BROOKLYN'S TROJAN HORSE. The Other Dave drew my attention to Jonathan Lethem's open letter to Frank Gehry asking the architect to pull out of Bruce Ratner's project for downtown Brooklyn.

I tend to concur with Lethem. I don't see any reason to build a Gehrian skyscraper complex in downtown Brooklyn. And Ratner and his cronies owe Brooklynites an apology for being so deceptive about the disruptive effect their scheme is likely to have on the community.

The entire city is too vertical and too crowded already--the concentration of people per acre is too high, too often out of proportion with green space, and inefficient and unhealthy in terms of street traffic. I would like to see the city's development move towards improving our quality of life by addressing those problems, not adding to them.

Such a change would probably require a groundswell of public opinion to counteract the political and financial momentum of the project. The longer I live in the city, the more I realize that developers and contractors and major landlords are a breed apart. They're certainly entitled do business; it's just that their business can really go against the common good. In suburbs, such people would seek land to increase the sprawl, but so much of this city has been developed that, to make really big money, the developer crowd looks for things to tear down and build up again. Their money and class standing give them political influence that "people power" might be able to moderate.

There was a time when unions built affordable housing, some of which survives to this day. I have to believe that many more such projects could be mounted today. If only the masses could find their mojo again. I'm encouraged by the activism in Brooklyn, but it'd be interesting to see more proactive development done by communities rather than developer types. Unless I'm grossly mistaken, I'm sure this is being done--some, in fact, near the site of the Ratner project--but I'm sure more of it could and should be done, too.

Photo: David Marc Fischer