Toddler troubadour sings against Ratner

If you’re under
10, this is your Woodstock: Children’s folk singer Dan Zanes —
the Bob Dylan of the pre-school set — has joined the opposition to
Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project and will headline an anti-project
concert next month.

Zanes’s Brooklyn
Blues
Dan Zanes says he doesn’t write overtly political
songs, but his new tune, “Wander in the Summer Wind,”
was inspired by a vision of Brooklyn that, he says, is jeopardized
by Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards mega-development. Here are
the excerpted lyrics:

Take a left on Kane Street
Another one on Henry
Take a look around us
For anyone we know
Up the hill and down again
Hand in hand
We’ll be feeling grand
When we wander in the summer wind

I’ll take you to the river
Maybe down to Red Hook
Eat a few tamales
Over by the soccer games
Basketballs are flying
Over by the schoolyard
I hear the breeze
Call your name

High and low
People that we know
They say, “Hey there”
And “How’ve you been?”
Good, good, good
And do you think you would
Like to wander in the summer wind
We can take the F train
Right on up to Ninth Street
Walk on to the park
To where the steel drums play
Dance around in circles
With anyone that we meet
All this could happen
On a summer Saturday

Zanes, a resident
of Cobble Hill, became a member of the advisory committee of Develop Don’t
Destroy Brooklyn last month and now hopes to spread his anti-Ratner message
through song.

“My opposition is mostly about saving the soul of Brooklyn,”
Zanes (pictured right) told The Brooklyn Papers. “Everything I do
is about community — in my case, the spirit that comes from making
music. That’s what Brooklyn means right now. That’s why we came
here. But Ratner’s project is in direct opposition to all that’s
good, soulful and communal about Brooklyn.

“We need to remember what we love about Brooklyn and stop this.”

Across nearly a decade and on his eight best-selling albums, the former
Del Fuegos frontman has been singing to kids. But in this fight, he’s
playing to the adults.

“I was like everyone else who had heard about the project —
busy with work and family and I thought, well, it’s ugly, but it’s
inevitable,” said Zanes, who’s been so busy, in fact, that he
even let his membership in the Park Slope Food Co-op lapse.

When he took the time to consider the “nuts and bolts” of the
project — the 17 skyscrapers, the basketball arena, the 6,900-units
of housing, the thousands of cars, the use of eminent domain to condemn
buildings where people are currently living — Zanes said he could
ignore it no more.

“I thought, ‘Well, I live in Cobble Hill, that’s not going
to affect me.’ But this project is not just in ‘someone else’s’
neighborhood,” he said.

Zanes, who is known by virtually everyone with a kid under age 12, said
his job will be to spread the word to “busy, self-centered”
people like himself.

“I tell people: get informed about the entire project and then make
up your mind,” he said. “Atlantic Yards is everything Brooklyn
is not. Check Bruce Ratner’s track record: Atlantic Center, Atlantic
Terminal, Metrotech. Is this the guy we want doing the single biggest
development in New York City?”

And then Zanes issued his most-damning edict (at least from the perspective
of a dewy-eyed 10-year-old Park Slope Zanes fan): “Ratner gave us
Chuck E. Cheese. Is that the best we can do for our kids?”

A spokesman for Ratner declined to comment.

Although Zanes will headline the Saturday, June 3, concert at the Hanson
Place Central United Methodist Church in Fort Greene, don’t expect
any overt anti-Ratner songs.

“I’m not that kind of songwriter,” said Zanes, who will
sing protest songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “I Don’t
Want Your Millions, Mister,” and the more-subtle “Wander in
the Summer Wind,” a classic Zanes yarn that celebrates the serendipity
of just taking a walk in a low-rise borough (see sidebar).