Neil deMause

City Limits launches its new affiliate site The Brooklyn Bureau today, featuring two articles by yours truly at the top. The main feature is a look at downtown Brooklyn redevelopment seven years after a controversial rezoning, which can charitably be termed a work in progress:

Joe Chan had every reason to be confident. The former aide to deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, newly installed in 2006 as head of the business-run Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, had just watched as the Bloomberg administration pushed through a rezoning of a 22-block stretch of downtown Brooklyn intended to convert the once-sleepy government office and discount shopping district into a third central business district to complement midtown and downtown Manhattan. Already, developers had announced plans for several mixed-use towers to complement the existing MetroTech complex that opened in the early 1990s. As Chan told a reporter at the time, his mission was clear: “If our views are obscured, we’ll know we’ve done a good job.”

Seven years after the City Council approved the rezoning, the downtown Brooklyn skyline and streetscape alike have indeed changed, though not exactly in the way that Chan or his former bosses had envisioned… [read more]

Meanwhile, an accompanying sidebar takes a closer look at some of the shopkeepers who have been displaced by the changes to their neighborhood:

When the city approved an ambitious rezoning of downtown Brooklyn in 2004, Yaakov “Jack” Fuzailov didn’t think it would negatively affect his barbershop on the corner of Bridge Street and Willoughby Avenue. After all, he figured, he had a five-year lease and a verbal promise from his landlord of a five-year renewal. Even when construction for a new subway underpass tore up the streets in front of his shop, he struggled through, waiting for the day when his customers could return. “I was working for free, because I thought I could build a future,” he says. “Thinking that it will be better tomorrow.”… [read more]

A quick fact-check of yesterday’s much-hyped state comptroller’s report declaring Coney Island to be booming:

Yesterday state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli issued a report on economic development in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, and declared the two Brooklyn communities to be “back as dynamic neighborhoods where New Yorkers can come to live, work and play,” with job growth far exceeding that of the city as a whole.

DiNapoli’s press statement was quickly snapped up by numerous city news outlets, with the Post’s headline typical: “Report shows huge gains in jobs, population gains for Coney Island.”

It was an odd moment for anyone who’s actually been to Coney Island lately, since there are few obvious signs of a massive renaissance… [read more]

If you’ve been wondering where my non-baseball writing has gone to recently, I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline that’s going to start showing up in print (and in pixels) in coming weeks. And the first of these is now out, a profile of Brooklyn developer Bruce Ratner for the Jewish Daily Forward, on the occasion of his firm’s reported ties to a state senator accused of bribe-taking:

When federal prosecutors charged New York State Senator Carl Kruger with taking more than $1 million in bribes in March, few were surprised to see seven others indicted with him. The colorful Kruger, who represents the heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach, Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay, has long attracted media attention for high-profile deal-making among a wide network of politicians and lobbyists… [read more]

If you can’t be bothered to read Atlantic Yards Report’s crazy-long FAQ on its even crazier-long series on Bruce Ratner’s still crazier green-cards-for-financing schemes, you can now read my Cliff Notes version instead. (Not nearly so crazy, but with more Jackie Chan jokes.)

The ever-epic Norman Oder of Atlantic Yards Report today closes out his epic series on Bruce Ratner’s bizarre green-cards-for-financing scheme with a (wait for it) epic FAQ on exactly how the New Jersey Nets Brooklyn New Yorkers co-owner plans to take advantage of an obscure federal job-promotion program to save himself a jabillion dollars… [read more]

Earlier this month, the owners of Coney Island’s Luna Park announced they’d be booting out eight boardwalk businesses because they didn’t fit their image of a “year-round” Coney. That’s been the stated dream of city planners for years now — but is it a realistic one?

For Zamperla, the acclaimed developers of Coney Island’s new Luna Park, the honeymoon didn’t last long. Just five months after opening Coney Island’s first new amusement park in half a century, the Italian-based amusement-ride company came under fire for announcing early this month that it would not renew leases for eight of the 11 businesses occupying the boardwalk properties that it leases from the city. Gone would be Ruby’s Bar & Grill, a Coney institution dating to 1934, as well as several other food vendors and the popular Shoot the Freak game. Only a Nathan’s satellite store and two souvenir shops would survive. … [read more]

Looking back at the legacy of New York Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff’s development projects, with three years of hindsight:

Two seemingly unrelated news items from the last month: The tunnel boring machine digging the extension of the number 7 subway line completed its task, leaving the new project on target for a late 2013 opening. And the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a quasi-public development corporation formed to oversee the reconstruction of a 22-block swath of downtown Brooklyn, was reported to be short of cash and threatened with being reduced to “a shell” of its former self.

The tie that binds these two stories: Dan Doctoroff, who as deputy mayor for economic development spearheaded both the 7 train extension and the downtown Brooklyn rezoning, along with numerous other development projects that marked Mayor Bloomberg’s first two terms in office… [read more]

Now that New York City’s comptroller has charged that the city’s development arm illegally withheld $125 million in revenues from the city treasury, does he actually have a shot at getting it back?

Comptroller John Liu’s finding that the Economic Development Corporation (EDC) had shortchanged the city treasury by $125 million raises the question of whether the comptroller can force the EDC to return the monies.

Asked at a telephone press briefing on Wednesday if he’d use his power to refuse to sign off on city contracts to compel EDC to pass the money along (EDC, though effectively a branch of the mayor’s office, is technically a non-profit corporation that contracts with the city to do economic development), Liu replied: “I hope it doesn’t need to get any further beyond this point,” adding: “We will use every authority we have in this office, and I imagine the mayor will do the same thing, to get that $125 million.”

It seems unlikely, however, that the mayor will have Liu’s back, since two mayoral agencies have already signed off on the EDC’s practice… [read more]

It’s been just about forever since anyone built anything new in Coney Island (this doesn’t count), so little wonder everyone seemed so excited today to attend a press conference announcing actual new stuff this summer:

In what’s becoming a bit of a Coney Island tradition, City Hall officials shlepped out to Brooklyn in a slushstorm today to make the long-rumored announcement that the Italian firm Zamperla has been tapped to open a new amusement park in Coney to replace the dearly departed Astroland. Actually, two new amusement parks: Luna Park (named in part to honor the classic Coney park that burned down in 1946, in part because that’s what they’re all called in Italy) will open on the old Astroland site this summer, and the less-historically-monikered “Scream Zone” will follow in 2011.[read more]

More than you ever wanted to know about the fate of Brooklyn’s last surviving big-league ballpark wall:

The saga of the last surviving Brooklyn ballpark wall just keeps getting murkier and murkier. The latest news: Con Ed, which since the 1920s has owned the Gowanus property that once was a series of ballparks named Washington Park, tells the Voice that it is going to tear down part of the brick wall that runs along Third Avenue — but debate still rages over whether that section is a historic baseball artifact or just, you know, a wall… [read more]

Years after first weighing in on the Washington Park controversy, I get to revisit the question of just whose ballpark wall is still standing in Brooklyn:

After all the hoohah over the last surviving remnant of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ home before Ebbets Field, it turns out that the wall in question isn’t actually so much a Dodgers wall after all. “I can say with absolute certainty that this wall was not part of Washington Park prior to the Brooklyn team’s departure [in 1912],” historian and Brooklynpix proprietor Brian Merlis declares in today Daily News. “It’s still an historic wall, but there’s no evidence … that it’s the original wall.”

This will come as no surprise to readers of the BrooklynBallparks.com site (run by my Field of Schemes colleague David Dyte), which for years now has been quietly laying out evidence that the windowed brick wall running along Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Gowanus was built in 1914, after the Dodgers’ departure, when Washington Park was reconstructed to play host to the Brooklyn Tip-Tops of the Federal League… [read more]