Atlantic Yards Arena Takes Shape, but Protests Carry On
By LIZ ROBBINS
Published: July 18, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/ny...-shape.html?hp
Steel beams arc high into the Brooklyn sky, flanked by five cranes that rise from a deep, divisive hole in the ground. Sections of prefabricated concrete seat platforms and concourses — the guts of every sports arena since Roman times — are now in place.
Trucks rumble through the hot, dusty corner of the 22-acre site known as Atlantic Yards. There, shoehorned into one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn, the arena for the New Jersey Nets is finally taking shape.
After eight years of delays — involving eminent domain lawsuits, neighborhood protests, financial setbacks, the removal of its world-renowned architect to cut costs and the enlisting of a Russian oligarch to cover them — the arena, the site’s first building out of 17, is on track to open in September 2012.
“Sometimes I look at it and I am amazed we all got there,” Bruce C. Ratner, the chairman and chief executive of Forest City Ratner Companies, the project’s developer, said last week after part of the roof truss was installed. “It was a long haul.”
The arena, however, is the only building with a definite debut date. And the fights that have surrounded the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project from the beginning are far from over, with the rising colossus (and what is yet unseen) giving opponents fresh reason to complain.
The arena’s construction spills over onto the main thoroughfares of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, snarling traffic and sending rats scurrying onto sidewalks. Trucks are kicking up dust when they exit, and some construction workers have been parking their cars illegally in the neighborhood.
At least one bar has received a liquor license in anticipation of the arena’s opening, and neighbors are already fearing the late-night noise and clientele on game nights.
Meanwhile, a new documentary featuring the opposition to the project, “Battle for Brooklyn,” has galvanized some advocates again, lending a national focus to their cause. They are quick to point out that while moderately priced housing and jobs for Brooklyn residents were the hallmarks of the Atlantic Yards promise, the first has not happened, and the second has been slow to come.
Last week, a justice in State Supreme Court ruled in favor of these opposition groups, ordering the state body that oversees the project to conduct another environmental review in light of the delays.
Plans for the first of 16 residential and office towers have not been made final. The project is suffering from a lack of financing, and to cut costs, Forest City Ratner is considering using a prefabricated construction method to get the first building, with 34 stories and 400 apartments, started by the end of 2011. Because fewer workers would be needed under this method, unions that supported the project are now upset.
As of this month, the company said that the construction on the arena and the surrounding subway and rail yard infrastructure projects employed 430 workers (180 from Brooklyn), a fraction of what the developer promised and far from the 10,000 jobs that Senator Charles E. Schumer promoted.
Mr. Ratner vowed that “Forest City will get the project done one way or another,” but Candace Carponter, the legal director for the opposition group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, whose numerous lawsuits helped delay the start of the project for several years, said she doubted he would be able to secure financing to build more of the project. As for the arena, Ms. Carponter predicted: “It will be a worse nightmare than anyone has imagined, traffic-wise, and the influx of not the right business to the neighborhood. It’s going to be on people’s doorsteps.”
On Wednesday, panels of the weathered steel facade are to be installed on the side of the arena. A 30-foot-tall test portion has been sitting for the last three months in a staging lot on the corner of Pacific Street and Carlton Avenue.
The new design from SHoP Architects and Ellerbe Becket for the arena, the Barclays Center, which the British bank will pay nearly $400 million to name, is smaller (it no longer has room for National Hockey League-size ice) and simpler than the Frank Gehry design that was scrapped because of the cost.
About half of its 18,000 seats will be sunk below street level, and people walking past the arena will be able to look in and view the scoreboard suspended over the court.
On a recent tour of the site, Bob Sanna, the executive vice president for design and construction for Forest City Ratner, showed the $50 million reconstruction of the Atlantic Terminal subway entrance. By agreement with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, that must be completed before the arena can open.
The temporary rail yards for the Long Island Rail Road, a $65 million reconstruction, are in place and operating.
In seeking financial backing to begin construction of the towers, the company has arranged for $249 million in loans from investors in China through a government program that offers immigrants green cards in exchange for a $500,000 investment. The investors are still being vetted, said MaryAnne Gilmartin, Forest City Ratner’s executive vice president for commercial and residential development.
An office tower planned for the area in front of the arena is on indefinite delay, because the company has been unable to secure a lead tenant. In its place, there will be a public plaza in front of the subway entrance and main entrance to the arena. “You adjust to everything,” Mr. Ratner said.
Local advocates see little about the project that enhances the neighborhood, and are especially angry about the plan for 1,100 surface parking spots between Dean and Pacific Streets and Vanderbilt and Carlton Avenues on land the company intends to use for residential towers. “Forest City Ratner has no concern for the quality of life in and around the yards,” said Letitia James, a Brooklyn city councilwoman, who called the lot an eyesore.
Mr. Ratner said that once the towers were built, the parking spots would be sunk beneath them. But those buildings have become part of the project’s second phase, which does not have to be built for 25 years.
On Wednesday, Judge Marcy S. Friedman of State Supreme Court ruled that the Empire State Development Corporation, the state body overseeing the project, failed to adjust its environmental impact study from 10 years to 25 years in 2009 when it approved Forest City Ratner’s modified building plan. Justice Friedman ordered the development corporation to conduct a new study to determine whether alternatives were needed for the lot where parking is planned.
Ms. Carponter of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the lead petitioner in the suit, hailed the decision as a rebuke of the development corporation’s oversight and a chance to amend the project. The judge did not, however, order the current work to be stopped.
The community has been most vocal about the rat problem, and Forest City Ratner has recently been more receptive to people’s outrage. Last month, more than 60 residents gathered in the Soapbox art gallery on Dean Street to tell horror stories of a “rat tsunami,” with rats, very likely stirred up by the construction, chewing through their car wires and destroying their engines, running rampant on doorsteps and eating through plastic garbage cans.
Mr. Ratner said he spent two hours the next day touring the site with Joseph Sheehan, the president of a private contractor, Colony Pest Control. At a bimonthly Atlantic Yards meeting with city and state officials on Thursday, Forest City Ratner officials announced that they would give residents vouchers to purchase sturdy, rat-proof garbage cans, and that Colony Pest Control would help with a plan to control the rodents.
Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire who recently founded his own political party, took some of the financial pressure off Mr. Ratner by buying a majority stake in the Nets last year and a 45 percent stake in the Barclays Center.
Brett Yormark, the chief executive of the Nets, has been aggressively selling sponsorships, suites and 4,400 premium season-ticket packages, while booking nonbasketball events like the Moscow Circus.
Included in a mass e-mail for V.I.P. tickets was Daniel Goldstein, a founder of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, who refused to sell his apartment for years and finally took $3 million to move, allowing his building (in the middle of the arena site) to be razed. Mr. Goldstein, who now rents an apartment two blocks away, had once put his name on a list to learn more about the Nets’ plans. “It was ironic,” Mr. Goldstein said.
He is the dogged protagonist in “Battle for Brooklyn,” which spans seven years of his group’s fight against the project and the company’s use of eminent domain. As the credits roll, Mr. Goldstein’s building is being demolished in May 2010.
Asked whether he would see the film, Mr. Ratner paused. “Eventually,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/ny...-shape.html?hp
The basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets is rising on the 22-acre site in Brooklyn that is known as Atlantic Yards.
Bob Sanna, the executive vice president for design and construction at Forest City Ratner, reviewed plans for the construction of Barclays Arena.
It has been designed to be half above ground and half below ground.
Donald McKenzie waited for a slab of concrete at the site July 6.
The project is also adding a new subway entrance.
Workers talked at the intersections of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues.
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