Will somebody please get their story straight? It seems like every day I pick up the paper there is a story about the NJ Nets moving or not moving to Brooklyn. One day the story is saying that the arena will never be built and another day I read that the Barclays Center as it will be called will be open for the 2010 season.

The latest stories appeared last weekend. The New York Daily news reported that the NJ Devils were interested in buying the team and moving them to Newark only to have Bruce Ratner in a guest opinion piece on Sunday deny the story and reassert that the arena would open as planned. On Monday, another article claimed that Brooklyn would never happen.

Mr. Jones will probably not be placated by Mike Lupica's comment in yesterday's Daily News:

As soon as Caring Bruce Ratner said the Nets weren't for sale and were still on their way to Brooklyn, I immediately imagined the team bus making a U-turn and heading for Newark.

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Our Time Press has great rally coverage, although we're pretty sure Velmanette Montgomery did not give a shout-out to "Joe Melman."

Atlantic Yards Report had this to say about the coverage:

Note that Our Time Press, a Bed-Stuy-based newspaper (formerly twice a month, now weekly) aimed at the black community, has published a variety of voices on Atlantic Yards. Miller's piece, as well as co-founder Bernice Elizabeth Green's endorsement in 2006 of Owens for Congress, looked critically at the project. Regular "Commerce and Community" columns by Errol Louis, on the other hand, have cheered Atlantic Yards and harshly criticized opponents.

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The real land grabbers?

The next paragraph in the Courier-Life article amps up the claim:
"They are the real land grabbers, because they took the property first and turned back what was jobs into condos," chimed in Charlene Nimmons, sitting nearby and a signatory to the Atlantic Yards community benefits agreement (CBA) with developer Forest City Ratner Companies (FCRC).

Nimmons is not a neutral observer and, in this case, not a coherent one.

It's not unusual to repurpose former industrial properties as housing. Forest City Enterprises, the parent company of Forest City Ratner, does it all the time; it's called historic preservation and saving embodied energy.

In the Brooklyn, the "they" who "took" property includes Boymelgreen, an ally of Forest City Ratner in a lease dispute with Henry Weinstein, who owns a building in the footprint. Should counter-protestors have be protesting Ratner and Boymelgreen?

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And the so-called Building Five, which would sit on the opposite side of the Atlantic and Flatbush bowtie intersection, is also no longer part of any Forest City Ratner renderings, the latest suggestion that Gehry will not be the designer of that part of the project. (A source told The Brooklyn Paper that the developer has dangled the site to other architects, including the controversial Robert Scarano, but no decisions have been made.)

NoLandGrab: Just when you thought the project couldn't be more loathsome, imagine the collective groan that would follow, if Scarano was named the architect for Site V, the current site of PC Richard and Modell's.

threecee on flickr

Ward Bread Bakery Building demolition, Prospect Heights Brooklyn, New York

This building is being demolished for Atlantic Yards.

This short video was produced from a sequence of photographs.

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AP
DAVID B. CARUSO

Big corporations give him money. Presidential candidates seek his endorsement. He has influential friends in Congress and the governor's mansion.
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But he still carries baggage from his early days as a fire-breathing agitator: Government records obtained by The Associated Press indicate that Sharpton and his business entities owe nearly $1.5 million in overdue taxes and associated penalties.
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Since the late 1990s, his civil rights group has grown from a small outfit, with a few hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue, to an organization that now routinely takes in $1 million to $2 million per year, thanks partly to corporate support.

Donors have included beer giant Anheuser-Busch, which gave more than $100,000 last year, and Forest City Ratner, a real estate development company that courted black leaders for support of a plan to build an NBA arena in Brooklyn.

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The feds now want to talk to former Assemblyman Michael Spano about his dealings with the Yonkers City Council and Forest City Ratner's controversial Ridge Hill development project:

Federal prosecutors investigating the Yonkers City Council's handling of the controversial Ridge Hill development have issued a grand jury subpoena to Assemblyman Michael Spano.

Two federal agents visited Spano on Thursday at his office and asked him about his dealings with Ridge Hill as well as powerbroker Albert Pirro, the estranged husband of former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro and a one-time lobbyist for the $630 million project.
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Spano's subpoena orders him to appear before a federal grand jury in White Plains on May 20.

After he left the Assembly in 2004, Spano worked for the Patricia Lynch Associates lobbying firm, which has Forest City Ratner as a client. He said he was asked in 2005, because of his knowledge of Yonkers, to speak to city officials to gauge their views and objections to the project. He said he spoke to council members Annabi, Dee Barbato and John Murtagh.

His dealings were "strictly informational," he said. He did not lobby them, he said, but just relayed the information to his firm.

"No one at any time did anything inappropriate that I am aware of," Spano said.

The probe has focused on lobbying efforts of council members on behalf of the project.

Read the rest of the article for more details and a wrap-up of the political scandal forming around the approval of Bruce Ratner's project.

Three words: Follow the money.

Mooney’s pub has lost its fight to stay in its Flatbush Avenue home and will close for good by the end of June.
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Now that Mooney’s has been priced out, and there’s a wrecking ball destined to demolish Freddy’s on Dean Street to make way for Atlantic Yards, it’s getting tougher and tougher to find a decent boozing environment.

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NoLandGrab: That's okay, we can all hang out in the public space on the arena's green roof, or in the urban room. Oh, wait...guess not.

The Brooklyn Paper
Ben Muessig

“Just because we don’t want the arena to happen doesn’t mean we don’t want development,” said Lillian Hope of Prospect Heights. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t have jobs. We just don’t want them working to build Ratner’s vision.”

Others said that union members should have joined the anti-Ratner rally, given that the developer originally promised 15,000 union construction jobs, but has since admitted that Atlantic Yards will employ 1,500 construction workers per year over its proposed 10-year buildout.

“Protest Ratner, he’s the one not building and he’s the one who proposed a project that couldn’t happen or get financing,” said Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

Though Goldstein sought common ground, the standoff between camps was tense — especially when a group of protestors from the pro-Yards rally looped around the “Time Out” demonstration, surrounding the opponents of the project. Police officers, with plastic handcuffs dangling from their belts, formed a human wall that halted the energetic, though nonviolent, procession.

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The Brooklyn Paper
Gersh Kuntzman

Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner and his foes presented starkly different visions for the mega-project this week — one, a scaled-back, Frank Gehry wonderland, the other, a collection of bulky buildings and a basketball arena surrounded for decades by parking lots.

Fittingly, the rival visions were published on Monday in rival newspapers, with the Daily News trumpeting the new Gehry renderings and the New York Post playing up the Municipal Art Society’s far-less-glamorous vision in its own exclusive, “The future’s ‘blight’; Nightmare vision of B’klyn arena.”

The Society said it was moved to create the doomsday renderings because Ratner himself has admitted that the 16-tower Atlantic Yards project now contains only two confirmed structures: a residential building and a publicly financed $950-million basketball arena that he intends to begin building before the end of 2008.

The memorable quote in this article comes from Architect Errol Crawford, with language evoking an art piece from Donald O'Finn:

“I think the new design looks like student work at best,” he said. “It is a shame the amount of money being spent on crap like that. I realize that Gehry’s signature is deconstructivist architecture, but his elevations [an architecture term meaning “exterior views”] suck.

“The Williamsburgh Savings Bank building should not have to look down at a clogged toilet bowl every morning,” he added.

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Accusations are flying from all sides of the Atlantic Yards debate over the apparent slowdown in developing the Prospect Heights mega-project. In the four and a half years since the project was announced, delays, lawsuits and controversy have dogged the plan, and some are eying a potential endgame for the project. The timetable for completing the project has been pushed back to 2018, and subsidies for the project ballooned out to $2 billion, even as the first phase of the project has shrunk to include only the Nets Stadium and adjacent office tower.

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The Brooklyn Paper
Ben Muessig

One of Bruce Ratner’s boosters at the pro–Atlantic Yards rally on Saturday is a former strip club manager who used to arrange for dancers to have sex with NBA stars.

The Atlantic Yards supporter, Thomas “Ziggy” Sicignano, who now runs Brooklyn U.S.A., a youth basketball program in Park Slope, said that Ratner’s foundation gave his organization $10,000 in 2005.

That donation came four years after his stunning courtroom admission that he prostituted strippers to attract NBA stars to the Gold Club in Atlanta.

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News that the venerable firm of Weil, Gotshal will relocate workers from its IT, finance and operations departments, currently in Midtown, to Bruce Ratner’s Downtown campus this summer was hailed as a major win for the Brooklyn business community.

But the announcement initially sounded more monumental for Metrotech — whose tenants include behind-the-scenes employees of JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns. On Tuesday, Forest City Ratner Executive Vice President MaryAnne Gilmartin trumpeted the Weil, Gotshal news at the Brooklyn Real Estate Roundtable, claiming that the deal would involve high-priced law partners and their big expense accounts.

Such “front office” relocations are “a paragon shift” for Metrotech, Gilmartin said.

But hours later, the law firm put out a press release that revealed that only a small portion of its staff will move to 15 Metrotech, between the Myrtle Avenue promenade and Tech Place, this summer. The firm would not say how many of its 1,300 Manhattan-based employees would end up in Brooklyn.

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Atlantic Yards Report

I think the new timetable is unrealistic, especially since Chuck Ratner, CEO of parent Forest City Enterprises, told investment analysts last year, speaking about three other projects, "As you know, in our business, these things take a very long time, most often, frankly, longer than we anticipate."

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When it comes to megadevelopments, it may be better for developers to lock in the deal, then declare (and even negotiate) a flexible timetable, as with Atlantic Yards.

The negotiations over the Hudson Yards project are a notable counterexample. In an article yesteday headlined Deal to Build at Railyards on West Side Collapses, the New York Times reported:
Six weeks after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority selected Tishman Speyer Properties to build a vast complex of office towers, apartment buildings and parks over the railyards on the West Side of Manhattan, the deal has fallen apart.

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