Yesterday, rapper Jay-Z announced that the basketball team he co-owns, the New Jersey Nets, will simply change its name to the Brooklyn Nets when the team moves to its new arena on Atlantic Avenue next year.
All new sports arenas, it seems, involve subsidies and political shenanigans. This one more than most. ACORN’s race-hustling, Mayor Bloomberg’s technocratic central-planning, and developer Bruce Ratner’s cronyism all played a big role in building the arena and the surrounding development.
I visited the neighborhood, and the bar being shut down by the development, last year to write this column:
Wealthy and well-connected developer Bruce Ratner wants to bulldoze an old neighborhood in Brooklyn and turn it into high-rise apartment buildings and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets. Many locals, including the hipsters who live in Park Slope and the firemen who work at FDNY Squad No. 1, don’t want this steel hulk named Atlantic Yards casting a shadow over their neighborhood and filling their streets with traffic.
Ratner is white, is wealthy and has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians. But his allies say they’re working for the less fortunate who need “Change,” fighting against privileged whites who want “resegregation.”
“If this thing doesn’t come out in favor of Ratner,” said James Caldwell, a black man who runs Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, “it would be a conspiracy against blacks.”
Ratner is white, is wealthy and has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians. But his allies say they’re working for the less fortunate who need “Change,” fighting against privileged whites who want “resegregation.”
“If this thing doesn’t come out in favor of Ratner,” said James Caldwell, a black man who runs Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, “it would be a conspiracy against blacks.”
