Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

This train yard/warehouse area was three blocks from my old apartment in Brooklyn and is being planned by Jay Z and Frank Gehry (!) to become a massive sports stadium complex for the NJ Nets. I know it really doesn’t matter anymore, but it disturbed me how NY Newsday kind of made it seem like a good chunk of Prospect Heights was going to get swallowed up in this plan, which seems likely since the area in question is not that wide and the plans unveiled show a massive stadium with skyscrapers and bunch of other stuff. The whole thing really infuriated me on so many levels: 1) the place was starting to chug out of its slump on its own. Those warehouses on Dean and Pacific were being turned into lofts. A lot of small business and grocery stores were opening. 2) Areas around stadiums are miserable. There’ll be nothing but sports bars and date raper jar heads trying to park their SUVs. And 3) Frank Gehry = pukey architecture. In Santa Monica, where every other building is the work of that flavor of the month, I worked in a Gehry building and it was the most shoddy, poorly planned space I’d ever been in. His work is kind of instantly dated before it’s even finished.
Shockingly, the Times is in love with the whole idea and compared it to Rockerfeller Center and Battery Park. Make sure you check out the slide show.