love4 - where in bk are you? if convenient you should check out the latest progress on the new LIRR terminal - it's pretty much fully glassed! i'm looking forward to that scaffold coming down and the construction elevator and shed on wsb going away as well.
Rangers Suck, Devils in First!!!! HAHAHA!! Listen I'm a fan not a bandwagoner like the rest of you guys will be and Love4NY why can't you be a fan while they are in Jersey if they ever do move. Rod Thorn even acknowledged that the breautiful Rock is a definate possiblity if this project keeps languishing. It's called being a fan of your team and where your from.
I'm not a fan of the Nets, but you can't tell me the Nets as an whole organization wise would be better off on the other side of the hudson.NY usually attracts good players and they would receive more media coverage . Jason Kidd said it best , we were on the wrong side of the hudson..
BKlove, I'm from Coney Island but I'm moving to 306 gold street within the next 3 months. I love the area. Its definitely live and pumping. I cant wait to be so near to Juniors & BAM. I'm also a fan of the new buffalo wild wings that opened up, it was a great place during football season. I was actually thinking about how the progress was coming along on the new LIRR terminal. I'll stop by next week i guess. Wasnt the MTA behind all the delays on that project?
JCMAN- I'm a Knicks fan, always have been, even now that they suck. I do feel i will have to be a big BK Nets fan, this is my home turf, no doubt about it!
I think the Nets would be a big draw in Newark as well. The Nets average 17,000 a year with 17,000 being the NBA average. With the Rock being at basketball capacity 18,000 the Nets most likely would see a 10% jump in ticket sales being at the Rock. And wait Jersey can't attract great talent...umm Vince Carter, Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson, Devin Harris, Drazen Petrovic, Kenny Anderson, Sam Cassell, etc.. don't give me that bull, get a real arguement. Kidd was wrong it wasn't so much being in Jersey, it was being in the Meadowlands. Vince Carter had a chance to go the Knicks but he decided to come to Jersey. Hell even Kiki Vandeweghe decided to become GM with the Nets AND doesn't want the coaching job with the Knicks!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by STEAMWORKSNYC
The New Jersey Devils attract star talent with the Babe Ruth of goalies in Martain Broduer, Scott Stevens, Ken Danyeko, Partick Elias, etc.. New Jersey can does attract great talent!!!
Oh also the Devils ticket sales went up 15% when they moved to the Rock. I mean the Devils are a recent hockey dyansty and are first in the Eastern Conference while the Rangers and Islanders lack behind yet again!!!!
If you want to use NY to attract players...umm then how come the Knicks have no real stars to speak of because they are a joke and a disgrace. I know what you are saying about NY being a draw, but don't Jersey bash to make a point that doesn't work with me nor does it deter me or shut me up!
I really do not want this project to go through. I hope it keeps getting delayed and evenutally dies a slow death. I mean the Nets PRESDIENT Rod Thorn acknowledged that Newark and the Rock is a viable alternative if this project keeps stumbling. Also James Vanderbeek, Devils owner, said he would love for Ratner to put the team up for sale so he can buy them and move them to Newark with the Devils at the Rock where there is an NBA ready lockerroom seperate from the Devils and Seton Hall lockerooms. This project is not a done deal yet as far as I'm concerned.
it's disappointing how lacking in vision the city and state leadership can be. there's no sense that you need to allow developers to build things in order to create and keep jobs; instead, a strange feeling of entitlement seems to pervade everything from community boards to the state assembly which treat downtown brooklyn and midtown manhattan as if they were UNESCO sites, not a world financial capital that needs to compete with other top-notch cities worldwide to compete for jobs.
even empty lots in midtown are now being called off-limits to skyscrapers, while the city tries instead to cobble together cockamamie mega-projects with state support. big surprise that those don't seem to go as planned... this short-sightedness needs to change.
What I mean about attracting allstar players , I mean by the means of FA's. Not draft picks, not by two or three way trades by disgruntle players who just want a way out of their current team. By means of NJ Nets was my first choice to play for . Everyone you mention was either a draft pick or had issues with their current team and demanded a trade such as Carter.Quote:
Originally Posted by JCMAN320
With the Devils tickets going up 15% shouldn't be no surprise to you or anybody.They were playing at the Meadowlands aka No mans land. I have season tickets for the Jets and going their for a day game is torture. I can't even imagine going their for a night game where there is no mass transit , no bars and a old arena. Face it people like new things and when it comes to new stadiums and arena's people want to be apart of it.The Devils was over due such as is the Islanders. If Wang can pull of this Lighthouse project you will see the same results. New arenas will bring back the fans. I understand you want the Nets to stay in Jersey ,but IMO I think they will benefit greatly in Brooklyn.Now the Knicks as a whole are a different story, but their still is an attraction to play for them. Even Kobe named them some time ago as the team he would love to play for.I know the Atlantic Yards is not a done deal ,and I hope they don't screw this up . We are going to have to wait and see.
Oh and if I remember correctly , Marty was drafted by the Devils so it wasn't like in the beginning of his career he had a choice.;)
good stuff. i'm a big fan of oro, been watching that building and its neighbors progress over the past several months from my vinegar hill vantage point. by the way, my dad grew up in CI, but i grew up over by AY. speaking of AY, i noticed today that down toward vanderbilt they've begun installing cylindrical spans to support the deck over the cut.Quote:
Originally Posted by Love4NY
in the interest of keeping AY in this thread, i'm bringing this post in the Solow East Side thread over here:
http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/sh...postcount=1126
i wonder sometimes as to how many of the speculators questioning whether AY will make it off the ground have recenty visited the site. they are working there regularly and making significant progress each week.
^^ I think the speculation is based on if the whole project will be finished. I am pretty sure that with the money already invested into the project that it will proceed, at least Miss Brooklyn and the arena.
As for the rest of the development, I would not be as optimistic.
by the time this poject gets to that stage we'll be back in a gowth phase of the econ cycle and the credit markets will be out of their funk, so i doubt that this will not get fully built - may take longer than previously projected, but it will happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by ramvid01
Slow Economy Likely to Stall Atlantic Yards
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...n/yards600.jpg Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Some residents oppose the Atlantic Yards project over concerns that it will flood the area with new residents and heavy traffic.
By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: March 21, 2008
The slowing economy, weighed down by a widening credit crisis, is likely to delay the signature office tower and three residential buildings at the heart of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the developer said.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/.../yarslarge.jpg
“It may hold up the office building,” the developer, Bruce C. Ratner, said in a recent interview. “And the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings.”
Mr. Ratner, chief executive of Forest City Ratner, did not specify the kinds of delays possible, but suggested that construction could be put off for years. His comments are his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project, spanning 22 acres at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.
The developer did say he was confident about starting construction on a $950 million basketball arena for the Nets by the end of the year. The arena was to be surrounded by the office tower, known as Miss Brooklyn, and three residential buildings in the first phase of the project.
But Mr. Ratner has yet to secure an anchor tenant for the Miss Brooklyn building, and now plans to phase in the residential buildings slowly.
Economic downturns have a history of delaying, and sometimes killing, large construction projects in New York.
The Riverwalk project, a plan to build five residential towers on a 30-acre platform over the East River, surfaced in 1980 but collapsed a decade later after the economy slowed. A developer for the redevelopment of Times Square was selected in 1984, but work did not begin for 12 years — with a different developer — largely because of a recession, as well as 47 lawsuits.
New York is not alone in seeing projects falter or even collapse in recent months. Ian Bruce Eichner’s $3.9 billion Cosmopolitan Resort Casino, a condo-hotel complex in Las Vegas, is facing foreclosure after he failed to finalize a deal for financing.
The once high-flying developer Cameron Kuhn has defaulted on loans related to projects in Orlando and Jacksonville, Fla. And in Los Angeles, a number of residential projects have been delayed or abandoned.
Mr. Ratner’s remarks were a far cry from the optimistic days of December 2006, when the state approved Atlantic Yards and Forest City indicated that it would build the first phase of the project within four years and complete the entire venture in a decade.
In another indication of the problems facing the project, Forest City recently sent a letter signed by the project’s celebrity architect, Frank Gehry, to chief executives of many of the city’s biggest corporations, inviting them to become a tenant in the “centerpiece of the project,” Miss Brooklyn. It was originally scheduled to be completed in July 2009.
Brokers said that developers usually home in on companies actively looking for new headquarters, rather than cast such a wide net. Forest City’s approach was more akin to cold-calling to solicit interest, a possible sign, they said, that the developer was struggling to find tenants.
Mr. Ratner insisted that the Brooklyn office market remained healthy, but he conceded that “until we get a tenant, we won’t start Miss Brooklyn.”
“It’s not going to happen in a nanosecond,” Mr. Ratner said during an interview across Atlantic Avenue from the railyard where he plans to build the arena. “I hope it’s not going to be drawn out. I’d hope that the first residential building will be done within six months of the opening of the arena, and a second one a year after that.”
Atlantic Yards has been the target of protests and lawsuits since Mr. Ratner proposed it more than four years ago. Some local residents say the project is oversized and will overwhelm the neighborhood, flooding it with new residents and heavy traffic. They also oppose the government’s use of eminent domain to condemn property on behalf of a private developer.
The courts have ruled in Mr. Ratner’s favor 18 times, but two cases are on appeal, or are expected to be shortly. Mr. Ratner said his project had been held up for nearly two years by lawsuits brought by one group, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, and its supporters.
Given the current environment, some critics worry that Mr. Ratner will negotiate for deeper subsidies, reduce the amount of low- and moderate-income housing included or eventually sell off portions of the site to other developers who could use their own, less expensive designs.
“We need leadership in the city and the state to face the music,” said Daniel Goldstein, the sole resident remaining in a building on the Atlantic Yards site and a leader of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. “The project needs to be reconfigured, rethought and renegotiated. The promise was affordable housing. It’s clearly been put on the back burner, while the arena has been moved to the front burner.”
Atlantic Yards began with Mr. Ratner’s purchase of the Nets in 2004 and the idea of moving the team, which currently plays in New Jersey and loses about $30 million a year, to the railroad yard. It was near the spot that the Brooklyn Dodgers once considered for a new stadium before the team fled to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.
The project swelled into 8 million square feet of apartments, office space, stores in 16 towers, an arena and eight acres of open space, stretching from Flatbush to Vanderbilt Avenues.
At least 30 percent of the roughly 6,000 apartments are to be for low- and moderate-income families and individuals.
The arena sits at the west end of the site, embraced by Miss Brooklyn and three residential buildings with about 1,000 apartments, as well as a separate building at what is known as Site 5, which is also being delayed. In the second phase, a residential complex with 5,000 units in 11 towers would be built on 13.6 acres between Sixth and Vanderbilt Avenues in Prospect Heights.
The undertaking will require Forest City to spend more than $550 million in the early stages to buy land and build new sewers, water mains and a railyard for the Long Island Rail Road. The city and the state agreed to provide $300 million in subsidies, and tens of millions in tax breaks.
Mr. Ratner faces the same stiff challenges that are suddenly hobbling other developers after a 10-year boom: an economy teetering at the edge of recession, a credit market that has all but closed for large-scale real estate projects and a lack of tax-exempt financing for housing.
“Financing is very difficult to come by, and it’s becoming even more difficult,” said the developer Douglas Durst, who is completing the Bank of America tower on 42nd Street in Manhattan. “Nobody knows how bad this is going to be. As for commercial projects, now doesn’t seem to be the time to start one.”
Adding to the uncertainty surrounding Atlantic Yards is the ascension of a new governor. Gov. David A. Paterson, who took office on Monday, called for a statewide moratorium in 2005 on the use of eminent domain, which is needed to clear the site of about 20 property owners. Mr. Paterson was a state senator when he made the proposal; his office said it is reviewing the matter.
The Internal Revenue Service has also issued a proposal to tighten the regulations on the use of tax-exempt bonds for stadiums and arenas, which could swell the cost of the arena beyond the current $950 million estimate. And there is increasing competition by developers for the limited number of tax-exempt bonds for residential development that include affordable housing.
Mr. Ratner, whose company was a development partner in the new Midtown headquarters of The New York Times Company, said he remained optimistic and committed to building the affordable housing. He has been working with Avi Schick, chief executive of the Empire State Development Corporation, to complete all the documents for the project this summer, so that the state can start and finish condemnation by the end of the year.
Some work has started: Buildings on the site have been demolished, and construction is under way on a temporary railyard for the Long Island Rail Road. The city and the state have already provided $58 million of the $300 million in public funds for the project.
Mr. Ratner has had plenty of experience with long-term projects. The 4-million-square-foot MetroTech office complex nearby, for instance, took nearly two decades to complete.
“This is a good project,” he said of Atlantic Yards. “Good things sometimes take a long time.”
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.
Architecture
What Will Be Left of Gehry’s Vision for Brooklyn?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...21atla-600.jpg Gehry Partners
Frank Gehry’s design for Forest City Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn. Much of the project may now be delayed.
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: March 21, 2008
The growing possibility that much of the multibillion-dollar Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn will be scrapped because of a lack of financing may be a bitter pill for its developer, Forest City Ratner. But it’s also a painful setback for urban planning in New York.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/...21atla-650.jpgGehry Partners
Part of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, as originally envisioned by Frank Gehry.
Designed by Frank Gehry, the project was a rare instance in which the architectural talent lined up for a New York project matched the financial muscle behind it. When it was unveiled in late 2003, it seemed to signal a genuine effort to raise the quality of large-scale development in a city still stinging from the planning failures at ground zero.
So if the decision to proceed with an 18,000-seat basketball arena but to defer or eliminate the four surrounding towers is defensible from a business perspective, it also feels like a betrayal of the public trust.
Mr. Gehry conceived of this bold ensemble of buildings as a self-contained composition — an urban Gesamtkunstwerk — not as a collection of independent structures. Postpone the towers and expose the stadium, and it becomes a piece of urban blight — a black hole at a crucial crossroads of the city’s physical history. If this is what we’re ultimately left with, it will only confirm our darkest suspicions about the cynical calculations underlying New York real estate deals.
The project that the city approved in late 2006 would have included eight million square feet of residential and commercial development on an eight-acre site extending east from Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, one of the borough’s most congested intersections. For many who opposed it early on, it was yet another instance of powerful economic interests trampling on the rights of a deeply rooted middle-class community — one that had already been reshaped by waves of transplanted Manhattanites. Mr. Gehry’s involvement was simply a bit of window dressing intended to give the project an aura of enlightenment.
I sympathized with these arguments to some degree. New York has had a terrible track record with large-scale planning in recent years. Look at Battery Park City. The MetroTech Center. Donald Trump’s Riverside South. All are blots on the urban environment, as blandly homogenous in their own way as the Modernist superblocks they were intended to improve on.
But it’s important to remember that this is also the city that spawned Rockefeller Center, a 22-acre development at the core of Manhattan that became a glorious emblem of the 20th-century metropolis. For some of us Atlantic Yards presented a creative opportunity for the 21st century.
If large-scale development is unavoidable, why not enlist serious talents like Mr. Gehry to come up with an alternative to the bottom-line proposals that have been the accepted norm for decades? Finally a big developer had turned to a legitimate architectural hero for help, rather than the usual corporate hacks.
As it turned out, Mr. Gehry’s design revealed both the promise and the limits of that collaboration. The main residential blocks to the east of the arena lacked the architect’s signature ebullience. A series of mismatched towers along two sides of a central courtyard encompassing several blocks, they followed most of the usual planning rules: adhere to the street grid, pack in a good deal of retail along the street, add a dose of public space.
But if that part of the development bordered on soporific, his design for the arena block was a tour de force. Most urban sports arenas are big, windowless boxes that suck the life out of their surroundings; Mr. Gehry’s great invention was to conceal this one behind a dense array of residential and commercial towers. The most glamorous of these, Miss Brooklyn, clad in cascading sheets of glass, anchored the arena to Flatbush Avenue. Three smaller residential towers, their playful forms like unevenly stacked children’s blocks, framed the arena on the east and south.
This imaginative fusion of inside and out, with the intensity of the sports arena paralleling the bustle of the street, spelled promise. Visitors arriving by subway would spill out into a multitiered glass atrium; directly above, the voluptuous curves of Miss Brooklyn would be a counterpoint to the nearby Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower — a classic stone phallus.
Between the bases of the towers, views would open up from the street onto the concourses that envelop the arena. During a Nets game, pedestrians strolling along Flatbush Avenue would be able to catch glimpses of anguished fans inside; when the arena was empty, its dark, gaping void could have the haunting effect of the ruins of a Roman coliseum. A cold, characterless intersection might thereby be transformed into Brooklyn’s vibrant answer to Times Square, minus the saccharine Disney décor.
The first sign that something was amiss arose when Forest City began to reduce the percentage of affordable housing units in the design and add condominiums, decisions that altered the project’s character. Then the developer quietly asked Mr. Gehry to redesign Miss Brooklyn to cut costs. The delirious exterior was replaced by a less graceful design, with floors piled loosely on top of one another, their forms twisting as they rose. The atrium was reduced to an empty glass hall with a set of bleachers overlooking the street.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gehry invested more energy into designing a 20-story tower for a site across Flatbush that he hoped would balance his composition by creating a visual bond between the sides of the avenue.
Still, the core of his concept, the charged relationship between the enclosed arena and the street, remained intact.
Without the towers the arena is likely to become an enormous eyesore. Even if Mr. Gehry adorns it with a seductive new wrapper, its looming presence will have a deadening impact on a lively area. The magical peekaboo effect of peering between the bases of the towers into the arena will be lost. The atrium, once a vital public space, will be reduced to a barren strip of pavement.
No development at all would be preferable to building the design that is now on the table. What’s maddening is how few options opponents seem to have.
We could wage a public campaign to stop it. We could pray that Forest City Ratner comes up with more money. But given that the city approved the plan, we cannot prevent the developer from building the arena. Nor is there any way of preventing Forest City from selling off pieces of the property to other investors, who could then come up with any design they liked, as long as they abided by zoning and density guidelines.
Mr. Gehry, on the other hand, could walk away.
In the old days, when he was still a budding talent with an uncertain future, he walked off jobs when a client began pushing things in the wrong direction. This was not simply an act of vanity; it showed that the quality of his work mattered more to him than a paycheck.
Years later, he has been backed into a familiar corner. There’s much more money at stake here, and I expect that he is torn between a sense of loyalty to his client and a desire to make good architecture.
But by pulling out he would be expressing a simple truth: At this point the Atlantic Yards development has nothing to do with the project that New Yorkers were promised. Nor does it rise to the standards Mr. Gehry has set for himself during a remarkable career.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company.
“This is a good project,” he said of Atlantic Yards. “Good things sometimes take a long time.”
i think i may get that tatooed on my ass. if i do, i promise to post pictures here.
Oh dear. He might only build the arena and this only a few days after getting a couple of hundred million in public financing.