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March 14, 2012
SQUARE FEET | THE 30-MINUTE INTERVIEW: Bruce C. Ratner
The New York Times
by Vivian Marino
Fresh off being fawned over by Charlie Rose, Bruce Ratner sits down with the Murrow-esque New York Times real estate section.
Q. So you were born on 1/23/45.
A. It’s significant because I’m obsessed with numbers. They just stay in my head forever, and that’s what I think about.
Some numbers Bruce is apparently not so obsessed with: his empty Atlantic Yards promises of 10,000 permanent jobs, 17,000 construction jobs and 2,250 units of "affordable" housing.
Q. You seem a bit obsessed with Brooklyn, too, yet you were born and raised in the Midwest and live on the Upper East Side.
A. When I came to the city after law school, my first job was working for the City of New York. Actually, it was in Queens during the Lindsay administration, and I worked in all the boroughs. Brooklyn had a fascination for me. Everybody has heard of Brooklyn — be it the Brooklyn Dodgers, Coney Island or the Brooklyn Bridge. We would have moved to Brooklyn had my kids not started school in Manhattan.
And now that the kids have been all grown up for how many years? Oh, forget it. We'll leave this to Norman Oder.
Posted by eric at March 14, 2012 11:27 AM