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.
Gee, it’s sure a good thing that eminent domain cleared out the full condos in that “blighted” neighbourhood before the district revitalized itself.. in spite of the massive sports palace sucking money out of the private sector just as fast as the government can print it.
Whew! Timing is everything…
I’m just LOLing at all of the hype for what essentially is the thirteen year old Indianapolis seating bowl transplanted a few thousand miles east.
“…the thirteen year old Indianapolis seating bowl transplanted a few thousand miles east”
You must be planning on taking the long way around from Indy to Brooklyn.
Ratner used the line – “Jobs, Housing, Hoops”
Reality is part-time jobs, no housing but they’ll be hoops, what a great promise eh?