Construction on Forest City Ratner’s $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn could be “put off for years” and Frank Gehry’s design could be scaled back, according to two articles published by The New York Times on March 21. In one article, the developer’s president and CEO, Bruce Ratner, told the paper that the nation’s slowing economy and credit crisis “may hold up the office building”—which is the 8-million-square-foot project’s signature component and was due to be completed in July 2009—and that “the bond market may slow the pace of the residential buildings,” which were to include as many as 6,000 units. More than five years in the making, the 22-acre project has drawn criticism from locals, who object to its scale and the displacement of existing residents. Concerns about Atlantic Yards’ economic viability began circulating in January, as RECORD reported, but Ratner’s comments to the Times marked “his first public indication that the darkening economy has slowed the ambitious project.” Ratner said that without an anchor tenant he is unable to begin construction on the office tower, which Gehry has dubbed “Miss Brooklyn.” (Gehry has apparently lent his name to a letter that the developer mailed to major corporations seeking a tenant.) Ratner, meanwhile, does intend to begin construction on an 18,000-seat arena for the Nets basketball team by the end of 2008. In a separate article, Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff observed that “Mr. Gehry conceived of this bold ensemble of buildings as a self-contained composition—an urban Gesamtkunstwerk—not as a collection of independent structures. Postpone the towers and expose the stadium, and it becomes a piece of urban blight—a black hole at a crucial crossroads of the city’s physical history. If this is what we’re ultimately left with, it will only confirm our darkest suspicions about the cynical calculations underlying New York real estate deals.” Calling the arena without Gehry’s intended context an “eyesore,” Ouroussoff urged the architect to “walk away” from the project, as he might have done when he was a younger man. “There’s much more money at stake here, and I expect that he is torn between a sense of loyalty to his client and a desire to make good architecture,” Ouroussoff wrote. “But by pulling out he would be expressing a simple truth: At this point the Atlantic Yards development has nothing to do with the project that New Yorkers were promised. Nor does it rise to the standards Mr. Gehry has set for himself during a remarkable career.”
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