Silver: That’s Oversight For MSG, Not For Kings

Sheldon Silver is eager to show that he doesn’t just block any major project:

A state oversight board voted yesterday to approve the Atlantic Yards project near Downtown Brooklyn, removing the last regulatory hurdle for one of the biggest real estate projects in the city’s history.

The vote by the Public Authorities Control Board capped three years of battles between opponents and supporters of the $4 billion project. The version approved yesterday — eight million square feet over 22 acres along Atlantic Avenue — includes a huge residential housing complex with about 6,400 market-rate and subsidized apartments, a basketball arena for the Nets, and a smattering of office space, with a design punctuated by elaborate towers that dwarf nearby residential neighborhoods.

The approval of Atlantic Yards, which would be built by Forest City Ratner Companies, came after several other ambitious development projects in New York City — like a West Side football stadium and the Moynihan Station, both in Manhattan — were rejected or stalled by community opposition and political rivalry. Atlantic Yards still faces two lawsuits, with more probably on the way, but Forest City officials say they are confident that they will prevail in court.

. . .

A once-sizable chunk of office space was given over to yet more apartments, to woo Brooklynites eager for housing, and to allay potential concerns by Mr. Silver that the project would compete with commercial properties in the speaker’s Lower Manhattan district.

On paper, the project grew to a peak of more than nine million square feet, before shrinking back to the roughly eight million square feet originally planned — a decrease that did little to mollify those residents and officials who said that the project had been far too big and dense from the beginning.

. . .

Opponents of the project strongly criticized yesterday’s decision.

“From the beginning, the project has been a public-private partnership in which the public has not been represented,” said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society, part of a coalition of civic groups known as Brooklyn Speaks that had urged Mr. Silver to delay the project. “The vote today reflected a process that simply did not allow New Yorkers to shape the project, and the result is a plan that will not work for Brooklyn.”

Location Scout: Atlantic Yards.

Mind The Gap . . . And Old Navy

The city’s tourism board, seemingly just now realizing what the pound is worth, seeks to solidify its position as England’s Tijuana:

This week, NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism arm, placed ads in five of the busiest underground train stations in London promoting the savings to be had in New York with the dollar near a 14-year low against the British pound.

“Pound for pound, New York City is the place to be,” the ads read. “Well, make that pound for dollar.”

Indeed, London was the only city ranked more expensive than New York in a recent report published by UBS, a Swiss financial services company. The strength of the pound has contributed to London’s rise: Yesterday, it was worth about $1.96, up from about $1.60 four years ago.

The subway ads direct viewers to a Web site, nycopenbook.com, that compares the cost of a variety of purchases in each city, from a bagel with cream cheese (£2 there vs. £1 here) to a pair of designer jeans (£72 vs. £50) to a laptop computer (£679 vs. £515).

“The British are pretty savvy travelers and are pretty keenly aware of the exchange rate,” said Fred Dixon, the vice president for tourism development at NYC & Company. “The British and the Irish will come to New York for a long weekend to shop like we would go to Boston.”

Chris Sell, a Briton who owns the Chip Shop restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, said he would soon have firsthand evidence of the city’s cut-rate image among his countrymen. He said that his father, Brian, was due to arrive today from his home in Rugby and that tucked in his luggage would be an article from a British newspaper listing the top 10 bargains to scoop up.

“I know a bunch of people who do come over here for two or three days with an empty suitcase and go to Century 21 and just load up on cheap clothes.” Mr. Sell said. “The dollar’s been in the toilet for so long now, it’s worth almost two-to-one.”

Sure, It’s Good To Be King . . . But It’s Even Better To Be The Deciding Vote On The Public Authorities Control Board

Mmm . . . courtside seats:

Sheldon Silver could always just say no.

That is the nightmare facing Forest City Ratner, the real estate developer whose $4 billion Atlantic Yards project must now be approved by an obscure state oversight board on which Mr. Silver, the state Assembly speaker, controls one of three votes.

Over three years, Forest City has assembled an astonishingly wide and deep political coalition behind the Brooklyn project, ranging from outgoing Gov. George E. Pataki to Acorn, the liberal advocacy group for low-income people. The developer has endured thousands of pages of studies and reviews, staged hundreds of meetings and hearings, beat back lawsuits and persisted in the face of a growing and energetic coalition of opponents and critics.

But now — once again — the fate of a multibillion-dollar project comes down to Mr. Silver, a politician who has not hesitated to delay or halt grand development plans when he deems it appropriate.

It was Mr. Silver, along with Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, who effectively killed the West Side Stadium last year by withholding his vote on the Public Authorities Control Board. And in October, Mr. Silver delayed another major project, the $900 million Moynihan Station, questioning the financing behind it.

It remains unclear whether Atlantic Yards, which is to include an arena for the Nets, will meet a similar fate. Mr. Silver has said he generally supports the project, along with Mr. Bruno and Mr. Pataki. Each controls one vote on the board, and the three must vote together to approve a project. They have already set aside $100 million in state funds for Atlantic Yards, and at a news conference on Thursday, Mr. Silver called the Brooklyn project “worthy of the area.”

Corporate Taggers: Small-Scale Guerrilla Strikes Or Full-Blown Insurgency?

The issue is whether it’s the letter or intent of the law that matters:

Chase Manhattan Bank recently began branding city sidewalks with its octagonal logo, making perhaps the most distinctive mark yet in this form of guerrilla marketing.

Now, Chase is neither the first nor the only company to use graphic projectors to beam commercial messages onto public sidewalks at night, where pedestrians simply cannot help seeing them. Commerce Bank is another. But the Chase logo is so bold, its branches so numerous and its corporate profile so high that it may set an irresistible example.

Are you beginning to imagine the sidewalks of New York paved from curb to curb after dark in a luminous blanket of logos?

Section 19-138 of the city’s Administrative Code is standing in the way.

“It shall be unlawful,” it says, “for any person to deface any street by painting, printing or writing thereon, or attaching thereto, in any manner, any advertisement or other printed matter.”

That goes for advertising being beamed onto the sidewalks, the Department of Transportation said yesterday.

By its own count, Chase installed graphic projectors inside about two dozen branches in the city as part of an overall refurbishing effort. “We’re trying to create a brighter, friendlier feel to our branches,” said Thomas A. Kelly, a spokesman for the bank. Projectors were installed where foot traffic and neighborhood context warranted them, he said.

“We see kids jumping in and out of the octagon,” Mr. Kelly said. “It’s a fun thing. . . .”

And although Chase has promised to turn off the lights, or signs, or whatever they are, the problem is that they kind of work:

After stepping through a Chase logo the other night, Amber Harris, a graphic designer and an Upper West Sider, said, “I think we’ve run out of places to brand.”

On the other hand, she allowed, if she were a Chase customer looking for a branch in an unfamiliar neighborhood, “I’d be pretty happy to see this.” She likened the phenomenon to the Batman signal.

Then there’s the graffiti moral equivalence:

The Municipal Art Society takes a dimmer view of signs created by “corporate vandals who seem to view sidewalks as nothing more than canvas for their own style of graffiti,” said Vanessa Gruen, the organization’s director of special projects.

“That the latest version of sidewalk defacement is projected rather than physically attached does not differentiate it from stickers, paint, etched names or any other age-old form of sidewalk graffiti,” she said. “All are a visual blight.”

Tom Sawyer’s Whitewashed Fence: Version 2.0

Blogs and amateur websites have turned Times Square into its own publishing platform:

Advertisers have long been drawn to Times Square as a valuable place to reach consumers, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for space on billboards and blazing video screens.

But recently they have discovered that down on the ground, new technology has given low cost, face-to-face marketing campaigns something of a cutting edge as consumers spread their messages on the Internet.

Take the recent display of public toilets set up by [a major toilet paper company]: Used by thousands in Times Square and viewed by 7,400 Web users on one site alone. Or [a major sports industry’s] recent display of racecars; videos of the event have been viewed on [a user-generated video sharing website] more than 1,800 times. More than 60 people wrote about the event on their blogs and 60 more spread the word — and pictures — on [a user-generated photo sharing website].

“The great thing about the digital world is you can capture these events,” said Christian McMahan, brand director for [an alcoholic beverage], owned by [a multinational corporation responsible for many alcoholic brands]. “People can see them whether they were there that day or 3,000 miles away.”

As a result of the growing popularity of consumer-generated pictures, videos and e-mail messages on Internet sites like [a user-generated video sharing website] and [a corporately owned online community], advertisers are getting consumers to essentially do their jobs for them.

. . .

“Times Square is becoming, in a way, a publishing platform,” said Peter Stabler, director of communication strategy for [a major advertising agency part of a publicly traded media communications company]. “What happens in Times Square is no longer strictly the province of location. You can experience things that are happening there, even if you’re not there.”

On sites like [a user-generated video sharing website], [a user-generated photo sharing website] and [a corporately owned online community], an army of tourists and residents are spreading advertisers’ messages well beyond Manhattan, using their cell phones and video cameras as they walk through the marketing crossroads of the world.

Consumer brand companies are taking advantage of that by hosting elaborate events, fully aware that those events are great fodder for footage. Hosting events in Times Square, advertisers said, is like buying product placement in a TV show or a movie — except the cameras are held by consumers and the placement is on the Internet.