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February 11, 2010
It came from the Blogosphere...
Runnin' Scared, Downtown Brooklyn -- Where It's All Happening, Eventually, Baby!
The Village Voice blog appraises today's NY Post story.
And the big draw, which the Post saves for near the end -- Atlantic Yards. They've gone bullish in the wake of recent legal victories, and Forest City Ratner has sent their EVP MaryAnne Gilmartin to inform Observer readers, "The wait is over. We are building Atlantic Yards." And if you have the clams and the stones to join the Downtown Brooklyn gold rush, 46 nights a year you may expect drunken and (no doubt) disappointed Nets fans to stream into your neighborhood, patronize your local drinking establishments, and vomit on your local streets. Downtown Brooklyn, baby! It's what's happening, shortly after now!
Focused Filly, What $2 is Really Worth
Buried in the game notes at the bottom of the article is a really interesting line: "Despite the paltry turnout, the paid attendance for the game was 12,873." The weather - admittedly - sucked, so the very fact that 1,000 people were able to dig themselves out from the snow should've been enough news.
But run the numbers: individual game tickets sell for somewhere between $10 and $1,950 through Ticketmaster ... and 12,873 people paid, yet only 1,000 showed. While we don't know the exact breakdown of tickets sold, no matter how you slice it, that's happy math for Bruce Ratner and his pool of investors.
NoLandGrab: What the author doesn't realize is that in the NBA, "paid" attendance really means "tickets distributed," and anyone familiar with the Nets knows that free tickets distributed routinely run into the several thousands. So the math is far from happy for Bruce Ratner, and even less so for his very unhappy investors.
Lola in Brooklyn, HOME OF THE BROOKLYN NETS???
This semester, my colleagues and I are joining a group of artists, community members, life long residents, and concerned citizens to explore and bring light to the city of brooklyn's atlantic yards area.
The atlantic yard's area, which is a stretch of downtown Brooklyn, is set to be demolished and "developed" into a thriving area, which will contain the home of the "Brooklyn Nets" formally the New Jersey Nets, the worst team in the NBA. Great news, sports fans!
.....??
NLG: And we thought all this time we'd been bringing light to Brooklyn's "Atlantic Yards area."
The Daily Growler, thegrowlingwolf On Us(A) Being Yahoos
This rant is a little loose with the facts, and the grammar, but it's still a good rant.
Then there was the Williamsburg Bank in that beautiful old tower, the tallest building in Brooklyn, now owned by Magic Johnson who has turned it into luxury condos--no chance for his average Brooklyn black brothers and sisters to ever live there. Magic's no dumbass. He's been buying up New York City property for years. He opened a movie complex just up at the East Side end of my street. He bought a skyscraper in Newark for pennies on the dollar and turned it into a luxury condo building. Like I say, Magic's no dumbass. His luxury condo building in Newark is by the new sports arena they just built over there. The Williamsburg Bank building, by the way, is right up the street from Mayor Bloomberg's old developer (Bruce Ratner) buddy's getting eminent domain rights to destroy the Brooklyn Center City area (via the Atlantic Rail Yards) in order to build his new super-Brooklyn downtown, with its new hi-rise luxury hotels and hi-rise luxury condos and its new supersports arena (to be named in honor of Barclays Bank) that will soon house the unsuccessful New Jersey Nets basketball team (also the "mogul rapper," as he is referred to by the Yahoo press, Jay Z is an investor in this development)--soon to be the unsuccessful Brooklyn New Jersey Nets! This is a real scumbag Power Elite move to turn Brooklyn into a rich boys's playground. The new controlling owner of the New Jersey Nets (already called the Brooklyn Nets on paper), by the way, is a real American patriot of a dude, believe it or not a RUSSIAN fat cat (how did a former Russian Commie become a rich Capitalist after Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union?) Yes, that's right, the precious Brooklyn Nets--bringing sports back to Brooklyn--ironically on the very site Walter O'Malley wanted Brooklyn to build him a new stadium or he was taking the Dodgers to L.A.--is owned by a fucking Russian billionaire.
Posted by eric at February 11, 2010 9:31 PM