« Whitewash! "Blueprint for Greatness" Goes Down | Main | The closing: MaryAnne Gilmartin »
August 2, 2010
So much for "structured programs and services": meditation room planned for the arena would be 150 square feet, more the size of a living room
Atlantic Yards Report
Remember that breathless 4/2/10 Brooklyn Paper article, headlined Finally, the Nets have a prayer! New arena to have ‘meditation’ room?
It somehow became the lead story in the next week's print edition, complete with an artist's imagining of what a meditation room might look like.
It was way off, as was the sports management expert quoted in the article who speculated that the room could be a revenue generator if it could accommodate a large congregation.
It won't.
How big might it be?
Though Forest City Ratner would not reveal the design of the room to the Brooklyn Paper, a March 2009 document describing Atlantic Yards benefits, which I obtained via a Freedom of Information Law request to the Empire State Development Corporation, describes the meditation room as just 150 square feet.
...From chapel to atrium to meditation room
The Reverend Herbert Daughtry, who runs a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) partner organization supported by Forest City Ratner, originally wanted a chapel.
That wouldn't fly, so instead emerged the meditation room or, as Daughtry declared in his dramatic 8/23/06 testimony at the hearing on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement, an atrium: "It will provide a place for our young, a place for the seniors, a place for the youth to come together in an atrium designed by us."
...How many people can "come together" in a 150 square foot space? Not many.
Posted by eric at August 2, 2010 9:59 AM