one or two buildings are on the table right now, but the developer stills says he’ll build the whole thing.
Posted by eric at December 22, 2009 11:48 PM