Kiddie rocker Dan Zanes will headline this weekend’s big rally against an even bigger development — Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project.
Zanes and a troupe of acrobats, activists, beat-boxers and actors — Steve Buscemi, anyone? — will convene at Grand Army Plaza on Sunday afternoon and entertain (and exhort, in the case of the politicians) an expected 10,000 fellow travelers in the fight against Ratner’s 16-skyscraper, 6,860-unit, 19,000-seat arena project in Prospect Heights.
Months in the planning, the Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn rally has the air of an old-time barn-raising, as more than a hundred volunteers promoted the event, local businesses contributed materials, and artists honed their acts.
Sunday’s rally comes as Ratner finishes up a final study of the project’s environmental effects, the first step in the public-approval process.
Although Sunday’s fight will take it to the streets, DDDB won a smaller, behind-the-scenes victory last week after catching the Corcoran real-estate firm putting Ratner’s Frank Gehry-designed horse before the public-approval cart.
Broker Paul Zumoff had advertised a vacant commercial property on Flatbush Avenue near Pacific Street as near the “new Nets Basketball Stadium.” But when DDDB spokesman Daniel Goldstein reminded him that the project hasn’t yet been approved by the state, he rewrote the ad.
Now the $10-million parcel’s listing describes its possible neighbor as the “proposed Forest City Ratner Mega-development Project.”
Goldstein was crowing over the small linguistic victory.
“He did the right thing,” he said. “The project has been sold as a done deal since day one [but] nothing is a done deal.”
Zumoff agreed.
“I am a Park Slope North resident and have attended DDDB rallies,” he told The Brooklyn Papers, adding that he is “interested in the preservation of Brownstone Brooklyn.”
