The Brooklyn Paper: Protesting Ratner’s honor
The current issue
Neighborhood Map
Bay Ridge
  • Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights
Brooklyn Heights
  • Downtown, DUMBO
Carroll Gardens
  • Cobble Hill, Red Hook, Boerum Hill
Fort Greene
  • Clinton Hill, Crown Heights
North Brooklyn
  • Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick
Park Slope
  • Prospect Heights, Windsor Terrace, Greenwood Heights
GO Brooklyn
Dining Guide
Where to GO
Events calendar
Classifieds
The Brooklyn Wire
Not Just Nets
Police Blotter
Perspective
Parenting
Politics
Transit
Podcasts
Brooklyn Cyclones
Merchant news
About The Paper
RSS Feeds
CNG Boro Politics

Protesting Ratner’s honor

The Brooklyn Paper

Tools

Print this story
digg
del.icio.us

The Brooklyn Museum has expressed shock that its decision to award Bruce Ratner its highest honor has been so widely criticized.

We’re wondering why. Any institution as connected to the borough as the Brooklyn Museum certainly should have seen the attacks coming.

Mac Support Store

To be clear, we will not criticize the Brooklyn Museum for honoring a rich person like Bruce Ratner. Charities and arts institutions have always survived because of benefactors — a group that includes everyone from the most-responsible corporate citizens to those who earn their money in less-appealing, though legal, ways. And all those donations go toward something good.

In a perfect world, arts institutions would not have to go begging — or, worse, risk the appearance of impropriety by courting donations from controversial figures accused of not caring about the interest of the broader community.

So while we understand the Brooklyn Museum’s motivation in honoring Ratner, we are equally cognizant of why so many Brooklynites — many of them museum members — were picketing the institution on Thursday night.

Whatever contributions Ratner makes to the arts community (and it’s unclear exactly what they add up to, by the way), his Atlantic Yards mega-project has been an utter insult to the notion of community involvement and concern for neighbors.

For one thing, Ratner paid a bargain-basement price for a valuable publicly owned resource — the air rights over the MTA’s Vanderbilt rail yard. And his design for the now-truncated Atlantic Yards project called for massively out-of-scale towers and the much-reviled superblock configuration.

Lest we forget, dozens of residents are being evicted from their homes so those buildings can be turned over to Ratner — hardly an example of being a good neighbor.

Most important, his project was allowed to circumvent the city’s normal public review process.

That’s the same review process that countless other developers — even ones who give big money to charity — must undergo.

But not Ratner.

So while the Brooklyn Museum is free to honor anyone it chooses, the Museum should not be surprised when residents of the borough choose to picket that selection.

©2008 Community Newspaper Group

←DUMBO: Watchtower: Eye-in-sky is talk of DUMBO
→Circle of life (and death)

Reader Feedback

Enter your comment below

By submitting this comment, you agree to the following terms:

You agree that you, and not BrooklynPaper.com or its affiliates, are fully responsible for the content that you post. You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening or sexually-oriented material or any material that may violate applicable law; doing so may lead to the removal of your post and to your being permanently banned from posting to the site. You grant to BrooklynPaper.com the royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual and fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content in whole or in part world-wide and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media or technology now known or later developed.

First name
Last name
Your neighborhood
Email address
Daytime phone

Your letter must be signed and include all of the information requested above. (Only your name and neighborhood are published with the letter.) Letters should be as brief as possible; while they may discuss any topic of interest to our readers, priority will be given to letters that relate to stories covered by The Brooklyn Paper.

Letters will be edited at the sole discretion of the editor, may be published in whole or part in any media, and upon publication become the property of The Brooklyn Paper. The earlier in the week you send your letter, the better.