NEW YORK, NY

by Neil deMause

Brooklyn Borough Hall is, in many ways, a relic of a bygone era. It turns its back to the street, its marble front steps facing what was once the main Fulton Street drag, but is now a sterile pedestrian mall called Cadman Plaza. If the structure looks like an old-fashioned city hall, that's because it once was one. But the last mayor of Brooklyn, the now-forgotten Frederick W. Wurster, packed his things and moved out in 1898 with consolidation of Greater New York, leaving the old building to the office of the borough president, now a sort of relic itself, with little political role but too much history for anyone to seriously consider abolishing the post. Besides, then who would occupy Borough Hall?

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz came along a century too late to be mayor of Brooklyn, but that doesn't stop him from acting like one. Barrel-shaped with a voice to match (during the recent blackout he stood atop the Brooklyn Bridge, shouting though a bullhorn at the mob of trudging commuters, "Welcome back, Brooklyn!"), he is presiding over a rare packed house beneath the gilded ceiling of Borough Hall's second-floor hearing room. "Good morning!" he thunders to the sea of cameras in the back, the mob of print journalists down front, the besuited functionaries flitting about, drawn by the smell of power. "We are on the threshold of restoring Brooklyn to its rightful place on the national stage!"

The occasion is the presentation by developer Bruce Ratner of a plan to build a mammoth development atop the open-cut rail lines running into Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue terminal, with towering apartment buildings and office complexes designed by celebrity architect Frank Gehry. As revealed in the full-color press packets handed out by Ratner's Forest City Ratner development company - Forest City for Cleveland, where Ratner's forebears made their first billion on the real estate market - the project would cost $2.5 billion, require the demolition of two existing city blocks, and dwarf the landmark Williamsburgh Bank building (a building so beloved to Brooklynites that they lobbied successfully to keep the name even after the bank itself was swallowed whole in a corporate merger) with vast asymmetrical blocks of metal. It would arguably be the greatest change to the face of Brooklyn since the construction of the Bridge.

None of that, though, is what has drawn the overflow crowd today. They're here for what Ratner calls the "centerpiece" of his plan: a basketball arena to lure the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn.

The mere notion of a big-league sports franchise in Brooklyn - Brooklyn where men not yet born in 1958 can still feel the ancestral ache of the loss of the Dodgers - is enough to reduce Marty to near tears as he introduces Ratner to the podium, enormous balsa-wood scale models of the project to either side of him.

"Bruce, I don't know what to say to you - I just don't know what to say," says the borough president, his voice choked. "This little boy, at 12 years old, crying like a baby - I lived on Empire Boulevard, a few blocks from Ebbets Field - and those tears of joy are swelling up in me - I just can't wait!"

Ratner talks long and says little, but hardly anyone's eyes are on him in any event. Likewise his distinguished neighbors in the room's front row: Gehry, a smallish white-haired man, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a smallish grey-haired man with a perpetual expression like he's just received an unexpected prostate exam. Likewise even the one person in the room who merited applause as he entered: rap superstar Jay-Z, who Ratner has just introduced as an "investor" in his project, and who looks bewildered as he mutters a few words of apologies for not wearing a tie, and thanks for being invited to the party.

The star on this day, it's clear, is the balsa wood. To either side of the podium, huge models represent Gehry's vision for the project, the arena a metal oval amid jumbled blocks, vaguely skyscraper-shaped. On one side of the room, an entire table is filled with what look to be surplus wood scraps, paper and wire mesh attached with glue and hundreds of pushpins in a vague approximation of buildings, representing nothing in particular but forcing gawkers to stumble over camera tripods in the attempt to squeeze past. Behind the speakers, a wall of computer renderings shows the imagined view from every angle, mapping out where buildings would go, depicting tree-lined promenades of indeterminate location.

"Don't worry about these funny shapes at this point," says Gehry in his turn at the podium. "These are just blocks. We'll make something out of it as we go."

A few more words from Marty - "My dream is that one day we will all be at the NBA playoffs, watching the Brooklyn Nets whip the Manhattan Knicks! And then we will all walk over to Junior's for America's Finest Cheesecake!" - and it's time for a handful of questions from the assembled journalistic throng. Hands go up - how much of the $2.5 billion will be city money, how many people will be displaced, what if anything does Ratner plan to pay for development rights to the cash-strapped Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which has recently floated rumors of yet another subway fare hike to close its yawning budget gap? Each question in turn is skillfully deflected from the podium: "The numbers are still being worked on and discussed." "Almost none - there's one block with residents on it." "This is not going to be the salvation of keeping the MTA going."

And then it's over, the mayor instructing us to clear the room so that the next wave of onlookers can ascend from the first-floor area where they've been penned, watching the day's spectacle on a big-screen TV. As we file out, we are handed canvas gift bags emblazoned with the "B Ball" logo that is everywhere on this day. Inside are a B Ball t-shirt, a B Ball hat, and a small plastic bag, which opens to reveal a miniature Junior's cheesecake.

It seems like there was a question that we meant to ask, but we've forgotten what it was.

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The Story So Far...

November 6, 2002, was a triumphant day for NYC2012, the committee of movers and shakers charged with bringing the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York City. After years of jockeying for advantage over several other U.S. cities, after blanketing Manhattan with banners and placing a giant welcome message on the Times Square Jumbotron for visiting Olympic dignitaries, the decision was final: New York would be the U.S. candidate, fighting it out in an international competition with the likes of London, Paris, and Istanbul to be the 2012 host city.

The New York mayor's office, which had pushed the Olympic bid hard, erupted in glee at the announcement, the mayor himself embracing the nearest person at the time, who happened to be Billy Crystal. And now, in the City Hall's Blue Room, a squadron of former Olympic athletes had lined up for the city's official coronation by the U.S. Olympic Committee. "If there's any place that's demonstrated the power of hope," intoned USOC head Lloyd Ward, "New Yorkans have done that."

Close enough.

Amid all the celebration, only the most churlish pointed out that while much of the games preparation - resculpting two Queens lakes to equip them for slalom canoe races, transforming the industrial Williamsburg waterfront into a site for beach volleyball, and so on - would be paid for by the Olympics themselves, the centerpiece, an Olympic stadium that the mayor and his planners hoped to build atop a rail yard on Manhattan's West Side, would require about $3 billion in public money. The important thing was; New York was on the road to Olympic glory.

All that was left now was to find $3 billion.

December 17, 2002

Like so many public buildings, New York's City Hall used to be open to the public. No longer. Now, the majestic steps and broad plaza, once crowded with office workers on their lunch breaks, are off-limits, a pair of police checkpoints ensuring that only those on official business may enter. This is a relic not of 9/11, but of Giuliani Time: early in the mayor's eight-year reign, he had ordered City Hall surrounded by fences and gates, the better to keep protesters and other common folk from muddying up his front stoop.

Even most of the lunching office workers had likely never ventured into City Hall itself, where a curving central marble staircase leads to the City Council chambers, all polished wood and oil portraits and cheap folding chairs. It is here that the fate of the city's massive Hudson Yards project - replacing the West Side parking lots, its tenements and soot-caked warehouses, with blocks and blocks of office buildings, an expansion of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, a new subway line, and oh yes, an Olympic stadium - will be decided. Or would be decided. Because most of the project is expected to be under the state's jurisdiction, the city council has been left largely powerless. But they're here to hold hearings, so hearings they will hear.

David Yassky, a former lawyer for Congressman Charles Schumer who was elevated to power when term limits forced out his predecessor - thanks to term limits, fully two-thirds of the current council are rookies - starts off the debate by declaring: "I am convinced that bringing the Olympics to New York City would be a good thing." Just in case any of Yassky's colleagues might remain unconvinced, though, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff takes the podium, along with a Powerpoint projector. Deputy Dan - former president of NYC2012, minor West Side landholder, major investment banker, with more than a passing resemblance to a young Albert Brooks, down to the shit-eating grin - seldom appears anywhere without his Powerpoint projector.

Doctoroff immediately launches into the Soccer Story. It was a hot July afternoon in 1994, he recalls, and Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands was packed with fans for the big Italy-Belgium World Cup soccer semifinal. "The passion and intensity absolutely floored me," he says, and you can see it in his face as he says it. "When you injected national fervor into the event, it totally changed its character." To some people, this realization would bring to mind Leni Riefenstahl; to Dan, it made him dedicate his life to bringing New York the Olympics.

"Let me talk about the plan we've developed to host the games here," he says, and instantly the screen fills with the image of two men with swords.

[continued...]

Neil deMause is the editor of HERE magazine, and co-author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit. He is covering the West Side stadium and Brooklyn arena plans for the Village Voice.