To the editor,
I am black, born and bred in Brooklyn. I despise Bruce Ratner not only for the assaults he has made on the borough with Metrotech and the Atlantic Center and Terminal malls, but for his lies to people of color that accompanied each over-reaching project.
Metrotech was heralded by Ratner and his partners in elected office as the “economic engine” that would “capture” corporations fleeing Manhattan for New Jersey, and put all the able-bodied unemployed men in the Farragut, Whitman and Ingersoll houses to work.
Metrotech did neither, of course.
The corporations induced to move to Metrotech in the beginning had to be induced again to stay after the first 10 years, and even then so much office space was unfilled that the city and state came to Ratner’s rescue and rented the vast empty spaces.
As far as the hundreds and thousands of construction jobs promised to the men of the projects, neither I, nor anyone I know, ever got one. More than half the men of Farragut, Whitman and Ingersoll were unemployed before, during and after Metrotech.
[At Atlantic Yards,] the Community Benefits Agreement hands the job of lying to created groups of color. Yes, we all know Ratner has bought his African-American support. Money does talk, and there are people who don’t catch on when they’re being hoodwinked, even with the same damn lie over and over.
Yet, given all this background, I have not been involved in the fight to stop Ratner at Atlantic Yards. Why? Because the fight against Ratner has not jumped the inner-city cultural divide. Develop Don’t Destroy has failed to persuade their minority neighbors that Ratner is fooling them again, this time through surrogates.
It is a pity that those fighting Atlantic Yards didn’t keep trying to find common ground with us people of color. Not everyone for Atlantic Yards is a bought-off loudmouth. Leon de Augusto, Bushwick
• • •
To the editor,
I thought my letter of April 26 was modest, but it elicited such a lengthy response from Daniel Goldstein (“Yards foes: Let’s set the records straight,” Letters, May 10).
Of course, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn would want to list diverse organizations and ethnicities under its aegis. My point is: where are the many different faces and voices of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn,?
Goldstein, exclusively, speaks for Develop Don’t Destroy, their 26 allied groups and 4,000 supporters. And the people in the pictures — take the Brooklyn Museum protest, for example — look like him, not me.
Thomasina Millet, Crown Heights
Watch your language
To the editor,
I enjoy reading The Brooklyn Paper every week because, without it, I would not know how many virgins Bruce Ratner defiled that week, which is an important issue to me.
That said, I want to share some ideas with my less-than-completely literate colleagues: On page 16 of the April 26 issue, a story about the Macaroon King of Brooklyn (“This cookie doesn’t crumble”) contained the following sentence: “…one could still smell the coconut oils and see the empty cans, waiting for their lode.” Is it possible that the writer meant “waiting for their loads”? Perhaps.
There were probably many other similar examples — there are easily a dozen per issue — but The Paper managed to find a couple even more offensive ways to use the English language. Here’s one from an article about Coney Island (“City to Thor: Take Coney plan or leave it”): “The Bloomberg Administration’s original proposal … went down as smoothly as a saber in a rookie sword swallower’s throat.” Does Mr. McLaughlin need a tutorial on the difference between a “sword” (a weapon with a long blade) and a “saber” (a subset of sword meaning a weapon with a curved blade which would probably be difficult to insert into the esophagus)?
And what’s that sentence doing in an otherwise workaday story about redevelopment plans for Coney Island?
Things got worse: “Thor ate up plots of land between West Eighth and West 15th streets … like they were Nathan’s hot dogs.” Does that mean he put mustard and sauerkraut all over the real estate? Or that he swallowed them (saber-like?) within a bun (and was it a top-sliced or side-sliced bun)?
I guess my gripe can be summed up by saying that people no longer seem to care about writing crisp, clear sentences that express a direct idea. This may be a side effect of the e-generation where people just dash off quick text messages without much thought. Quick text messages are fine and so are paint-spattered jeans. But not for all occasions.
Harry Steinberg, Park Slope
Editor’s note: Our dictionary defines “lode” as “a source of something,” in this case, macaroons. And we encouraged florid language in the piece about Coney Island because, after all, it was about one of New York’s most colorful neighborhoods. Besides, none of our stories are “workaday” precisely because of this newspaper’s colorful prose.
A new bar brawl
To the editor,
In your editorial, “A fight worth having,” (May 3), you say, “Most of us want lively commercial strips in our neighborhoods, but we also want a reasonable amount of peace and quiet.”
In Carroll Gardens, we have the perfect balance: Smith and Court streets for commercial strips, all the surrounding ones for residential.
Yet in an earlier column (“I’ll drink to that,” Downtown and North Brooklyn editions, April 19), Mike McLaughlin wrote that a bar on quiet Hoyt Street was a great idea.
Please at least be consistent, if you cannot be balanced.
Mary Hedge, Carroll Gardens
The writer is a member of the Hoyt Street Alliance.
Bank jobs
To the editor,
Isn’t it ironic that banks are taking over Seventh Avenue (“Stomach pains for 7th Ave eateries,” March 1)?Will people be just going there to deposit the money they would have otherwise injected into Park Slope’s local economy?
The very landlords who swarmed to new mortgages on equities they though they had eventually will default and hand their assets back over to guess who.
And “who” will in turn sell them at a loss to wiser business owners unwilling to hedge their bets on rental fees any longer!
Alexandre Barbier, Park Slope
