“Miss Brooklyn” is dead — but Bruce Ratner has released new renderings (above) of the 511-foot tower that he hopes will take her place.
Ratner has said he won’t build the Frank Gehry–designed tower, now called “Building B-1,” until he finds an anchor tenant. And he told the New York Times last month that the entire Atlantic Yards project consists of the publicly financed basketball arena (which has taken on even more of Gehry’s signature look) and two smaller buildings around it.
But this weekend, he did an about-face an op-ed in the Daily News (and suggested that our recent front page was inaccurate, despite the fact that Miss Brooklyn is, indeed, dead and that Ratner himself admits that the Atlantic Yards that was approved in December, 2006, has, indeed, been significantly altered).
Ratner’s op-ed claimed that Atlantic Yards was right on target, though it repeated that the Miss Brooklyn tower had been eliminated until an anchor tenant is found.
In a subsequent press release issued by Ratner’s company on Monday, he called Gehry’s new designs “elegant.”
That echoes what the starchitect told The Brooklyn Paper back in April, when he said that the iconic tower at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush avenues would “look better than anyone imagines.”
Did Gehry live up to his promise? Is the new non–Miss Brooklyn better than the original? See The Brooklyn Paper this week for full coverage.
