update

» Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Miss Brooklyn?

Suddenly, momentum is shifting in the Atlantic Yards debate. For months now, Bruce Ratner’s plan to build 17 high-rise towers and a luxury sports arena in Brooklyn has steamed ahead, resistance seemingly futile. Three events, in quick succession, have changed the game and put the politically connected developer on the defensive.

First, on Tuesday, the New York Times splashed Frank Gehry’s latest designs for Atlantic Yards across the front page. Ratner has long been criticized for the cheap, fortress-like architecture of his other Brooklyn projects. Gehry, the celebrity architect renowned for designing buildings that look like crumpled balls of tinfoil, was brought aboard to neutralize that critique and provide the developer with aesthetic cover. Yet, Gehry’s designs did what months of petitioning, protesting and public meetings couldn’t. They got “sensible,” well-heeled, politically connected Brooklynites pissed off, paying attention and preparing to fight. For neighborhood advocates who have been working diligently to get an apathetic public to pay attention to the travesty underway at Atlantic Yards, Gehry’s architectural models were a gift.

Then, on Wednesday, London won the 2012 Olympics bid. Suddenly, it is no longer unpatriotic to suggest that a 19,000-seat arena at the traffic-choked intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic might be a bad idea. With the Olympics bid and Manhattan stadium debate finally out of the way, New Yorkers are finally examining Ratner’s Atlantic Yards proposal on its own merits. They’re seeing that the project has little to do with the genuine needs of the communities and city around it. Real estate industry insider Peter Slatin reports that the Atlantic Yards project “is being driven not by the requirements of the district nor by a compelling urban vision, but rather by the high price,” the $300 million, Ratner paid for the New Jersey Nets basketball franchise. According to Slatin, “The project ballooned in size under pressure from Ratner’s co-investors on the Nets, who are increasingly concerned that their investment pay off.”

The Ratner plan suffered its third and most signficant blow on Wednesday when a rival real estate developer submitted a surprise bid for the railyards, just under the MTA’s deadline. The Extell Corporation’s bid adheres to most of the urban design recommendations put forward in the Unity Plan, a development proposal generated through community-based design workshops. Unlike the Ratner plan, Extell’s has no arena, it makes a genuine effort to knit together and fit in to the low-rise neighborhoods around it, and, most important, it requires no eminent domain. Extell isn’t asking the government to seize people’s homes and workplaces.

Granted, the odds of the MTA accepting the Extell bid are slim. You’d think the cash-strapped agency would have put real effort into marketing its valuable property. Yet, from the beginning, the MTA treated the bidding process as a mere formality. The Extell offer materialized only because neighborhood advocates took it upon themselves to send out the MTA’s requests for proposal to scores of developers. Regardless of how the MTA treats it, Extell’s bid is a big win for the community. The competing bid legitimizes the Unity Plan by putting real money behind it, the competition keeps the Atlantic Yards story in the news, and that ensures light will shine on the sweetheart dealings, lack of democratic process and disregard for community input that have defined the project up to now.

But let’s get back to Gehry’s gift to the Atlantic Yards opposition, the architectural model and sketches he showed Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. The designs are so bad they’re almost funny. Gehry calls the 70-story skyscraper at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush “Miss Brooklyn,” as in, “We’ll sure miss Brooklyn if this crap gets built.” The arena itself is barely visible beneath Gehry’s torqued pile of boxes. For Ratner and his political supporters, the arena's invisibility is a problem. They’d much rather you focus on the return of professional sports to Brooklyn than pay attention to the 21-acre land grab and mountainous landscape of new skyscrapers. To solve that problem Gehry has wrapped an entire city block with a 10-story tall, glowing Nets billboard, complete with, what I believe is a massive Jason Kidd head looming over Flatbush Avenue. Easter Island’s got nothing on the New Brooklyn, yo.

Ouroussoff unwittingly does more damage to Ratner's cause when he writes, "As you arrived by car along Flatbush Avenue your eye would travel up a delirious pileup of forms, which become a visual counterpoint to the horizontal thrust of the avenue." Though it's difficult for a mere layman such as myself to understand what this high priest of architecture is talking about and why it has any inherent value to actual human beings, the idea of thousands of Nets fans arriving at the arena by car is, of course, an absolute nightmare. If Gehry and Ratner are thinking of their typical Atlantic Yards "user" as someone who gets there with a car, Brooklyn is in a lot more trouble than even the harshest critics of this plan thought.

But it would not be at all suprising if Gehry and Ratner are, in fact, thinking of making Atlantic Yards an automobile-oriented development. At the one city council hearing that has taken place on the project, Ratner spokesman Jim Stuckey was asked Forest City Ratner would allay the community's traffic congestions concerns. Stuckey told city councilmember David Yassky not to worry: Ratner would include plenty of parking and would widen the avenue to accomodate greater traffic flow. For progressive urban planners, these are fighting words. Even not-so-progressive planners know that the single best way to encourage automobile traffic is to provide copious parking and wider thoroughfares. Stuckey's solution wouldn't solve the area's traffic problems, it would exacerbate them.

With skyscrapers jutting up at odd angles, Gehry’s design gives an overall impression of towers simply bursting out of the earth like giant crystal formations. Ouroussoff explains to us little people that the design reflects the energy and vitality of today’s Brooklyn. Not surprisingly, the master planners and architectural theorists completely ignore the fact that a city's energy, vitality and creativity is generated on its streets and in its neighborhoods, not by “a skyline fraught with visual tension.” Over the last decade Brooklyn has become the place to be in New York City, in equal measure to the corporate deadening and commercial take-over of Manhattan. There is no more creative space on that side of the East River. Cataclysmic money has squeezed it out.

Ultimately, what we see in Gehry's designs is an attempt to create an energetic urban metropolis from scratch. What we end up with is a cartoon version of a real city. The closest architectural analogy to Gehry's plan isn't anything in New York City. It's the New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Photographs courtesy of NoLandGrab.org



Comments

All right, so Gehry is out to lunch. This architecture is terrible. I hate it too. But aesthetics are a matter of taste and few people ever agree on architecture. Maybe some people will like it.

More important is that Ratner's plan would create 6,000 homes, while the Extell plan creates only 1,940. All across the U.S. northeast, cities are atrophied, hollow-eyed versions of their once great selves -- New Haven, Hartford, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Cincinnati. These cities suffer from decades of disinvestment, white flight and planned shrinkage continues. Small pedestrian friendly towns have suffered the same fate as businesses have fled to the suburban rings. Beyond the northeast, "cities" are merely agglomerations of auto-dependent suburbs -- Atlanta, Phoenix, etc.

New York stands along as the only walkable, pedestrian- and transit-friendly city that is gaining traction as we proceed further into the 21st century. More people want to live in Brooklyn and Manhattan than there is space to house them all. This leads to prohibitively expensive real estate, deferred dreams and untold economic opportunity lost to other communities that make it easier to build housing. It also fosters ever greater dependency on the car as would-be New Yorkers are forced to live in suburbia.

The Atlantic Yards, right on top of a subway and regional rail hub, are a very appropriate place for dense residential living. Dense residential living doesn't have to entail height, a stadium, bad architecture, or my personal pet peeve, street demapping. The Ratner plan has all four of these thing, but I like it better than Extell's plan because it makes for better use of centrally located urban land.

AD: I agree with you that the aesthetics of the architecture really shouldn't be the main focus. What's beautiful to one person is ugly to another. New York City can afford to have some ugly or controversial buildings in it. The important thing, I believe, is how urban design and architecture impacts New Yorkers ability to live, work, move about the city and build healthy neighborhoods and communities. The process by which these kinds of big development projects get done is also important. On all of these counts, this Atlantic Yards project is really falling short.

This little story sums up the "starchitect" problem well: The Ratners, being based in Cleveland, should know it. My Dad's social work school at CWRU was right across the street from the business school building
that Gehry designed. It's the usual titanium hodgepodge. The inside of the school is actually pretty cool and impressive to look at and walk around in. Aesthetically, I think it's great. But during the building's first Cleveland winter the students and faculty discovered that heavy avalanches of snow were suddenly and unexpectedly sliding off the weirdly sloped roof and, at extremely high speed, landing on the pavement smack in front of the school's front doors. They had to stop using the front doors for a significant part of winter which, of course, is about 6 months of the year in Cleveland. Gehry, in all of his theoretical and conceptual grandeur forgot to account for the mundane facts that it snows a lot in Cleveland and the sloped rooftop, as it has evolved over the last few millennia of human civilization, actually has a functional, day-to-day, street-level use. These practical human implications are the things that often get lost when visually-oriented, masturbatory, ego-trip, high-theory architecture is running the show. Combine that type of architecture with cataclysmic developer money and government urban renewal and, well, let's put it this way: This is not the combination of factors that has ld to Brooklyn's resurgence over the last 10 years. Quite the contrary...

David: I completely agree that human behavior is paramount to aesthetics. My point in bringing up aesthetics was only to note that people rarely agree on such matters, and thus, to render aesthetics nearly moot.

Naparstek: That story would be funny if it wasn't so unfortunate for the people of Cleveland. I wonder what Gehry's firm did to remediate the problem?

The most frightening part of your post was the quote from the Jim Stuckey. He wants to widen the streets around there? There will be plenty of parking? No, no, no, no, no! Folks from Forest City Ratner, if you're listening: If you win this bid, you need to do whatever you can to promote transit ridership to Nets games. That means above all else making parking prohibitively hard to find. Then if anything, widen the sidewalks around there to accomodate all the fans -- not the street, for God's sake! Then you should charge high prices for parking and work with the MTA's marketing department to encourage subway and LIRR ridership to the games. Believe me, you don't need parking to entice potential fans. That's the whole point of moving to Brooklyn in the first place, right? You will fill the arena with transit riders alone. You have a glorious opportunity on top of a subway and regional rail hub. Don't waste it.

But on to the Extell plan. Man, that plan is just awful. It involves just as much cataclysmic money as the Ratner plan, but without the money. Block after block of a monotonous weirdly undulating slab, moving away from the street and ignoring it while blocking out views of the city beyond from the pedestrian at its foot. If I had stumbled across that plan without any knowledge of who designed it, I might have thought it was a Gehry design. The plan reminds me of the unfortunate Chatham Green. (1961, Kelly & Gruzen.) This undulating slab at 185 Park Row fills up an entire superblock. It is set back far from the street, surrounded by parking lots. This obliterates any hope of a pedestrian friendly street wall and deadens the whole environment around it. The contrast between bustling Chinatown to the north and this early '60s dead space could not be more clear. The Extell plan calls for a similar form but on a more cataclysmic scale. Far better would be to leave what is there there, and perhaps upgrade lot-by-lot.

So the Extell plan and the Ratner plan both leave a lot to be desired. But at least Ratner adds vital density and what appear to be at least a few places with a street wall. And as long as he can mitigate this potential traffic nightmare, I think an arena would be a great morale boost and community spirit building venue for Brooklyn. I'm not basketball fan, but a city within a city of 2.5 million people should have its own arena. It's unfortunate that Ratner wants to demap Pacific Street, widen other streets and insist on lots of parking. But it's still a better plan than Extell's, if only by a slim margin. Don't let problems with Ratner's "planning process" and unfortunate use of eminent domain lead you to use to rose colored glasses on the Extell plan.

AD: A few months ago I was saying the same thing: Don't get all caught up in the bad process. But now having been more involved over the last few months, I can no longer say this. The way the MTA land is being dispensed with, neighborhoods around the site are being completely ignored, people are being evicted using eminent domain, and a single private developer is being favored and allowed to do whatever he wants is really not right. It's almost Soviet-style this process that's underway here. It's definitely not democratic. No good product can come of such a bad process.

Gehry does not make liveable spaces. It's all flash and dazzle, and he's had to tone down some flash to keep from blinding motorists. (No such consideration is ever made for people on foot in a Gehry project, though.) I think Kunstler put it best:

http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200408.html


shut em down:
http://www.nolandgrab.org/archives/2005/07/how_to_defeat_r.html

Hey Sean, Hi back to Cindy. Nice to "see" ya. Great comments. I totally agree. There's something kind of high-end Soviet about one, government-favored developer and architect designing 17 towers in one spot. Ironically, along with the handing of the bid over to FCR the MTA announced yesterday that they were going to build their own platform over the west side railyards in Manhattan and then sell the space lot by lot to a variety of developers. Duh. That's what neighborhood advocates have been suggesting the MTA do in Bklyn for months now.



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