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January 20, 2011
Two from The Onion the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Brooklyn Broadside: Is a Major Office Building a Prospect for Brooklyn?
First up is Dennis Holt, who after all these years, still doesn't know where "downtown" Brooklyn begins and ends.
Would it be called the Panasonic Building? It just might if it were within the Atlantic Yards development. But it might not were it to go into existing MetroTech space. What am I talking about, for Pete’s sake, or the phrase might be for Bruce’s sake?
Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal broke a story that has very much been kept under wraps for all the obvious reasons. Credit reporters Joseph Se Avila and A. D. Pruitt.
Under wraps? They're not close to making a decision, and our bet is that the unwrapping was done by Forest City.
Here’s the grabber: Panasonic Corporation of North America is headquartered in Secaucus, New Jersey. For reasons not spelled out, it wants or needs to move someplace else. The state of New Jersey is moving heaven and earth to keep it there, probably in a new building in Newark.
Guess where Panasonic is looking? In Downtown Brooklyn, of course, either as part of MetroTech (NYU Polytechnic is there, remember) or as part of the Atlantic Yards development. (Remember Frank Gehry’s Miss Brooklyn?) Bruce Ratner controls both sites. The numbers may change, to be sure, but it appears that Panasonic would need about 250,000 square feet for about 800 jobs. Those are numbers that call out for an anchor tenant and the building of a respectable office building.
Back in the real world, Norman Oder pointed out on Tuesday that nearly three times that much space is vacant at MetroTech.
Next up is Henrik Krogius, who must be talking about some other Atlantic Yards.
Review and Comment: Idea for Gowanus?
We live in a changing Brooklyn that tries to cling to its (not always so sweet) past, in a time when the speed of technological change has unsettled many people. Reaction against innovative planning has marked the new millennium on matters like Atlantic Yards and the financing and design of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and yet individual towers not part of any considered community framework have sprouted willy-nilly. It’s not the same old Brooklyn. But facing up to the need for more considered and innovative approaches to development comes hard.
Say what? "Innovative planning?" We'll let Norman Oder take that one.
Atlantic Yards Report, Daily Eagle columnist: "Reaction against innovative planning has marked the new millennium on matters like Atlantic Yards"
He's right that individual towers have sprouted thanks to the Downtown Brooklyn rezoning, but the lack of response--and anticipation--is at least partly because the rezoning was supposed to bring mainly office towers, not residential ones.
But Atlantic Yards as "innovative planning"?
Audacious design, maybe.
The planning was non-existent; the project was imposed from on high, with the state overriding local land use review.
Posted by eric at January 20, 2011 10:25 AM