Through December 11, local investigative theater company The Civilians are staging In The Footprint: The Battle Over Atlantic Yards at Fort Greene’s Irondale Center, mere blocks from where this long-debated project is currently underway. We caught up with Michael Friedman, the show’s lyricist and composer, to ask him about process, community dialogue and his personal views on the project.
TreeTop Development claimed victory at their first luxury condo auction last week, despite its abrupt ending. “It seems like they changed the rules midstream,” said a potential buyer. “You don’t set the conditions and then change the rules when you’ve attracted all the people.”
More details on the auction and its aftermath after the jump!
“Do you hear the crickets?,” asked Ali Jafri, a broker for Prudential Douglas Elliman. We were standing on the ninth-floor balcony of a brand-new three-bedroom condominium for sale at 20 Bayard Street in Williamsburg. “That’s something you won’t get in Manhattan.”
These days, Mr. Jafri might hear crickets more often than he’d like. It was the Sunday before the European markets began to tumble, during peak open house hours, and the buyer traffic through Brooklyn’s newer towers was slow. Just a few days earlier, The New York Times had declared that “the credit crisis and the turmoil on Wall Street are bringing New York’s real estate boom to an end.”
As a chillier wind sliced through Brooklyn’s popular corridors last Saturday night, it was hard to imagine by the looks of things that anything was wrong with the economy. On North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, young women with Louis Vuitton bags teetered in Manolo Blahniks on the arms of their white-collared dates. Booze coursed through veins as the music at Sea shook passersby with stentorian beats.
But the next day at the sleepy Brooklyn Inn, the 138-year-old Boerum Hill bar frequented by local financial types, The Times’ Sunday business section sat menacingly on the oak bar as Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne” wafted through the air. Two 30-ish JP Morgan employees sat quietly at the bar contemplating the future of the financial industry, fretting a bit about their own jobs.
