Feature

Back to the Future

These days, however, there is still no shortage of Brooklynites who don’t care to look into Ratner’s crystal ball. Just last week, a group calling itself the Prospect Heights Action Coalition was outside the Junior’s press conference picketing Ratner’s New Brooklyn vision, which some consider obscene.

“Everything he’s doing is just homogenizing. He plops down this massive suburban-mall architecture in the middle of the neighborhood. It creates walls between the communities. Atlantic Center was built to be unfriendly. Atlantic Terminal, which is going up now, just looks shabby. And does anyone in Brooklyn really want a Chuck E. Cheese?” fumes the group’s Patti Hagan, a 24-year neighborhood resident. “One of the nice things about Brooklyn always was that the Williamsburgh Savings Bank was the only tall building around. This was big-sky country. This is just one more step in the Manhattanization of Brooklyn.”

Ratner’s opponents predict a plague of potential problems, from rats nibbling on trash left behind by basketball fans to asthma exacerbated by fumes pouring from fans’ SUVs. More generally, the quaint quarters of the borough still teem with resentment of the invading “yuppie hordes.” Ratner’s proposed site is surrounded by a standing army of seventies-era urban homesteaders, many of whom are also “old lefties” and ex-hippies, which gives the current debate a little extra juice—it’s left vs. lefter. Hagan, for example, decries government support for pro-sports arenas as “corporate welfare,” and believes city money would be better spent on housing for seniors, public schools, or perhaps a playground for children built on a platform over those very rail yards.

If one concern unites skeptics across the political spectrum, however, it’s traffic.

“Most people in Brooklyn take public transportation,” Ratner insists. “City rules said we had to build MetroTech assuming that 11 percent of the people who worked there would travel by car. In reality, I don’t think it’s 3 percent.”

Neighbors scoff, but evidence suggests the concept is not, on the face of it, absurd. A few years ago, the San Francisco Giants built a scant 5,000 parking spaces for their new 41,000-seat PacBell Park downtown (their old park, Candlestick, had 20,000). The team boldly predicted that an astonishing 50 percent of their game-day fans would use public transportation, which in the Bay Area is feeble indeed compared with New York’s. San Franciscans predicted disaster. In the end, however, the park not only kick-started the once-desolate China Basin district but exceeded the team’s optimistic transportation goals.

Ratner believes a lot of community resistance, however well-intentioned, is ultimately misguided. Narrow anxieties about traffic miss the larger peril that the city is hemorrhaging jobs—just the sort of back-office jobs that complexes like MetroTech are designed to retain. In the months following 9/11, downtown Manhattan alone lost an estimated 25,000 employees to the suburbs, and not just because companies were fleeing Osama.

“In ten years, we lost 12 million square feet of office space to New Jersey, which is huge!” exclaims Amanda Burden, New York’s planning commissioner. Indeed, that space represents perhaps $150 million in lost tax revenues. “Guess why. We didn’t have any sites to build an office building. Downtown Brooklyn had only one available site. Only one! The rest of it is still zoned for medium-density, and ten-story buildings just aren’t going to do it.”

That will almost certainly change by this time next year, Burden says. The Bloomberg administration is feverishly pushing the interagency Downtown Brooklyn Development Plan, which would rezone significant swaths of the city’s commercial quarters, mostly around Fulton Mall, to accommodate as many as ten Manhattan-style commercial skyscrapers, plus new parks and housing. All of this could—should—happen over the next ten years, Burden says. The idea is to “knit” together all of Brooklyn’s isolated assets—from the hip bistros of Smith Street to the design studios in Williamsburg to the ever-expanding bam to the ambitious waterfront parks planned to stretch from Brooklyn Heights to Greenpoint—into a cohesive bloc. “This is an absolutely huge priority,” Burden says. “Downtown Brooklyn is a key element of the administration’s citywide economic-development strategy. The city is very prepared in order to attract this growth, and we are willing to invest scarce public dollars and public open space to catalyze this growth.”

Ratner figures to be a serious player in this redevelopment. Adjacent to a new arena, Ratner plans to build a $2 billion, 21-acre development featuring both retail and office space and some 5,500 units of housing, which he says will come in various-size buildings and serve various income levels.

“We’re going to get hemmed in by all these high-rise luxury buildings,” worries Prospect Heights resident Muriel Tillinghast. “And a 20,000-seater arena is really over-the-top.”

Of course, it’s not as if the proposed development site is exactly Parisian in charm. Ratner himself considers the arena site—a gaping pit of naked railroad tracks ringed by barbed wire—a “scar.” Indeed, stand in front of Atlantic Center and survey the terrain. Few would mistake the Atlantic-Flatbush junction for the Jardin du Luxembourg. All Ratner asks is that potential neighbors of the arena consider the potential. “Frank Gehry recently bought a lot to build on in Venice Beach,” he offers. “The two lots next door tripled in value.”

Then again, turn around and you’ll see part of the problem, not the solution. Brooklynites almost universally consider Ratner’s Atlantic Center a dreary, big-box eyesore. Ratner? Well, he sort of agrees.

“When I started, I did not have any understanding of the importance of architecture,” he admits sheepishly. “So honestly, Atlantic Center is not something that we’re terribly proud of. But I’ve evolved, I think. Now Frank Gehry is for me an idol, like Larry Doby when I was a kid. Listen, if I have something to do with a new arena, it’ll be radical,” he says deliciously.

The hidden gamble for Ratner is that he’s going to have to try to buy a basketball team without any guarantee of a permanent home. Yes, the team has a lease at the Meadowlands until 2008 and could actually pull out of it when a Brooklyn arena is completed, which Ratner says could take three years. As a worst-case scenario, Ratner has not ruled out a privately funded arena. It might not come to that. City and state officials appear amenable to helping out with an arena, at least under the right framework. The likes of Doctoroff and Burden certainly seem to see an upside.

The question is whether the borough will, too. In a sense, it all comes down to, yes, the “vision thing.” Out West, they dream big dreams and build big stadiums, stadiums with sushi bars and swimming pools. Brooklyn, sturdy and soulful as it is, has been out of the vision business for close to 100 years. But maybe that’s changing, too.

Borough President Marty Markowitz is as Old Brooklyn in manner as a Junior’s egg cream, but he lights up when talk turns to the New Brooklyn Nets. “Brooklyn is the only location that works for the Nets,” enthuses Markowitz. “They left Long Island for a reason. They wouldn’t even be thinking about New Jersey if they realized that the natural fan base is here. All we can do is hope. Football, we don’t have room for an 80,000-seat stadium. Baseball, the Mets and the Yankees have complete veto power over a third team in New York City. The only sport is basketball. If we don’t get this team, the next time this comes around probably will not be in our lifetime.”