On December 20, the vote by the Public Authorities Control Board ended three years of debates between opponents and supporters of the $4 billion project. The approval of the three-member Public Authorities Control Board came after the developer agreed to shrink the size of the complex’s highest tower ~the 620-foot building called “Miss Brooklyn” by the project’s architect, Frank Gehry~ so that it will be shorter than the nearby Williamsburgh Savings Bank, Brooklyn’s tallest building at 512 feet, despite critics said the changes were far too modest to allay their concerns over the project’s size and scale.

Yesterday’s vote followed days of intense negotiation between officials at the Empire State Development Corporation, which is watching the project, and aides to Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the State Assembly, who has one of three votes on the control board. Gov. George E. Pataki and Joseph L. Bruno, the State Senate leader, control the other two votes on the board, which must vote unanimously for a project to be approved.

“The Atlantic Yards project, two years in development, will create tens of thousands of construction jobs and thousands of permanent jobs, and bring professional sports back to Brooklyn for the first time since the departure of the Dodgers to Los Angeles nearly 50 years ago,” said Gov. George Pataki.

“I have voted for it today because I am satisfied it meets all the necessary criteria under the PACB statute,” said Silver. “Furthermore, I am pleased the developer is committed to addressing numerous community concerns through several specific actions that will result in significant neighborhood improvements.”

Forest City offered new concessions for the deal. At least 200 of the market-rate condominiums will be subsidized and made affordable to first-time homeowners. They also said it would invest $3 million to improve existing parks in and around the site and would build at least 200 affordable home-owner units on site and the remaining 600 to 1,000 affordable units as close to Atlantic Yards as possible.

“We are ecstatic,” said ACORN Executive Director Bertha Lewis. He said the $4 billion project is a boon for her entire community. “It allows low, affordable housing,” added Lewis. ACORN says the 22,000 construction jobs and the 5,000 more permanent jobs that the project is expected to generate are also an added bonus.

Not all people like it

Opponents of the project say they will keep against the plan in court, despite the unanimously approval of the plan by the Public Authorities Control Board (PACB) Wednesday. They say the project will hampering the low-rise surrounding of Brooklyn, covered by the same area as Kings County, a sprawling conurbation of tree-lined brownstone buildings that rarely rise above five storeys. Also known as City of Trees and City of Churches, it is one of the five boroughs of New York on the south-east flank of Manhattan; on its own, it would be the fourth biggest city in the US.

It also potents to toughing neighborhoods, creating a traffic jam and forcing people unwillingly out of their homes. They say the plans will lead to 23,000 more cars in the area each day, 15,000 new residents and 18,000 visitors to the arena -the new home of the Nets basketball team, which currently plays in New Jersey. For you to know, the owner of the Nets, Bruce Ratner, is the developer of Atlantic Yards.

Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy and a plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the project, vowed yesterday to stop it in the courts. “The federal eminent domain lawsuit brought by citizens protecting their constitutional rights is rock-solid, and without those plaintiffs’ properties, Atlantic Yards as we know it cannot be built,” Mr. Goldstein said.

“From the beginning, the project has been a public-private partnership in which the public has not been represented,” said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, part of a coalition of civic groups known as Brooklyn Speaks that had urged Mr. Silver to delay the project. “The vote today reflected a process that simply did not allow New Yorkers to shape the project, and the result is a plan that will not work for Brooklyn.”

The project plan

Atlantic Yards will be many things to many people. Located at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, bounded by Pacific and Dean Streets and Vanderbilt Avenue, and primarily situated over the MTA/LIRR’s Vanderbilt rail yards, Atlantic Yards will span 22 acres and transform the current railyards and predominantly underutilized and industrial area into 17 iconic buildings, including the state-of-the-art arena. The project is expected to create 15,000 construction jobs during the 10-year building period and between 1,500 to 6,400 office, arena and retail jobs when it is finished. The state and New York City are contributing $100 million each toward the project. According to Forest City Ratner, Atlantic Yards will generate over $5.6 billion in new tax revenues over the next 30 years.

The first phase will include the 18,000-seat arena ~which would return big-time, pro sports to Brooklyn for the first time since the Dodgers moved in 1957~ and four towers of commercial and residential space. The first phase will also include a fifth, mixed-use tower. Of the 6,000 condominium and rental units planned, 2,250 will be priced for low and moderate income residents, under the plan. In all, the project will have 8 acres of open space. A second phase will include an improved train yard and improvements to the subway station, according to the resolution approved by the state Public Authorities Control Board.

The developer plans to begin construction at the site in January and start building the 850,000-square-foot sports and entertainment arena in the fall. The arena is expected to be completed in time for the 2009-2010 basketball season. Also included in the first phase with the arena will be five mixed-use structures. When it is built out, the project will have 336,000 square feet of Class A office space and 247,000 square feet of retail use and the 165,000-square-foot hotel. It will also have eight acres of landscaped open space for the public’s use.

Atlantic Yards is one of the most important developments in the history of Brooklyn. It will serve as a pride sign of Brooklyn’s revitalization and create a new home for Brooklyn’s very own NBA franchise: the Brooklyn Nets. The project is an ambitious ten-year venture intended to boost the local economy with the creation of diverse, modern facilities for both public and commercial use. The sports arena, commercial office space and residential units designed by Gehry and will be complemented by a number of open spaces and public areas designed by Laurie Olin of the Olin Partnership.

The Atlantic Yards project is led by FCRC, which has been instrumental in the revitalization of downtown Brooklyn over the last 20 years. Having explored a number of options, FCRC pointed Gehry Partners to bring its innovative approach to the Brooklyn Atlantic Yards project. Gehry has a reputation for landmark buildings with a distinctive blend of architectural design and functional planning, and the firm’s core skills were thought to be perfectly suited to the challenges of working on a flagship project in a tight urban setting.

The Miss Brooklyn concept

Frank Gehry is designing the individual buildings and the larger development to complement the surrounding communities, creating a sense of scale that fits the low rise feel of nearby neighborhoods and the more urban feel of downtown Brooklyn.

The buildings are spaced and sized to minimize bulk. That different sense of scale, of course, is a lot smaller than the type of bulding he has been commissioned to design here. Given the scope of this multifaceted project, and its importance for the surrounding community, the designers have had to focus on the synergy of the different elements right from the conceptual design phase, even though the individual elements will be constructed at different stages.

At the centre of the development will be the 800,000ft² Brooklyn Nets Arena, which will include a public park on the roof, ringed by an open-air running track that becomes a skating rink in winter. As well as providing a home for the Nets, the arena will be available to local youth athletic groups and schools as a sporting venue, and will also be a venue for concerts, community events and family entertainment. Sports arenas typically shut themselves off from the surrounding area, and are usually surrounded by open spaces with extensive parking facilities. This will not be the case at Atlantic Yards, where the arena will open directly onto busy urban streets. The designers will therefore need to bring the building to life, even when it is not hosting a game.

Gehry has designed the stadium facades in glass, so that the inner concourses are visible from the outside and patrons inside the arena can look out on the city around them. The interior will also be flooded with natural light during the day, giving a sense of vibrancy and life. Gehry described the new stadium, outlining how he tried to maintain an undisrupted bowl-shape and minimize separation between tiers of seating. The stadium features a ceiling, still in design, cluttered with structural components and what are currently flowing mesh screens to give the atmosphere a sense of intimacy and activity, Gehry said.

For Miss Brooklyn, the biggest building anchored to the northwest of the arena is the project’s largest and most “iconic” building, “We were experimenting with different levels of iconicity,” said Gehry, who continued, “Not every building can be sculptural.” The other buildings vary in height and style in order to create, according to the architect, “a skyline and not a development.” The streetwall along Flatbush Avenue varies in texture, with typical Gehry-style corners and an irregular sawtooth pattern in plan. This “architectural messiness,” as Gehry described it, will hopefully break up the potentially monolithic and cold exterior of the massive arena.

Gehry said that when he transported the model via airplane from Los Angeles to New York he had to give it a name so it could get its own seat. He likens the tower to an actual Brooklyn bride he saw walking around one day. “She’s a bride,” he said of the tower, “With her flowing bridal veil ~I really overdid it. If you had seen the bride you would~ I fell in love with her.” The tower to the right is her husband, and the second shiny one to the left is the man she will have an affair with, according to Gehry. The ‘bride’ is facing the Williamsburgh Savings Bank tower in the lower left hand corner, try to give meaning that he is the one she will run off with. Gehry said that he and his team spent a lot of time studying Brooklyn and its “body language,” in order to make the complex fit in, and also how his children live or have lived in Brooklyn. Then what exactly does he think of Brooklyn? “I like it…. It’s a very friendly city. It has a different sense of scale. It’s got a fabulous street life. It’s got an ethnic mix that seems to coexist.”

The landscape

“By synthesizing the best of art and science, we seek to transform natural and man made elements into expressions of social purpose, reconciling the character of the place with its contemporary adaptations,” said Laurie Olin, who is designing the publicly accessible open space at Atlantic Yards. He has directed some of the most extraordinary transformations of the human environment in the last several decades, including Bryant Park and Battery Park in New York City and Canary Wharf in London. His firm, Olin Partnership, is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning landscape architecture and urban design firm dedicated to creating artistic, sensitive and timeless environments.

Olin’s designs are characterised by powerful, imaginative concepts, fine craftsmanship and the use of handsome, lasting materials to create beautiful, useful and meaningful outdoor spaces. Part of its brief will be to turn Atlantic Avenue into a tree-lined boulevard that runs past the arena and the office towers. He referred to extensive research about the geography and history of the neighborhoods, opting for a topographically diverse landscape that would respond to the slopes, hills, and heights that, he noted, are central to the character of Brooklyn’s neighborhood. Into the center of the development, Olin incorporated promenades, boardwalks, recreational facilities, and a pond. While most of these are slated for public use, the green roof of the arena ~which can be seen but not climbed~ and the running track around it will be available only to the building’s residents and hotel guests.

The complex will have seven acres of publicly accessible open space, but it will be inside the interior courtyards formed by Gehry’s buildings and dwarfed by their height. Laurie Olin, the landscape designer, discounted the idea that hiding the open space would keep New Yorkers from using it. “I don’t think one has to draw people into open space in New York City. They will find it.” The swamp and pool will collect stormwater and reduce runoff.

What a critics

Opponents of the project have criticized the height and scale of Mr. Gehry’s designs, among other issues, and the possible use of eminent domain 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 would not require eminent domain. Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, which opposes the project, said the new design “puts Gehry sheen on top of repudiated 1960’s-style urban renewal. 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.”

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