Big Boxes Create Exclusive Enclaves in Downtown Brooklyn

By Tom Angotti

Suburban-style development is cutting up downtown Brooklyn. Instead of building on the successful pedestrian-friendly Montague Street and Fulton Street areas, developers are allowed to create separate auto-dependent enclaves. The enclaves reinforce an inequitable urban environment that limits the accessibility of people of color and poor people to public space. The big and boxy retail and office buildings are setting the trend with the acquiescence and support of the city’s official planning bodies.

Atlantic Center, built on top of one of the city’s most important transit hubs, is

a fortress threatening those from the surrounding Fort Greene neighborhood who dare approach on foot. It is located at one of the busiest intersections in Brooklyn, where Atlantic, Flatbush, and Fourth Avenues, three wide arterials, come together. It invites even more traffic with its giant parking garage, but there is no direct connection from the building to the ten subway lines and Long Island Railroad station only 100 feet away. This is truly a big box and not a mall, since internally the common space takes the form of corridors to move people from one store to another, discouraging any truly public activities. It faces inward and turns its back on the street life that makes other parts of the downtown vibrant and exciting, yet it doesn’t even have the basic amenities of a suburban mall. It is an affront to its users. It is oppressive commercial design.

Across the way from Atlantic Center and on the corner of this intersection is a new and smaller retail operation with PC Richards and Modells. Since this building has limited outdoor parking, customers might be encouraged to walk in. However, pedestrians in the area will not simply stroll around to this store if they have to battle the poorly marked and dangerous intersection of the three wide arterials to get there. The store entrances are miniature openings in a solid four-sided concrete façade. The building has no eye-level windows. Another small fortress.

To build this monument to commercial greed, the developers took over most of a community garden that had been in operation for years. An opportunity to humanize and bring some order to one of the most threatening and bewildering areas of the downtown was missed. Given the lack of public open spaces in the downtown, there should be a principle of no net loss of public space for private development. When the tower that houses the Marriott Hotel, another downtown enclave, was built on the site of what was once a public park, this set a precedent for future reductions of public open space. In exchange for the park, the city got the Metrotech corporate plaza, a sanitized and exclusive mall.

While the city’s urban planners don’t necessarily have statutory control over the design of all of these developments, they could exercise active leadership in a number of ways. The Department of Transportation’s traffic policy for downtown Brooklyn hinges on moving as much traffic to the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges as possible. To this end Flatbush Avenue is currently being widened and the city is throwing away millions of dollars in the Downtown Brooklyn Traffic Calming study to make a few minor street improvements in the area instead of seriously calming and reducing traffic as the study was supposed to. These traffic policies encourage developers to create auto-oriented buildings that turn their backs on the congested streets and barren sidewalks. The result is a downtown with a disjointed collection of separate enclaves, much more like the downtowns in other parts of the U.S. than our own downtown Manhattan. The result is the exclusion of the least mobile and least affluent workers and residents from whatever civic spaces remain.

November, 2001