by Joel Meyer
The area that developer Bruce Ratner has proposed for Atlantic Yards is shaped like a rowboat, shown from profile. In the language of urban planning, this area is called the footprint. The Long Island Rail Road yard in the northern half of the footprint would be preserved. Atlantic Yards would be built over the yard's half-mile-long cement valley.
AMB: Flatbush Atlantic Traffic.
The real problem is the southern half of the footprint, the section where people live and work. A walking tour of the footprint starts at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, a morass of traffic and transit. As envisioned by Ratner and world-famous architect Frank Gehry, this would be the gateway to Atlantic Yards. On this spot, four skyscrapers would surround an arena for the relocated New Jersey Nets. Ratner plans to pay $300 million for the team if he receives a rubber stamp from the NBA. Patti Hagan is my guide on the tour. The community activist has lived in Prospect Heights for twenty five years. During that time, she's seen the neighborhood become a desirable place to live.
TAPE (HAGAN): This neighborhood has developed organically and gradually. One by one, somebody has come and said I'm going to take on this building and fix it up.
Pacific Street runs down the middle of the footprint, from west to east. The rail yard is on our left to the north.
AMB: [Train Air Brakes]
On the right...three industrial buildings converted to condominiums during the past five years. Two of these would be torn down to make way for the arena under the Ratner plan. The first is a former Spalding sporting goods factory, where basketballs were once manufactured. The second is six-thirty-six Pacific Street, the Atlantic Arts Building.
TAPE (HAGAN) People only started moving in here less than a year ago. But look at the front of it. It was designed in 1924 by an Architect named Kingsley from Chicago and he was a man who specialized in designing very beautiful storage buildings.
The facade of the former warehouse is pale yellow with brightly colored accents that look like wildflowers.
TAPE (HAGAN) Up there that's Daniel Goldstein's apartment. (Reporter: The one with the sign on it.) Yeah.
AMB: Buzz In
The decision to build the arena development will likely be left up to the state, which can condemn private property in the footprint. The process is called eminent domain. Owners are given market value for property that stands in the way of public projects. From his seventh floor living room window, Goldstein can look out over low rooftops in southern Brooklyn clear to the Verazzano Narrows Bridge.
AMB: I see four steeples. There's a church over there. There's five churches I can see right now.
It's the perfect apartment. It took him five years to find it. And on the first day he saw this view, he also heard about the arena for the first time.
TAPE (GOLDSTEIN): I thought, Wow that sounds cool. A basketball arena in Brooklyn. I like basketball. I like the Nets. There were no details about where it was going.
Later, Goldstein found out the project would force him to move. He became a full-time activist for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. Bruce Ratner wants to break ground at the arena site before the end of the year. His opponents have something else in mind.
TAPE (GOLDSTEIN): The way to win this is to delay it, to tie it up in the courts, to tie it up in the court of public opinion. To make it so uncomfortable for the politicians and for Ratner, that he just drops the whole thing.
[DEAD STOP. AMB]
AMB: (Outside AA Building)
Patti Hagan turns onto Pacific Street, stopping at two row houses near Vanderbilt Avenue.
TAPE (Hagan): And on the second floor here are Victoria and Russell Harmon who've lived here for 62 years, their entire marriage. The Gonzales have been there for thirty five years or so. There are three generations now living here.
Developers and arena opponents have disputed the exact number of people in the footprint who would be displaced. The Daily News used figures from the 2000 census and occupancy records from the condo buildings to derive a population of three hundred eighty three permanent residents.
TAPE (Hagan): There are people in these buildings from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Guadalupe Ferrero is from a small village in Mexico. Her husband is from Cuba. I've counted up 26 nationalities just within the footprint. This is the way the world out to be, I really think.
Hagan walks past a homeless shelter and a small factory where a Chinese-born entrepreneur manufactures blank canvases for world-famous artists. This would be the eastern half of Atlantic Yards, a blend of high-rise housing and commercial space. Ratner would build seventeen buildings in total, including Brooklyn's tallest. Halfway down Dean Street, Patti Hagan stops at another cluster of homes where two office towers would be built.
TAPE (HAGAN): This building a single mom from Lahor, Pakistan and her kids live here. And then a Palestinian family lives there and then another Pakistani family lives up there on the top. And then there's a Moroccan neighbor up there. And then David Sheets lives down here...
David Sheets is a paralegal. He lives in a tidy basement apartment with a postage stamp of a backyard. He moved to Prospect Heights 24 years ago. Back then, the cheap rent came with strings attached.
TAPE: Years ago, it was not some place that you would want to wander around at night. Particularly, frankly, if you were white, it was suspect that you were wandering around here at all.
Sheets says neighborhoods like Prospect Heights have just started to recover from the side effects of housing projects and highways created many decades ago.
TAPE (Sheets): Neighborhoods like this suffered lacerations on a massive scale that were publicly imposed again and again. After the 1970s, there was a reprieve to that. There's been a good 25 years or so when these neighborhoods have been left alone. Just like walking into a forest after it's burned down, things begin germanting and sprouting back up. And that's what's happened around here.
Renters in the neighborhood had a mixed reaction to the influx of affluent condo owners. Sheets says the new crowd was an economic anchor.
TAPE: At the same time, we saw rents increasing on adjacent blocks and surrounding blocks.
Under eminent domain, the value of rental property is determined by how much rent is collected. Sheets says the very idea of Atlantic Yards has caused gentrified rents to climb even higher.
TAPE: The business owners, the building owners, the condo owners, the loft owners are very understandably concerned about, should it come to this, what their settlement should be. The renters are paying already.
AMB: [Interior, Freddy's Bar]
During its 75 year history, Freddy's Bar has been a Prohibition-era speakeasy, a hangout for factory workers and a cop bar. Today, Freddy's might be just another dive bar...if it weren't for the backroom, a bodega-sized performance space. Musician Scott MX Turner has played in the backroom about thirty-five times. His band is The Devil's Advocates. At tonight's Bob Dylan tribute, their punk rock send-up of "Tangled Up in Blue" roasts Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, an Atlantic Yards supporter.
AMB: [Tangled up in Blue] ..and Marty started dealing with real estate whores..
TAPE (TURNER): What makes Freddy's great is the fact that it does thing no other bar is going to do. It has live music in the face of the Giuliani era ban on music and ban on dancing and ban on fun. You know, there's more that goes on in a week at Freddys than goes on at other bars in a month or a year.
Tonight's event is called "No Blood on the L-I double-R Tracks," a take on the 30-year-old Dylan album about separation and heartache. From the stage, organizers called for the MTA to solicit competitive bids for development of the rail yard in the footprint.
AMB: "A Simple Twist of Fate..." (Hillary Spielgelman)
Freddy's is a tenant. Bar manager Donald O'Finn says his boss owns the liquor license, but not the building itself. If eminent domain is used to clear the area, it might be hard to find another place where literary readings, live jug bands, and off-duty police can peacefully co-exist. O'Finn says the best neighborhoods revolve around bars like Freddy's.
TAPE (O'FINN): When they would start a town, the saloon was always the first place they would build because it was a gathering point It was a place to go and relax where they could go and think about what's going on, and meet other people because you're so busy in your day to day thing.
For many opposed to Atlantic Yards, the use of eminent domain is the sticking point. The perception of secrecy in the process was mentioned by many who spoke to me. Ratner's company, Forest City Ratner, did not return repeated phone calls. Here's Donald O'Finn:
TAPE (O'FINN): We don't want to stand in the way of progress or community development. We just want it done fairly and right. And if it turns out that all the cards are on the table and we have to go, we'll go.
Interviewed by the Daily News, Ratner said Atlantic Yards would bring 10,000 permanent jobs and forty-five-hundred units of housing to the area. The current neighborhood has no more than a couple hundred of each. But Donald O'Finn says the developers need to take a closer look before condemning his community.
TAPE (O'FINN): If that comes about, I want the people who are driving the bulldozers to know what they're destroying. It would be a huge loss.
For Columbia Radio News, I'm Joel Meyer.
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