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tel/fax:
718.362.4784
Please note our new postal address when sending
contributions to the legal fund:
121 5th Avenue, PMB #150
Brooklyn, New York 11217
About DDDB
Our coalition consists of 21 community organizations and
there are 51 community organizations formally
aligned in opposition to the Ratner plan.
DDDB is a volunteer-run organization. We have over 5,000
subscribers to our email newsletter, and 7,000 petition
signers. Over 800 volunteers have registered with DDDB
to form our various teams, task-forces and committees
and we have over 150 block captains. We have a 20 person
volunteer legal team of local lawyers supplementing our
retained attorneys.
We are funded entirely by individual donations from the community at large
and through various fundraising events we and supporters have organized.
We have the financial support of well over 3,500 individual
donors.
More about
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Steve Cuozzo's Newspeak Column on Ratner Dumping the Doubleplusungood Gehry
NY Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo writes an Orwellian column, where
it is Develop Don't Destroy that has been the "Orwellian-titled," "well-financed,"
"bullying", "liars." Not Ratner with his billionaire Cleveland
backers, his orchestrated
bullying disruptions of public hearings by his surrogates and partners, and
his—yes we'll use the word—lying (see:
Gehry, Frank, still "our
lead architect").
As for Orwellian see Stuckey
comments or the
EIS. Finally for "Orwellian" and "lying" see any one of
the Liar
Fliers.
While Cuozzo is correct that dumping Gehry could be devastating for the Atlantic
Yards project (though his hyperbole that the project is dead is Orwellian), his
Orwellian doublethink, newspeak makes milk come out of our noses, full speed.
Update:NoLandGrab posts their smack down of Cuozzo.
Here he is. We re-publish his column in full to make sure there are no charges
of us being Orwellian (note the Orwellian headline):
'NET'
LOSS IS DEVASTATING
DREAM PROJECT DEAD WITHOUT GEHRY
By Steve Cuozzo. NY Post
SO sad. So irreversible. And so inevitable.
They all apply to the axing of architect Frank Gehry's magnificent design for
the Nets arena that was the creative inspiration, and political locomotive,
driving Bruce Ratner's monumental Atlantic Yards project.
Sure, Ratner says he still plans to build. Yippie! The new arena design now
on the table bears as much resemblance to Gehry's as a Dumpster does to his
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Reconfiguring the arena and much else on the site will require a whole new set
of state and city approvals for design and financing -- a return to square one
when the credit markets are frozen and government has no appetite for subsidizing
developers.
There's no way to sugar-coat the calamity. There's near-zero hope for Ratner's
declared plan to proceed. With apologies to "King Lear," nothing more
will come of nothing.
Getting Atlantic Yards off the ground was always a long shot. But the indisputable
majesty of Gehry's NBA arena -- which would finally have replaced the derelict
Parachute Jump as Brooklyn's iconic structure -- won backing from the state
and city for the whole, $4 billion, 15-building kit and caboodle on the triangular
site where Atlantic and Flatbush avenues diverge.
Its tall towers weren't necessarily in the same league. But the multi-use arena,
beautiful and humane, was possessed of the transformative power unique to the
greatest architecture. At a stroke, it would have ennobled and energized a swath
of Brooklyn that the boom mostly passed by.
Atlantic Yards was probably too much to take on even when the economy was thriving,
thanks to its many "moving parts" -- a tangle of political, regulatory
and financial approvals all needing to mesh at the same time.
Great enterprise requires great ambition and courage. Ratner had both, but he
needed to start work immediately. The main reason he couldn't was the Orwellian-titled
Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn -- a cunning, well-financed advocacy group that
sued, lied and bullied for four years, all with the purpose of foiling development.
DDDB co-founder Daniel Goldstein gloated time and again over the effectiveness
of his delaying tactics. He ran Ratner ragged until the bottom fell out of the
market and made financing impossible.
So, don't expect Brooklyn's ugliest wasteland of exposed rail tracks and rat-strewn
lots to blossom -- the Dodgers will return sooner.
Posted: 6.06.09
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