Yesterday Forest City Ratner released images of the temporary public plaza slated for the triangle between Flatbush and Atlantic, and you've gotta appreciate the spin coming from the developer and his design team. Wedged between two epic traffic sewers, without much noticeable provision for shade or shelter, it will become, in the words of Bruce Ratner, "one of Brooklyn’s great public spaces." (Until an office tower gets built in its place.)
Pasquarelli insisted that “the plaza [will] become a meeting place, and the focus of the neighborhood.”
When asked, Pasquarelli admitted that there would be considerable noise from the traffic on Atlantic and Flatbush avenues, but no more than in other urban plazas.
“There’s a lot of traffic around Union Square, with Broadway,” he said. “This plaza will feel safe and open.”
As of this month, there's only one lane of moving traffic on two sides of Union Square. Ratner's plaza will be enveloped by traffic, and unless you approach from Prospect Heights, you won't be able to walk to it without crossing some of the deadliest streets in the city:
All that traffic is only going to get worse. As Daniel Goldstein of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn noted in his response to Ratner's announcement, Brooklyn could be stuck with the "interim" plans for the Atlantic Yards site for a very long time. Which means, for the foreseeable future, huge surface parking lots on the east side of the arena generating lots and lots of car trips. Those parking lots don't appear in Forest City Ratner's renderings. But this does:
Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Sixty people died in the first three months of the year, 50 percent more than the first quarter of 2018, which was the safest opening three months of any Vision Zero year.