Much attention has been paid to the changes the Barclays Center has wrought on the surrounding brownstone neighborhoods: eminent domain evictions, property values both falling and rising, construction noise, a starchitect fight and a rat tsunami. Yet nothing could have prepared the borough of kings and kombucha for this: Hooters “desperately” wants to open an outlet near the new Nets arena. Read More
The issue of parking and traffic is always a problem in New York. If you aren’t renting a space for an exhorbitant price, then chances are that you are driving around the block a few dozen times. (Unless you are in the Bronx, then you just park wherever on the street.) But no other borough likes to hoot and holler over traffic more than Brooklyn.
The construction of the Barclays Center is no exception, the Post reports: Read More
New York is not much of a hockey town. The Rangers are the top team in the league right now, and still the awfulness of the Knicks gets more attention. The Super Bowl is sucking up a lot of air time, but even if the Rangers win the Stanley Cup—their first since 1994, second since 1940—the back pages of the tabs will still spend most of their time on off-season baseball news. Sean Avery’s sartorial choices attract more attention than a Henrik Lundqvist shut out.
Thus The Observer almost slipped on the ice in surprise when two reports surfaced yesterday about hockey coming to some unlikely places. Read More
A chauffered Lexus LS sedan pulled up to the corner of Dean Street and Flatbush Avenue and out slid Bruce Ratner from the back seat. He was 15 minutes late. Read More
Bruce Ratner has dodged another foul at Atlantic Yards. After the facade fabricator for the new Barclays Center closed abruptly in December, it was not clear how soon fabrication could resume given the complex nature of the work. But just a few weeks after the closure, ASI Limited is back in operation and Read More
The New Jersey Nets are taking another step closer to becoming Brooklyn’s first professional sports team since the Dodgers walked away from the borough almost 55 years ago, sources revealed to The Commercial Observer yesterday.
The team is relocating its corporate headquarters from East Rutherford to Downtown Brooklyn, where the organization is taking 35,145 square feet at the office building 15 MetroTech Center. The Nets will take the space for between five and 10 years at rents in the $30s per square foot, said sources. Read More
After years and years and years of delays, debates, lawsuits and left turns, things have been moving along at a favorable clip at Atlantic Yards—at least compared to past history.
Since the Barclays Center broke ground two years ago, construction has continued pretty much unabated, a few rodents notwithstanding. Meanwhile, Bruce Ratner is behind on his plans for new apartment towers, but he is also shaking things up with the idea of making them prefabricated.
It is then a little surprising to learn that the firm responsible for the facade of the new arena has abruptly shut its doors, and the completion of the Barclays Center could hang in the balance. Read More
Late last month, a “rat tsunami” descended on Brooklyn, kicking up rodents on the streets surrounding the Atlantic Yards project. Neighbors in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene complained that construction of the Barclays Centre was sending rats into the neighborhood. Though a Forest City Ratner spokesman at the time suggested to The Observer that the problem was not conclusively worse than anywhere else in the city, the developer has now seen fit to pony up for some industrial strength garbage cans for neighbors as well as a tougher pest plan. Read More
The Brooklyn Academy of Music and Forest City Ratner just announced a partnership to host a handful of large-scale events at the Barclays Center beginning after the Nets inaugural season there in 2012-2013. In an interview with The Times, Bruce Ratner gave an interesting explanation for the BAM/Barclays hook-up: Read More
Officially, Mikhail Prohkorov owns the Nets.
Following Tuesday’s approval from the NBA’s Board of commissioners, the Russian billionaire today closed on a deal with developer Bruce Ratner to buy the Nets for $200 million (and fund tens of millions in losses), according to a joint statement put out by Mr. Ratner’s Forest City Ratner and Read More
