Looking East down Atlantic Avenue at Smith Street in Brooklyn (WNYC/Amy Pearl)

NEW YORK, NY May 17, 2006 —The last time anybody asked the residents of Brooklyn whether they wanted a basketball arena and high rise project at the Atlantic Yards, more Brooklynites than not said “WHY NOT”? But an increasing number of influential individuals and groups in the brownstone neighborhoods nearby are organizing against the proposed development. WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein has more.

REPORTER: Smith Street in Brooklyn used to be an avenue of hardware stores and bodegas – now it’s full of restaurants and coffee shops filled even mid-morning. On a recent mild day, musician Dan Zanes was sipping coffee on a sidewalk bench and talking about his growing attachment to the three and four story blocks that make up this low-rise neighborhood.

ZANES: What I’ve also come to feel is this tremendous sense of possibilities that anything could happen, when I think of a progressive urban environment, Brooklyn is a place where it all could happen.

REPORTER: Brownstone Brooklyn is Zanes’ muse. His townhouse is frequently featured in his Disney Channel videos. He even wrote a song about the neighborhood on his new CD, “Catch that train.”

ZANES (SINGING): We can take the F train, right on up to 9th Street. Walk on to the park to where steel drums play.

REPORTER: The proposed Atlantic Yards development is about a mile from his home. But the controversy around it seemed distant until now.

ZANES: I also thought it was somewhat inevitable and I was doing my thing and I was busy like everybody else and I didn’t tune it in much more than that, other than to think its unfortunate but I hate to say it, but what are you going to do?

REPORTER: Zanes is a popular guy in brownstone Brooklyn. A lot of the 40-somethings that are raising families here listened to his band, The Del Fuegos, in college, and they now buy his CD’s for their kids. As we’re sitting on Smith Street, a neighbor comes by. When Zanes tells him he thinks the project is way too big, his friend gives him the thumbs up. “I’m with you man.” The project has yet to be approved, but almost every major politician in the state is on the side of the developer. Housing advocates and unions have also gotten behind the project. Up to now, the opposition consisted of mostly scrappy group of accidental activists. Now Zanes, Heath Ledger, and author Jhumpa Lampiri are among the 30-odd Brooklyn luminaries joining the opposition group, Develop Don’t Destroy.

Bruce Bender isn’t too worried about that. Bender, now a Vice President at Forest City Ratner, grew up in Brooklyn. He lives in Park Slope now. We sit across the street from the elementary school where his wife heads the PTA.

BENDER: While people may not want the arena, we want to make it better, because once it opens I am positive that people are going to say ‘Wow, this is terrific.’

REPORTER: For him, the arena and high rise project are part of Brooklyn’s natural progression.

BENDER: There are a lot of needs in this borough. This borough has to keep on progressing. It would be the fourth largest city in the country. We used to be third – I don’t know who became bigger than us. We have great culturals, great schools, great restaurants, great libraries, and this is just another step to our greatness, I think.

REPORTER: That vision of Brooklyn was presented in a recent flyer by Forest City Ratner that blanketed Brooklyn mailboxes. It showed brownstones, children sitting on stoops, couples celebrating at a concert in the Park. It showed renderings of a proposed promenade and the interior of the arena. Though Bender says the flyer is just one in a series of communications, this one is clearly a play for the same brownstone audience that Develop Don’t Destroy is hoping to reach with its advisory board. What the brochure did not picture is the proposed 62-story tower. A birds-eye drawing of the project made the arena look like a meadow. Bender says the new building models simply weren’t ready by the time the flyer went out. Opponents say it was a cynical move.

LETHEM:I think that flyer is a terrible miscalculation on their part.

REPORTER: Author Jonathan Lethem is another member of the new advisory board.

LETHEM:It consists almost of a kind of confession compulsion. They’re horribly embarrassed about what they’re presenting, so they’ve hidden it from view. There are no towers.

REPORTER: Lethem’s most recent book, Fortress of Solitude, is the story of a youth – not unlike Lethem himself -- who lives through the gentrification of Boerum Hill, beginning in the 1970’s. The entire first section is called “Underberg,” named for a former supermarket supply store on Atlantic Avenue. The building was located not far from where architect Frank Gehry wants to put the entrance to the new Nets arena. Ratner recently tore down the Underberg building, saying it was unsafe. There’s nothing now but plywood surrounding an empty lot.

LETHEM: Well, it is a real active erasure.

REPORTER: Lethem says he’s resisted talking about the recent court battle over the demolition of Underberg and several other buildings in the arena footprint, because he says, he was “too involved.”

LETHEM:You really know you’re a New Yorker when you walk around and you see the things that were there and aren’t any more. New York is about remaking itself and about these layers of erasure that are only visible to the natives. Querying the Ratner proposal is not an act of naïve sentimentality or a suggestion that Brooklyn ought to somehow freeze itself into its present condition and never change again. I understand that the life of cities is transformative, I lived that experience. But there are transformations and there are transformations and there are necessary battles and this is one of them.

REPORTER: Architect Frank Gehry doesn’t see it that way. Last week, he showcased his latest designs, saying he was trying to pick up on the texture of the borough, it’s “body language.”

GEHRY: I think the issue is how do you manage change and manage it in a way that represents and respects the place it’s in and that was our intent, absolutely to respect Brooklyn and the place that its in, that there is a yearning for a sports team.

REPORTER: The project is way bigger than a basketball team. Ratner’s PR coup has been to couple an appeal to that retro yearning with Gehry, an architect with considerable cache in modern New York. But now, the other side is upping its own élan quotient. That delights architectural critic and Brooklyn Borough historian Francis Morrone.

Sitting in JJ Byrne Park in Park Slope, I asked Morrone about the charge that the new advisory board is just an elite group, appealing to elites.

MORRONE: Oh yeah, I think you could say that. It was pretty necessary by the time this advisory board was put together that such people be put on it. The battle has to be joined at the level of elite cultural opinion because right now we have a situation where this kind of intervention in the urban environment has great cultural cachet.

REPORTER: The cachet war is now in full tilt. Opponents of the arena now have a megaphone. It’s been granted to them by celebrities who say the very essence that’s attracting people to Brooklyn – including some of them – is threatened by the project. I asked Bruce Bender, the Ratner executive, about that.

BENDER: I don’t know, some people are saying that, a lot of people are not saying that.

REPORTER: There’s no up or down vote on the project, but what people are saying now matters. Bender says the developer would meet with the new advisory board. That’s a breakthrough, of sorts. It would be the first meeting between Develop Don’t Destroy and the developer. For WNYC, I’m Andrea Bernstein.