When did this become at New York City events blog? Oh vell. This Wednesday at 7:30 at the Old First Reformed Church at the corner of Carroll and 7th Ave here in Park Slope there will be a free showing of the new documentary "Brooklyn Matters." The subject of the film is the much-contested proposed 22-acre (I have not run out of compound adjectives yet) Frank Gehry-designed Atlantic Yards development project in north Park Slope and Prospect Heights. Amazing, isn't it, that a proposed development plan has its very own Wikipedia entry?
But you know what would be really cool? If someone built a 3-D model of Atlantic Yards in Google Earth.
UPDATE: Ha, ask and you shall receive: Invisibleman's Jon Keegan's Google Earth model of the Yards. You can even download his placemark layer and add it to your own Google Earth. Here's a view of the same model looking from Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. At right is the view I captured from the Grand Army Plaza subway stop, just north of Prospect Park.
For what it's worth, Steven Johnson wonders whether the project perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The end result would be to have a developed corridor running from the Yards to downtown, replacing what is now sort of an echoing chasm and introducing a touch of big-building urbanism to brownstone Brooklyn. Of course, many of us in the most recent wave of Brooklynites choose to live in this outer borough exactly to escape big-building urbanism. Johnson cites Jane Jacobs to argue that the charm of human-scaled urban places is tied to the fact that they exist in the same environment as more massive development. Exactly. That's why Brooklyn is so darn charming today. There's already a ready contrast to the livable scale of our borough. It's called Manhattan.
But you know what would be really cool? If someone built a 3-D model of Atlantic Yards in Google Earth.
For what it's worth, Steven Johnson wonders whether the project perhaps isn't such a bad thing. The end result would be to have a developed corridor running from the Yards to downtown, replacing what is now sort of an echoing chasm and introducing a touch of big-building urbanism to brownstone Brooklyn. Of course, many of us in the most recent wave of Brooklynites choose to live in this outer borough exactly to escape big-building urbanism. Johnson cites Jane Jacobs to argue that the charm of human-scaled urban places is tied to the fact that they exist in the same environment as more massive development. Exactly. That's why Brooklyn is so darn charming today. There's already a ready contrast to the livable scale of our borough. It's called Manhattan.
