MAS calls Atlantic Yards project "unacceptable".

The Municipal Art Society weighed in on the debate over Forest City Ratner Companies' plan to develop 22 acres in the heart of Brooklyn, saying the current Atlantic Yards plan is unacceptable because it fails to address many neighborhood concerns and flies in the face of some contemporary thinking on urban planning.

In a media-only conference held in the basement of a church near the site last Thursday, just before the MAS and other groups were to present their findings on the project to community members, MAS President Kent Barwick outlined his group's polite opposition to the Atlantic Yards project as it currently stands.

"We've reviewed this plan carefully and we've come to the conclusion that, as currently constituted, the plan does not work," said Barwick. "It is our hope that it continues to evolve." According to a presentation prepared by MAS, a 113-year-old urban planning advocacy group, Forest City Ratner's proposal to build 16 skyscrapers and a stadium for the Bruce Ratner-owned New Jersey Nets on the site of abandoned rail properties near the Atlantic Avenue transit hub fails, at varying levels of severity, to live up to understood principals of urban design and neighborhood planning.

Chief among the MAS' concerns, which are shared by several handfuls of community groups, are that the buildings on the Frank Gehry-designed site will be too tall and that plans to remove sections of local streets, creating "superblocks," will isolate the new buildings from the surrounding community and block easy access by outsiders to a public park currently slated to run inside these large blocks.

"For generations, Williamsburg Bank building has been Brooklyn's wristwatch," said former city planning commissioner, Stuart Pertz, who walked those attending through the first half of the MAS' slide show. "The proposed project will block view of that building from Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues ... We suggest the buildings be set back to avoid destruction of this sightline."

Architect and planner John West, picking up the presentation where Pertz left off, attacked the idea of superblocks and questioned just how public the public park between Gehry s residential towers would be as currently planned.

"Creating what are supposed to be public parks within a superblock doesn't work. It's something we've tried before," said West, with an image of the East Side's Stuyvesant Town, considered by many a failure in urban design, projected on the screen. "Over in Stuy-Town we have [parks within a superblock] and while it's a pleasant thing for Stuy-Town residents, it's essentially private in a way that parks with direct street access, like most in Brooklyn, are not.

In their least reserved criticisms of the night, the MAS took state and city overseers to task for failing to institute a proper public review process for the project and failing to address looming traffic concerns, as tens of thousands of residents and sports fans flock to the boggling intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, where traffic already backs up at all times of the day.

"This is not something that's the developer's fault, this is part of a deeper problem," said Barwick.

Barwick, along with Pertz and West, expressed support for some sort of development at the currently blighted Atlantic Yards, and saying his group was simply looking for the best solution.

"Really, we're here to foster community involvement," Barwick said. "We're hopeful our presentation will start discussion of these design principals ... They don't always make the greatest headlines, we'd like to think they're important, especially at such a sensitive site with such potential."