A WNBA Championship Prompts a Parade, and Amnesia (Weekly Digest)

Also, developer Greenland USA promoted giant project at Site 5 as part of "The Brooklyn Trio," the borough's three tallest buildings. Images, however, were redacted.

Oct 27, 2024

This digest offers a way for people to keep up with my Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report blog, as well as my other coverage in this newsletter and elsewhere.

After Atlantic Yards was announced in 2003, some gauzily projected a championship celebration for the NBA’s expected New Jersey-to-Brooklyn Nets. No one anticipated a WNBA team.

Remember: if a second professional team arrived at Barclays Center, according to a nonbinding February 2005 document, "additional rent and other terms" would be negotiated. That didn’t happen.

No one remembers that. Instead, when the New York Liberty won the WNBA championship last week, the press, unsurprisingly, covered the celebratory parade, the politicians’ speeches, and the gathering at the arena.

Sure, the players, coaching staff, and even savvy ownership/management deserve kudos. Few can produce as successful a “sports entertainment corporation.” It’s just that ownership doesn’t deserve a pass on a publicly supported arena.

Political points

Political rivals basked in publicity divorced from any tough political decisions. Brad Lander—the urban planner turned City Council Member and now Comptroller—acknowledged, in a tweet, that he was wrong to be “not excited” about an arena.

I reminded him that the arena doesn’t pay taxes. He didn’t respond.

I’d forgotten that Council Member Lander just four years ago signed onto a letter from a colleague, calling for city sports venues to pay taxes and stating, "The Barclays Center was supposed to be a boon for Downtown Brooklyn, but it [was] merely a high-priced trojan horse for gentrification around the Atlantic Yards that many consider a disaster."

(I wrote: “A disaster for those displaced, a boon for some property and business owners, very much a mixed bag for the public interest and very much less than was promised.” I’ll write more about Lander’s various stances.)

Well, as the late Assemblymember Richard Brodsky once said, “There is nothing like professional sports to make public people nutty.”

From this newsletter:

Oct. 22: Welcome to "The Brooklyn Trio"? In architecture firm's presentation, developer Greenland lobbied hard to build bigger at Site 5 opposite arena. New York State signed on. Tower images still redacted.

This is the backstory to the plans for a two-tower project at Site 5, longtime home to the big-box stores P.C. Richard and the now-closed Modell’s, involving the shift of bulk from the unbuilt flagship tower once slated to loom over the arena.

Empire State Development (ESD), the state authority that oversees/shepherds the project, in October 2021 agreed to support various changes, which could lead to a two-tower project with 1.242 million square feet, rising 910 feet and 450 feet respectively, and including LED signage.

The arguments in the 2018 presentation were remarkably self-serving. Below, the outlines of the approved streetscape at B1 and Site 5, looking west from Atlantic Avenue near Sixth Avenue, portray the possibilities in the least flattering light.

Those outlines would hardly be a commercial choice. Meanwhile, the proposal for the future streetscape was redacted by ESD, when it delivered the document in response to my Freedom of Information Law request. Still, I earlier commissioned alternative images.

From Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Oct. 21: New York Liberty win WNBA title! Among the "public people" cheering are Comptroller Brad Lander and Attorney General Letitia James.

Oct. 23: As NY Liberty await a parade and a party, NYC claims playoffs generated $18.3M+ of "economic impact." That primarily benefits the team/arena owner.

Learning from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park

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