And even Mr. Ratner admits that, as a Brooklyn-based commercial builder,
he once ranked at the bottom of the city's architectural food chain.
Brooklyn's Trojan Horse
What's wrong with the buildings Frank Gehry wants to put in my neighborhood?
By Jonathan Lethem
Posted Monday, June 19, 2006, at 12:14 PM ET
Dear Frank Gehry,
We've never met, but last month I sent you a letter. You didn't answer,
so I'm trying again. I'm a novelist who grew up in the Boerum Hill
neighborhood of Brooklyn, and who lives there now (I've also lived in
Oakland, Toronto, and in rural Maine, in case you find my perspective
suspiciously parochial). The subject of my letter is the ill-conceived
and out-of-scale flotilla of skyscrapers you propose to build on a
series of sites between Atlantic Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn, in
your partnership with a developer named Bruce Ratner and his firm,
Forest City Ratner Companies.
Click here to see a slide show
Most people, if they've heard of this proposal at all, believe you've
been hired to design a sports arena, to house the New Jersey Nets, a
team owned by Mr. Ratner. Anyone who's glimpsed the drawings and models,
however, knows that other, larger plans have overtaken the notion of a
mere arena. The proposal currently on the table is a gang of 16 towers
that would be the biggest project ever built by a single developer in
the history of New York City. In fact, the proposed arena, like the
surrounding neighborhoods, stands to be utterly dwarfed by these
ponderous skyscrapers and superblocks. It's a nightmare for Brooklyn,
one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our
lives and, I'd think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is
the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but
aesthetically—and socially—disastrous new development to Brooklyn. Your
presence is intended to appease cultural tastemakers who might
otherwise, correctly, recognize this atrocious plan for what it is, just
as the notion of a basketball arena itself is a Trojan horse for the
real plan: building a skyline suitable to some Sunbelt boomtown. I've
been struggling to understand how someone of your sensibilities can have
drifted into such an unfortunate alliance, with such potentially
disastrous results. And so, I'd like to address you as one artist to
another. Really, as one citizen to another. Here are some things I'd
hope you'll consider before this project advances any further.
cont'd....
http://www.slate.com/id/2143634