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July 27, 2011
The Battle for Brooklyn: Blues for Mr. Charlie’s Numbers
The Icehouse Gang
by Kevin Baker
Well, whattaya know? Seems like we may have thrown a little sugar in the gas bag, excuse me, gas tank of progress over in Brooklyn, Forest City Ratner.
It appears that the Ice House Gang’s favorite movie of 2011, The Battle for Brooklyn, has raised a new ruckus about New York City’s greatest continuing rip-off, the building of the basketball arena for a shady Russian oligarch atop the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn.
...Let’s concentrate instead on how great it will be to live high atop one of those 34-story, 400-apartment, pre-fab towers. No doubt as comfortable as riding on a Chinese bullet train these days.
What’s more, the pre-fabs have finally put paid to the ridiculous jobs figures bandied about the project by the likes of our own U.S. Senator, Charlie Schumer. Mr. Schumer promised 10,000 jobs from Atlantic Yards—many of them to be had by local, minority residents, according to the Rev. Herbert Daughtry and other friendly, neighborhood demagogues.
Instead, the construction of the arena and the promised repairs and renovations of the train terminus below it are now going to employ all of 430 workers, just 180 of them from Brooklyn.
Oh, well. Mr. Charlie can go back to resolutely refusing to regulate Wall Street in any way from his key position on the Senate Finance and Banking committees, and pursuing his real obsession—the destruction of bike lanes wherever they may be found.
Posted by eric at July 27, 2011 9:54 PM