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August 14, 2012
Brooklyn rebounds as the new bohemia
USA Today
by Rick Hampson
The trendspotters at USA Today set their time machine to 2005 and discover that Brooklyn is heating up.
At the end of another disappointing season, Brooklyn Dodgers fans would console themselves with the refrain, "Wait 'til next year!" The team is long gone, but for Brooklyn, next year is here.
The arrival of the NBA Nets gives Brooklyn its first major league team since the Dodgers' departure for Los Angeles in 1957, and something else: more evidence that, as its denizens claim, the borough that was once a punch line is now the coolest place in America, a land of rooftop farms and pop-up art galleries, of haircuts, eyeglasses, hats and body piercings so chic that even Parisians utter, "Très Brooklyn!"
"People I know from London don't want to go to Manhattan," says Kari Browne, 33, a former broadcast news producer who last month opened a cafe in the up-and-coming Victorian neighborhood of Ditmas Park. "They want to come to Brooklyn."
Related coverage...
Atlantic Yards Report, Behind "Brooklyn rebounds as the new bohemia": does arena mean "Brooklyn is back" or something more complicated?
The article describes the project thusly:
The New Jersey Nets' relocation to the new Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn is a big reason why guard Deron Williams re-signed with the team and why the league's best center, the Orlando Magic's Dwight Howard, once tried to join him.
When the arena opens this fall with concerts by Jay-Z and Barbra Streisand and the first Nets' game, it will cap one of the more remarkable reversals of fortune in U.S. urban history.
Barclays is part of a planned $5 billion high-rise residential-commercial complex that community groups have criticized for abusing the power of eminent domain, uprooting residents and ripping up the neighborhood fabric.
But to Fred Siegel, a New York writer and political activist, the project says: "Brooklyn is back."
It's interesting to hear Fred Siegel quoted as saying that the Barclays Center indicates that "Brooklyn is back." I bet he said more, or would have, if they asked. Siegel also has called arena developer Bruce Ratner a "master of subsidy" and questioned whether there was any reason to provide public subsidies for the arena.
Posted by eric at August 14, 2012 10:19 AM