Boxing fans were pouring out of the Barclays Center Dec. 5 after Daniel Jacobs defeated Peter Quillin to retain his WBA world middleweight title when Elicia Howard says she was ambushed on Dean St. by three intoxicated men.
One of the men danced in front of Howard as she returned home from work that night and then grabbed her in a bear hug. Another seized her from behind and dry humped her. The third laughed and yelled from the street, egging on his friends as they sandwiched the tall, athletic 23-year-old woman.
Howard sought sanctuary at a nearby firehouse and one of the drunks was still pulling on her arm when an Engine 219 firefighter opened the door to let her in. The men remained outside for about 30 minutes, shouting and pounding on the firehouse door; one of the drunks told the firefighter he wanted to give the frightened woman his phone number. The firefighter walked Howard home when the men finally left.
“I’ve lived on Dean St. for 20 years, and I never felt unsafe, but now it feels like I’m living in a shark tank,” says Howard, who believes the men had been at the Barclays Center because she overheard them talking about the bout before they assaulted her.
Welcome to life in the shadow of Atlantic Yards, the ambitious and divisive $4.9 billion real estate project that includes 15 high-rise buildings that will eventually tower over central Brooklyn as well as Barclays Center, the rust-colored 18,000-seat home of the NBA’s Nets and the NHL’s Islanders. When developer Bruce Ratner and his political allies — most notably then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Gov. George Pataki, Ratner’s Columbia law school classmate — unveiled plans for a massive real estate project anchored by a Nets arena in 2003, they promised it would be a powerful economic engine that would bring jobs and affordable housing to the borough.
Community activists and longtime residents, however, say many of the promised benefits have yet to materialize — but the headaches and hassles they feared would be generated by the project, renamed “Pacific Park” in 2014 after years of controversy, have arrived right on schedule.
Howard and other residents say the neighborhood feels like it has been taken over by an occupying army. Noise from the construction sites around the Barclays Center is deafening, sometimes roaring on from dawn until well into the night. Traffic is snarled on streets narrowed by construction fences and clogged with trucks. The rat population has boomed and dust and diesel emissions foul the air. Confrontations with the 1,700 workers employed at the construction sites near the Barclays Center and the thousands of fans who regularly attend Nets and Islanders games as well as other events are all too frequent, the residents say.
“You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve had construction workers tell me ‘Go f--- yourself’ or threaten to kick my ass,” says neighborhood activist Wayne Bailey, who sits on Community Board 8 and is the president of the New York Police Department’s 78th Precinct Community Council.
Some residents say Ashley Cotton, the partnership’s executive in charge of public, government and media relations, makes a real effort to find solutions to their complaints.
“We take these issues very seriously and act swiftly to address them,” Cotton says.
Other residents, including Howard, believe Cotton and her staff are more intent on glossing over the problems the Atlantic Yards project has brought to their neighborhood. But everybody agrees answers are hard to find for a project that will transform a chunk of low-rise Brooklyn into an area that resembles Midtown Manhattan. The Atlantic Yards has unleashed a Pandora’s box of daily hassles on the neighborhood that the developer simply can’t manage, residents say.
“It is the proverbial bull in the china shop,” says Park Slope resident Steve Ettlinger. “Even when they do everything right, they are still going to break the china.”
Those tensions are likely to escalate as Greenland Forest City Partners, the partnership between Ratner’s company Forest City Ratner and Greenland USA, the Chinese real estate investment firm that bought a 70% stake in the Atlantic Yards project two years ago, proceeds with recently unveiled plans to build an enormous 1.5 million square foot office building directly across the street from Barclays Center. Activists and residents fear the massive new building will bring even more congestion, pollution and problems.
“It feels like we are being boxed in in this neighborhood. The attitude we get from the construction workers and the fans is, ‘Sorry, but we’re going to do what we want to do in your neighborhood.’ They act like this is 34th St. and 7th Ave.,” Howard adds, referring to the location of Madison Square Garden. “It’s not. This is our home.”
Crime is up in the area around the Barclays Center since construction began in 2010, according to New York Police Department statistics. There were 845 major felonies reported in the 78th Precinct (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, grand larceny of motor vehicle) reported that year, a figure that jumped to 1,009 in 2013 before it slipped to 956 in 2014. The numbers, of course, don’t suggest a causal link between the project and crime, and crime in the 78th Precinct is down dramatically from earlier years (there were more than 1,700 major felonies reported in 2000).
The assault by the three drunken boxing fans wasn’t Elicia Howard’s first disturbing Atlantic Yards incident. She had put up with catcalls and lewd comments from construction workers for months, including one smitten hardhat who followed her around the neighborhood like a lovesick puppy and once drew a heart in the dust on her car. She’s witnessed ugly confrontations between neighborhood residents and sports fans. Hockey fans especially seem dismissive of the black and Latino residents who live near the arena. Howard says she saw a group of men wearing Rangers jerseys curse out members of a predominantly African-American church before an Isles-Rangers game at the Barclays Center earlier this year because the parishioners told them they couldn’t park their Mercedes SUV in a no-parking zone.
But Howard says she is especially furious about an incident with a construction worker that took place a few days before the assault by the drunken boxing fans.
Howard, a sports marketing professional, says she usually responds to construction workers’ creepy comments in a civil manner, but she wasn’t feeling particularly friendly the morning of Dec. 2.
She was exhausted after taking a red-eye from Seattle to LaGuardia the night before and frustrated that the cab fare from the airport was $100 — double the usual price — due to a traffic jam.
Luggage still in hand, she went to a store near her home to pick up a croissant for breakfast. As she left the store, a worker said “good morning” in a leering tone. This time, she ignored the man.
“I was not in the mood,” she says. “I’m not obligated to respond. That’s when he got offended and called me an ‘ugly bitch.'"
Howard boiled over in anger: “How dare you come to my neighborhood and disrespect me!” Howard remembers telling the construction worker. “How dare you come to my neighborhood and disrupt everything and demand that I respond to you!”
The 20 or so other workers who witnessed the incident didn’t intervene. Howard says they simply laughed at her. She approached a supervisor at the Tishman Construction site who refused to discuss her complaint. He wouldn’t even shake her hand.
“He didn’t take it seriously because I am a black female,” she says, “and to me, that was the ultimate insult.”
The Dec. 9 Atlantic Yards Community Update, the bimonthly meeting between Forest City Ratner executives, representatives from public agencies, community activists and Brooklyn residents was supposed to focus on designs for a tower at 664 Pacific St. But as journalist Norman Oder reported in his “Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report” blog, the agenda was derailed when two of Howard’s friends, Marci Blackman and Sarah East Johnson, brought up the incidents with the boxing fans and the construction workers. Howard, again out of town on a business trip, did not attend the meeting. But Johnson says she was optimistic when Cotton offered to meet with Howard a few days later at LAVA, Johnson’s Bergen St. acrobatics/dance/theater studio.
Howard and Johnson say they exchanged ideas with Cotton and her staff about making the neighborhood safer for women, including sexual harassment workshops for construction workers that would focus on why many women feel threatened by catcalls and lewd comments.
They also talked about establishing a “code of conduct” for fans that would be distributed on leaflets and displayed on the Barclays Center scoreboard and other arena signage. The code, Howard says, would remind fans that the arena abuts residential areas and that public drinking and urinating on sidewalks would not be tolerated.
“It was a satisfying initial response, for sure,” Johnson says.
Cotton also told Howard that Greenland Forest City Partners will soon require construction workers to wear color-coded identification cards that will identify their worksites and help the developer — and police — identify problematic workers.
In an interview at Forest City Ratner’s Metrotech offices earlier this year, Cotton told the Daily News that she called a meeting at the NYPD’s 78th Precinct right after the Dec. 9 meeting. The project contractors and site supervisors were told that lewd behavior and other inappropriate conduct would not be tolerated, she said.
“At any given time we could have 1,700 construction workers out there. I need levers in order to create accountability for these workers,” Cotton says, “so they know (they’ve) been photoed, given an ID, given a sticker that goes on (their) helmet, and there’s real accountability around these kinds of issues.”
But Howard says she is discouraged because there’s been little action since that meeting. The ID program has yet to be implemented, and she has heard nothing about the harassment training for workers.
Cotton says one proposal has already been implemented: A video “Islanders Code of Conduct” is now displayed at the arena during NHL games, while audio recordings asking fans to behave plays outside the Barclays Center during boxing and hockey events.
“To suggest that we haven’t taken this issue seriously or address it quickly is completely false,” Cotton says.
The ID program, Cotton says, will take time. “We are moving through the process and steps needed to get the system in place, including identifying and procuring equipment, getting the unions and the contractors on board, etc.” she says.
Johnson, who was opposed to the project before construction began at the Barclays Center in 2010, says she believes Cotton and her staff have good intentions. But the project that began with the developer using the threat of eminent domain to clear homeowners and businesses from the footprint has to overcome years of distrust from residents, she says. Street harassment of women, she adds, has been a part of construction site culture forever. It’s going to take more than good intentions to solve that.
Howard, however, says she wants action, not assurances.
“I wanted to believe their promises, I wanted to believe they were genuine,” Howard says. “But it is all empty promises.”
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