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March 12, 2010
Let's go, Nets! Hoop reality comes to Brooklyn with arena groundbreaking
NY Daily News, Editorial
Our friends at the Daily News, still high from yesterday's lobster sliders and champagne, do a post-groundbreaking victory dance.
New York has been on a half-century losing streak as far as sports teams are concerned. First the Dodgers and the baseball Giants, then the football Giants and the Jets left for elsewheres near and far.
That's why we've been feeling so blue for the past fifty years. Duh!
But now the pro basketball Nets are moving in. And they're coming to a new 18,000-seat arena to be built in the heart of Brooklyn. How great is that? Plenty great.
And how much greater it would be if the Nets weren't possibly the worst team in NBA history is almost too much to comprehend!
Congratulations to team owner and real estate developer Bruce Ratner on the successful completion of a seven-year battle to get moving on the so-called Atlantic Yards project in the face of no fewer than 34 lawsuits in opposition.
It's possible that the alleged number of lawsuits and legal victories has been different on every single occasion it has appeared in print.
Ratner's grand vision called for building both an arena to rival Madison Square Garden and 6,400 units of housing, much of it affordable, on a tract of land and over rail yards that have been fallow for more than 40 years.
"Fallow" must be a new slang term for "vital railroad infrastructure." Unless they mean the properties adjacent to the railyard, which were occupied by homes and businesses that were rapidly and organically re-energizing the neighborhood.
More of the same follows.
Posted by eric at March 12, 2010 6:42 PM