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September 23, 2012
The Times takes a balanced-ish look at "Hurricane Barclays," but still significant omissions (like construction violations, Ratner on timetable)
Atlantic Yards Report
Given the general press cheerleading for the Barclays Center, as well as the New York Times's pattern, in news coverage, of leaning toward the developer's narrative, it's somewhat refreshing to see a more balanced article on the front of the Metropolitan section today, headlined In Brooklyn, Bracing for Hurricane Barclays.
In fact, the article implicitly (and belatedly) demolishes the dangerously fanciful formulation that the Times peddled in the fall of 2005, that "the project's seemingly inexorable movement suggests that Mr. [Bruce] Ratner is creating a new and finely detailed modern blueprint for how to nourish - and then harvest - public and community backing for a hugely ambitious development."
Today's piece even includes the now-infrequent disclosure that Forest City Ratner "built The New York Times’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan."
At the same time, even this 2,700-word article can't capture some of the nuances in the controversy, and there are both gaps and errors that obscure what I call the Culture of Cheating.
One small but important one: the Barclays Center arena is portrayed as occupying the triangle serving as its plaza. Actually, the arena occupies most of the space between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and Dean Street and Atlantic Avenue (see schematic at top of blog). This isn't the first time the Times has gotten the map wrong.
Omissions worth noting:
- no mention of the repeated construction and traffic violations documented on camera by Atlantic Yards Watch and a consultant's report (and papered over by Ratner)
- no explanation of how the state agreed to give Forest City Ratner 25 years to build the project, rather than the promised ten, how the state held back official documents in a lawsuit (it and FCR eventually lost) over the timetable, and how Ratner claimed ten years “was never supposed to be the time we were supposed to build them in”
- no mention of the community request for a "Neighborhood Protection Plan" modeled on the Wrigley Field example
- no mention that the state overrode city zoning prohibiting sports facilities within 200 feet of residential districts
NoLandGrab: The New York Times article could be called pretty good coverage of the Atlantic Yards project -- if it had been done when it might have made a difference as to whether a new Nets arena would be built.
Posted by steve at September 23, 2012 10:39 PM