Flashback to 2014 Videos: "Pacific Park, Brooklyn's Newest Neighborhood"? A "Neighborhood From Scratch"?
It was a stretch then, with no open space. It's more dubious now. Was CookFox designing "for us," or (Chinese) condo buyers? If "we live in Brooklyn," who's "we"?
My ongoing assessment of the project’s architecture—see Part 1, regarding tower entrances—led me to reconsider these four videos, which seem from a very different time, given the project’s currently stalled state.
In 2014, Atlantic Yards—soon to be renamed—was on a roll. New investor Greenland USA had taken a 70% share in the remaining project, excluding the arena and the under-construction B2 (461 Dean St.) tower. Original developer Forest City Ratner became junior partner in a joint venture.
Greenland Forest City Partners changed the project’s name to Pacific Park Brooklyn (though many people still use the original name, or Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park). They started spending on promotion. So let’s look at some hype videos the firm ordered.
Back then, the videos ranged from questionable to ridiculous.
No, the project couldn’t constitute a “diverse neighborhood” with an “8-acre park,” because construction would come in the unknowable future, a neighborhood can’t be just 22 acres and/or bisected by a major road like “Flatbush Avenue,” and the “park” would be publicly accessible, privately managed open space.
The videos now seem more dubious.
Video 1: A “neighborhood from scratch”?
Consider the video below, posted in December 2014. (I previously wrote about it here.)
It begins with an image of the B14 (535 Carlton Ave.) tower, with lush trees nearby, then flashes into the Brooklyn Bridge. An unidentified narrator states: "The New York we love is a place that largely happened by accident. But what if it happened on purpose?"
But what if it didn't? At the time, the project had gone through one name change, multiple schedule changes, and multiple changes in program.
Since then, Forest City has bowed out, two new developers built three towers (and one of them collaborated with Greenland on a fourth), and Greenland has, since November 2023, been on the verge of losing control of six railyard development sites in a foreclosure. (New joint ventures to take over the remaining project sites, led by Cirrus Real Estate, are emerging.)
Note that the lead image in the video, looking north on Dean Street at the path to “Pacific Park” east of B14, accentuated by robust trees and bordered by a retail space with notably high windows, is not today reflected in reality, as shown in my photo below (which cuts off the cars parked along Dean Street).
The narration is then accompanied by historic, black-and-white footage of construction: If you could build an ideal New York neighborhood from scratch, what would you do?
From scratch? Remember how original architect Frank Gehry embraced the opportunity "to build a neighborhood practically from scratch" (misquoted in the Times without the word "practically"), and how that raised hackles.
Of course a 22-acre site, with an irregular outline, could never be a neighborhood. Today, with a cluster of four towers one long block away from another set of four towers, there’s little connection. Six towers, with attendant open space, are yet to emerge over the MTA’s Vanderbilt Yard.
No wonder those operating towers near the arena block, far from the 2.7 acres of open space (of 8 acres promised), have embraced anodyne names like Brooklyn Crossing (B4, 18 Sixth Ave.) and Plank Road (B14, 662 Pacific St.), with no reference to the distant—in time and, for now, location—”Pacific Park.”
Building the hype
The video narration then flashes to a Brooklyn sign, an image of Gehry at work and his 8 Spruce Street (aka “New York By Gehry”) tower, the historic Times Plaza Atlantic Avenue control house, and the Barclays Center subway entrance.
You would build it in New York's best borough, commission a master plan by America's most celebrated living architect, place it next to Brooklyn's biggest transportation hub, surround it with Brooklyn's most dynamic and thriving neighborhoods.
The last phrase brings us Grand Army Plaza with its historic arch and greenmarket, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the leafy streets of historic Prospect Heights.
The phrase "best borough" is, of course, boosterism. Gehry wasn't hired to do a master plan but to design buildings and to add a sheen to the project to help with approvals—before his arena design was traded for a smaller, cheaper version.
While the arena block borders the transit hub, buildings in the east are closer to other subway stops, not the “Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr” subway.
While the project provides access to some great neighborhoods, it’s pretty much—except for Site 5—within Prospect Heights. Thus TF Cornerstone, the developer of 595 Dean St. (B12/B13), has embraced Prospect Heights, not “Pacific Park,” as shown below.
For “all New Yorkers”?
The next passage invokes the classic Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower, the Brooklyn Academy of Music opera house, and the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph on Pacific Street near the project. Today, only the latter building seems to have influenced the project, notably the design of the 550 Vanderbilt condo building.
Make it a place for all New Yorkers to live.
That covers a lot of ground. After all, the affordable housing, as we’d learned, was skewed to middle-income households, and it’s become even more skewed since then. (The “all New Yorkers” quote shows a non-diverse set of people at dinner.)
Design questions
Design buildings that celebrate the city's architectural esthetic. Include amenities and retail that New Yorkers demand, and Brooklyn deserves.
As to celebrating the city's architectural esthetic, some buildings work far better than others in terms of material, while the scale is a significant shift. (There were no images of nearby row houses.)
Could that be why a fantasy graphic of the 550 Vanderbilt tower reduced a 19-story building, nearly the project’s shortest, as a modest eight stories, surrounded by large trees and an outline of open space 1) not yet built and 2) extended, wrongly, to encompass the intact residential block between Sixth and Carlton avenues and Dean and Pacific streets.
As to the purportedly included amenities and retail, the video shows retail outlets in nearby Prospect Heights, because none had been built in the project.
It’s taken a while, but Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park today does have retail, ranging ranges from chains (luxe fitness, expensive ice cream, healthy salad, veterinary clinic) to more local restaurants, coffee, and beer.
A “perfect little park”?
Then, introduced bizarrely with scenes of Prospect Park, the narrative continues: And at the center of it all, you'd create a perfect little park, the most beautiful park for blocks around.
Then we see projected scenes of the “park,” which seem very aspirational.
As far as I can tell, this is view looking southwest toward the 535 Carlton (B14) site and Dean Street, from the main corridor of open space—demapped Pacific Street—that requires project completion to attain. The neighbor B13, the west tower of 595 Dean Street, is somehow omitted.
After a shift to an image of the disconnected B3 (38 Sixth Ave.) and B2 towers, then 535 Carlton and 550 Vanderbilt more than a block away, the narrative ends: You would build a neighborhood that looked like it was always there, and soon, it will be. Pacific Park: Brooklyn's Newest Neighborhood.
Even in the best scenario as of that video, that publicly accessible open space--not a "park"--wouldn't have been done until 2025. Now it likely would take at least a decade, probably longer.
Maybe, someday, the project—not a “neighborhood”—will look like it was “always there,” but that will require neighbors to endure some significant construction noise, dust, and disruption.
Video 2: “We live in Brooklyn” (but who’s “We”?)
The video below did not get as much play.
Why? Perhaps someone recognized that a project which gained support in largely Black Central Brooklyn, given promises to fight gentrification, in this video featured a mostly white cast, not just playing and consuming but even working in service jobs?
(I noticed cameos by a light-skinned Black woman, a maybe-Hispanic woman, and a maybe-Asian woman.)
Or maybe someone noted that the Brooklyn cred assumed by the “Pacific Park. We live in Brooklyn” tagline bolstered Greenland, owned significantly by the government of Shanghai?
An unidentified narrator states: It means something different to everyone. A place to live. A way of life. An ideal situation.
Well, maybe not everyone, but the images are mostly Brooklyn icons or gentrification stalwarts: the Brooklyn Bridge, Prospect Park, a coffee shop, the Brooklyn Museum, the Grand Army Plaza arch, Doughnut Plant, Prospect Park (again), BRIC, brownstone streets, the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket, the Brooklyn Bridge (at night), the Barclays Center, the subway, restaurants, pizzeria, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the bridge (again), Grand Army Plaza (again).
Work. Grow. Connect. Shop. Enjoy. Live. Thrive. Whether you’re from here, or just come here, Brooklyn’s what you make it. Pacific Park. We live in Brooklyn.
Only in the last frames do we see virtual reality images showing 550 Vanderbilt and the associated open space at ground level, looking unusually lush and expansive, and then the upper-floor terrace.
The whole thing’s pretty ineffable—Brooklyn’s what you make it”—but we know who’s targeted. (Here’s the YouTube version, by the way.)
Video 3: 550 Vanderbilt
The June 2015 video below promotes the 550 Vanderbilt condo building. (In September 2015, I wrote about a version with Chinese subtitles, aimed at the tower’s original audience. I then wrote in January 2017 about the version below.)
The video shows architect Rick Cook of CookFox at his desk and in his office, with his colleagues, and consists solely of his narration. He sounds sincere, and he’s a fine architect, but his patter’s just not that convincing.
My name is Rick Cook, I'm an architect, and our studio, CookFox, had the opportunity to design 550 Vanderbilt. Designing this building in some ways, as a crafted whole of a series of homes, is entirely different from any of the other condo projects we've done. The difference for us in designing in Brooklyn is that more than half of our studio lives there. We're designing homes for us, and for our neighbors.
Designing homes for us? C’mon. (That was especially ironic in the Chinese-subtitled version.) How many of his subordinates could pay, say, $540,000, the entry-level price for a studio? Today, studios list for $739,000 and $750,000.
We believe that we should design for a very wide audience. Diversity is a strength, and we have a very wide diversity of unit types that we hope will lead to a wide diversity of homeowners.
Well, "wide diversity of unit types" would lead to a diversity of household size but not, as Atlantic Yards once promised, socio-economic diversity.
It's uniquely crafted for this one site in the world, and this one remarkable neighborhood of Prospect Heights, and right on an eight-acre open space known as Pacific Park.
It is a well-crafted design, with bricks and precast concrete, reflecting some elements of the existing neighborhood. In citing Prospect Heights, Cook apparently didn't get the memo that the project was supposed to be Brooklyn's "newest neighborhood."
Though Cook, thankfully, didn’t call it a “park,” his phrasing suggested that the “eight-acre open space” already existed. That recalls the style bloggers paid for hype.
The entrance to the building today, as shown above, looks a lot like the rendering, though the gap between the entrance canopy and the windows above it is greater, the trees are far more modest, and the concrete is tarnished. Also, a row of parked vehicles is inevitable.
Looking at the building
Then we see images of the building.
From the minute you walk in the front door of 550, you look right through the lobby into Pacific Park, and then you get to your unit, and there's large windows protected by heavy masonry frames with views and light and air in your apartment.
They couldn’t look into the “park,” since it didn’t exist yet. As of then, there was an empty lot to the west. Today that’s become a building (B12, and open space. Still, the north end of 550 Vanderbilt looks over a railyard that awaits a deck before tower construction, a long-away (and noisy) process.
Then we see apartment interiors, other interior shots, and another notably lush version of the adjacent open space.
Our greatest hope is that when people call 550 home, they'll be proud of its authenticity, of the quality of life that they have and the way this building fits into Prospect Heights and sets up the new condition of Pacific Park.
The buzzword “authenticity” seems risky, given what was demolished to bring about the project. At 202 feet, 550 Vanderbilt is the second shortest building in the project, so the “new condition” is very much a start, with buildings more than double--perhaps triple—the height coming over the railyard.
The screenshot above portrays a deep zone of greenery west of the tower. In reality—and I shot the photo below from the westernmost edge of the open space outside the adjacent building—it’s neither as deep or as green. The largest element’s a plaza.
We're passionate about the idea that a healthy, resilient city depends on diversity and the highest quality housing, and we believe that we've made that the heart and soul of 550.
With 550 Vanderbilt--as opposed to 535 Carlton, another CookFox building, described below--they were building “diverse” ownership units for the wealthy, initially many of them overseas Chinese recruited by Greenland USA’s Shanghai-based parent.
Video 4: 535 Carlton
I hadn’t written previously about the video below, but it also was released around 2015 and also features architect Cook as narrator. Though titled “Pacific Park,” it focuses on the other CookFox building, “100% affordable” 535 Carlton Avenue.
For our studio, working at Pacific Park is extremely important. Over half of our office lives in Brooklyn. And for them, it’s designing buildings for their neighborhood.
Well, not quite their neighborhood. It’s a big borough.
We’re operating in the context of a master plan done by Frank Gehry, arguably the most famous living architect in America.
OK, but rather than see a master plan of the 22-acre site, we get a shot of landmarked leafy Prospect Heights, then Gehry’s 8 Spruce Street. Then we see the arena oculus and a wide shot of the venue.
The video, as shown in the screenshot above, portrays 535 Carlton, in the view looking north on Carlton Avenue, as somewhat more modest in scale than reality, as shown below. (I couldn’t stand in the street for the photo because of, well, traffic.)
And then we have our friends at SHoP, who designed Barclays Center, which has reinvented the idea of an urban arena, that actually creates a space: I’ll meet you under the oculus at the Barclays Center.
Yes, but that was an accident, since Frank Gehry was supposed to have reinvented the urban arena by surrounding it with towers, notably a flagship that was never built.
We then see leafy Carlton Avenue, now part of the Prospect Heights Historic District.
535 sits on Carlton, at the corner of Dean, and Carlton is a beautiful street of masonry row houses, lots of texture on the windows, humanly-scaled railings. It’s really a beautiful, beautiful street.
It is, and it was a challenge to fit in, one CookFox tried to meet. Then we see construction scenes, Cook, and images of 535 Carlton again.
This is a building that we wanted to be made out of the stuff of the neighborhood and the stuff of the neighborhood is earthy materials. So we made the building out of brick. It’s a building with much more depth and light and shadow that you might expect from an affordable housing. We believe that these buildings need to feel solid and have a presence on the street.
The building does use brick well. However, the CookFox’s renderings incorporate flat-panel concrete. As built, the fluted panels look more irregular and more shoddy, especially in a more expansive view (as I’ll describe in another article).
We’re architects that like to work at all scales, from tiny projects to huge projects, and one of the interesting things about working at the scale of Pacific Park is that it allowed us to do a project like 535, 100% affordable, and help the mayor accomplish his goals for affordable housing in this diverse city.
Well, the mayor’s goal was numbers, and a fully “affordable”—er, income-targeted—building helped get him there. However, with 65% middle-income units, aimed mostly at households earning six figures, it deviated from the project’s original promise, which was, among the affordable units, 40% middle-income.
Also, in a telling episode that went ignored (beyond my coverage), the presence of 535 Carlton, yoked into a dubious “zoning lot” with 550 Vanderbilt down the block, helped condo buyers save an estimated $50 million. Such financial maneuvering doesn’t get a video.
No hype videos were produced for the two other towers (B2, 461 Dean, and B3, 38 Sixth Ave.) being built around that time, perhaps because their flaws were more obvious. I’ll cover that in the future.