By Mustafa Mehdi Vural
Atlantic Yards will change Brooklyn. But there is no unanimity among urban historians and scholars on what this change will mean for the borough.
For the last six years, Atlantic Yards has been a Brooklyn tale of money, power and politics. It has been the subject of endless debate, court battles and public relations wars. Today’s ceremonial groundbreaking came only after last week’s decision by the Kings County Supreme Court paved the way for the transfer of the land to developer Bruce Ratner. The stadium at the center of the $4.9 billion project is scheduled to open in 2012.
Atlantic Yards will bring not only an arena to downtown Brooklyn. There will be 16 high-rise residential and office buildings – with some 6,400 apartments, 2,250 of which will be subsidized – not as many as originally planned but nonetheless a dramatic transformation that will be debated for years to come.
“Concerns over losing brownstone Brooklyn is understandable,” said Robert Snyder, an associate professor of journalism and affiliate professor of history at Rutgers-Newark who has published books on New York. “But some changes in cities are inevitable.
“Brooklyn has been suffering economically since the end of the World War II,” he continued. The borough lost its industrial base, and with it its economic vitality. As in other cities, Atlantic Yards will try “to use sports and other entertainment venues to bring commerce and trade back to the city.”
Plans for a sports arena on the site dates to 1954. The area had been a wholesale meat market that was being relocated to Canarsie. Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was looking for a site for a new stadium to replace cramped and aging Ebbets Field. O’Malley, who planned to build the park with his own money, hoped to convince the city’s building czar, Robert Moses, to condemn the land on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, making it affordable for him to buy. Moses refused. And in 1957, O’Malley moved the club to Los Angeles.
Now, for the first time in over 50 years, the borough will once again have a professional sports franchise, the home of which will be the centerpiece of Atlantic Yards – the 18,000 seat Barclays Center.
But that is little consolation to opponents of the project, among them Jacob Segal, an assistant professor of history at Kingsborough Community College.
“These economic development projects help the better-off in the society, it hurts, don’t help the worst-off,” he said. “I personally tend to oppose that kind of development.”
The project, he explained, is essentially “luxury buildings and apartments and a few low income housing thrown in and that upsets the ongoing life of the community. It is disruptive and it is costly to the community.”
Still, the change foes of the plan fought has begun.
“I think that Brooklyn is in reconsolidation,” said David Nasaw, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. The borough “has thought to redefine and reconfigure itself as great city or great borough in its own right.”
Though Nasaw still harbors doubts about whether the Nets will ever play in Brooklyn, Atlantic Yards, he added, “would come a long way to repositioning Brooklyn as a city in its own right as it was in the 19th century.”
But for that to happen, he added, “people will have to have a reason to come early to the game. Seeing the Nets play basketball and to stay afterwards to have drinks.”
In other words, a new, revitalized entertainment district.
“I’m not sure it’s going to happen,” he said. “I hope it does.”
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