July 23, 2008
P’Heights to get protection?
The Brooklyn Paper
by Sarah Portlock
The city is moving toward protecting a wide swatch of Prospect Heights — but the proposed “historic district” would not bar a project that some neighbors think is the biggest destroyer of the area’s history: Atlantic Yards.
Last week, the Landmarks Preservation Commission began the process of designating approximately 12 blocks in Prospect Heights as a historic district that encompasses 870 buildings from the mid 19th- to early 20th-centuries.
The district would stretch from Flatbush to Washington avenues and from Eastern Parkway to Pacific Street — up to, but not including, Bruce Ratner’s $4-billion mega-development.
That inclusion could have saved the neighborhood — if “it had been done in time,” said Candice Carpenter, a lawyer who has worked with the anti-Atlantic Yards group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.
Deciding the boundaries of the proposed historic district is a matter of determining which buildings have a distinct “sense of place” and a coherent streetscape, said Landmarks Preservation Commission spokeswoman Lisi de Bourbon.
“The purpose of our agency is how to protect the historic fabric of the city’s neighborhoods, not to stop development,” de Bourbon said, noting that Landmarks primarily looks at architecture, dates of construction, and the streetscape. “It certainly may have been a part of the motivation of people who wanted us to designate the district, but that’s something that we really can’t consider.”
NoLandGrab: OK, let us get this straight. LPC's role is to protect the worthy "historic fabric" of neighborhoods, unless that pesky fabric lies in the path of mega-developments planned by politically connected developers? The politicization of the LPC is obvious, and cries for an agency with more teeth and independence that could actually save architecturally and historically significant buildings like the Ward Bakery and Spaulding Factory from the likes of Bruce Ratner — and Mayor Bloomberg.
Posted by eric at 11:27 AM
What's Made Brooklyn Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)
Reason Online
by Damon W. Root
The libertarian blog picks up on The Times's recent coverage of Brooklyn Brewery's real estate woes.
Sunday's New York Times brought word of the latest twist in the saga of New York's Brooklyn Brewery and its president Steve Hindy, purveyors of various fine beers, including the great Black Chocolate Stout. Back in 1996, Hindy and partner Tom Potter set up shop at a former matzo ball factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, then a mostly rundown industrial neighborhood but today a thriving hipster paradise, replete with bars, gourmet shops, and luxury condos. The only problem is that now the brewery can't afford to stay. So Hindy looked to city officials for help.
...There's a cautionary tale or two here about getting in bed with city officials and their shady real estate allies, but the worst of it has been Hindy’s support for controversial developer and New Jersey Nets owner Bruce Ratner, the driving force behind the atrocious Atlantic Yards project, a massive boondoggle that, if realized, will produce a taxpayer-subsidized basketball arena for Ratner’s Nets along with various office buildings and luxury complexes that will displace more than 40 business owners and tenants via eminent domain and other measures.
Still, what do you expect from the wolf's lair of New York's corrupt and massively regulated real estate market? As Hindy admitted to the New York Observer last year, "Things like the development at Coney Island and things like Atlantic Yards—that’s what we have to work with, and we have to make the best of it.”
Posted by eric at 9:21 AM
July 22, 2008
At MCNY panel, defending dissent and promoting the better way to develop (not like Atlantic Yards)
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder reports from a panel discussion last Thursday at the Museum of the City of New York that went a little off-topic.
But the Civic Talk, sponsored by Henry Stern’s New York Civic and titled “What If? Battles Over Development,” was notable for some rhetorical disagreement about the nature of civic opposition and some strong opinions on the right way to develop in New York. And Atlantic Yards came up not as a good example but as something to be avoided.
...[Urban Planner Alexander] Garvin then criticized government projects and, apparently, public-private partnerships like those pursued by the ESDC: “And we would stop having this ridiculous argument that we constantly have about the government going to get involved in developing property on its own. I think the government should be not developing real estate. The government should be doing its investing in its infrastructure and its own property. And there is a great deal of it. We do not maintain our streets well. We have collapsed bridges everywhere.”
“And finally this city has begun to do the kind of investment that it did in the 19th century, and that I believe would help deal with a lot of what Al Butzel is talking about," he said. "If we stopped talking about developing Atlantic Yards or developing these things and left private property to the private owners to develop and instead spent our money on the public realm, I think we’d get a lot of work [done].”
That drew significant applause.
Posted by eric at 9:35 AM
July 15, 2008
HOLD 'EM ACCOUNTABLE: DEVELOPER FILING PROPOSED
A City Council bill would require those who use public subsidies to spell out a project's public impact.
CityLimits.org
by Lauren Victory
With controversy erupting around practically every major new development in New York City – the new Yankee Stadium, Ground Zero and Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards, to name a few – concerned citizens have been looking toward the public review and approval process for a stronger voice. The help they seek may have arrived recently, in the form of the introduction of City Council Bill 801, titled Community Impact Reports.
Aimed at those seeking economic development benefits such as direct project subsidies, low-interest financing, tax benefits, tax-exempt financing, and tax-exempt bonds and grants, the bill would require the developer of each project to submit a comprehensive report to City Council outlining the intended social and economic effects of the project on the surrounding communities. Organizations in contract with the city for the purpose of providing social services, or those that create affordable housing units exclusively, are exempt from the requirement.
“We need to have a way to monitor the benefits that are given to developers,” said Councilman Thomas White Jr., a Queens Democrat who chairs Council's Economic Development Committee. Around the city, such benefits are legion: In fiscal year 2006, the New York City Industrial Development Agency alone granted at least $700 million in tax breaks to individual firms.
Councilman Albert Vann, in consultation with Councilmembers White, Bill de Blasio, Letitia James and others, created the bill to "help us to understand how city funds are being used in communities, to help them directly," according to Vann’s legislative director, Dottie Conway. Introduced June 29, the bill is now being further shaped by feedback and is not yet scheduled for a hearing or a vote.
NoLandGrab: Critics question how effective this legislation might actually be, and some see it as just another spin on City- and State-mandated environmental reviews, which are produced by the developer and always seem to arrive at the same, ain't-this-great outcome.
Posted by eric at 9:39 AM
July 13, 2008
Prospect Heights Historic District Advances
Gowanus Lounge
The creation of a Prospect Heights Historic District is making progress. The Landmarks Preservation Commission will “calendar” the district this Tuesday (7/15), which is the first step in formally creating it. This would lead to a public hearing and a vote on the District on October 28. Per a release from the Municipal Art Soceity, which teamed with the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Corporation to push for the district, the Chair of the PHNDC says: “The Landmarks Commission has obviously recognized the threat posed to the character of one of Brooklyn’s most well-preserved brownstone neighborhoods. The pressure from the Atlantic Yards project and other recent developments are of grave concern to the hundreds of local residents who have written in support of historic designation for Prospect Heights.”
Posted by amy at 4:02 PM
July 12, 2008
The Prospect Heights Historic District moves forward
Atlantic Yards Report
From a press release issued yesterday by the Municipal Art Society:
On Tuesday, July 15 the Landmarks Preservation Commission will “calendar” the Prospect Heights Historic District, the first step toward protecting one of Brooklyn’s finest – and most endangered – historic neighborhoods.
...
Prospect Heights is rich in historic architecture, with blocks of beautiful Italianate and neo-Grec rowhouses, interspersed with churches, small commercial and apartment buildings. Located just north of Prospect Park, the neighborhood has seen few changes since it was first developed in the late-19th Century. Today it is threatened by the Atlantic Yards project, a proposal by the developer Forest City Ratner to build 16 towers and a sports arena on a 22-acre site adjacent to the neighborhood.
...
Given that the Municipal Art Society has on previous occasions described the AY site as part of Prospect Heights, I'm going to consider that "adjacent to the neighborhood" line a lapse. My previous reportage on the landmarking effort is here and here.
Posted by amy at 9:12 AM
July 9, 2008
It came from the Blogosphere...
Center Hold, Your Friendly Neighborhood
NYC makes one blogger's list of candidates of Best Planned Cities, with a few caveats, gratis the New York Department of Shitty Planning:
[T]he truth is that New York’s planning department has been heading down hill since the 70’s and 80’s saw development of government housing projects in all 5 boroughs. Schools have attempted to improve by segmenting themselves into smaller, more focused institutions but are facing the same problems their behemoth predecessors endured. And the biggest building project New York has seen in decades, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Project, is an ostensible humanist project at best.
In the wake of this weekend's column by Michael O'Keeffe in the Daily News, two different blogs note that sportswriters seem to have the sharpest eye for political commentary:
Washington Square Park, NY Daily News: “Kiss my grass, Mayor Bloomberg” by Michael O’Keefe
I’m impressed by sports writers. They inject passion and reflect on history in a way that, for the most part, political writers and media covering City Hall don’t. If politics was covered the way sports is, perhaps more people would know what was going on and the world … our City … would be a different place.
DDDB.net, The Sportswriter Gets it Right
It's interesting that among mainstream New York newspapers, it's often the sports writers who have most pithily summed up the Atlantic Yards and Yankees deals for the corporate welfare exercises they are. As noted below, city columnist Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News deftly skewered the Yankees job promises last week. And then in the Sunday Daily News, sportswriter Michael O'Keeffe followed up with this observation about the state of big-money sports in the City of New York.
Note: Juan Gonzalez covers local issues for the Daily News, not sports.
Posted by lumi at 4:25 AM
June 25, 2008
Chicago, Say No to the Olympics!
Gapers Block
by Ramsin Canon
A warning to Chicagoans to reject the 2016 Olympics includes a reference to the "now-infamous and loathed Atlantic Yards development," and offers up a link to our favorite project watchdog.
There could be a continued dilution of any top-down negotiated "Community Benefits Agreement," as happened in New York City in the now-infamous and loathed Atlantic Yards development, as reported by In These Times' Michael Gauss. In that case, developers sought political cover by enticing a community group (in that case, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN) into a backroom deal that left plenty of room for developer wiggle room.
Posted by eric at 12:18 PM
June 22, 2008
Campaign to Reform the Governance of Atlantic Yards
BrooklynSpeaks via YouTube
June 16th Press Conference at City Hall, NY to launch campaign to reform the governance of Atlantic Yards.
Posted by amy at 10:35 AM
June 19, 2008
10 to lose: Ugly buildings NYC would be better without
 |
amNY
by David Freedlander
While Bruce Ratner busily tears down every building he can in the footprint of his Atlantic Yards project, including the landmark-worthy Ward Bakery, amNY thinks he should perhaps be tearing down one of his own.
Each winter, amNewYork devotes a special issue to 10 buildings in New York City that we fear will soon disappear under negligent eye of the city's real estate interests.
Now, with the turning of the seasons and the sun high in the sky, we say enough with gnashing of teeth over this vanishing city. It's time to do a little pruning.
Besides, even the glittering New York City skyline is bound to contain a few clunkers. That's why we asked some of the city's leading architects and critics to put away their pencils and take out their erasers, and tell us which parts of New York the city would be better of without.
...6.) Atlantic Center
Rob Lane, Regional Design Programs, Regional Plan Association:
"Seems like the focus should be on buildings and structures that are not just ugly in someone's opinion, but things that detract from, if not destroy, the most essential part of urbanity — the pedestrian experience. One example is Atlantic Center in Brooklyn. Not only is it an eyesore, it completely detracts from the walkers experience through long empty sidewalks and hallways and absolutely no street life whatsoever."
Photo Gallery [photos 1-12 correspond to the buildings featured in the article]
Posted by eric at 3:30 PM
June 13, 2008
Is the Poor Economy Saving Our Skylines?
Jaunted.com
The Western World may be losing it's dominance in the neverending skyline wars, but that might not be such a bad thing for American and European city-dwellers. German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reports that as the credit crisis is halting ambitious real estate projects in the States, emerging powers such as China, Dubai and Russia are building bigger and crazier skyscrapers than ever.
This skyline boom may be providing these nouveau riche nations with status symbols, but much of the construction is being criticized by architecture experts as environmentally and aesthetically harmful.
Public opinion in many places seems to agree with the experts' contention that modern skyscrapers are ugly. The Spiegel article cites European architects who see a positive side to the poor economy because it will allow the continent to preserve it's "enduring cityscapes."
Similarly in New York, Frank Gehry's $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn is stalling thank to money troubles, which must be a relief to the area residents who have protested the plan since it's inception. Another major New York landmark, the proposed Freedom Tower, is also way behind schedule, but it's not like those designs have been highly anticipated by the locals.
Posted by eric at 9:33 AM
June 10, 2008
Cities vs Skyscrapers
Market Movers
Portfolio.com
by Felix Salmon
Condé Nast Portfolio columnist Felix Salmon critiques BusinessWeek's recent proposition that when it comes to architecture, bigger (and newer) is always better.
Many thanks to Matthew for pointing me to an extremely peculiar 3,000-word Business Week feature on global architecture. If you want proof that the teachings of Jane Jacobs have yet to sink in around much of the rest of the world, then all you need to do is read this article, which paints global architectural activity as, in the words of the headline, "The Battle for the World's Skyline".
...And it would be very hard indeed to find many New Yorkers who agree with the Business Week article that the scaling-back of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn is "a tough blow for New York". (I suspect the authors will have lost most Brooklynites when they describe the area as "an industrial wasteland".)
Posted by lumi at 1:29 PM
The Battle for the World's Skyline
Cities like London and New York don't have the money to keep up with Asia, Russia, and the Persian Gulf. Is the Western urban landscape out of date?
BusinessWeek
by Ulrike Knöfel, Frank Hornig and Bernhard Zand
From a Western perspective, at least, this is precisely the problem. Economically booming megacities — such as Beijing, Shanghai and Dubai — where extravagant skyscrapers are shooting up all over, mean that cities like New York are beginning to look old and outdated, despite attempts to modernize. In Europe, the eastern part is beginning to look more modern than the western part. Cities like Istanbul and Moscow are more dynamic than London, Paris or Milan.
There have never been this many skyscrapers on the drawing boards, with most of them planned for the world's new boom towns. The West is eying this development with jealousy, all the more intense for its inability to compete. The massive downturn in the American credit market has caused the cancellation or postponement of many major architectural and urban-planning projects.
...Yet another of Gehry's urban improvement ventures has run into difficulties. Gehry was commissioned to transform an industrial wasteland in Brooklyn into a mixed-use architectural pearl. The price tag of the Atlantic Yards project — which New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised as a "colossal achievement of one of the world's leading architects" — was $4 billion (€2.6 billion). But demand has been unsatisfactory, and Gehry was forced to reduce the size of the largest tower in the complex. According to the developers, construction of several of the planned buildings will be placed on hold.
It's a tough blow for New York. For real estate aficionados, it remains the "ultimate 24-hour American city," a place that attracts the global elite. But it takes some effort and a constant series of facelifts to keep it that way. Where else but in New York is there so must distaste for any form of inertia?
NoLandGrab: "Damned lawsuits! I bought this overpriced Brooklyn condo because I thought this backwater was going to be more like Istanbul or Moscow."
Posted by lumi at 12:48 PM
June 9, 2008
Manholes - And What They Can Teach Us
The Footprint Gazette
The new blog diagnoses the cause behind the symptom of exploding manhole covers on Dean Street.
Did anyone else hear those manholes exploding up and down Dean St. yesterday? Did you hear what they were trying to tell us? Three manholes did their inaugural summer dances early yesterday evening prompting the fire department to take what must have been one of their shortest drives down to the end of their block. It also prompted the regulars at Freddy's to take the short trip outside to see what all the commotion was about.
I'll tell you what the commotion was all about. The city, the streets of the city, were trying to tell us something. They are ill and they angry. They are upset that on the other end of the block the sewer pipes have been exposed to help expedite the flushing of your tax dollars. Millions of your bucks are heading down that there exposed drain to prep for an arena that stands as an emblem of civic dysfunction. Meanwhile the city's infrastructure requires those dollars to keep things like manhole explosions from halting day to day life.
I don't know if the manholes popping were directly related to the construction blighting up the block, but I do know that the juxtaposition of the two painted a pretty precise painting of why this project stinks.
Posted by eric at 2:27 PM
May 30, 2008
Open space versus parks
Greater Greater Washington
This District of Columbia blog serves up Atlantic Yards as an example of development that is not "good for the area."
The design for Poplar Point seems to do the best with what it has. Making the stadium stimulate activity in the neighborhood depends upon generating foot traffic to and from games rather than simply a lot of car trips to parking next to the stadium. The deck over the 295 freeway is a key piece, connecting the new neighborhood with the old one and the Metro station. The stadium is near the deck and from the drawing, I don't see any surface parking lots.
If the deck doesn't get cut for cost reasons and the stadium can in fact draw more events beyond the 33 professional soccer games a year, this will be good for the area. If the project morphs into something like NYC's Atlantic Yards, where one building after another gets "postponed" and acres of "temporary" surface parking will last for ten years or more, then we'll prove Fisher right. I hope not.
Posted by eric at 10:19 PM
May 22, 2008
At MAS, AY as an example of a neighborhood planning struggle
Atlantic Yards Report
When it comes to discussions of “David vs. Goliath,” the subject of a Municipal Art Society (MAS) Planning Center Forum on May 14, Atlantic Yards is an inevitable subject, though--as I’ll note below--the politics of AY means that more than one set of parties might consider themselves “Davids.”
The panel addressed the issue of “neighborhood planning in the face of large-scale development,” and planner/architect Stuart Pertz, in his introduction, noted that some projects are inherently large, and only work if built on a large scale. “Unfortunately, it often gets out of hand,” he said, suggesting that “Goliath in development has extraordinary leverage, using powerful lawyers, contractors, planners, and unions.” Then again, he said, “there are many Davids.”
A fair amount of the discussion revolved around the Atlantic Yards-alternative UNITY Plan.
Architect Marshall Brown (right), a developer of the UNITY plan for the Metropolitian Transportation Authority’s Vanderbilt Yard (and beyond), said, with perhaps some retrospective bravado, “Four years ago we realized we needed to have something in place for the probable occurrence of Forest City Ratner’s plans running aground.” He suggested that Atlantic Yards exemplified a “willful ignorance of limits,” including the physical limit of an eight-acre railyard, the legal limit of eminent domain, the democratic limit of ULURP (the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, bypassed in this case for a fast-track state review), and “finally, the all too evident limit of the talents of a single architect.”
He noted that he wasn’t dissing Frank Gehry, just pointing out--as have others, and even Gehry himself--that megaprojects require multiple architects.
Brown suggested that questions of sustainability and the “looming environmental apocalypse” meant that the Bloomberg administration should prioritize quality ahead of quantity: “I’d say it’s a city of limits.”
Lawyer Candace Carponter (right), a co-chair of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN), described how the coalition, formed to respond to the Atlantic Yards environmental review, moved from officially agnostic to ultimately oppositional, joining a lawsuit challenging the review, and becoming a supporter of the UNITY plan. She suggested that the combination of a new governor, “detrimental economics,” and the Newark option for the Nets might provide an opening for the UNITY plan--though of course, that remains to be seen.
Posted by eric at 10:45 AM
The Manhattan Borough President stresses land use
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder surfs the web to evaluate how New York City's five borough presidents look at land-use issues.
As noted in the discussion May 14 at the Municipal Art Society, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has advanced ahead of the other borough presidents in stressing the importance of land use issues and in training Community Board members on land use issues.
Follow the link for a look at the different borough home pages.
Posted by eric at 10:43 AM
May 20, 2008
How build big in NYC? Not via the AY example, panelists suggest
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder files an in-depth report on last night's "Can NYC Build BIG Anymore" panel discussion, and offers plenty of reasons why opponents of Atlantic Yards won't miss Empire State Development Corporation President Avi Schick when he leaves at the end of the summer.
What are the right ways to build big projects in a growing city? Although panelists who spoke Monday night didn’t make the point explicitly, the answers they offered--public planning, realistic timetables, public ownership, infrastructure first, and media skepticism toward overhyped renderings--generally point to the opposite of the process behind Atlantic Yards.
The panel, titled Can NYC Build BIG Anymore?, was sponsored by Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century and held at Iguana Restaurant in Midtown. Notably, the acting head of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) also offered a hearty defense of Atlantic Yards, adopting some of developer Forest City Ratner's talking points.
The question, panelists agreed, was not “can” but “how.” “One of the problems we have to confront is that people want to build big too fast,” observed Avi Schick, acting president of the ESDC, which approved and is overseeing Atlantic Yards. “Sometimes they bit off a little too much when they tried to push an entire plan forward at once.”
Posted by eric at 9:09 AM
May 18, 2008
State Development Agency Buffeted by Slowing Economy and Internal Rifts
New York Times
CHARLES V. BAGLI
For more than a year, the state’s main economic development agency, the Empire State Development Corporation, has been in disarray, plagued by turf battles, poor management and the political collapse of Gov. Eliot Spitzer, business leaders and state officials say.
...
A co-chairman of the development corporation, Patrick J. Foye, was one of the first officials to lose his job when Gov. David A. Paterson took over in March. Mr. Paterson has yet to nominate someone to run the agency.Moreover, the governor has sent conflicting messages, preaching fiscal austerity while suggesting that the state can move forward on a host of costly projects, including the Second Avenue subway, the extension of the No. 7 line, the $14 billion redevelopment of the West Side railyards, the $14 billion Penn Station project and the $4 billion Atlantic Yards basketball arena and residential complex in Brooklyn.
A senior adviser to Mr. Paterson rejected the idea that the administration had sent mixed messages, saying the governor would not commit to projects that the state cannot afford. The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, also said the administration planned to release plans for revamping the agency. As part of that overhaul, Mr. Paterson will eliminate one of Mr. Spitzer’s more contentious innovations: dividing the corporation’s leadership into downstate and upstate leaders.
Posted by amy at 9:39 AM
May 9, 2008
A Tale of Two Cities, Only One With Sewers
The New York Times
by Susan Dominus
When Gordhandas Soni, the owner of an Indian food company, agreed to relocate his warehouse and factory to Willets Point, Queens, back in 1990, it never occurred to him to ask about some of the more basic amenities — the sewage system, for example. “You never ask, ‘You have sewers here?’ ” said Mr. Soni, whose business is called House of Spices. “In America, right here, in the heart of New York City? No! It never occurred to me to ask. It would be silly to ask.”
...Now Mr. Soni has banded together with 11 other businesses in Willets Point, filing a suit charging that the city has neglected to repair potholes and provide basic services like sewers and snow plowing, in an effort to devalue the property and ease the path to redevelopment.
Put in the sewers, and fix the potholes, he and his allies contend, and Willets Point will redevelop itself. The city, in reply, concedes that might be true — but because the area is on a flood plain, the city couldn’t provide sewers without removing the businesses, creating an unfortunate but intractable chicken-and-egg situation.
...Even if the city could make him whole, Mr. Soni wonders, why shouldn’t he get some additional compensation for the inconvenience of losing his property? As he put it, why should the city “take away from the small guy like me and give to a billion dollar company just so he can make another billion dollars?”
...Although it’s never easy for American manufacturers to compete with their counterparts in India — especially when it comes to something like an Indian food product — Mr. Soni says that he would be thrilled with his prospects were it not for this major uncertainty hanging over his head, and the threat that the city could invoke eminent domain to take the property.
“I always thought India would be my competition, that India would run me out of business,” he said, watching a machine fill jars with a dark, rich tamarind paste. “I didn’t think it would be New York City.”
Posted by eric at 12:45 PM
May 8, 2008
When will Olin's new open space designs be released? (Soon)
Atlantic Yards Reports
Norman Oder wonders when we might get new renderings from Atlantic Yards landscape architect Laurie Olin.
First Frank Gehry's new designs, then more from Laurie Olin? That sounds like developer Forest City Ratner's new Atlantic Yards strategy.
...As I pointed out Tuesday, Olin's somewhat stale designs, curiously enough, remain in the Atlantic Yards Image Gallery.
However, as Gehry's new graphics suggest, the Urban Room would be quite different. Thus Olin's designs surely will be updated--but when?
Posted by eric at 8:49 AM
Lotsa "Atlantic Lots"
StreetsBlog, Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots?
With development projects across the city threatened by an uncertain economy, critics of Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards project believe that a slowdown in construction could burden Prospect Heights with decades of blight. A slide show by the Municipal Art Society, called "Atlantic Yards or Atlantic Lots?," offers a bleak look into the future, like this rendering of neighborhood blocks destroyed for "temporary" surface lots that would accommodate some 1,400 cars.
MAS is calling on Governor David Paterson to suspend demolition in order to prepare an interim development plan, and has a link to a web form through which members of the public can contact Paterson directly.
The Campaign for Community-Based Planning, Atlantic Yards = Atlantic Lots?
Following up on this weekend’s Call Time-Out on Atlantic Yards rally, the Municipal Art Society has released renderings of what the area might look like as demolitions continue and only a small piece of the proposed project is actually built. Visit atlanticlots.com for a slide show.
Posted by lumi at 5:42 AM
April 30, 2008
Olympic Landscape
The NY Sun
By James Gardner
Congratulations Bruce Ratner, your Atlantic Yards plan is now on the short list of controversial projects in NYC:
When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. There are none of those nettlesome obstructions that beset the urban planners of New York City: community boards and concerned citizens, good-government types and the dithering dysfunctionality of a score of agencies. Well known to all are the hurdles that developers and architects have encountered recently at ground zero and the Atlantic Yards, the acrimony that has beset Columbia University's West Harlem expansion, not to mention the travails of Londoners over furnishing Heathrow with one lousy little new runway.
Meanwhile, in less time than it takes for New Yorkers to draw up a committee to decide whether to vote on drawing up a committee, the city of Beijing has reinvented itself in anticipation of this August's Olympic Games. Whole neighborhoods have been gleefully wiped out in order to build the Beijing CBD, or Central Business District, situated between the capital's 3rd and 4th Ring Roads and now the site of CCTV headquarters, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Despite the social consequences, Beijing appears to be one NYC architecture critic's wet dream:
Taken together, the new architecture of Beijing is a partial and mitigated success, whatever its social benefit or harm. But however many eggs had to be broken to make this particular omelet, New Yorkers can only look on in envy and amazement at the boldness, the size, and the inventiveness of these new designs, which would never have stood a chance in Gotham.
NoLandGrab: Mayor Bloomberg would probably give his right arm to do away with the pesky Community Boards, heck, even skip the City Council, in order to "streamline" the city planning process. Imagine how many neighborhoods and blocks the city could have plowed and resown if the city had been awarded the 2012 Olympic games.
Posted by lumi at 4:58 AM
April 25, 2008
Arena subway access without the Urban Room? ESDC says it's OK
Atlantic Yards Report
The "Urban Room" at Atlantic Yards (aka, "atrium") is billed as a multipurpose, glass-enclosed retail gallery, public space, ticket window, subway entrance, and the largest stoop in Brooklyn, and has been lauded and sold as a "significant public amenity," "a soaring Piranesian space," "a prominent feature of the pedestrian experience," and "its own destination." Yet without the signature tower — fancifully dubbed "Miss Brooklyn" — might developer Bruce Ratner deliver an "Urban Shed?"
Norman Oder sifts through the few documents that have been made public, and it looks like the only requirement is that Ratner "provide reasonable assurances... that the new subway station access that will adjoin the Arena will be completed and operational at the time the Arena is opened for operation."
Oder concludes:
Without Miss Brooklyn, it looks like there's no room for the Urban Room.
Posted by lumi at 4:26 AM
April 22, 2008
Will Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 survive his mayoralty? Should it?
Atlantic Yards Report
Many people concerned about planning and development issues were heartened by Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s announcement last year of PlaNYC 2030, observed Eve Baron, director of the Municipal Art Society (MAS) Planning Center. However, as she said introducing a forum titled “PlaNYC2030 Post-Bloomberg” on April 14, many people think important issues were left out--and the panel discussion bore that out.
Posted by lumi at 5:19 AM
April 17, 2008
Atlantic Yards Subsidies Might Total $2 Billion
Runnin' Scared [The Village Voice]
By Duncan Meisel
The Voice's daily blog published a recent-news wrap for Atlantic Yards, covering subsidies, more subsidies and architecture critic Diana Lind's scathing takedown of Bruce Ratner's controversial megaproject.
Posted by lumi at 4:34 AM
April 16, 2008
Answers About Brooklyn Architecture
City Room (The New York Times Blog)
Diana Lind, author of "Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design," answers questions from readers. She most definitely has not drunk The Times's Kool-Aid when it comes to Atlantic Yards.
Q: Speaking of Atlantic Yards, what does Ms. Lind think of this megadevelopment, and its potential effects on Brooklyn life?
— Posted by matt
A: Living in Fort Greene half a block from Atlantic Avenue, I’ve thought a lot about the Atlantic Yards project and its potential impact on life in Brooklyn. Certainly the site merits some kind of development, but I’m opposed to the Ratner plan as it stands now for a few reasons. I take umbrage at the project’s vast, uninterrupted scale; its street closings; its miserable sense of public space (when was the last time you threw a Frisbee on a private building’s lawn?); and most recently, revelations of its more than $2 billion worth of tax write-offs and subsidies from the government, according to the New York Post. Though the project has promoted the fact that it’s going to create jobs and housing, the scheme of using public money to finance this endeavor sounds like robbing Peter and Paul to pay Mary (sorry, the pope’s coming to town).
But I also have aesthetic qualms with the project. I don’t think any one architect should be in charge of designing 22 acres of any city. In a March 21 article by the New York Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, the project’s uncertain status is lamented. Mr. Ourousoff points to the importance of great planning projects like Rockefeller Center (roughly the same size as Atlantic Yards). But Rockefeller Center was developed by a team of architects; Atlantic Yards will not be. Gehry is good at what he does, and as others have noted his voluptuous style would nicely contrast with the phallic bank building, but more than seven million square feet of his outlandish style (of any architect’s style) starts to look pretty tacky and boring, no matter the context.
So, if the project goes ahead as it’s planned now, how this will affect life in Brooklyn? A lot. Irreversibly. It will complete Brooklyn’s transformation from a post-industrial residential borough to a city unto itself and will extend Downtown Brooklyn to Fort Greene, Prospect Heights and Boerum Hill.
Spending time in Brooklyn now, one senses the borough’s promise and mutability. When and if Atlantic Yards is completed, I think many people will feel an enormous opportunity was lost on a not particularly innovative project. If I were in charge of the development site, I’d scrap the plan, build a platform over the railyards, and auction off small parcels of the site to varied developers, cultural organizations and schools. The diversity of approaches to the parcels would mimic the city’s naturally haphazard development process and allow for more community involvement.
NoLandGrab: Better hurry up and take a screen shot of this piece, since we don't think we'll be seeing such unvarnished criticism of Atlantic Yards in the pages of the Times's print edition any time soon.
Atlantic Yards Report, Answers About Brooklyn Architecture, criticism of AY
Norman Oder must must have been rendered speechless, since he posted the passage we cited above sans comment.
Posted by eric at 12:21 PM
April 15, 2008
West Side plans in disarray; what about AY?
Atlantic Yards Report
An article in The New York Times prompts Norman Oder to compare the Atlantic Yards fiasco to the Hudson Yards disarray:
Yesterday, in an article headlined West Side Redevelopment Plans in Disarray, the New York Times described a harsh reality that has some interesting echoes in Brooklyn:
Because of the economic downturn, logistical problems and, critics say, design flaws, the expansion of the Javits Center has died, the plan to rebuild Penn Station and the area around it is in jeopardy and there are deep questions about financing, public and private, to extend the subway or build over the railyards. ...But many urban planners, architects, community leaders and developers say the downturn may have a silver lining, providing an opportunity for the city to rethink and reconfigure sweeping proposals many of them had doubts about all along.
The article didn't mention Atlantic Yards, but there are some comparisons and contrasts worth considering.
The full article briefly examines the developer selection process, increased density around transit hubs, public costs and the Regional Plan Association's position.
Posted by lumi at 5:32 AM
April 10, 2008
Willets Point property owners sue city
NY Daily News
by Jess Wisloski
Long-time NoLandGrab readers will remember Jess Wisloski, who cut her teeth covering the Atlantic Yards land grab and is now on the Willets Point beat.
Willets Point property owners filed a lawsuit against the city Wednesday, charging it has deliberately denied the area basic city services to grease the skids for condemnation.
About 150 business owners and their supporters gathered on the steps of City Hall to announce the federal case and to protest the city's plans to redevelop the gritty 60-acre industrial swath known as the Iron Triangle.
...Eight City Council members backed the protesters Wednesday and denounced the city's negotiating tactics, which the business owners said have been in bad faith.
Mayoral hopeful Tony Avella (D-Bayside), who heads the Council's zoning committee, said he would refuse to approve any plans that would invoke eminent domain to develop something on the site other than a "good public purpose," such as a school or a highway.
"It is a completely different thing to take it and give it to another private individual, a developer, who will then turn around and make millions of dollars," Avella said. "We're here today to say, 'No.' Go back to the drawing board, Mr. Mayor."
More coverage:
The New York Times, Businesses in Potholed, Sewerless Queens District Sue the City
“Some of the photos you see behind me — you see floods, you wonder if this is New York City in 2008 or Baghdad after a few mortar rounds,” said Councilman Hiram Monserrate of Queens, whose district includes the area.
Councilman Eric N. Gioia, also of Queens, said the threat of eminent domain, even as a last resort, was “like walking into a negotiation, putting a gun on the table, and saying, ‘I’d like to strike a fair deal; I’ll only use the gun if I have to.’”
Newsday, Willets Point businesses sue over mayor's plan
Queens Times Ledger, Willets Pt. biz group to sue for infrastructure upgrades
Gothamist.com, Willets Point Locals Sue City Over Neglect
At a City Hall rally yesterday, Anthony Fodera, president of Fodera Foods Inc., told the Times that he’s “been there for 35 years; I have yet to see them fill a pothole.”
The Queens Courier, Willets Point businesses sue city
NY1, Ten Willets Point Landowners Sue The City
"This is our property," said Feinstein Ironworks Owner Dan Feinstein. "It's been in our family for generations. This is our legacy to our children and our grandchildren, and we're not going to allow this administration to steal it from us."
Posted by eric at 3:15 PM
April 9, 2008
Willets Point protesters sue to block $3B city plan
Protesters say the city hasn't t provided sewers, sidewalks, paved roads or storm drains for the last 40 years. New development is like throwing out the baby before changing the bathwater.
Crain's NY Business
by Hilary Potkewitz
Willets Point property owners have filed a federal eminent domain suit against New York City in an effort to keep their businesses from falling prey to "redevelopment."
A group of businesses facing eviction by the city from their homes in Willets Point, Queens filed a federal lawsuit against the City of New York and several public officials Wednesday. It is the companies’ latest effort to forestall plans for a city-backed $3 billion mixed-use project on their land.
The case, filed in the Eastern District federal court, seeks to force the city to provide sanitary sewers, sidewalks, paved roads and storm drains in a commercial area that has had none for more than 40 years. The suit also seeks unspecified damages, charging city officials with a “waging a campaign of intentional neglect to create and perpetuate an eyesore for eventual justification of the use of eminent domain,” according to the filing.
The businesses say they’ve been thrown out with the bathwater.
“The city has intentionally driven down the value of these properties by withholding services,” says Michael Gerrard, a partner in the environmental law practice at Arnold & Porter, which is representing the business owners. “It is impermissible for the city to try and take advantage of that [lack of services] to acquire properties at fire-sale prices.”
NoLandGrab: While a spokesperson for the City's Economic Development Corporation called the area "blighted and seriously contaminated," she didn't comment on the City's failure to provide the neighborhood with sewers, sidewalks, paved roads or storm drains for the past 40 years. But now that fancy new Citi Field is set to open across the street next April, the area's problems need to be addressed — through eminent domain, if necessary (but only, of course, as a last resort).
Posted by eric at 5:09 PM
April 3, 2008
LETTER: How to Build a City
The NY Times, Letter to the Editor
To the editor:
Re “Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans” (Architecture column, March 27):
Nicolai Ouroussoff comes to the right conclusion: When you are trying to build a city, it’s about championing the public good, not counting beans.
But by bemoaning the quality of the proposed buildings and the watering down of Frank Gehry’s work for the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, he adds to the confusion about the difference between building a city and treating big chunks of the city as if they were architectural design problems.
The fact is that great cities do not rely on cutting-edge architecture. They rely on a clear framework of streets and open spaces, designed by and for the public, that over time can support the full spectrum of architecture, from the pedestrian to the heroic.
Indeed, how many heroic buildings can you have in one place before none of them are?
Robert Lane
Director of Design
Regional Plan Association
Posted by lumi at 4:35 AM
March 31, 2008
The Community Boards face cuts, but the system needs a boost
Atlantic Yards Report
It was a relatively small article on page 5 of the City section of the New York Times, sandwiched in between pieces on the closing of a beloved laundry in Cobble Hill and after-school life at a coffee/tea/spice shop in Park Slope, but it touched on a very important issue: New Yorkers have way too few resources to pursue democracy at the neighborhood level. What it didn't explain is why the Community Board (CB) system needs reform, and may well become an issue in the next mayoral race.
The article, headlined Not Quite Passing the Hat, but Already Feeling the Pain, concerns cuts of 5%-8% at the CBs, which may not sound like much, but cut into already limited resources.
...City Council Member Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, lamented that CBs often don't have the resources to be proactive, to say "This alternative works." The Atlas is an attempt to change that, to show what community planners have been doing.
Support from the Borough President and others, Brewer said, can be key to empowering the CBs. Most don't have the staff to keep up with all the changes in their community and put all documents online. "Maybe Craig Hammerman"--District Manager of Brooklyn CB 6, which has an extensive web site--"because he's a nut," Brewer said affectionately, but few others manage similarly.
NoLandGrab: Brooklyn CB 6 — largely thanks to the tireless Hammerman — has long advocated for a much greater community role in the Atlantic Yards project.
Posted by eric at 3:28 PM
March 29, 2008
Meet Avi Schick, New York's New Steamroller
The New York Observer
Eliot Brown
A longtime attorney, today he sits as president and acting CEO of New York State’s powerful development agency, with control over numerous multibillion-dollar projects such as the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Station, the Javits Center expansion and the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. With a new administration in Albany and the top position vacant following the recent resignation of the Empire State Development Corporation’s co-chairman, Patrick Foye, a well-connected Mr. Schick is pushing to make his temporary role at the agency’s top a permanent one, according to people with knowledge of his plans.
...
A physically imposing Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, Mr. Schick is cordial and warm in casual conversation, noticeably fidgeting his legs as he sits and talks with a confidence about his work. The posts of LMDC chairman and ESDC president, which also includes overseeing the $4 billion-plus Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn and the possible use of eminent domain for Columbia University’s West Harlem expansion, keep him tied to his work, so much so that he has said he’s added a visible set of gray hairs to his previously jet-black beard.
Schick has already earned the love of both Sheldon Silver and Bruce Ratner:
The developers of Atlantic Yards, Forest City Ratner, also give high marks to Mr. Schick, with CEO Bruce Ratner praising him for his intelligence and competence.“He’s got a combination of legal ability, leadership and also being able to pull together both lawyers, agencies and the private sector,” Mr. Ratner said. “Compared to other people I’ve worked with in government, he’s on the very, very top.”
Posted by amy at 11:05 AM
March 28, 2008
As Builders’ Grand Visions Dissolve, So Does Our Faith
NY Times columnist Clyde Haberman takes a sideswipe at Atlantic Yards in today's column about grand urban development plans and promises broken (emphasis added):
On other fronts, plans to expand the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center were hurled into limbo by the administration of Gov. Eliot Spitzer. (Remember him?) Have you noticed proposals for a new Pennsylvania Station going anywhere? Much of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn now seems about to be put on hold — not that everyone will mourn.
For the ne plus ultra of development delays, we have only three words for you: World, Trade and Center.
Posted by lumi at 6:45 AM
Visions of parking lots at stalled Atlantic Yards site
MetroNY
By Amy Zimmer
If you're wondering why Bruce Ratner has been taking down every building he possibly can in the footprint of his stalled Atlantic Yards plan, there's only one answer... PARKING.
What’s next for Atlantic Yards? How about a giant parking lot?
At least, that’s what some Brooklynites fear is coming in light of developer Bruce Ratner’s announcement that the recessionary climate has stalled parts of the $4 billion project.
“He’s demolished a number of buildings,” said Tish James, the area’s City Councilwoman and a vocal critic of the project, at a recent City Hall hearing on congestion pricing. “I don’t want those lots to be turned into parking lots.”
Ratner has said construction on the 18,000-seat arena was scheduled to begin by yearend, but other parts of the project’s first phase — housing, retail and an office tower dubbed “Miss Brooklyn” — are on hold.
Some have already predicted that if congestion pricing becomes a reality, a boom in parking lots and garages will soon follow in easy-access portions of the outer boroughs.
James said she is worried about the parking-lot scenario at Atlantic Yards because “it’s a revenue generator and right now [land is] sitting fallow.”
...
A Ratner rep insisted the land would not be turned into parking lots.
NoLandGrab: Don't count on un-named Ratner reps to all of the sudden start telling the truth.
Ratner has already revealed that he plans to use cleared land as a "temporary surface parking lot." Only the definition of "temporary" is unclear.
The graphic above shows what Norman Oder calls "Phase 0," in July 2006:
Note that there's no official rendering of what might be called phase zero, which would show the entire site east of Sixth Avenue as either surface parking, staging, or railyards. Phase zero would persist during the construction of the first stage, over four years.
We now know that "four years" could actually be more than a decade.
Posted by lumi at 6:28 AM
A Bright Future for Brooklyn
The NY Times, Letter to the Editor
To the Editor:
Re “What Will be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn?,” by Nicolai Ouroussoff (Architecture, Weekend Arts, March 21):
The cancellation of Atlantic Yards would not be a “painful setback for urban planning” but a victory for Brooklyn and for responsible future development. Mr. Ouroussoff’s grand architectural visions for the Manhattanization of Brooklyn leaves out the effects on individuals.
Dozens of residents have been evicted because of Atlantic Yards, and the project would do further harm:
The “Brooklyn Bride” would cast a permanent shadow over the surrounding area.
The Nets Stadium would cause impossible traffic congestion.
Public streets would be closed for what would be a luxury development.
There would only be minimal affordable housing (Bruce Ratner has continually backed off from his initial promise).
A coalition of Brooklyn organizations has come up with a Unity Plan, to provide for the improvement of Brooklyn homes and services. The possibility finally looks brighter for that.
Reva Cooper
Brooklyn, March 21, 2008
Posted by lumi at 6:21 AM
UNITY Plan on Display on Atlantic Avenue
By way of dddb.net (Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn):
The UNITY Plan architectural model is on display in the windows of the Atlantic Avenue Betterment Association (ABBA) at 321 Atlantic Avenue between Smith and Hoyt Streets in Brooklyn. The public is encouraged to come take a look and spread the word.
The UNITY Plan is a community development plan and process for developing the Vanderbilt rail yards, a sensible alternative to Forest City Ratner's failing Atlantic Yards proposal.
Posted by lumi at 4:28 AM
March 27, 2008
Profit and Public Good Clash in Grand Plans
The NY Times
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Congratulations Bruce Ratner, your Atlantic Yards overdevelopment is officially a "FIASCO!"
According to the NY Times's architecture critic, in a piece about government-sponsored megaprojects in NYC (emphasis added):
The bitter battles over reconstruction plans for ground zero. The unraveling of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. And now this.
Given current economic realities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s selection on Wednesday of a team led by Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side railyards seems like a wishful fantasy. Yet even if the project takes decades to realize, it is a damning indictment of large-scale development in New York.
Like the ground zero and Atlantic Yards fiascos, its overblown scale and reliance on tired urban planning formulas should force a serious reappraisal of the public-private partnerships that shape development in the city today.
Nicolai Ouroussoff continues by trashing Tishman-Speyer's development plan for Hudson Yards, before getting in another another dig on Atlantic Yards:
In the Atlantic Yards project, Forest City Ratner acknowledged last week that it would delay building most of the elements of Frank Gehry’s design for that eight million-square-foot development because it is short of financing. If built, the project would be a pathetic distortion of the original design. And the developer already has city approval.
NoLandGrab: One misunderstanding on Nicky O's part is that Bruce Ratner's controversial project never had "city approval." Atlantic Yards is a STATE PROJECT, which includes all sorts of overrides of local zoning restrictions and is why the building of an arena was approved just across the street from people's houses (think looking out your bedroom window and seeing an arena).
MORE COMMENTARY:
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, The Fall of Plan: AY Goes From Eden to Fiasco
Ouroussoff's predecessor, the late Herbert Muschamp, had originally and infamously called Atlantic Yards a "garden of Eden." Oh how the grossly out-of-scale, financially infeasible, promotionally overblown have fallen.
Atlantic Yards Report, Ouroussoff: AY a "fiasco" with "city approval"
Wouldn't you know it, Norman Oder already tried to save the hardworking editors at The Times from themselves:
Actually, the developer already has government approval, but the city has nothing to do with it. The Empire State Development Corporation approved the project. I sent in a correction on Saturday after Ouroussoff made the same mistake in his essay on AY last Friday.
The Times didn't address the correction yet. But the distinction remains important; had the project gone through the city approval process, there would have been more public oversight and discussion.
NoLandGrab: Seriously, the sporting thing would be for The Times to correct the errors that keep getting repeated in the "Paper of Record" and reply, "Thanks for watching our backs, Norman!"
Posted by lumi at 5:30 AM
March 20, 2008
Planner Burden on balanced growth, community consultation, and "esthetic democracy" (in Brooklyn)
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder parses a two-year-old CUNY-TV interview with City Planning Commission Chairperson Amanda Burden in an attempt to understand how she looks at rezonings. This passage tells us just about all we need to know.
Burden: That's the thing. Any rezoning, to get it passed or done, has got to pass community boards and elected officials. So we have to build consensus. And the only way you can do that is by really showing people visually what they're going to get, and bringing in the stakeholders and getting them to feel invested in the plan. For instance, in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, here you had two miles of waterfront, it was fenced off, inacessible, derelict for decades. So to really get the community to not only understand the zoning that we were proposing, but to buy into that, we took the committee for open space of the community board there around to all waterfront parks in the city, and they chose the benches and the lights and the paving and the railing that's going to be on their waterfront. So this is really a plan that is created by the community. Otherwise we would have never have gotten it passed.
NoLandGrab: Oh, goody, the Community Board committee members appointed by the Borough President and Council Members get to pick the trim, while developers turn brownstones and warehouses into 30-story luxury condos. We love consensus!
The irony though, is that such meaningless input would be a welcome upgrade to the absence of a community role in shaping Atlantic Yards.
Posted by eric at 10:06 AM
March 12, 2008
How an omission in the LEED formula helped FCR and doomed the Ward Bakery
Atlantic Yards Report
So it's not just critics with hindsight who think LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, which aims to produce "green buildings" by assigning points scants the value of preserving existing buildings such as the Ward Bakery and their "embodied energy," the energy that went into building materials and construction.
It's a developer of LEED himself. "I happened to be on a retreat with a founder of LEED," commented planner John Shapiro at the annual conference of the Historic Districts Council last Saturday. The founder, Shapiro said, explained that a committee of the U.S. Green Buildings Council "intentionally downplayed historic preservation, because if they put it in the formula [for LEED], it would blow everything away and architects would ignore it."
Had the cost and value of embodied energy been factored in, it might have changed the equation the Empire State Development Corporation calculated when it asserted that the cost of development at the Ward Bakery site would be an additional $30 per square foot.
Posted by lumi at 5:34 AM
When it comes to PlaNYC 2030, AY is still the elephant in the room
Atlantic Yards Report
Remember how Atlantic Yards was the elephant in the room when Mayor Mike Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 was presented last April, given that it went conspicuously unmentioned in the housing chapter?
Well, city officials discussing the sustainability plan keep offering rhetoric counter to the sequence behind Atlantic Yards. The issue came up at the annual conference Saturday of the Historic Districts Council, with keynote speaker Rohit Aggarwala, who directs the Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability.
The plan initially was to address population growth and land use, but quickly grew. “[We began] what we thought was going to be a strategic land use plan," Aggarwala said, "but we quickly realized: you can’t think about land use in a city without thinking about transportation. And you can’t think about transportation without thinking about air quality.”
The chain connects to energy, water, and climate change. “If we solve one problem the wrong way, it’ll set us back on the others,” he said.
Of course, Atlantic Yards was approved by the state without any transportation improvements beyond game-day tweaks, and even supporters think congestion relief is necessary for the an arena to have a chance at the site.
NoLandGrab: HA! Aggarwala appeared at the Park Slope Civic Council's forum on sustainability last Thursday, and gave the EXACT same spiel. His comments spurred a handful of questions on Atlantic Yards, as several attendees were eager to call the Bloomberg administration on its hypocrisy, but the moderator (a known coward) gave Aggarwala a pass on the issue, contending that the forum was supposed to focus on "how to, not how not to."
PlaNYC's map for future residential growth
Norman Oder shares a map that he hadn't seen before. Have you?
Posted by lumi at 5:10 AM
March 8, 2008
Academic: public-private partnerships in NY are one-sided
Atlantic Yards Report
A pointed analysis of one-sided development deals from Thursday's New York Times might have led some people to think about Atlantic Yards:
“Public-private partnerships are now one-sided arrangements in which the public actors no longer plan public spaces in the public interest,” said Elliott Sclar, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University. “Instead they facilitate private-sector developments of these spaces in exchange for slight public amenities. In this case, the public gets the chance to catch a train in the basement of a vertical shopping mall.”
...
Are the Atlantic Yards benefits "slight public amenities"? The courts haven't had to decide. Rather, as U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis wrote in his decision last June dismissing the Atlantic Yards eminent domain challenge, "This case simply does not require the court to consider whether the Project is a good idea.. the issue before this court is whether the taking of Plaintiffs’ properties is rationally related to a conceivable public use."The Empire State Development Corporation commented, "We are pleased by the decision, which reaffirms the Atlantic Yards project's many public benefits: affordable housing, a world-class sports venue, improved transportation and increased economic activity."
Well, the affordable housing is delayed, the sports venue would be, an appeals court acknowledged, "generously leased," the improved transportation would include a new subway entrance under a shopping venue, the "urban room," and increased economic activity would be offset to a significant (though never fully calculated) degree by subsidies and public costs.
Posted by amy at 10:06 AM
March 6, 2008
DDDB to get preservation award from HDC, but Ward Bakery demolition continues
Atlantic Yards Report
From the Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn newsletter:
The Historic Districts Council (HDC) will be awarding Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn their Grassroots Preservation Award for our "ongoing efforts to stop the Atlantic Yards project." There will be a ceremony in May. We thank the HDC for acknowledging and honoring our ongoing work.
HDC gives several Grassroots Preservation Awards, often to groups that, unlike DDDB, have succeeded in their preservation mission. Last year's winners included the Broadway-Flushing Homeowners Association, the Crown Heights North Association, the East Village Community Coalition, and the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance, all of which had achieved preservation progress.
DDDB and allies have succeeded in raising consciousness about valuable buildings within the Atlantic Yards footprint and the general importance of responsible development, but it has not succeeded in blocking the ongoing demolition of the Ward Bakery, though Forest City Ratner and parent Forest City Enterprises have certainly practiced historic preservation elsewhere. Tracy Collins's photo shows the smokestack coming down.
...
Norman Oder notes that one building isn't coming down, yet:
If Forest City Ratner is in such a hurry to build the Atlantic Yards Arena, why hasn't the developer started to demolish the Spalding Building, which, unlike the Ward Bakery, actually would be within the arena footprint?
Maybe because it was already renovated into condos, and should the project be scotched, the apartments could easily be marketed.
Posted by lumi at 5:30 AM
March 4, 2008
UNITY workshop begins to address the whole AY footprint
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder reports from this Saturday's UNITY planning workshop:
Is it realistic to consider another future for the planned Atlantic Yards footprint, one based on the principles of the UNITY plan unveiled last September? That was the premise of a workshop Saturday organized by the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development, along with the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods (CBN).
And while the four-hour session didn’t produce definitive solutions, it did for the first time extend beyond the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Vanderbilt Yard, the major public property in the AY site, to the rest of the footprint, now owned mostly by developer Forest City Ratner. In other words, the project, launched in 2004 as Understanding, Imagining and Transforming the Yards (UNITY), might need a revised acronym.
About 40 people attended the event, held at the Belarusian Church on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill. Their conclusions were not particularly surprising: development should be contextual; major current buildings should be preserved; space for industry/manufacturing should be maintained; and new public space should be created. (Space for affordable housing was already part of the plan.)
Needless to say, an arena was not on the table, and any new plans would ultimately have to be measured against the costs of development. And the Ward Bakery, a building participants would like to save, is currently under demolition.
Posted by lumi at 5:35 AM
March 3, 2008
Unity
Brit (back) in Brooklyn posted this image from last Saturday's workshop for the community-supported UNITY plan.
Posted by lumi at 5:14 AM
February 29, 2008
TOMORROW: Workshop: Rezoning the Atlantic Yards Footprint
From StreetsBlog:
The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods is sponsoring a workshop by the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development to further the community based planning process for the area around the Vanderbilt rail yards. The area is currently proposed to house the Atlantic Yards development but with the global credit crisis there is a very strong possibility that project will never happen. Community members and elected officials will participate.
When
March 1, 2008 10:00 am - 2:00 pm
Where
St. Cyril’s Belarusian Cathedral
401 Atlantic Av. (at Bond St.)
BrooklynRSVP
Hunter College CCPD 212-650-3328 or ccpd @ hunter . cuny . edu
Posted by lumi at 5:15 AM
February 28, 2008
The UNITY plan expands, and will be up for discussion
Atlantic Yards Report
The UNITY plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's Vanderbilt Yard was unveiled in September, the project web site was re-launched in mid-January, and there's a public meeting Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., to update people and seek further input on UNITY.
The discussion will broaden to more of the Atlantic Yards footprint rather than just the 8.5-acre Vanderbilt Yard.
...What's clear is that two very different visions have emerged. While the UNITY plan would add significant residential density (1500 units over eight acres would be 187.5 units/acre, compared to 6430 units over 22 acres, or 292 units/acre), it would concentrate the tallest buildings at the east end of the site, near Vanderbilt Avenue.
It would place a park at the congested intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, while Forest City Ratner's plan would have an Urban Room, which will serve as a subway entrance and an entrance to the arena and arena block buildings, while housing an atrium, retail, and Nets ticket windows.
NoLandGrab: Click here for more info regarding Saturday's workshop.
Posted by eric at 9:35 AM
February 27, 2008
The Eagle Pimps Out (Makes Better) City Projects
Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter Sarah Ryley comes up with a new-n-improved Atlantic Yards project:
Bored by the debate between advocates of superblocks and Jane Jacobian traditionalists, who prefer the old-school street grids, the delay in the Atlantic Yards project would be used as an opportunity to marry the two concepts. Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt avenues would still be demapped, but the seven high-rises would be adjusted back to the traditional street grid lined with storefronts on both sides, the glittering glass towers creating a monumental archway leading into a park. Cobblestone streets off-limits to cars, dotted by fountain-side seating, would bisect the massive block, creating an effect similar to what Union Square would look like if its bordering streets were turned to promenades. Restaurants would be nestled into the curves of the buildings to accommodate outdoor seating, and retailers would be a mix of national and local boutiques. Landscaping for the park would be a mixture of hardtop to accommodate Saturday farmer’s markets and basketball games, and grassy lawns. A giant glass cube would float 20 feet high in the center, accessible by elevator, containing Mac’s newest flagship store.
Developer Forest City Ratner would make a fortune off retail rents (judging by the success of other promenade shopping districts), urbanists would finally have the car-free streets they’ve only dreamed of, and Brooklyn would have the coolest Mac store in the world.
Posted by lumi at 6:12 AM
February 23, 2008
Plan to Rebuild Penn Station Area May Be Close to Failure
The New York Times
by Charles V. Bagli
The sweeping $14 billion proposal to transform Pennsylvania Station and the district around it is in danger of collapse because of the softening economy, shortfalls in government financing, political inertia and daunting logistical problems, government officials and real estate executives involved in the project said this week.
...Some government officials and real estate executives are concerned that a slowing economy and the current state of the credit markets, where there is little money available for large real estate deals, could cause problems for both the sale of the railyards and the Moynihan project.
NoLandGrab: And what about New York City's other railyard deal?
Posted by eric at 3:27 PM
Let’s Chop Up Superblocks
Streetsblog
There's the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn. While there are a lot of reasons to criticize this project, starting with the process that seemed to reverse the normal way development of a public parcel should proceed. But when you get down to urban design of the plan itself, it has entirely too few streets. Not only does it de-map some existing ones, it doesn't pick up the possibility of creating new ones so that this big area could be divided into smaller, pedestrian friendly blocks.
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Why do developers haul out the superblock so quickly when designing current projects, and why do public officials let them, despite its near death in academic circles?
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Large concentrations of money affect development in New York City disproportionately, and such large concentrations of money often favor having large concentrations of land to work with. While it may be a disservice to the city to have a large, island-like superblock - traffic flow is disrupted, walking and bicycling trips are made more difficult -- to the developer, a superblock allows for wide floor plates, campus-like settings and a level of land use control that would not otherwise be possible. And since the government sector is weak, large developers often end up doing what suits them first, not the public.
Posted by amy at 11:49 AM
February 21, 2008
City’s Sweeping Rezoning Plan for 125th Street Has Many in Harlem Concerned
The New York Times
by Timothy Williams
The Bloomberg Administration has proposed a sweeping re-zoning for Harlem's iconic 125th Street, which has neighborhood residents worried. If recent re-zonings around the city are any indication, they should be.
Amanda M. Burden, chairwoman of the Planning Commission, who since her appointment in 2002 has presided over some of the most extensive rezoning undertaken for two generations, said she was not intent on making 125th Street another generic boulevard.
Ms. Burden said she had spent more time studying the 125th Street proposal — including attending 30 to 40 meetings and walking the street on several occasions — than she had on any other project, including Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Columbia University’s expansion in western Harlem.
NoLandGrab: If Amanda Burden had done nothing more than a drive-by while glancing at a map, she would have "spent more time studying the 125th Street proposal" than she spent studying Atlantic Yards. But no, she immersed herself, even conducting her own primary research:
The idea that the street needed development hit her, she said, when she attended a recent Roberta Flack concert at the Apollo with a friend who works on the street.
After the concert ended, Ms. Burden said, she asked her friend where they should eat. “Downtown,” the friend replied.
“There should be a million different eateries around there, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to frame and control growth on 125th Street,” Ms. Burden said. “The energy on the street is just remarkable, and it’s got to stay that way.”
NLG: We're dying to comment on Amanda's dining quandary, but it's better that we just bite our tongue.
Posted by eric at 11:02 AM
It came from the Blogosphere...
Found in Brooklyn, Meanwhile back at Freddy's, this one is mine.
First, some Toll Brothers rage, where the author hurls the ultimate invective at the development company's Gowanus proposal, calling it "the mini Atlantic Yards." [Congratulations Bruce, your Atlantic Yards plan is now the poster child for really crappy overdevelopment that only a politician could love.]
Then on to art in the footprint of Bruce's controversial plan:
ANYWAY back to pimping the art show at Freddy's. This was my contribution to the show. I painted on found book covers and then collaged them together. Any of the images look familiar?
I will be continuing to feature the artists that participated in the show and I remind you to stop by Freddy's and see it for yourself. The demolition surrounding dear Freddy's is enough to drive one to drink. Freddy's is in the footprint of the Atlantic Yards and Bruce Ratner is the man they write their rent checks to, sick isn't it?
Metroblogging NYC, Why Is The Government So Stupid?
An explanation of one of the many stupid things about NYC and Atlantic Yards:
While mayor Bloomberg and many city agencies are actively trying to reduce the problems caused by private vehicles in the heart of Manhattan, fund improvements in mass transit and provide affordable housing; city mandated policies in the outer boroughs promote driving and car ownership by requiring building owners to build parking garages even in areas reasonably well served by mass transit.
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Like any market distortion, parking requirements have created their own set of absurd choices.
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One such area is Atlantic Yards, in which at least 4000 parking spaces will be put in with over 2000 required for residents in spite of the fact that the site is a major transit hub served my multiple subway lines and the Long Island Railroad. Many of these will come in the form of hugely expensive and potentially dangerous underground parking. Doesn't anyone remember the first World Trade Center attack which thankfully did not involve plastic explosives?"Last year, several commentators on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) questioned the provision of parking--not just interim surface lots, but also the 2570 underground spaces intended for the project's residential component and an additional 1100 underground spaces for the arena."
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
The Big Apple, ProHo (Prospect Heights)
An examination of the name "ProHo" (ugh!) uncovers this interesting boo boo in the Wikipedia entry:
Prospect Heights is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, bounded by Flatbush Avenue to the west, Atlantic Avenue to the north, Eastern Parkway to the south, and, Washington Avenue to the east, at the end of Prospect Hill. However, real estate brokers with a vested interest often misrepresent the eastern boundary as being as far as Classon, Franklin, or even Bedford Avenues. In its northern section are the Atlantic Yards.
NoLandGrab readers know that the railyards are named "Vanderbilt Yards." "Atlantic Yards" is the name that Bruce Ratner bestowed on his megaproject — the brand name fits nicely with his Atlantic Center and Atlantic Terminal Malls.
California Real Estate, California Tenants Fight to Save Rent Control
Congratulations Bruce, your Atlantic Yards plan is still a national poster child of eminent domain abuse:
Emboldened by a national outcry against the use of eminent domain to seize property for private developments like Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, California landlords have devised an ingenious attack on the state’s local rent-control laws: Disguising a statewide referendum to ban them as a measure to reform eminent domain.
Walking Off the Big Apple, The New York of Raymond Hood, Architect: Final Thoughts
In thinking about comparable urban developments of our own era, the kind that fuse private economic power with state ambition, the extraordinary projects in Abu Dhabi and Dubai come to mind, or maybe, the building of contemporary Berlin. But what new projects await Gotham? Well, several developments of some scale are in the works - the High Line/Hudson Yards redevelopment projects on the west side of Manhattan, Atlantic Yards in downtown Brooklyn, designed by Frank Gehry, and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site downtown.
Still, whichever of these large projects come to fruition in this uncertain economy, contemporary architects and urban planners could learn a few lessons from Raymond Hood's skills and visionary design. A trip to Rockefeller Center is a start, watching people take pictures of friends and family in front of the fountain and enjoying the scene of people falling down on skates. Sure, the Rock's often crowded, but isn't that precisely the point?
NoLandGrab: Sorry to be a wet blanket, but it seems that Atlantic Yards has defied as many lessons from Rockefeller Center as it has absorbed. Ratner is hoping that if he builds it, they will come.
Posted by lumi at 4:14 AM
February 15, 2008
Downtown, Related Developments Bear Out 2004 Projections
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By Dennis Holt
If you look at Atlantic Yards through rose-colored glasses, it's not as big or boondoggly as it seems:
Although not a construction spade has pierced any of the large ground that is known as the Atlantic Yards site, its enormous size tends to dwarf all other Downtown Brooklyn development projects.
At more than 8.6 million square feet and a total price tag of $4 billion, with more than 6,000 housing units planned, half affordable, Atlantic Yards will hold its own with just about anything except maybe the Hudson Yards project proposed for the west side of Manhattan.
But if you look carefully at what else is in the works for Downtown Brooklyn and separate the developments by area, a different story emerges. And if you break up the Atlantic Yards project into its components, it isn’t as awesome as the whole thing looks.
As a bonus, author Dennis Holt comes to this startling conclusion:
All in all, it is a safe conclusion that the goals of the 2004 rezoning plan, to overhaul much of the old Downtown Brooklyn core area, are being achieved, and there were a lot of people who scoffed at those hopes.
NoLandGrab: The Downtown Brooklyn Plan ran so far off the tracks that the Mayor had to appoint Joe Chan to try to get it back on line. Nowhere in the original rezoning plan does the City predict that the market would deliver primarily high-rise luxury housing and then head into a real estate slump, or maybe it does if you squint real hard.
Posted by lumi at 5:16 AM
February 7, 2008
New York Can Do Better Than the “New Fourth Avenue”
StreetsBlog
Just how is Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue supposed to live up to its billing as "Brooklyn's answer to Park Avenue," when developers build crap like The Crest (pictured) and Atlantic Yards looms like a bad omen?
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The fate of Atlantic Yards and congestion pricing, still fairly clouded by uncertainty, could either exacerbate the current traffic problem or lead to a more ped-friendly and transit-oriented allocation of street space. But for the immediate future, at least, we can expect developers (some less villainous than Bruce Ratner) to dictate events.
Posted by lumi at 5:24 AM
February 2, 2008
CHANGING NYC: As costs grow, New York's grand plans shrink
AP via AMNY
DAVID B. CARUSO
Forest City Ratner, the company preparing to build blocks of new skyscrapers in Brooklyn, anchored around an NBA basketball arena, recently suggested that the protracted court battle over the $4 billion project could compromise its financing."The credit markets are in turmoil at this time," Andrew Silberfein, the company's finance director, said in a court affidavit. "There is a serious question as to whether, given the current state of the debt market, the underwriters will be able to proceed with the financing for the arena while the appeal is pending."
Later, Forest City officials sought to dispel any idea that the Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards project is in trouble, saying the court filing was intended to persuade a judge to resolve the legal dispute quickly.
Posted by amy at 12:52 PM
January 25, 2008
How Jacobs would view Yards
The Brooklyn Paper
By Michael Desmond Delahaye White
I went through the principles set forth in Jacobs’s book to create an Atlantic Yards report card (right). This report card covers all of Jacobs’s standards, such as the need for short blocks, a close mingling of buildings that vary in age and condition and even some of her more-obvious guidance: Don’t expect Jacobian endorsement of the mega-development’s 15-story illuminated electronic billboard.
Across-the-board, the mega-development earns almost entirely failing grades.
Jacobs pointed out that “big plans” lead to “big mistakes.” Her thinking also points out that when enormous subsidies are misdirected with disrespect for the city’s vital fabric, those mistakes are bigger and government is much more culpable for the harm.
The “F” grade that Jane Jacobs would have given this project speaks for itself.
Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report adds:
Would Jane Jacobs approve of Atlantic Yards? I've written before about how the planners behind the project Yards certainly were not unmindful of the Jacobsian qualities for a healthy city, but the project really wouldn't qualify.
Posted by lumi at 4:26 AM
January 9, 2008
Setting Standards for Green Neighborhoods
Gotham Gazette
By Tom Angotti
An interesting article exploring what it means to be green, especially when you're an urban megaproject like Atlantic Yards:
Recent successes with green buildings have spurred new efforts to make whole neighborhoods more sustainable and environmentally friendly. But is the attempt to develop a "green neighborhood" stamp of approval just an industry marketing gimmick? The pilot projects chosen in New York City -- including Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, Willets Point in Queens and the Columbia expansion in upper Manhattan -- raise some serious questions about how green these proposed neighborhoods will be.
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Some experts have expressed concern that LEED certification is too narrowly focused on individual buildings and does not take into consideration the relationship of the building to the urban environment. After all, individual buildings can be environmentally friendly while at the same time contributing to destructive patterns such as suburban sprawl, displacement of viable communities and demolition of sound buildings and communities.
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Forest City Ratner's Atlantic Yards is being promoted as "transit-oriented development," even though the project's environmental impact study found it will encourage auto use. In addition, while the developer says it may build LEED-certified buildings, the environmental review showed that the project will leave most of the area in permanent shadows.
Posted by lumi at 5:11 AM
January 5, 2008
The Community Plan for the Vanderbilt Yards
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn
When Atlantic Yards finally goes away, the community is ready with the UNITY Plan. The website for the plan has just launched; there you can also download the pdf of the complete plan and view more plan models.
Posted by amy at 10:26 AM
January 3, 2008
The Hudson Yards Proposals: Plenty of Glitz, Little Vision
The Wall Street Journal
by Ada Louise Huxtable
The noted Wall Street Journal architecture critic bemoans the proposals for the Hudson Yards, and concludes her review with a scathing indictment of government's role — an indictment that applies just as aptly to the fiasco better known as "Atlantic Yards."
The city thinks like a developer; that vision thing, the long-term overview, the balance of private investment and public utility and amenity, is just not there. The disposition of public land is expedited on the developers' terms even though the land is the most powerful negotiating tool of all -- something so valuable in New York that builders would kill for it -- and the Hudson Yards are an estimated $7 billion prize. It is accepted that whatever the plans are for these vast tracts of squandered opportunity, they will ultimately be controlled, compromised, or scuttled by the winner of the financial contest that is at the heart of the matter. New York will continue to sell itself short all the way to the bank.
Posted by lumi at 10:18 AM
Critic Huxtable on West Side yards plans: New York sells itself short
Atlantic Yards Report
From the perspective of Atlantic Yards critics, the plan to develop the West Side yards (aka Hudson Yards) is inevitably superior, because it starts with an RFP rather than an anointed developer.
And indeed, Gov. Eliot Spitzer this week told the New York Observer: We are pleased with the bids as they came in—in terms of the magnitude financially, the scale of the proposals, the creativity, the involvement of some of our most prominent real estate companies and private-sector employers who want to site headquarters there. … It reflects and justifies our confidence that if we did an RFP [request for proposals] for that site, we could elicit great response.
But critics have already offered several cautions. In New York magazine, Justin Davidson warned that finance will trump design, and New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff called it a "grim referendum on the state of large-scale planning in New York City."
And yesterday, Wall Street Journal (and former New York Times) architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, in a review headlined The Hudson Yards Proposals: Plenty of Glitz, Little Vision, was harsh, writing that only two of the five design teams "appear to have thought about it beyond the standard investment model blown up to gargantuan scale." (She never wrote about Atlantic Yards.)
Posted by lumi at 4:38 AM
December 31, 2007
Best & Worst of 2007
Preservation Nation
Brooklyn Under Siege
Atlantic Yards is clearly in the "worst" category in this look back at U.S. building preservation issues in 2007.
Brooklyn is becoming too cool for its history. New York City’s largest development, the Atlantic Yards project, made headway this year, erasing the 1910 Ward Bakery building. Developer Forest City Ratner has put at least six more historic buildings on the chopping block to make way for its 22-acre project, whose main feature is a basketball arena designed by Frank Gehry. Neighbors say the new construction is inappropriate next to their quiet historic brownstones.
NoLandGrab: Forest City Ratner has done its "worst" to "erase" the Ward Bakery building, but so far, they've only managed to topple the parapet and perform some "pre-demolition" work.
Posted by steve at 6:33 AM
December 24, 2007
PlaNYC 1950: why parking shouldn't be required at apartment projects like Atlantic Yards
Atlantic Yards Report
Mayor Mike Bloomberg's much-praised PlaNYC 2030 contains a glaring omission, a failure to address the antiquated anti-urban policy that mandates parking attached to new residential developments outside Manhattan, even when such developments, like Atlantic Yards, are justified precisely because they're located near transit hubs.
Last year, several commentators on the Atlantic Yards Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) questioned the provision of parking--not just interim surface lots, but also the 2570 underground spaces intended for the project's residential component and an additional 1100 underground spaces for the arena.
(Map from Atlantic Yards web site.)
The Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) dismissed the questions, but the issue won't go away.
Posted by lumi at 5:12 AM
December 22, 2007
Penn’s Jacobsian experience, and the difficulty of planning
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder uses lessons learned by the University of Pennsylvania to illustrate the pitfalls of trying to drive redevelopment with a monolithic plan.
A quote from Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and former president of the University of Pennsylvania:
In his 1990 book Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society, Lindblom points out the impossibility of being truly comprehensive in urban planning from the start, because there are inevitable biases that frame the work in the abstract and there is an inexhaustible number of forces that enter into the life of cities over time that cannot be anticipated in advance.
Oder applies this issue of uncertainty to Atlantic Yards:
This raises many questions about the environmental review process regarding major projects like Atlantic Yards. Among them: Can a ten-year effect on traffic and transit really be estimated? Is ten years a legitimate endpoint, or an arbitrary one? And what if the buildout would take much longer?
Posted by steve at 8:12 AM
December 21, 2007
Where were you? Brooklyn AIA offers belated, underinformed AY solutions
Atlantic Yards Report
Some of the most sober and trenchant criticism of Atlantic Yards has come from architects, notably Jonathan Cohn in his now on-hiatus Brooklyn Views blog. Now, four years after the project was announced, a letter to the editor published in this week's Brooklyn Paper is the first evidence, as far as I can tell, that the Brooklyn chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA)--or any other AIA chapter--has taken a stance on Atlantic Yards.
Despite attempts to be constructive, the message is underinformed and in some ways misguided.
Norman Oder examines I. Donald Weston's bizarre assertion that the "stadium" — oops, it's an "arena" — could be "relocated further away from the street," brings up the temporary surface parking lot, which runs counter to Weston's four-point traffic plan, and explains that had the American Institute of Architects submitted these comments to the Empire State Development Corporation during the environmental review in 2006, they might have received some sort of response.
Posted by lumi at 5:30 AM
December 20, 2007
The AY omission in the Jane Jacobs exhibit, some contentions, and the lesson of skepticism
Atlantic Yards Report
Norman Oder concludes his two-part, two-day examination of the Municipal Art Society's Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York exhibit by taking issue with the absence of Atlantic Yards from the physical exhibit (it does pop up rather frequently in the companion book, Block by Block), and offering his own Jacobsian critique of the controversial project:
Beyond that, I’d observe that it’s a stretch to consider Atlantic Yards a downtown anyone would want to visit. It’s basically an arena (plus Urban Room) attached to a modern-day (and improved) Stuyvesant Town, with retail at its base. Sure, some people might visit the Urban Room and the open space when there’s programming, but a tiny spot of lawn would not a borough magnet make.
Rather, Atlantic Yards is part of a fabric of mostly luxury housing developing in Downtown Brooklyn and beyond; it would not create that downtown core. (There would be significantly more affordable housing than in other nearby developments, but the pace and provision is hardly guaranteed, most isn't geared to the poor, and it came in a private deal for increased density.)
Posted by lumi at 11:33 AM
December 19, 2007
The Jane Jacobs exhibit: a worthy reaffirmation but just the start of a longer discussion
Atlantic Yards Report
Haven't had the time to tour the Municipal Art Society's Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York exhibit? Haven't had the cha