Unswayed by the bogus claim that the project would infringe on public enjoyment of the Brooklyn Bridge, the City Council voted 40-9 last week to approve Dock Street Dumbo. It took some courage for Speaker Christine Quinn and the big majority to withstand the hysteria whipped up by the huge propaganda campaign that had swept up celebrities in its cause. The pressure was felt keenly by local council members David Yassky and Bill de Blasio, who voted with the minority. Yassky, still repairing his tarnished image on matters of development and preservation, went so far as to say before the vote that he opposed the loss of views “not those of people from their apartments, but the views of those millions of New Yorkers and others who walk or bike over the bridge.� Ms. Quinn, who had walked the bridge twice – once with opponents and once with proponents – was unimpressed.

A rearguard action has been promised by the opponents. ( How many rearguard actions do we in Brooklyn have to see? We’ve seen them with Atlantic Yards and Brooklyn Bridge Park.) Unless some devastating irregularity, amounting to malfeasance, can be proved against the School Construction Authority in approving the proposal for including a middle school in Dock Street, there does not seem to be much ground for a legal challenge. Even then, the question of the Authority’s internal handlings is really beside the point – the point being that the Walentases proposed putting the school into Dock Street when no one else had a feasible alternative or could come up with one at less cost to the city.

The great likelihood, therefore, that Dock Street will be built means that another battle is in the offing. Since constructing Dock Street will mean elimination of the shed that has served St. Ann’s Warehouse for its productions, St. Ann’s is looking for another space. Its preferred one is the now roofless Tobacco Warehouse, inside of which some kind of permanent “big top� could well be installed. Now that the state has turned management of Empire/Fulton Ferry State Park over to the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, the prospect for re-use development of the Tobacco Warehouse and the Empire Stores becomes more imminent. A few years ago, a proposal by the Walentases to use the Empire Stores for technological startup efforts by Polytechnic University graduate students was rejected, and the developer Shaya Boymelgreen was given the job of converting those warehouses, a job his firm proved unable to accomplish. There have also been proposals for the Tobacco Warehouse, one of which would have turned it into a sailing vessel repair shop and museum.

In the meantime, the Walentases, with their big stake in DUMBO, have remained in the wings as potential restorers and converters of these 19th century structures. However, any move to make use of the Tobacco Warehouse looks certain to be fought by those who would rather see it be left as a picturesque ruin, open to the sky. The Brooklyn Heights Association, in its long-running war against all things Walentas, signaled some time back that it would raise a fight if St. Ann’s Warehouse or any other enterprise were to try to roof the shell.

The fun and games are sure to continue.

Looking for Hope

The news got worse. Forest City Ratner had held back on telling us that not just the arena but all of Atlantic Yards would no longer be built to the designs of Frank Gehry. The project would have no touch of greatness. One felt tempted to say: You had your chance, Brooklyn, now forget about it (fuhgeddaboutit!) and let’s go back to scratch. But where does that get us? Supposedly Gehry’s master plan and guidelines for the 22-acre project remain in place, presumably meaning that some boxes could be built on spaces marked out in the Gehry plan. Is that better than nothing?

From a legal perspective, a change of architects would not seem to affect Bruce Ratner’s use of eminent domain (upheld after numerous appeals) to proceed with a project that, at least as conceived, would have 17 buildings with 4,000 apartments, 40 percent of them to be set aside for low- to middle-income families. The quality of the architecture may have been an esthetic and moral consideration providing support for the concept, offering justification for the element of public subsidy involved, but in practical and legal terms the numbers were about all that mattered. Design excellence carries a cost, which is what got it killed, but it is hardly a determining factor in the official reviews and legal proceedings. And so we are left with the prospect of a project that bears little or no resemblance to the original vision, but that – from an official standpoint – is still essentially the same project.

Huge as the disappointment is, a second-best project may yet be better than none. Bruce Ratner’s record on architecture is a very mixed one, from such cheap atrocities as One Pierrepont Plaza and the first Atlantic Mall to the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times building and the Gehry-designed Beekman Tower, both in Manhattan. In between are the uninspired but serviceable buildings of MetroTech in Brooklyn. Two things are suggested by this range: one, that Ratner has commissioned better architecture as he has gone along; second, that he has been moved to adopt a higher standard for Manhattan than for Brooklyn. (Watching a television report last week on the glorious new annex to the Art Institute of Chicago, also by Piano, I couldn’t help but feel sad that Brooklyn isn’t Chicago when it comes to architecture.) Still, there are many architects who could produce economical designs for Atlantic Yards that we wouldn’t be ashamed of.

That the Atlantic Yards site cries out for major development remains unquestionable. Here is this void at Brooklyn’s potentially most vital intersection, at a transportation hub crossed by ten subway lines and six bus routes as well as having a terminal of the Long Island Rail Road. A concentration of population at such a point represents the environmentally best way for a city to build. An article in the business section of last Sunday’s New York Times, which reported on urban revival in several cities around the country being spurred by development concentrated at light rail hubs, carried this observation: “Local government might invest in transit, parks and infrastructure, revise zoning laws and offer financial incentives in return for a developer taking the risk of building in an unproven area.� Atlantic Yards abundantly offers a transit advantage even without light rail, although the notion of trolley cars passing there along Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue offers food for thought. The traffic problems caused by the convergence of a hodgepodge of dissonant grids at that part of Flatbush Avenue will demand some radical solutions – one of which is congestion pricing or other discouragement to private vehicular traffic. Transit accessibility helps offset the burden of that.

Having discharged Gehry from the project, Ratner now needs to let Brooklyn know what he has in mind for Plan B and who its architects will be. We can’t expect greatness – Brooklyn evidently wasn’t ready for greatness – but a respectable-enough development, perhaps looking a bit like Battery Park City, can still be hoped for. Different architects for the different buildings could give the project some necessary variety (which Gehry had offered by varying the building shapes). The preliminary renderings that have been published of the new arena design are not encouraging. Let’s hope Ratner will show he can do better than that. It can’t be the magnificent complex we might have had, but, hey, this is only Brooklyn!

— Henrik Krogius, Consulting Editor
Brooklyn Heights Press & Cobble Hill News

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