Not that the regulars of Freddy’s Bar and Backroom in Prospect Heights needed an excuse to stop by the watering hole on Aug. 23, but a call for action, in the form of a mass e-mail, packed the bar more than usual for an early Tuesday evening.

The e-mail, which was subsequently picked up by various neighborhood newsgroups and Web logs, called for the troops to turn out and voice their opposition to developer Bruce Ratner’s proposed Atlantic Yards arena, housing and office skyscraper project for a national television program expected “at 6:00-ish 6:30-ish, to investigate the impact of the Ratner curse.”

One of the bar’s two televisions was set to Long Island’s PBS station, WLIW/Channel 21 (it also airs locally on WNET/Channel 13), just in case it was a live taping of the show, “The NewsHour with Jim Lehre — which has a history of award-winning, long-format TV journalism.

Now they were coming to Freddy’s and nobody knew what to expect. Instead of trying to figure it out, they waited … and they drank.
Frank Yost, who owns Freddy’s, sat at the end of the bar, taking the scene in with a small, somewhat complacent smile on his face. He referred all questions to his bar manager, Donald O’Finn.

“I don’t know where they are,” Yost said of the “NewsHour” crew.

O’ Finn said he knew just as little.

“I just got a phone call saying they were already out here, and doing a story on the Atlantic [Yards] project and wanted to come to Freddy’s,” said O’Finn, who has worked at the bar for eight years.

“I presume it’s because we’re sort of the center of the controversy here,” he said. “They said they’d already talked to the other side and they wanted to talk to the community.”

Scott Turner, who started the group and Web site Fans for Fair Play, an organization opposed to Ratner’s plan, said the e-mail and word was spread by a “Fredizen — a denizen of Freddy’s.”

“We were going to be here anyway,” said Turner. “That’s the thing about Freddy’s — if there’s an emergency response, people will come out here. But any reason to come to Freddy’s.”

Turner, lampooning the claims by Ratner and Borough President Marty Markowitz that the area is blighted and in need of development, joked that he was “forced out of Prospect Heights — it’s so blighted I couldn’t afford the rent.”

Gavin Smith, a local resident who showed off an anti-arena poster to Patti Hagan, co-founder of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, said he came out “just because this is the family.”

“We’re circling the wagons, so they get the word out. Wherever the mainstream media shows interest, we’ll take it,” Smith said.

By the time the camera crew finally did arrive, after 7, half the room, which had been at standing-room-only capacity an hour earlier, had cleared out.

People immediately got on their cell phones calling friends to come back to the bar.

“But now we’re all drunk!” quipped Hagan, who sipped on red wine.

In came the camera crew, which wasted no time setting up the lights, camera, and boom microphone, blocking the entrance to the bar.
Nobody seemed to mind the sudden intrusion, and conversations went back to the topics at hand.

Luis Suarez, a Brooklyn native and former host of National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation,” interviewed bartender and Prospect Heights resident Roger Paz.

“This is a low-rise community. It’s going to be like having Houston imposed on a brownstone neighborhood,” Paz said of Ratner’s Atlantic Yards proposal. “And they want us to be gleeful about our own obsolescence.”

Suarez, who was born in Crown Heights, raised in Bensonhurst, and spent many of his adult years in Park Slope, is the author of “The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966-1999,” in which he addressed the loss of urban neighborhoods.

He went on to interview several anti-arena activists and other Freddy’s patrons, basically whoever jumped in front of the microphone.

Prior to coming to Freddy’s, the show interviewed Atlantic Yards supporters such as Borough President Marty Markowitz and ACORN director Bertha Lewis, as well as opponents such as Councilwoman Letitia James and Candace Carponter, legal adviser for the anti-arena group Develop-Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

The segment is expected to air on PBS in two to three weeks.

©2005 Community Newspaper Group