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June 15, 2011
Bruce Ratner’s Brooklyn Boondoggle Highlights Hoops, Not Homes: Interview
Bloomberg
by Rick Warner
After everyone else in his Brooklyn condo building accepted a buyout and moved to make way for a new basketball arena, Daniel Goldstein was the only resident for an entire year. One day, he got stuck in the elevator with nobody around to help.
“It was spooky,” Goldstein, 41, recalled. “The alarm only rang in the building, the phone in the elevator didn’t work and I didn’t have a phone on me. I thought I was going to die in there, but after four hours I finally managed to push the doors open.”
Unwilling to be forced from his home, the New Yorker waged a seven-year battle to stop Bruce Ratner’s massive Atlantic Yards development in Prospect Heights. The original plans for the mega-monster contained not only the new home for the New Jersey Nets, but 16 towers containing more than 6,000 apartments.
Goldstein’s ultimately unsuccessful fight is the focus of “Battle for Brooklyn,” a documentary by husband-and-wife filmmakers Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley that premieres Friday in New York.
The grassroots campaign proved “you can fight city hall,” Galinsky said in a joint interview with Hawley and Goldstein at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. “When you see something wrong, you don’t have to roll over right away.”
Battle for Brooklyn opens at Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street, Manhattan) and indieScreen (285 Kent Avenue, Brooklyn) this Friday.
Posted by eric at June 15, 2011 10:07 AM