via Getty

Rihanna brought down the house at her concert at the Barclays Center on Sunday night, taking the entire neighborhood with her, according to Prospect Heights residents.

But the loud, booming bass rumblings that disrupted the neighborhood on Sunday night were nothing new for people who live in the direct vicinity of the Barclays Center. These complaints come less than a week after Barclays Center developer Forest City Ratner Companies was ordered to pay the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) a $3,200 fine for violations after a Swedish House Mafia concert in early March.

The Barclays Center has faced many noise complaints and several potential fines since it opened in September. Residents have complained of noise pollution after major concerts including Jay-Z in September, the Sensation dance concert events in October and the Swedish House Mafia concert. Until last week, the complaints were dismissed on technicalities.

According to city records, inspectors recorded a reading of 55 decibels (dB) for low noise frequency inside a nearby apartment the during the Swedish House Mafia show on Saturday, March 2. The 55 dB rate is about twice as loud as the 45 dB limit, as stipulated by the New York City Noise Code, section 24-231:

“No person shall make or cause or permit to be made any music origination form or in connection with the operation of any commercial establishment or enterprise when the level of sound attributable to such music, as measured inside any receiving property dwelling unit: … is in excess of 45 dB in any one-third octave band having a center frequency between 63 hertz and 500 hertz.”

According to the NYC DEP, noise complaints are the number one quality of life issue for New Yorkers. The agency updated the Noise Code in 2007 to “…balance the important reputation of New York as a vibrant, world-class city that never sleeps, with the needs of those who live in, work in, and visit the city.”

The Barclays Center has not yet returned The Observer’s request for comment.

The Atlantic Yards Watch, a community-based blog that reports on the neighborhood impacts of the Barclays Center and construction from the Atlantic Yards project, cited several texts and phone calls made to 311 on Sunday night reporting excessive noise during Rihanna’s concert. Prospect Heights residents were outraged that the noise pollution continues, despite the fines. The Atlantic Yards Watch provided the following transcripts from the calls:

“Rihanna is as loud as SHM or Sensations!!”

“Are you f****** kidding me, why can’t the police do something?”

“YIKES!! Why are they starting so late?”

“It woke us up!”

“Guess they haven’t done anything to minimize the noise!”

“[Past] midnight and they’re still going, when will it end?”

“Why are these noisy types of concerts allowed on Sunday nights?

Peter Krashes, who runs the Atlantic Yards Watch Blog and serves as a member of the Dean Street Block Association and secretary of the Prospect Heights Heights Neighborhood Development Council, said noise complaints have come from east, west and north of the Barclays Center, as far as a block away from the arena.

“The solution is probably structural,” Mr. Krashes told The Observer, citing the original plans for the arena, which were not anticipated to produce noise problems. The original design by architect Frank Gehry was replaced in 2009 by the design from Ellerbe Becket and SHoP Architects.

“For the short term [The Barclays Center] can put stipulations on the contracts of performers to limit noise levels, which it clearly hasn’t done,” Mr. Krashes added.

Mr. Krashes further noted that the DEP will continue to measure the noise level from the Barclays Center, and that the arena is conducting its own inspections.

“We’d like to know to what end they’re working,” Mr. Krashes said of the Barclays Center inspections. “If this was a bar or a restaurant, they could be shut down because it’s illegal.”

The Atlantic Yards Report noted last week that the fine may not be enough to solve the problem.

“For a neighborhood bar, a $3,200 fine for a noise violation can cause pocketbook pain. For an arena earning millions from concert tickets and concessions, it may be the cost of doing business, especially if they can fend off some fines with procedural arguments,” blogger Norman Oder wrote.

Rihanna will perform her second Barclays Center show tonight, around the same time the Atlantic Yards Quality of Life Committee will convene at a local YMCA to discusses quality of life issues with representatives from Forest City Ratner, the Barclays Center and Empire State Development, which is overseeing the Atlantic Yards project.

Several residential buildings will be constructed next to the Barclays Center as part of the Atlantic Yards project in the coming years.

“I think a lot of people are assuming they’re going to solve this problem by the time they build the residential buildings adjacent to the arena,” Mr. Krashes said. “But are we to wait two years for them to fix this?"

By Alex Fine.

Basketball is back. Three weeks after opening night was canceled in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, four months after the Knicks let Jeremy Lin slip out of town, 13 years since the Knicks’ fluke run to the NBA finals, and two decades since Pat Riley’s tough-guy team captivated New York in the early years of the Giuliani era, fans in the world’s greatest basketball city care without cynicism again.

The Isiah Thomas era and the Knicks’ failed pursuit of LeBron James are old news. The Nets’ long struggle for big-city relevance got lost somewhere in New York harbor. When the teams squared off Monday night in Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center, the city had plenty to cheer about: real stars, the top two spots in the Atlantic Division standings and the eyes of millions upon us.

“Brooooooklyn,” they sang in the style of Biggie Smalls—the best rallying cry in American sports—when the Nets scored a bucket. “MVP!” they chanted when Knicks star Carmelo Anthony stepped to the free throw line. The crowd was so loud at times it was hard to believe that the 17,000-plus fans weren’t all cheering for the same side.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was among them, as were Michael Strahan, Charlie Rose, Richard Gere and, of course, Nets part-owner Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé. By our count, there were 100 members of the press on hand, including representatives from Chinese, German and Italian outlets. ESPN had 12 journalists at the game, in case you were wondering how the sports network gauged its importance.

In the end, Mr. Anthony missed a jumper that would have won the game in regulation, and the Nets outlasted the Knicks in overtime. It didn’t matter, much.

For a night, we could forget that the Knicks hadn’t won a title in 40 years, forget about Bernard King’s balky knees and Patrick Ewing’s shaky nerves, forget about anything having to do with Mr. Thomas.
New York was back where it belonged, as the basketball center of the universe.

New York is a basketball town, God help us. There’s something in the collective DNA that tells us hoops is the most important sport, some vague understanding that there are neighborhoods where a kid can still become immortal on a playground, some distant memory of the days when teams traveled to media and not vice versa, the days when the Garden earned the right to be called Mecca.

So what if it’s an empty boast? So it’s been 40 years since Willis and Clyde led the team to glory, longer still since the city produced a truly elite player. (Best New York City product in the last 25 years is ... Stephon Marbury?) Basketball is the ultimate confidence sport, and New York is the fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence town. Don’t forget the darker days when the city’s greatness wasn’t a given, the days of “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” when we could swap tales of Earl “the Goat” Manigault snatching quarters off Harlem backboards—or Willis Reed staggering onto the court for game seven of the 1970 finals, John Starks rising high over Jordan and Grant for a left-handed jam—and recognize a grace and gall and toughness we imagined in ourselves.

Suffice it to say the psychic stakes were high for us Knicks fans setting foot in the Barclays Center on Monday night. Indeed, in the years since Bruce Ratner first broke ground, I often feared that the Knicks’ woes would continue, that the hangover from Mr. Thomas’s tenure, when the team collected overweight players with fatter contracts, would never abate, that James Dolan would remain a pox on the franchise. And that, in the absence of a team they cared about, the fickle masses would give in to the allure of the hottest borough, the newer arena, the team with one owner who’s rich enough to run for Russian president and another who doesn’t simply not suck, but doesn’t suck so much that he’s married to Beyoncé.

Would I blame them? No. Excommunicate? Probably. But something would tear loose from the fabric of my city if New York were no longer a Knicks town.

I can report that a trip to the Nets’ new arena offers temptation enough for a lesser-willed fan to cross over: High ceilings (this is Brooklyn, so exposed ducts, natch) and open sightlines; a thoughtfully curated selection of local food (Spumoni Gardens for the natives, Fatty ’Cue for the arrivistes, Nathan’s for the tourists); instead of the light shows that often mar pregame introductions, a dignified volley of fireworks. Instead of stadium anthems, music that reminds you that Brooklyn belongs to the world. (We have to wonder, though, how big a cut the sound man is getting from Roc-A-Fella Records: with the exception of the periodic Biggie track, it was almost entirely Jay-Z’s catalog.)

Slick Rick played at halftime. He was pudgy, and some of the words were lost in the acoustics, but still, it was a classy nod to New York City’s hip-hop history, and something that’s hard to imagine going down at corporatized Madison Square Garden.

I can also report, happily, that on the evidence of one evening, the fan exodus isn’t happening. Led by Mr. Anthony—reinspired, the sportswriters say, and leaner at the waist after playing alongside Mr. James in the London Olympics—and Tyson Chandler, the biggest man on the court, if not tip to toe, then certainly by the size of his heart, the Knicks have the look of a title contender. Maybe not a favorite, but at least a plausible long shot. It’s not just the fans who think so: the team filled out its roster for this season with veterans like Jason Kidd and Rasheed Wallace, the type of already-rich players lured not by the biggest paycheck but by the best title shot.

So the Nets fans were more numerous, more conspicuous in their “Fan Since Day One” badges (oh really?) and black-and-white Brooklyn gear. Knicks fans were, if not louder, better at the business of being fans. They chanted “Defense” from the first possession and serenaded Mr. Anthony at the free-throw line. Maybe it was simple sports loyalty, as Spike Lee, the world’s most public Knicks fan, tweeted at Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz: “With All Due Respect I’ve Been A NEW YORK KNICERBOCKERS Devotee Since 1967, Not Gonna Switch.” And as Mike Williams, a Knicks fan from East New York, Brooklyn, told us in the spacious bowels of the arena, “Knicks fans have been Knicks fans forever. The Nets are just a novelty.”

But let’s not overindulge in name-calling, at least not in the afterglow of this happy new rivalry. Who cares if the black-and-white-clad masses remember nothing of the Drazen Petrovic tragedy, the Derrick Coleman disappointment, if they had to read the banners hanging from the rafters to know the Nets won a pair of ABA titles in the days before the merger?

Instead, let’s celebrate for a moment the improbable course that led these two teams to their current exalted status. Nets general manager Billy King, who achieved middling results as the decision-maker for the Philadelphia 76ers, bet that by paying heavily for swingman Joe Johnson, late of the Atlanta Hawks, he could convince Deron Williams, his star free agent point guard, to re-sign with the Nets.

Meanwhile, if the Knicks are as good as their early play has promised, the fans will owe the team’s salvation (or at least, above-averageness) to the last figure they’d expect: current GM Glen Grunwald didn’t just play college ball with Isiah Thomas at Indiana University, he was hired by Zeke on two separate occasions. The Knicks are wont to downplay the relationship between the pair, lest they stoke our suspicions that the former GM is still conspiring to ruin the team. Mr. Thomas isn’t so coy: “I love Glen, he’s one of my favorite people on earth,” he told ESPN Radio last summer.

Who cares? Like players, executives come and go: love and hatred for them are fleeting emotions, and for the moment, Mr. Grunwald’s free-agent signing of shot-blocker Mr. Chandler and installation of defensive-minded head coach Mike Woodson (another one of Mr. Thomas’s Indiana pals), are all anyone needs to know.

The Brooklyn partisans can speak for themselves. Mark Anise, a Brooklyn resident who loves his borough so much he had a Nets ‘B’ tattooed on his right bicep on the ground floor of the Barclays Center, told me: “Basketball was the one sport where I always rooted for the name on the back of the jersey. I always said if Brooklyn got a team, then I’d root for the name on the front.”

Never one to mince words when it comes to his love for his hometown, Mr. Markowitz emailed The Observer, “Our fans are so wild, so over-the-top, so proud and so loud that even residents of the outer borough of Manhattan will hear us cheering for the best team in New York and the best team in the NBA, the Brooklyn Nets.”

On the way down to the postgame press conference, I passed an usher with his hands clasped in the air in the shape of the Roc-A-Fella diamond in an homage to Jay-Z. “We’re coming for you, Spike,” a colleague usher said to Mr. Lee, who wasn’t in the arena, or to no one. Or everyone.

Well, let them come—it’s good to have a rival. The great Knicks team of my youth, Pat Riley’s boys, tapped into the ethos of 1990s New York: tough as Charles Oakley, the man who used to ride an exercise bike to the point of tears, and cocky as John Starks, who played his college ball in nowhere Oklahoma, and believed even then that he was better than any of the anointed kings of the NBA. And so we loved them for it.

In the hearts of the city’s sports fans, they were displaced by Derek Jeter’s Yankees: brilliant hardworking men who made their fortune in New York City, tapped in less to the town’s blue collar roots than to the Wall Street princes who defined a revitalized city.

These Knicks aren’t that tough or that classy, and neither are these Nets. But the city doesn’t need an NBA title. Yet. For the moment, it’s enough to care.

pclark@observer.com

Making a killing on ticket sales.

While searching around the Municipal Bond Database (as is our wont)The Observer stumbled upon the quarterly cash receipts of ArenaCo, subsidiary of Forest City Ratner Corporation and the owner operator of Barclays Center.  The reports revealed a whopping $46,866,337.14 in sales from tickets, suites and sponsor installments between April 1st, 2012 and September 30th, 2012.

All of which amounts to just a drop in the bucket of the total $510,999,996.50 PILOT Revenue Bond issue currently being paid off by ArenaCo in payments in lieu of taxes to the city or state. This is good news for the bond holders, who presumably need all the help they can get. After all, their bond holdings are currently being given a BBB- rating, the lowest rating a bond issue can have while still being considered investment grade and one which ranks Arena Co and Barclays Center in the same investment strata as the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority.

Bond details.

It must be difficult to hold onto that kind of debt, especially when your bond issuer is busy in court trying to devalue the very property you're investing in. An action which Forest City Ranter called a mistake on Friday, according to DNAinfo. It appears that the Atlantic Yards property was inadvertently clumped in with other Forest City Ratner properties. Ones that must still be overvalued by the city finance department but which don’t have any of those pesky bond payments tied to their tax valuations. It all goes to show just how aggressive FCR is when it comes to challenging tax assessments.

So the next time you’re lining up in the Geico Atrium to buy tickets to an event, think of the city, the IRS tax laws it skirted and the hundreds of millions in tax revenue it sacrificed to get you there. A sacrifice that helps all of us, or at least some of us, by buoying a series of barely investment grade bond holdings.  It’s a ticket worth the money when a game this great is being played.

The Barclays Center, empty another night. (Forest City Ratner)

Mayor Bloomberg just said that he—not the Nets, not the NBA—made the decision to cancel tomorrow night's opening game at the Barclays Center between the now-crosstown rivals, the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Knicks. Instead, the first game will be Saturday night against the Raptors, and the hyped-up subway access to the arena may not be there, but extra buses should be. Here is the mayor's full statement on the game.

At my recommendation, the NBA has cancelled tomorrow night's game between the Nets and the Knicks, it was supposed to be the first Nets game in the new stadium. now the first Nets game will be Saturday at 7:30 at the Barclays Center, when the Nets play the Toronto Raptors. This game will be rescheduled, the NBA will be working with the city to provide extra bus service for Saturday night because the subways may not be back after that. There's plenty of mass transit, that's one of the beauties of the Barclays Center, unfortunately, we just didn't count on Sandy.

Hopefully Sandy doesn't come along very often.

We're sorry about the game, I was personally going to take both my daughter and Diana, we were looking forward to it, it's a great stadium, it would have been a great game, there's plenty of mass transit, but our police have other things to do. Lots of fans are going to be disappointed, the fans are disappointed, you should know the fans wanted to play, but I did talk to the NBA and recommended, asked them to cancel the game, it's all up to me.

Those towers? Still on except for one. (SHoP Architects)

Some good news for Bruce Ratner today, but probably not for the neighborhood or the folks who want to move into the developer's promised apartment towers at Atlantic Yards. The Islanders will mean more crowds roaming the streets of Prospect Heights and Fort Greene before and after games, and more revenue for the Barclays Center, but this will not help speed up construction of the long-delayed apartments, according to Mr. Ratner.

At a press conference inside the Barclays Center's trademark Geico Atrium this afternoon, an NPR sports reporter (rather than all the assembled metro hacks like us) was the only one to ask Mr. Ratner about the impact of the deal on the rest of Atlantic Yards, and what Mayor Bloomberg thought of the project's development, or lack thereof.

"This deal doesn't affect the housing, and I announced at our last press conference opening this place up that on December 18th we will have the groundbreaking for our first building, which is 50 percent affordable," is all Mr. Ratner would say.

The mayor then stepped up to the mic and let 'er rip. "Of course we want to get things done quicker, but given all of the angst that Bruce had to go through, the fact that the housing is a little behind schedule isn't the least bit surprising," Mayor Bloomberg said.

He then proceed to place the blame on everyone but Mr. Ratner, most notably with the locals who sued Forest City to prevent the seizure of their homes. "Those people that tried to stop the project or delay the project are the ones that really caused all of that," Mayor Bloomberg said. "The marketplace also wasn't terribly helpful."

A post on Norman Oder's Atlantic Yards Report reminds us, with this handy graphic, that at the outset of the project not only was the arena due to have opened three years ago but also six of the 13 apartment towers would also be finished. As recently as fall of 2010 Mr. Ratner was promising construction of the residential buildings to have commenced by some time last year. He is finally dead set on this year, but it seems as though he has arrived at that point of his own choosing, no one else's.

Mayor Bloomberg believes that is just fine. "There's a lot of good indicators that say that Bruce will be able to build and get it done reasonably expeditiously," he said. "Would it have been nice if it was done earlier, sure? But the real world is what it is."

After the press conference, reporters tried to ask Mr. Ratner if he had made a final decision on whether the first apartment building would be built modular or not. "We're not talking modular today," he responded curtly. Maybe that is because he still does not have financing for the tower, as Mr. Oder reported.

Welcome to the real world, indeed.

Mr. Dolan, tear down this arena. (MAS/Twitter)

The MAS Summit has been going on for the past two days, and it has been a cornucopia of delights for the city-obsessed, full of zany proposals for affordable housing, green buildings, starchitecture, community-based development and a giant floating doughnut hovering over Grand Central. But so far the most thrilling moment was deliver by The Times' architecture critic Michael Kimmelman during a discussion capping day one with the Municipal Art Society's president, Vin Cipolla.

The two of them basically meandered through a bunch of Mr. Kimmelman's columns from his first year on the job, and the first question was about Penn Station, when the critic had the audacity to tell the Dolans to scram. He still believes it is one of the most pressing planning issues in the city all these months after he wrote the piece. "I think there's a hunger to do something about this site, which I think is a blight on millions of people's lives every single day," Mr. Kimmelman explained.

He then mentioned that he was going to the Barclays Center later that night, that he is preparing his response to that project, but first he had a message for the Dolans, who—James Dolan in particular—are not especially well known for heeding the advice of others.

"I just have this feeling that the Dolans, whom I gather are very ambitious and competitive people—I don't know why I think that—are going to discover that they have, despite the money they're pouring into Madison Square Garden, that they have now the worst arena in town," Mr. Kimmelman said, drawing titters from the audience. "Well, they always had the worst arena in town, but now they have the second best, which is also the worst arena."

At this, everyone broke out into full-throated laughter.

Mr. Kimmelman could have left it there, but he went on to reiterate the case he has already made for moving the arena to improve Penn Station—like the Dolans, he is not one to let a subject that is bothering him drop.

"I'm serious in a way about Barclays," Mr. Kimmelman said. "None of this is going to happen or would happen in the next few years. Even if you're looking at this optomistically from the Dolan's perspective, they poured in this money, but amoratizing it over the next decade or 15 years, they may find it's a useful thing, over the next decade or two, to find a new home for the Garden. It's moved many times before. And maybe we can even address this central problem for the development of Midtown West."

It has been a little over a year since Mr. Kimmelman's first column ran in The Times, on the front page no less. In that time, he has covered a lot of territory—perhaps not quite enough, we still wish he wrote more than every few weeks, sometimes even only once every month, but that is largely because he has probably surprised many of his doubters and proven himself to be an extremely capable architecture critic.

It is true, he may not be an architecture critic in the usual mold, but Mr. Kimmelman has proven himself to be one of the foremost advocates for quality design and urbanism at this time. While too many may focus on the sexy rendering, the individual building, Mr. Kimmelman has taken a humanist, global, even universal approach to his job that is as much about making his own impositions on the buildings and places he writes about as on letting those designer and designers impose on him.

Look at what he has come up with this week, not simply another call to arms about what to do with a threatened midcenutry icon in Chicago, the Prenctice Hospital. Instead, he went out and tapped one of Chicago's foremost architects, Jeanne Gang, and challenged her to create a solution. Judging from the local press, while they may bristle at the carpetbagger telling them what to do, the proposal has indeed started a conversation about alternatives to save the hospital and let Northwestern expand all the same.

If anything, Michael Kimmelman is a design advocate, not an architecture critic. That may be just what The Times, and these times, call for.

Update: This just in from Twitter.

@MC_NYC @kimmelman @weareyourfek That comment seems kind. How about "worst arena in the world"?

—
Paul Goldberger (@paulgoldberger) October 19, 2012

When you're smilin', the whole borough smiles with you. (James Hamilton)

Even though the Barclays Center has yet to fully stock his beer, Brooklyn Brewery boss Steve Hindy still loves the project, as he makes plain in this email to The Observer, which we excerpted in the previous story. Even when people were hating on him for supporting the project, Mr. Hindy stood by it, and he believes prospered because of it. He covered a lot of territory in his note to us, so we figured why not post it in full.

We had initially asked Mr. Hindy why we could not seem to find any of his wares at the Barclays Center, and if his failure to buy a sponsorship (a very common practice among brands at the arena) had anything to do with it. Here is his response.

Matt,

We did not do any advertising in the new arena.  The big breweries did.  The asking prices were way beyond our ability to pay.

But we expect to have a good presence there, in bottles, cans and on draft.  We did purchase a suite and we enjoy Brooklyn Lager and Brooklyn East India there.

You are correct: I did strongly and publicly support the Atlantic Yards project.  I did not expect to be a big public supporter; I sort of stumbled into it.  The Brewery did a Nets promotion soon after the project was announced.  It was a family event, with Daryl Dawkins and the Nets dancers.  People brought their kids and got free hats and t-shirts.  It was fun.

The next day, some of the more radical opponents of the arena called for a boycott of the brewery.  The bar Freddy’s, which was bought out with imminent domain (at a great price), made a big show of throwing us out.  Some bars in Flatbush and Park Slope still will not carry our beer because of the controversy.  Not to whine, but it hurt because we have put a lot back into this community.

I did not back down and ended up writing an op-ed in Metro defending the project.

I think it is a great thing for Brooklyn, and I think the housing will be a big success.  Brooklyn needs all the economic activity it can get.  Brooklyn lags behind other parts of the city and state.  Those people who pooh-pooh the new jobs, part- and full-time, do not know how important those jobs are for the people of Brooklyn.

When the arena opened, I sent Bruce Ratner a note congratulating him.  He replied with a nice note thanking me for my support, which he recognized led to personal attacks on me and the company.  Ratner’s Metrotech, Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Yards are the biggest developments in the history of Brooklyn.  I believe they make Brooklyn a better place for all of us.

I know this was all a very small footnote to the development of the project, but it was a big deal for us at the Brooklyn Brewery.  We definitely suffered some collateral damage.

But the brewery grew rapidly in the past decade in spite of that, and we will grow 30% this year.  We hope to end up among the top ten craft brewers in the country.  (Last year, we were #13.)

Steve

Y'all thirsty? (Matt Chaban)

The Barclays Center is open, and like Brooklyn's favorite son who has been performing there all week, the arena lives up to the hype. It may not be universally loved, for its tortured past or rusticated design, but there is no question the Barclays Center is one of the most unique and interesting sports venues in the world. It is certainly the most exacting, with every inch of the place being burnished and detailed. It is like a Swiss watch—everything in its right place—albeit a Swiss watch with a discrete EmblemHealth logo on its face, the kind of thing handed out for a Christmas bonus. You eagerly wear it and just hope no one wants to see the thing up close.

One thing was out of place, though, when The Observer took in Wednesday night's packed Jay-Z concert: drinks, drinks everywhere, but not a drop from Brooklyn.

That is not exactly true. If we wanted a root beer float from precious Cobble Hill soda shop the Farmacy, there they were, 8 bucks a pop. (Get it? Pop? Forget it. You must not be from the Midwest like the rest of us in Brooklyn.) There were Budweiser taps as far as the eye could see, even a few Budweiser-branded Eighteen|76 bars, named for the year of the bubbly brew's inception. There were also rolling Stoli carts sprinkled throughout, reminiscent of the cocktail setups at a wedding reception or the basement of a frat house, with the lines to match.

And there was the expertly curated local food offerings—Calexico, L&B Spumoni, Fatty 'Cue, Cafe Habana, Nathan's—but that only threw into starker contrast the absence of any Brooklyn libations. It is not only the fact that Brooklyn has become home to numerous notable craft brewers and distillers but also the fact that one of them, Steve Hindy of the Brooklyn Brewery, very publicly defended this project for some time, even garnering boycotts from some of the haughtier establishments in the borough. His wares, despite much publicity to the contrary, were nowhere to be found.

There was another problem, as this reporter and his wife swilled a $10 Stella Artois (cheaper than many Manhattan bars, come to think of it). The tickets said the show started at 8 p.m., we had gotten here at 7:35 to be sure we had time for some delectable dinner, which cost a pretty penny, but then again it always does at arenas anymore, and at least the food was generally very good. Around 8, when we asked a very polite usher (everyone was trained by Disney) when the show might start, she said in about 40 minutes. In the end, Jay-Z would not take the stage for another hour and a half.

It is not that this is terribly rude, or that we are terribly un-punk enough not to deal with it. Promise. It is not that, as The Observer was later informed, Jay-Z, no matter where he plays, always likes to take his time, let the excitement built, let the stragglers arrive, let the DJ work his magic, calling out for Brooklyn in the HOUSE? This did not bother us.

What did is that Jay-Z is a part owner in the massive, beautiful, unusual venue we were now inside—and my wife could not shake the feeling that we and the 18,000 or so other fans and affiliates all here to see one man were somehow being made to wait by him so that people might buy more $10 beers, more $13.75 mass artisanal sandwiches. As he relaxed and we waited, the crowd was lining HOVA's pockets.

Don't forget, as Bloomberg food critic Ryan Sutton recently noticed, water is more expensive than soda.

The next day, The Observer inquired with a Barclays Center spokesman about the whole thing. He said the organization had no interest in disclosing whether or not Jay-Z was indeed taking a cut of the concession sales, either as a performer or as a miniscule partner in the operation.

As for the lack of Brooklyn Brewery beer, of Six Point, of Kings County bourbon and Breuckelen Gin? "They have Brooklyn Larger in bottles and cans (they are poured into cups)," the spokesman wrote in an email. But we protested. We looked, there was none. Maybe at one of the bars that we missed, but what about the rest? "I suggest you go back, drink less, and look more closely for the beverages you desire," he responded.

To be sure, The Observer checked with Steve Hindy, proprietor of Brooklyn Brewery, just to be sure of what was going on. Basically, the arena purchased the beer and was working out where to put it still—not every kink had been worked out by opening day, and those who paid the right sponsorships (Mr. Hindy said he could not afford them) seemed to be getting the most attention. We also noticed the Kosher Kiosks had yet to be set up yet. Still, many of the luxury boxes had been outfitted with the craft brews in their mini fridges, one of Mr. Hindy's associates told us. Figures.

Even if he was elbowed aside for the time being, given second-tier status despite being the hometown favorite, Mr. Hindy's love for the project remains.

"Ratner’s Metrotech, Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Yards are the biggest developments in the history of Brooklyn," Mr. Hindy said. "I believe they make Brooklyn a better place for all of us. I know this was all a very small footnote to the development of the project, but it was a big deal for us at the Brooklyn Brewery. We definitely suffered some collateral damage. But the brewery grew rapidly in the past decade in spite of that, and we will grow 30% this year."

Did we mention the show was—like the arena—unlike anything we had ever seen? Not life-changing, a little too slick, perhaps, but still certainly not the kind of thing one gets to experience on a regular basis. Unless you're a season ticket holder. Guzzling glitches aside, totally worth it.

Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

“We did it!” developer Bruce Ratner crowed a reported 14 times at the opening of his new Barclays Center in Downtown Brooklyn this weekend.

We sure did. Poor Brooklyn, always trying to develop some new civic identity all its own, and always ending up with ... a Barclays Center.

What stands out most about the new home of the Nets is how little it stands out. The arena’s latticework of “preweathered” steel panels is supposed to evoke Brooklyn’s brownstone tradition. But it looks instead like one more bricked-up urban bunker from the 1970s, when panicky municipal authorities thought they’d be fighting a race war. It is almost weirdly provincial for New York, more like a college fieldhouse for a Division III school in Sheboygan.

“So, how did we get here?” an “almost giddy” Mr. Ratner asked at the Barclays ribbon-cutting.

Good question. The answer is that it’s all too typical of how we live now, a game of bait-and-switch that is slowly reducing New York to the level of any other American city, while simultaneously robbing the people who live here.

Full disclosure: my wife’s sister is married to Matthew D. Brinckerhoff, one of the attorneys who tried to stop the city’s lawless use of eminent domain to build this (very dubious) public improvement. But don’t take his word or mine for any of this. Instead, check out the immensely entertaining documentary, Battle for Brooklyn, and/or Norman Oder’s meticulously researched website, Atlantic Yards Report, a sterling example of civic service.

You’ll be appalled if you do. When it was conceived back in 2003, Barclays was supposed to be far more than a mediocre basketball and concert hall named after a scandal-ridden bank. Plans called for a $4.9 billion, 22-acre residential, retail and office complex, creating 10,000 permanent new jobs and 2,250 low-to-middle-income apartments. It would be called Atlantic Yards and would be built over a major MTA rail junction, providing the transit authority with many millions of badly needed dollars in exchange for its air rights.

No less than Frank Gehry was hired on as the project architect, and he produced a fantastic, glowing jumble of skyscrapers around a largely transparent arena with a green field on its roof. Its scale was frightening, but it was a truly audacious plan, one that would have indeed given Brooklyn a world-class, urban core.

Mr. Gehry went about talking up what a great chance this was to “build a neighborhood from scratch”—apparently overlooking the thousands of people and the scores of businesses already located in the area. This would become a common failing, but it helped Mr. Ratner secure some $305 million in state and city subsidies under the auspices of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), one of New York State’s hundreds of largely unaccountable public authorities.

Thanks to the ESDC, no elected politician ever had to take an up-or-down vote on the deal. Mr. Ratner could clear the area using the threat of eminent domain, under the guise of clearing a “blighted” neighborhood. Many of the residents forced out of their homes were, in fact, living in condominiums, but apparently, they were blight condos. Obliging judges quickly rubber-stamped the whole process, ignoring such technicalities and, well, the law.

No serious auction for the property was ever held. When one was hastily slapped together, only one other developer, the Extell Corporation, made a serious bid for one of the hottest properties in New York. Extell actually offered the city more money for the site, including $150 million for the MTA’s air rights—or $100 million more than the $50 million Mr. Ratner originally provided. The bid was still rejected. It was clear that Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg had chosen Mr. Ratner to develop the site, and no one was going to upset that arrangement.

Once the money was in place, all the grand plans fell by the wayside, and Mr. Gehry was amicably—and profitably—cashiered. Mr. Ratner deftly secured the support of the city’s construction unions by promising 17,000 construction jobs on the project. In an ugly sort of reverse Bonfire of the Vanities, local minority leaders and organizations were quickly bought off and recruited. Longtime race panderer Rev. Herb Daughtry got $50,000 for his neighborhood association, control of 54 tickets for every Nets game and a $300,000 luxury suite at Barclays. Another neighborhood group, “B.U.I.L.D.”—Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development—was created out of whole cloth, thanks to at least $1 million from Mr. Ratner, and there was even $1.5 million for the late, unlamented ACORN. Their members did their best to keep out and shout down any neighborhood opponents at public meetings.

Meanwhile, Jay-Z was brought in to give the Nets a further minority gloss, leading the Rev. Al Sharpton to sniffle that his mother used to go see Jackie Robinson play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and now, praise God, “I’m glad I lived to see the color line in ownership broken in Brooklyn, where we’ve gone from Jackie to Jay-Z, where we can not only play the game but we can own a piece of the game. So my mother saw Jackie and my daughters will see Jay-Z—we have come a long way.”

Jay-Z owns an estimated 0.15 percent of the Nets. The real owner is Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the shady Russian oligarch who obligingly took 80 percent of the team and 45 percent of the arena off Mr. Ratner’s hands for a cool $223 million.

All the rest has proved to be smoke and mirrors, too. So far, at least, there are no apartments for anyone, nothing but hundreds of parking spaces for Nets ticket-holders. There aren’t 10,000 permanent jobs for local residents or anyone else, nothing like the 17,000 construction jobs promised. Mr. Ratner is lobbying the state for another $92 million in scarce housing subsidies, saying he can’t build affordable housing with union labor. He’s proposed an alternative: a 32-story building made out of pre-fabricated, modular units, imported from China and assembled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This should be interesting, as no pre-fabricated building that tall has ever been erected before.

Anyway, there’s no rush. The ESDC has given Forest City Ratner at least 25 years to complete the whole project. The MTA has allowed Ratner to renegotiate his contract down to $20 million up front, with the rest to be paid over the next 22 years. It has thus left tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. (By comparison, two developers recently agreed to pay $1 billion for the air rights over Manhattan’s Hudson Yards.) We may all be paying higher subway fares for years to come so that a Russian billionaire can have a place to party with Jay-Z and Beyoncé.

Yet while the Atlantic Yards is the most brazen and costly such scam today, it is no great departure from business as usual. One need only look at, say, Coney Island, where our permanent government recently put us through the same, depressing paces: enticing the public with fantastic visions of future development that were quietly withdrawn, enlisting local minority support that will doubtless be betrayed, and mindlessly handing over vast piles of taxpayer money to wealthy developers. There are more such projects being planned or executed all over New York. Their legacy will be a sort of public dementia, the creation of a city that we no longer recognize or comprehend.

And we did it.

editorial@observer.com

Looks promising, but where are the promises unmet? (Wayne Bailey)

Burning down the house that Ratner built. (Wayne Bailey)

Last night two very different events marked the grand opening of the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn.

Inside it was the beginning for Jay-Z’s newest 40/40 club location, with a party full of the glam and circumstance one would expect, drawing celebrity notables like Rihanna, J. Cole, ?uestlove, Adrienne Bailon, Tyson Beckford, and Lyor Cohen. Jigga man himself told MTV, "A guy stopped me in the hallway and said, 'Man this is a great thing for New York City.' And that's what the whole thing was about."

Outside, The Observer could count about a 150 people gathered who seemed to disagree. They had come from the ever-varied and ever-vocal community organizations that have been attacking this project since it showed up on their doorstep, a flurry of rage and acronyms: Brooklyn Speaks, the Brown Community Development Corporation, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), and the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), along with chapters of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

They came for a candlelight vigil to mark an end not to their cause, no, but to this chapter of the fight. Though whether turning the page to reveal a new chapter, or the epilogue, remains to be seen.

“We are here to remember” said Rev. David Dyson of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church, “and pray for the families that have lost their homes. For the families that still are in need of homes, in need of good paying jobs and a city in need of accountable development…We’re here because this cannot be the model for development in this city. Back door deals. Using the state to seize peoples homes. Forking over millions in tax payer dollars for a private development and putting our communities at further risk.”

Under the Barclays Center's impressive looking oculus, a giant rusted hoop jutting out over the arena's wide plaza and backlit by the neon glow of corporate sponsorship and advertising, the opposition took its turn to fire back at the project, starting with the bank itself. “This arena has been centuries in the making,” said Rev. Clinton Miller of Brown Memorial Baptist Church and the Committee for Arena Justice, “we recognize that Barclays was the same bank that financed the Holocaust. Barclays was the same bank that financed apartheid in South Africa. The same Barclays that financed the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This arena has to be prayed over. This space has to be consecrated. Promises have been made. Promises have not been kept. We pray for peace in this space. And we pray that one day brooklyn can be united again.”

Some people were enjoying themselves last night.

The arena, at once the public excuse for and most anticipated part of the Atlantic Yards project, was always a small part of the overall development. It is the next phase of 14 proposed residential towers, two of which will crown the south end of the Arena itself, that is the oppositions real, or at least its remaining, source of concern.

“I just want to make it clear that this press conference and all of our activites this week is not about sour grapes about the arena,” said Candace Carpenter, DDDB's legal director and spokeswoman, “It’s built. We understand that. We will live with that and people will enjoy it to the best they can...But we are talking about what we were promised. We are talking about the entire area behind this arena that is now laying fallow, which belongs to Forest City Ratner for as long as he wants.”

In other words, candles or not, the opposition is going nowhere fast. As Lumi Michelle Rolley of nolandgrab.org said, “If you can make it harder for another developer or politician to dream up a scheme like this. It’s worth it.”

With this in mind it is the promises that have been made during this projects long history that the various groups are watching closely. Because Forest City Ratner is often a slippery opponent to tie down. Consider the 10,000 jobs, which were meant to materialize from this development. A promise which was printed on PR fliers delivered to local area residents and on promotional materials released in December 2003. Materials that listed return mail addresses for Atlantic Yards, 1 Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, (a Forest City Ratner-owned development) the home of Atlantic Yards Development Company, LLC, a Forest City Ratner-affiliated company, and Geto & de Milly, Inc, a lobbying and PR firm listed in the employ of Atlantic Yards Development Company, LLC. It’s within this kind of climate of obfuscation that the opponent community organizations have committed to working.

Likewise the promise of low and moderate income housing has also been an elusive goal. "After delaying construction of the project's first residential building for two years, Forest City is now taking advantage of scarce government affordable housing subsidies to primarily build studio and one-bedroom apartments for more affluent tenants," quoted Michelle de la Uz, Executive Director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, within the press release. "It's not what Brooklyn was promised and certainly does not meet the critical need for housing affordable to Brooklyn's working class families."

In one case, at least, the opponents do have the courts on their side. A State Supreme Court ordered supplemental environmental impact statement, which followed on the heels of Forest City amending their project timeline from 10 years to 25 years. An ordered remediation, which Forest City strongly opposed.

“What they proposed in their original EIS (environmental impact study)” said Gib Veconi of the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council “was the most dense residential development in North America. It was more than two times as dense as the next one, which is in Harlem...It was so big that it was a license to build almost anything, without having to comply with new york city zoning and they could take as long as they wanted. It’s unbelievable. It’s probably the best real estate deal thats happened in New York City since Peter Minuit bought the island of Manhattan from the Lenape indians.”

It was Rev. Miller who closed out the nights vigil, quoting Mark 8:36, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? We ask the question what does it profit a borough to gain this 1 billion dollar arena. So we pray that Brooklyn does not lose it’s soul, lose it’s character,” adding, “For those of us who know better, this will always be Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street.”

Ads and anguish. (Kit Dillon)

And back they came on Friday. If Thursday night's vigil was somber and reverent, Friday's rally was energetic and full of rage. In addition to the sundry locals and ex-locals, protestors and hipsters and hippies there were some dressed as vampish millionaires. Billionaires for Barclays, rather than Bush. Some tropes never die. They resumed their position under the Arena’s electronic billboard inside the oculus, sponsorships still splashed across it.  The location adds an interesting Choose Your Own Adventure element to any protest staged there as ads for American Express, McDonalds, Foxwoods, and a history lesson of Barclays Bank (sans the parts about apartheid and fixing LIBOR rates and the like) stream across overhead.

It was Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn who reaffirmed the cry that the arena was just the beginning. “In this neighborhood we were told that this project was needed to stem the tide of gentrification in central Brooklyn," he said. "This arena is a gentrifying machine.”

"In the first tower of 14 proposed and approved residential towers, of the 380 units, nine will be affordable to Brooklyn families," he continued "That is pathetic.” (The numbers are open to interpretation. Forest City has promised to make 50 percent of the first tower affordable, but it is across a range of income bands. Those nine units are for a family of four making between $24,000 and $33,000 a year, the next 63 are reserved for families making up to $41,500, while those making up to $83,000, $116,000 and $133,000 annually each have 36 apartments per income band.)

But the fears of New York surrounding Hurricane Barclays may have been much like fears of New York surrounding another recent hurricane warning, memorable more for it’s bluster than it’s blow.

To date Jay-Z has given three concerts in a staggering series of eight nearly back to back shows (he is taking one night off on Oct. 2, which seems a rational step for a 42 year old man) and so far they have gone off with only minor hitches and no major traffic jams.  There did seem to be an unconfirmed police ramp-up on Saturday to help control the after show crowds that poured across Atlantic Avenue, either unknowing or uncaring of the Escher like crosswalks that zig-zag across the strange intersections created by the arena and the confluence of so many major streets.

Likewise there were sporadic reports of idling limos and tour buses encroaching on the once quiet residential side streets.  A quiet, which is in all likelihood a thing of the past for this neighborhood. Then again, Park Slope is still a part of New York.

All in all, the predicted storm of Barclays—traffic emergencies, feral and inebriated crowds—did not materialize even as 19,000 people converged onto Atlantic Avenue Pacific Street Barclay Center station.

Not that Barclays didn’t find a way to reach out and perturb a greater Brooklyn by firing a not insubstantial, FAA-permit-required laser at the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in nearby Fort Greene Park. It was a move that makes sense in it’s necessity (you can’t have a laser just shooting anywhere it pleases) but staggers in its acute cultural and historical insensitivity. It was a direct hit that was reported both by Norman Oder and the Post. “You wouldn’t want to see a laser on the Vietnam Monument in Washington," Ruth Goldstein, founding chairwoman of the Fort Greene Park Conservancy, told the tab.

It was new new Brooklyn taking a shot at old new Brooklyn and old old Brooklyn all in one single, surprising, impressive, incipient millisecond.