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March 30, 2010
It came from the Blogosphere...
Cleveland Frown, The Astonishingly Vapid Mikhail Prokhorov
In what one (admittedly, biased) writer called an "astonishingly vapid softball-laden happyfest" of an interview by Steve Croft of 60 Minutes, Prokhorov reveals himself as not much more than an overgrown child with a flaming Peter Pan complex, probably just what we should expect from the average person who happens to luck/steal his way into a $17 billion fortune.
...Theoretically, we might admire someone who actually possesses "a cutthroat business sense," but even such a puff-piece as the one produced by CBS can't help but show how little Prokhorov's fortune has to do with anything of the sort.
Special bonus: Norman Oder sets the record straight in the comments section.
Commercial Investor Property, church property for sale Brooklyn, NY
Here's something you don't see everyday — proximity to Atlantic Yards as selling point.
This is a 4 story industrial building on Atlantic Avenue between Bedford and Nostrand Avenues.
This is one of the busiest commercial corridors in Brooklyn on the border of Crown Heights/Prospect Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant.
This is a great opportunity for an owner/user, a non-profit or a developer to be just 1.5 miles or a 6 minute drive from the proposed Atlantic Yards basketball arena, and benefit from a grandfathered-overbuilt structure in an M1-1 zoning area.
NoLandGrab: You'll definitely be wanting to take the subway rather than the car — assuming the MTA hasn't shut down the subways completely by the time the arena is open for business.
Uncle Mike's Musings, Hard to Justify "What Ifs" with the Nets
Uncle Mike looks back at three decades' worth of New Jersey Nets "what-ifs."
What if Bruce Ratner hadn't bought the team and held a fire sale in anticipation of building the Brooklyn arena? Maybe the Nets would have stayed competitive. Maybe they'd still have Jason Kidd, Vince Carter and Richard Jefferson, if not Kenyon Martin. Then again, Kidd has been one of the moodier pro athletes of his generation, so maybe he would have forced a trade anyway. He brought the Nets to 2 NBA Finals and within 2 wins of an NBA Championship (getting swept by the Lakers in the '02 Finals and losing the '03 Finals to the Spurs in 6), but he's never led any team he's been with any closer than that. Still better for the team, any team, than Stephon Marbury, the man we traded away to get him, has ever been.
That was pretty much it for the Nets. They became a lame-duck team in 2005, when Ratner bought them and announced his plans for the Atlantic Yards project, including the Barclays Center. They have now been a lame-duck team for 5 years; even the Montreal Expos were only one for 4, and it will eventually be 7 years before the move is actually made, unless new owner Mikhail Prokhorov decides he likes the 18,000 fans who will come out every night to the Prudential Center, realizes that Newark is a great basketball city (as proven by the 2 sellouts crowds at The Rock that these same awful Nets got in the preseason), and tells Ratner to get another team or else go fucksky himself.
Curbed, Three Isn't the Magic Number at Gehry's Beekman Tower
There's a problem with Frank O. Gehry's mammoth erection, and it's not shrinkage—but it's related! During the darkest days of the recession, when developer Forest City Ratner threatened to cut Gehry's 76-story Beekman Tower in half, a deal was struck to lower construction expenses on the Financial District rental tower (which will also contain an elementary school), and its full-on FOGginess was saved. But in a cost-cutting move, it was decided that the Beekman's undulating facade would only cover three sides of the building. A necessary evil, perhaps, but a total bummer.
Posted by eric at March 30, 2010 11:07 PM