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April 19, 2010
It came from the Blogosphere...
Brownstoner, AY: Brooklyn Speaks Joins Timeline Challenge
While the Empire State Development Corporation approved the Atlantic Yards project for the second time last September, the deal details—the penalties and incentives to get the project done—weren't resolved until the master closing in December. And then the ESDC waited a full month to make the voluminous print documents available to reporters and others willing to visit the agency's office in business hours. That Development Agreement, which Norman Oder of the Atlantic Yards Report wrote about in late January lent credibility to what critics of the Atlantic Yards project have been saying for years: That there's no way Forest City Ratner's going to complete construction within the ten-year time frame and that the penalties for not doing so are as small as the wriggle room for avoiding them is large. (Back in April 2009 ESDC chief Marisa Lago even said on record that the project was expected to take "decades.") What's the problem with that? Well, the original Environmental Impact Statements, upon which the courts have relied, only evaluated the impact of the area being subjected to construction for a decade and twenty five years of construction could obviously take a bigger toll.
MultifamilyInvestor, New York City Multifamily Developer Evicted From Atlantic Yards
Troubled developer Shaya Boymelgreen may have lost LibertyPointe Bank to a federal takeover due to bad real estate loans, but at least he had his office, at 752 Pacific Street. Until this week.
Owner Henry Weinstein evicted Boymelgreen’s employees from their six-story commercial building, now part of the Atlantic Yards development site, for two of Boymelgreen’s sins: First, he illegally sold his lease to developer Forest City Ratner. Second, well, he just didn’t get around to paying his rent to Weinstein.
WORDS WORDS WORDS, Underberg
In the past month or so I've encountered some songs by Gabriel Kahane, a musician from my neighborhood. Underberg is my favorite track—I've found myself listening to it a few times in a row lately. Turns out that Underberg is also the title of the first and longest section of Fortress; both seem to refer to this building (aw geez, don't get me started on Atlantic Yards) and to evoke a sense of nostalgia, though if you listen close, not everything was so great back in the good old days.
IDOLIZE YOUR KILLERS, Yr City’s a Sucker
The economics of real estate development and its cultural implications are far beyond the scope my knowledge (and, by extension, this essay), though I generally see the urban growth and decay as intrinsically organic, where the organism could variously be considered on the scale of the block, neighborhood, city, state, etc. For example, Atlantic Yards will certainly redefine its immediate vicinity for years to come, but the massive, purportedly destructive influx of wealth—concretely as edifices; abstractly as cultural capital—is not necessarily artificial: it represents the continued evolution of Brooklyn, New York City and the Tri-State Area as a whole.
Posted by eric at April 19, 2010 10:44 AM