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July 12, 2012
Forest City: we need agreement with labor before loan available to go modular (plus EN-R's account of "drug dealers, gangs and prostitutes" plaguing AY site)
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder critiques the Engineering News-Record's big Atlantic Yards package. Some highlights:
Forest City has started foundation work, but at least according to the article, they're still not sure:
"We need an agreement with labor before we can get a bank loan, and [we] are working on both," says Gilmartin. "We are all optimistic, but if we run into a problem, we will build conventionally."
FCRC expects to start the first of three buildings in phase one by year's end. The other two are planned to follow, each six to nine months apart.
They've been saying "six to nine months" for a while.
...Rewriting history
One article, Fancy Footwork To Steady the Course of Brooklyn's Controversial Atlantic Yards Sports Village, begins with a truly fantastical lead:
Fifteen years ago, the 22-acre plot for the $4.9-billion Atlantic Yards sports village in Brooklyn, N.Y., was an eyesore. For more than 20 years, drug dealers, gangs and prostitutes had populated the neighborhood. Many buildings were vacant. "Blighted Brooklyn" was a more fitting moniker than the familiar "Brownstone Brooklyn."
My comment:
That's quite a lead paragraph. For fiction.
"Drug dealers, gangs and prostitutes" just a block away from the 78th precinct?
How about checking out
http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2006/10/21-years-of-prospect-heights-blight.html
or a description of when the hookers (but not gangs/dealers) roamed, a lot earlier
http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/18/dtgfreddyshistory20100430bk.html
or the court decision on "relatively mild conditions of urban blight"
http://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com/2009/11/faq-on-court-of-appeals-decision-in.html
And no one, even the developer, calls it a "sports village."
NoLandGrab: Though, as we wrote, it is a sports village.
Posted by eric at July 12, 2012 12:33 PM