I hate poisoning my blog with pictures of the Barclays center, but two salient points that have got me riled up.
1. Real estate in New York is so valuable that most world-class architects don’t get to build major buildings here in their lifetimes, and those that they do often don’t have the chance until they are 70 or 80 years old. I get these stats from a New Yorker article, which I will hyperlink at a later time.
In light of that, it is a travesty that this chunk of land was given over to Ellerbe Becket, an architect who has made his career building corporate basketball stadiums. I wish that I could explain how ugly this thing is, but all I can think is that it will weather worse (and faster) than Madison Square Garden. Not to mention that the logo makes it look like a hospital rotting from the inside.
2. The New York Times (I should hyperlink this, but I have no time) has given mostly favorable coverage to the stadium. At first, I was a little peeved. Half the New York Times junior staff has to live in the area surrounding it, and there is no way a rational human being could be positive about what I saw the other night—drunken idiots screaming in the middle of intersections, a livery cab driving the wrong way up a street, a building that looms so ugly at night it might as well be a pile of debris metal.
Then I became appalled when a friend pointed out that the New York Times building in midtown was developed by none other than…Forest City Enterprises, owned by Bruce Ratner. Bruce fucking Ratner. The man who developed the Barclays Center.
I mean, c’mon.
