Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - 1:33 PM EDT

Ahhhh, welcome to the side of light! Now there's no way they can do it!

I think Lethem does indeed nail the essential problems of this particular project: It's an enormous piece of corporate architecture as urban planning, from a developer with a terrible history and whose major achievement so far seems to be securing endorsements from New York state political figures and issuing creepy astroturf campaigns. It's pretty much a frontal attack on everything that's good about the borough, ripe with unintended consequences potential, and right in the middle of a number of very nice neighborhoods that would be choked by the project.

Much of the unhappiness about the clock tower, I think, is not so much castration anxiety as an inarticulate sense that Brooklyn shouldn't necessarily *have* buildings that are so big they dwarf the clock tower, and I think there's something to that. As you say, much of what defines Brooklyn as a city is its wonderfully human-sized architecture, and I think Lethem nails it when he accuses the project of an attempt to Houstonize Brooklyn. Brooklyn is definitely an expanding borough, which is going to change a great deal in the next twenty-five years, but that doesn't mean we should swallow whatever a developer wants to do----it means that making the right decision about a large and central piece of real estate is important, and a bad decision on this scale could have real consequences.

On a much, much less pragmatic tip: I love that it's the author of "Fortress of Solitude" who wrote this. I'll certainly admit, I am sometimes reactionarily against new construction projects, largely because I'm not automatically sure that something is better than nothing. That is: Whatever someone is planning to do with a space is not neccessarily better than whatever is already happening there. Obviously, that's not true in every case---and quite possibly not true of the Atlantic Yards. But Lethem's novel has a lot to say about how an abandoned, useless (to developers) piece of land---a train yard, say---can have all kinds of importance and meaning for people living around it. For children, especially, it's always these useless patches of land---leftover bits of forest in a suburban development, abandoned construction sites, and the like---that have more importance than any official park or playground.

Okay, so, having made the case for letting children play on abandoned construction sites, I'll step back. But glad that Lethem made a convincing case (to you and, I hope, others) that this particular project is a Bad Idea.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - 3:01 PM EDT

Yeah, I dunno about preserving or supporting things just because they have meaning for those nearby, particularly children. Some of my most meaningful experiences as a child involved fire and alcohol, but I'm not in favor of handing out whiskey and lighters to kids. Not only would that be totally irresponsible; it would also rob the associated experiences of their illicit qualities, which is much of what made them matter to me in the first place.

In terms of taking a space with that kind of meaning and transforming it while preserving some of those exotic qualities, I think the High Line project is an interesting example. There's also the more organic process by which semi-derelict warehouses get turned into art spaces and nighclubs (and then condos). These kinds of changes manage to preserve some of what made the derelict spaces interesting.

I'm sure that the tearing down of some of those crumbling buildings around Atlantic and Flatbush will bring sadness to a certain number of kids looking for forts, teenagers looking for places to have sex, and adult drug addicts in need of shelter. This strikes me as a slightly better argument for preserving them than the not-bigger-than-my-Billyburgh-dong! argument, but only slightly.

And yeah, Ratner has an awful record, and this project just reeks of the Robert Moses-style disasters that make so much of Queens so unpleasant.