The most remarkable part of this DNAinfo article on how the Brooklyn Nets are pumping a “signature scent” into the Barclays Center isn’t that the Brooklyn Nets are pumping a signature scent into the Barclays Center, nor even that the Brooklyn Nets have a signature scent. No, it’s that sports teams have apparently been spritzing perfume at you for a while now without your knowledge:

That cocoa-drenched cloud you inhale when you walk into the Times Square Hershey’s store isn’t candy — it’s ScentAir.

In recent years the company’s olfactory empire has expanded to include sports venues such as the Dallas Cowboys’ and Atlanta Hawks’ stadiums. At the St. Louis Rams’ stadium the air is redolent with a “cotton candy” fragrance that’s meant to “create a positive first impression for fans,” a team spokesman told ESPN.com.

It’s only fitting that the Nets are resorting to this, given that they were among the first franchises to pipe in fake crowd noise to make it sound like fans were actually cheering. Nobody’s allergic to loud sounds (okay, maybe Roger Miller), though, unlike smells — you have to wonder if the first sports-fan lawsuit against smell-spritzing can be far off.

I got my first look inside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last night, for the Neil Young/Patti Smith show. And while the show was mostly good (Patti was excellent and endearingly goofy in a too-short set; Neil and Crazy Horse were absolutely devastating on several songs, but much of the new material fell flat and the feedback solos could have been cut back by about 20 minutes), my first impression of the building was that it’s as underwhelming inside as it is jarring outside.

All modern stadiums and arenas have a fundamental problem to solve, which is how to jam in the maximum number of high-priced lower-deck seats and luxury suites without making the hoi polloi upstairs feel isolated from the event. The Barclays Center handles this extremely poorly, combining a sprawling lower section with a large wedge of suites that makes viewing from the front row of the upper deck (where we were seated) like watching from the opposite rim of the Grand Canyon. I don’t have schematics available to tell me whether I was actually more distant than I would have been at, say, Madison Square Garden, but I can say that last night the overwhelming impression I got was of just a massive sea of air in front of me, punctuated by the desk lamps lighting the suites in the ring below. (We could also glimpse passing traffic on Flatbush Avenue through a break in the curtain behind the stage, which felt less like a feature than a bug.)

There were other problems as well: The restrooms have been wedged into a section of the seating bowl where the concourses are exceptionally narrow, meaning when everyone lined up for them between sets, there were major traffic jams. The famed Jay-Z-inspired black/grey color scheme came off less urban chic than corporate blah. And while the Disney-trained staff were certainly friendly, I can’t say they were especially helpful — the defining image of the night for me was when the Nathan’s food stand guy sold me two bottles of Dasani water (a mere $4.50 each!) and then insisted on pouring them into plastic cups, apologizing the whole way that this was the way they had to do it.

I guess the same could be said about the arena as a whole. But I’m still waiting for my apology, Mr. Ratner.

A strange story emerged last week when the New York City news site DNAinfo reported that developer Forest City Ratner was fighting the property tax assessments on the Brooklyn Nets‘ new arena, filing a court petition claiming that the city had made an “erroneous” valuation of the land at nearly seven times its actual worth. This was weird, as DNAinfo noted, because FCR doesn’t actually pay any property taxes on the arena:

So the Brooklyn Nets home opener won’t be played tonight after all: The NBA announced yesterday that the game was being postponed, with the first game now scheduled for Saturday evening. The announcement came a couple of hours after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that subways will be running today, but not between Brooklyn and any of the other boroughs, meaning any fans from outside of Brooklyn would have faced a daunting task in getting to the arena. (Mayor Michael Bloomberg took credit for the postponement, though as Atlantic Yards Report pointed out, he’d earlier said, “I hope they do it. I plan to go.”)

Newspaper deadlines being what they are, though, news outlets had already assigned their “Welcome the Nets!” stories, so we have a couple of those today. First and foremost is the New York Times’ long review of Barclays Center, in which architecture critic Michael Kimmelman calls arena “a shocker” and “a giant billboard for corporate naming opportunities (my favorite: the Calvin Klein V.I.P. Entrance)”, as well as “an anti-Manhattan monument, not clad in glass or titanium but muscular and progressive like its borough” that avoids “a civic blight on a scale of Madison Square Garden.” It mostly comes down to “it’s kind of ugly, but at least it’s a different kind of ugly,” which I guess is one way of looking at it.

After the architecture-speak, though, Kimmelman then touches on some deeper points about urban planning of the arena and its surrounding development:

The Atlantic Yards project also exemplifies how the city, in this case hamstrung by the state, got planning backward, trying to eke public benefits from private interests awarded public subsidies and too much leeway. Development on this scale may take its lead from a developer’s vision but needs to proceed from public-spirited, publicly debated plans for what the city and streets should ultimately look like.

This area needed to have the conflicting street grids of the abutting neighborhoods linked. It needed more schools and public services to support the thousands of new apartments. It needed more pedestrian-friendly avenues and finer-grained architecture, possibly taller than now proposed in places but less monolithic at street level, with subtler and more humane massing of towers so that new buildings would improve the experience of walking along sidewalks and not just add square footage to the blocks.

This is all fine, Jacobsian analysis, but it’s hard to see what can be done about it now: Kimmelman recommends that the maybe-they’ll-be-built-someday housing towers “ought to be sent back to the drawing board” to include “smarter streets, different scales of development and diverse public services”; the arena, though, has already blocked off existing streets to create the kind of superblock that Kimmelman (and Jacobs) disdains, and it’s going to be tough to wedge in different scales of development in a project that was predicated on mammoth housing towers as the only real public benefit of the plan.

Over at Time.com, meanwhile, Sean Gregory calls the arena “a very nice place,” apparently because the concesions stands sell lobster and sushi, though he’s no fan of the outside of the building either. (“You could have used anything. Why rust?”) He also credits the Nets for requiring advertisers to use the team’s black-and-white color palette, so you get things like a McDonald’s logo in black — though Gregory doesn’t bother to mention that the same rules don’t apply to the McDonald’s ads on the outside of the arena.

Then there’s the Times trend story about how Knicks fans are converting to the Nets, according to “social media and anecdotal accounts” … but maybe let’s leave it there. We’ll no doubt get another round of Nets stories this weekend — assuming enough trains are running by the weekend to hold Saturday’s game, that is.

The worst of Hurricane Sandy has passed us, and Field of Schemes HQ is relatively unscathed. The New York City subway system is expected to be out of commission (or mostly so) for several days, though, which could cause big problems for the inaugural Brooklyn Nets home opener scheduled for Thursday, writes Atlantic Yards Report:

There’s been no word yet about the impact of the huge storm Sandy on the Barclays Center, other than the predictable (and early yesterday) announcement that [last night]‘s Journey concert would be canceled.

However, given that the subway system “has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” according to Chairman Joseph Lhota, and the city faces enormous challenges after power outages and flooding, as reported by the New York Times, it will take days, perhaps more, for the city and region to recover.
So I’m not going out on a limb to predict that [tonight's Smashing Pumpkins concert at the arena will be canceled. [Sunday] night, the first in a week of Jimmy Kimmel shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music–a series keyed to the Brooklyn Nets season–was canceled…
What about the much-anticipated Brooklyn Nets home opener Thursday, Nov. 1, against the New York Knicks? The Times’s Howard Beck confirms ”no definitive word” from the NBA.

Needless to say, this isn’t the biggest concern in New York right now, what with several blocks of a neighborhood in Queens burning down and entire highways submerged. But it will put a bit of a damper on the Nets’ official coming-out party. The NBA is still discussing whether or not to postpone the game; if they don’t, expect lots of cheap tickets on StubHub from ticketholders unable to get to the game without a boat.

[UPDATE: And this just in: The game will go on as scheduled, notwithstanding that all subways and many bridges and tunnels remain closed. Now to see whether ticketholders from outside Brooklyn (or too far away in Brooklyn to take a bus) dump their tickets on StubHub as expected, or if they can't because they've all lost power and the arena ends up half empty.]

I was away over the weekend and so missed seeing the opening of the Brooklyn Nets‘ new arena a couple of miles from my house, but fortunately everybody else on the planet was there to write about it. Some of the more interesting notes:

• The opening of the Barclays Center could undercut the high prices charged at Madison Square Garden, says the New York Times, citing AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips: “Prior to this we were really kind of held hostage on a tour to the availability of Madison Square Garden.” (Note: This means undercut prices charged to touring acts, not necessarily to ticket buyers. Though the Times does mention that Neil Young tickets in Brooklyn are $5 less than those at MSG.)
• Atlantic Yards Report reports that while patrons have spilled out into Atlantic Avenue after this weekend’s concerts, traffic tie-ups have been kept to a minimum thanks to extra traffic agents waving cars through when necessary — extra traffic agents who likely won’t be around for all future events. AYR’s Norman Oder further reports that most attendees he spoke with came by public transit, and those who drove parked a half a mile or more away and took public transit or walked from there.
• The MTA says its ridership numbers on the Long Island Rail Road into the Atlantic terminal were up by 1,200 over a typical Friday night, meaning about 6% of Jay-Z concertgoers came from Long Island (or eastern Queens) by train. Though given it was a work night, really it’d be more interesting to know how many people took the LIRR home after the game. Also, hard to say whether Jay-Z fans are going to be a typical arena crowd.
• Back to AYR: “Multiple residents in blocks immediately east and west of the arena reported feeling the booming bass from the concert inside their apartments–an unnerving observation confirmed by a walk outside. I was with some people standing on Sixth Avenue a few doors below Dean Street and we could hear/feel it. It was as if the Barclays Center is just a huge nightclub–or a massive SUV parked at the corner–with a souped-up sound system and imperfect noise protection.”
• Roof lasers pointed at a war monument and a housing project!

Otherwise, the world didn’t come to an end, and neither did Brooklyn — not in the first three nights, anyway. I’ll be over by the arena tonight a bit before showtime, and I’ll report back if there seems to be anything worth reporting.

I paid my first up-close-and-personal visit to the Brooklyn Nets‘ Barclays Center on Monday, and … well, suffice to say that the giant Barclays logo on the roof is the least remarkable element of the place (click on photos to enlarge):

Approaching the arena from Bruce Ratner’s mall to the north.

It’s very brown. Or browns.

Outside of the new subway entrance. Presumably will be marginally more inviting without the police officers standing guard.

The roof of the subway entrance is covered with environmentally friendly sod seeded with plants. Which is already peeling off.

The advertising board inside the “oculus” punched into the overhanging roof. More impressive (or oppressive, depending on your perspective) at night.

Underside of the pre-rusted roof panels. Not sure what’s up with the gappiness.

View from the back of the arena (Dean Street). At sunset, the glass window perfectly blends into the sky, and the top of the arena seems to be magically suspended in space. Or ominously, again depending on your perspective.

Other notes: I wasn’t able to get a good photo through the glass, but passersby can get a glimpse of the scoreboard and part of the seating bowl through the front doors, which is kind of a nice touch. And the roof is gently lit by specks of light at night, which makes it a less hulking presence (though the video screen is way, way more hulking at night).

Other than that, the main impression I came away with was “Man, that’s a lot of brown.” It definitely makes a major architectural statement; whether it’s the kind of statement the neighbors will ever grow to love is an open question, and probably one that will depend less on architecture than on whether arenagoers take the train as hoped, or insist on driving around in circles for an hour looking for parking. I expect that large numbers of Jay-Z attendees this weekend will be able to handle public transit; when the Barbra Streisand fans descend after that, though, watch out.

The Brooklyn Nets‘ Barclays Center opened this weekend — it actually opens opens Friday with a concert by Nets minority owner Jay-Z, but last Friday was when they took the shrink-wrap off — which means it’s time to cue the wall-to-wall media coverage of the ribbon cutting, as well as the anti-ribbon-cutting staged by local arena opponents.

The most substantive article was in yesterday’s New York Times, where Brooklynites described the arena’s arrival as:

• “a volcano”
• “almost like hurricane preparedness, where you go out and tape the windows and buy the candles”
• “the end of the community as we know it and the beginning of something new. What that ‘new’ is, we don’t yet understand.”

The Barclays Center is a bit of an anomaly among recent “downtown” sports facilities: Rather than being built in an underdeveloped area with the hopes that it will kick-start development (or on the fringes of a slowly developing area with the hopes that it will capitalize on interest there), the Nets arena is jammed into a crease between three boiling-hot Brooklyn neighborhoods: Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and Fort Greene. It’s one reason why so many residents are worried about what the nightly influx of 18,000 ticket buyers (and nightly outflux of the same, likely many of whom will have partaken of the arena’s champagne bars and beer taps) will mean for the surrounding blocks. Already, rents and sale prices of land near the arena are way up, reports the Times, and the state liquor board has granted about 40 new liquor licenses to businesses near the arena over the past year. (The promised housing that was to accompany the arena has yet to arrive, though given that most of the “affordable” units wouldn’t actually be that affordable anyway, it’s hard to say how much of a loss this is.)

Whether the flood of new thirsty patrons materializes, and whether they end up taking people’s parking spaces and puking all over their brownstone stoops as some fear, remains to be seen: A busy arena like Barclays certainly can have more impact than, say, a 10-games-a-year football stadium, but as sports economist Brad Humphreys predicted to me earlier this year, “A lot of existing bar and restaurant owners in the area are going to be unhappy when they actually lose business,” thanks to all the spending opportunities inside a modern arena.

If I had to predict, I’d guess that the arena will spark huge changes in the blocks immediately adjacent to the site, with sports bars and other generic retail pricing out the stores that previously existed, but not much impact a few blocks away, except maybe from fans circling for parking. For the moment, at least, the most noticeable impact for locals will be the new mammoth subway entrance that the state built to lead directly to the arena, and the new mammoth video board showing McDonald’s ads that hovers menacingly above it. Maybe at least they’ll mix in the occasional “Watch for dripping orange goo” PSA.