By now, surely, Frank Gehry is inured to the revulsion of others. After wrestling with the Spanish over his whimsical Guggenheim Bilbao museum, with Angelenos over his blindingly reflective Walt Disney Concert Hall, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over leaks in a $300-million complex he designed there, and with his own neighbours over his chain-link-fence-adorned house in Santa Monica, the 79-year-old Canadian-born architect is now one of the primary targets of community activists over the gargantuan Atlantic Yards development in downtown Brooklyn, of which he is the chief architect.
Conceived more than four years ago when developer Bruce Ratner purchased the New Jersey Nets and announced his intention to move them to Brooklyn, Atlantic Yards was envisioned as an instant neighbourhood: a 16-building, nine-hectare complex that would throw down an 18,000-seat basketball arena, thousands of luxury condos, low-income housing, and eight office towers.
The only problem was, there was already a neighbourhood there. And though Flatbush and Prospect Heights had seen better days - more than a thousand manufacturing jobs left in the mid-1990s - and local fans were psyched about the return of professional sports to the borough, others weren't keen on being evicted or having the low-slung character of their area altered in a blinding flash of outside money. Others complained that the development would bring "instant gentrification."
The tallest office tower, dubbed Miss Brooklyn, was a 185-metre edifice of undulating glass better suited to the canyons of Manhattan.
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Still, Gehry's designs were well received by architecture critics who were seduced by his vision of an arena, adorned with massive sails, that would hide within a huddle of angular buildings to provide a
"peekaboo" effect from the street. And despite community objections, especially to the government invocation of eminent domain (a.k.a. expropriation) to help Ratner acquire the land, the state finally gave the go-ahead to the development at the end of 2006, along with hundreds of millions in subsidies.
Since then, however, progress at Atlantic Yards has been about as speedy as construction at Ground Zero. And opponents have grown more vocal and better organized. Last month, when the Brooklyn Museum held its spring gala, the black-tie crowd had to push its way past a line of placard-wielding protesters upset that the museum - which otherwise has a very good relationship with its constituency - had chosen to use the occasion to honour Ratner, one of its benefactors. (Some opponents have a problem with perspective: One commenter on a blog account of the gala compared Ratner to Charles Manson and Hitler.) And last week, when the Observer published its list of the 100 Most Powerful People in New York Real Estate, Ratner was number eight, Gehry number 51, and the anti-Atlantic Yards blogger Norman Oder landed at number 77.
But then, real estate in this city is a blood sport and nothing ever gets built without some of the little people being crushed. Ratner has already defeated 18 lawsuits, and he obviously believes he can kill the remaining handful, including one that challenges the legitimacy of the state's environmental review. But while he has to wait for the courts to deal with those cases before he can build, another foe already has him on the ropes: the collapsing credit market.
When Atlantic Yards was first announced, it had an estimated price tag of $2.5-billion; that has since ballooned to $4-billion, almost one-quarter of which, an eye-popping $950-million, is allocated to the arena alone. This spring, when Forest City Ratner, the developer's company, admitted it was considering radical changes to help get the project back on track, the Times' influential architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, who had initially been a champion, suggested Gehry was being reduced to the role of a name-brand fig leaf and should walk away rather than compromise on his vision.
But Gehry isn't the type to quit, and two weeks ago, in a bid to re-ignite civic interest in the project, the company unveiled some radical new designs: The arena has lost its sails and is now apparently wrapped in titanium folds and flanked by only four buildings, one of which looks like a series of bird cages stacked precariously atop one another at a dangerous diagonal. The now dubbed B1 replaces the former Miss Brooklyn and promises to rise to only about 160 metres. B2, which will be built first, is a red-and-pink agglomeration reminiscent of a hillside shantytown.
Last Thursday evening, in a cultural contrast as stark as they come, the anti-Atlantic Yards organization Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn held a benefit concert at the Park Slope club Southpaw, while across the river - in Manhattan, that is - Forest City Ratner used the publicity over the new designs to kick off the sale of the arena's 130 luxury boxes with a splashy party on the 38th floor of the New York Times building. (The Times new headquarters was developed by Forest City Ratner, which has frequently caused Brooklynites to be skeptical of its coverage of Atlantic Yards.)
The admission fee for the Southpaw event, which featured a screening of the anti-Atlantic Yards documentary Brooklyn Matters and music by John Wesley Harding, was $15. The average annual lease fee on the luxury suites is $300,000; if you're feeling flush - say you work at JPMorgan rather than Bear Stearns - you could pony up $540,000 a year for one of 12 "elite" boxes, which, in an illustration that rich people operate in a different sphere of logic, are actually bunkers, located under the bleachers, with no view of the action (though they do each come with eight courtside seats).
Atlantic Yards isn't the only large-scale development in trouble. At the end of March, the developer Tishman Speyer was granted the rights to build office space, parklands, and residential towers on Manhattan's West Side Railyards. But two weeks ago, when it couldn't change the terms of the billion-dollar deal it had just agreed to, it walked off like a spoiled child. The Bloomberg Administration now has two failures to its credit in that one spot, after its ill-fated plan for a football stadium died with its Olympic bid.
Still, the administration, which doesn't seem to grasp that New York is a city of people who live at street level, continues to push these sorts of high concept developments. Up in Harlem, city council has just approved a rezoning that will see skyscraping office buildings and luxury condos consume historic 125th Street. The local community was opposed to it, of course. Not that it mattered.
