Jones Lang LaSalle


Developer Defends Atlantic Yards, Saying Towers Won't Corrupt the Feel of Brooklyn
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

From across the room, the new plastic-and-wood model of Brooklyn's proposed Atlantic Yards project — revealed by the developer Forest City Ratner at a news conference yesterday — looked a lot like the old one sitting a few feet away: a 22-acre swath of glass, brick and metal towers that would loom over the surrounding neighborhoods and alter the borough's otherwise sparse skyline.

But in an hourlong presentation of the project's latest design, Frank Gehry, the project's architect, and Laurie Olin, its landscape designer, emphasized details that they said would harmonize the planned arena and commercial and residential buildings with the neighborhoods they would border.

They described shorter and thinner buildings on Dean Street, where the project abuts a mostly low-rise neighborhood; extensive use of glass walls at street level; and what Mr. Olin described as "the biggest stoop in Brooklyn," a sort of public porch planned for the southeast corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues.

"It still feels like Brooklyn," said Mr. Olin.

But their presentation also made clear that the developer and its opponents still have vastly different visions of what, exactly, Brooklyn should feel like, at least in this corner of the borough, where the downtown commercial district shades into a quiet neighborhood of brownstones to the southeast.

"They should've been picketing Henry Ford," Mr. Gehry said yesterday, dismissing critics who have questioned the pace and scale of development in the borough. "There is progress everywhere. There is constant change. The issue is how to manage it."

Opponents of the project have criticized the density of Mr. Gehry's designs, among other issues, and the government's possible condemnation of property to make room for them. They have backed alternative plans for the site, including proposals by rival developers that would include mostly low-rise buildings and not require eminent domain. (Forest City Ratner is the development partner of The New York Times Company in building its new Midtown headquarters, a project that itself involved government condemnation of private property.)
Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, said the new design "puts a Gehry sheen on top of repudiated 1960's-style urban renewal."

He continued, "It's still way too big, and does not change the fact of 16 skyscrapers slammed on top of and next to low-rise, historic neighborhoods."

Mr. Goldstein also criticized Mr. Gehry for declining to meet with area residents. The project "remains an urban planning disaster," he said, because "Mr. Gehry and Mr. Ratner continue to ignore the community."

Yesterday's orchestrated presentation — Junior's, the famed Brooklyn cheesecake place, catered breakfast — came amid a contentious period in the two-and-a-half-year struggle over the Atlantic Yards.

The developer's decision last month to pare back the project's size by about 5 percent has done little to mollify its most astringent critics. And in the next few months, the Empire State Development Corporation, the state agency sponsoring the project, is expected to release a draft study of its potential environmental impacts that will almost certainly be the subject of legal action.

The Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods, an association of about 40 Brooklyn community groups, announced yesterday that it had hired Phillips Preiss Shapiro Associates, a real estate planning firm, to review the draft study.

Earlier this week, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn announced the formation of an advisory board to help with fund-raising, outreach and education. The board includes celebrities who live near the proposed site — such as the novelists Jonathan Lethem and Jhumpa Lahiri and the actors Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams — as well as preservationists, activists and politicians.

Yesterday's presentation is unlikely to temper the passions that have rallied them against Forest City Ratner. Though Mr. Gehry had previously suggested the project would be scaled back significantly, he was more elusive yesterday, saying that he had been "paring back" the design. "It is a process," he added.

Mr. Olin dismissed criticism from some community leaders and outside architects that the project's roughly seven acres of open space were too isolated from surrounding streets to be welcoming to residents.

"I don't think one has to worry about trying to draw people into open space in New York City," he said. "If there's open space that isn't closed or fenced in, people find it."

Much of yesterday's discussion focused on the project's 18,000-seat basketball arena, designed after a lengthy survey of arenas around the country. It is designed to "create intimacy" in an otherwise vast space, Mr. Gehry said, with tiers of seating structured so that "the people in the cheap seats are no longer second-class citizens."

Mr. Gehry spoke in sweeping language of his efforts to create "different levels of iconicity," varying the buildings' degree of unconventionality to create a skyline that would fit into the area. A few buildings would still be adorned with Mr. Gehry's trademark undulating panels, including the project's tallest, dubbed "Miss Brooklyn," which he described as a bride with flowing veils.
On the Dean Street side of the project, spaces between buildings have also been widened significantly from some early renderings to create better lines of sight from one side of the project to the other."We didn't take this lightly," Mr. Gehry said. "We spent an enormous amount of time studying Brooklyn."