WHEN ABRAM HALL LEFT WAR-TORN BUSHWICK IN 1986 after his mother died and his house was robbed, Brooklyn was in bad shape. Hall had moved in with his sister in Manhattan, just north of Central Park, and he wasn’t happy living there, so in the fall of 1987 he returned to his Brooklyn roots, first settling in Fort Greene near the Atlantic Yards, where Walter O’Malley had wanted to move the Dodgers, and then, after two years with a miserable landlord, moved into an apartment that once housed students from Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus.
When he moved in, downtown Brooklyn was devoid of commerce. Drug activity, prostitution, and other criminal behavior flourished. But the rent was cheap, and Hall was happy to be back in Brooklyn.
Then in 1988 a company called Forest City Ratner built 1 Pierrepont Plaza, near Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn Heights. Two brokerage firms, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, established a beachhead there. Forest City Ratner’s president, Bruce Ratner, had been the head of the Consumer Protection Division of the Department of Consumer Affairs under Mayor Lindsay, and after working for four years as a professor of law at NYU, he returned to government as Mayor Koch’s commissioner of consumer affairs.
Ratner’s family had owned a company that had been investing in real estate since the 1930s, and in 1988 he made his first foray into commercial real estate development in Brooklyn with Pierrepont Plaza. He followed that with an even bigger project, the MetroTech Center, a 6.4-million-square-foot office building and retail complex in downtown Brooklyn that broke ground in 1993. It was a project that had long been bandied about, dating back to the 1969 City Planning Commission report. The impetus for the development came partly from president of Polytechnic University George Bugliarello, who wanted to create a Silicon Valley for Brooklyn. Borough President Howard Golden was instrumental in changing the focus from research and development to back offices for the major Wall Street financial firms, only a short subway ride away. Among the MetroTech Center tenants are JP Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, and Keyspan (formerly Brooklyn Union Gas). Ratner followed MetroTech with a retail development called Atlantic Center, a large shopping mall that opened in 1996, and that was followed up by the Atlantic Terminal Mall, with Brooklyn’s first Target store, in 2004.
Ratner’s next downtown project will be a gigantic twenty-two-acre project called Atlantic Yards, a complex that not only will house the New Jersey Nets, the professional basketball team he owns and which he will move from New Jersey, but it will also include sixteen skyscrapers. Designed by world-famous international architect Frank Gehry, the Atlantic Yards has been blasted by opposing groups for dwarfing everything in the immediate area. It has also been praised by community and religious leaders for agreeing to include “affordable” housing in the deal. Rent payments will be subsidized by the New York City Housing Development Corporation. Despite the vocal opposition, the project received the green light from the Public Authorities Control Board in February of 2007. At the same time, Ratner sold the naming rights of the arena to Barclays Bank for $400 million. What Ratner didn’t consider was that Barclays got its start in the 1700s from the transatlantic slave trade. Black leaders wanted the deal killed. Barclays is obligated to spend $2.5 million to fix up basketball courts on Brooklyn’s playgrounds, but community leaders say it is not enough. Despite any criticism, many Brooklynites are looking forward to the building of the Atlantic Yards project.
Abram Hall, whose profession is print production, graphic design, and illustration, remembers when his Prospect Heights neighborhood was a slum. He is one of those rooting for Ratner and his new project, even if it means more density and more traffic.
ABRAM HALL “I lived in Manhattan with my sister for two years, and I discovered that for me Manhattan is not real. It’s like Disneyland. Brooklyn is more of a living kind of place. You have a neighborhood. I moved into my apartment in Prospect Heights in 1987. I was making $21,000 a year, which was not a lot of money in 1987 and I could barely afford to live there, but I took it because it was cheap. When I first moved in, that section of Brooklyn was rough. It was down and dirty. On Fourth Avenue, right in front of the unemployment office, you had hookers hanging out all night and people shooting up their drugs right there on Dean Street. If you walked down Pacific Street, it was, ‘Hey, you want a date?’ One antidrug activist was murdered by drug addicts. They paid $200 to take out a hit on her, and she was killed.
“Right across the street was the Daily News printing plant. It was operating twenty-four hours a day, and at eleven at night you’d see this whole parade of tractor-trailers go right into the plant to deliver the newsprint. If you hung around long enough, around three, the trucks would come out with the papers. But the Daily News left that plant and moved to New Jersey, and the area took a big hit, because a lot of satellite stores depended on the News employees. For a long time there was nothing around whatsoever.
“I bought my apartment in 1996 for $50,000 and today I could sell it for $430,000. In the last ten years the LIU Brooklyn campus has improved greatly, but more important, the MetroTech Center was built. The Chase Bank headquarters is there. Ironically, Chase was the bank that wrote out the mortgage for my place, because at that time no other banks were granting mortgages for co-ops. They established that right there, and from that point the next big improvement came around 1997 when the Brooklyn Marriott went up, and for a long time the Brooklyn Marriott was the most successful Marriott in the city. It has a very low vacancy rate. For some strange reason a lot of people who come to the city don’t want to stay in Manhattan, but they don’t mind staying in Brooklyn. So the Brooklyn Marriott was another piece in the puzzle. Also, around that time, Pratt Institute revitalized itself. I graduated from Pratt, and while I was there it was run by Jerry Pratt, who was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Exxon stock. His father was one of the original partners with John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, but I was never too impressed with him as my college president. I thought he ran the place almost into the ground, but the man they have now seems to have a vision, and now they are turning students away who want to come to Pratt. They have a big campus, big dorms. When I went there in the 1980s, you could rent a one-bedroom around there for $300 a month. It was dangerous. When I was there, a student was murdered. It was a traumatic event. Pratt has worked hard with the community and the police, and they have turned the place around, and now Pratt is a top-flight school again.
Abram Hall in front of the University Apartments.
Doug Grad
“The churches like Emmanuel Baptist Church have revitalized themselves. Emmanuel Baptist now has four or five services every Sunday, and it’s open every day. A lot of things have come together, but I give the most credit to the MetroTech Center. And I am looking forward to the building of the Atlantic Yards project.
“If you ask me, I’d say most people in Brooklyn are for it. Atlantic Avenue goes all through Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and all the people who own houses in those communities are 100 percent for it. If you go in the other direction and hit Boerum Hill, residents are less enthusiastic. If you head into Prospect Heights, it becomes a topic of hot discussion. If I had to make a bet, I’d say it’s sixty-forty against, there.
“Those of us who lived here when Prospect Heights was a crime-ridden empty area remember what it was like. We knew where we wanted Brooklyn to go based on where we started. But the people who moved in just ten years ago, they liked it the way it was, and they don’t want it to change. But this is a snapshot. It is not the end of the movie.
“I’m seeing high-income people moving in. My co-op, University Towers, has been predominantly black, but most of the people moving in today are white. Most of the people moving into the neighborhood are white or Asian. The blacks moving in are professionals driving Hummers. The economic status of its residents has gone up, up, up. Philip Michael Thomas lives here, because no one bothers him. Rosie Perez lives here. And other famous people as well.”
After working for Oxford Press for ten years, Hall went to work for Golden Books, which went bankrupt. He was let go during the summer of 2001. He set up his own publishing/consulting business, concentrating on printing and production, but in 2004 his sister Rita died, and the emotional hit took its toll. He now works in White Plains for the Starwood Hotel creative services department. He has had to buy a car, and that’s another reason he is happy he is living in Brooklyn.
ABRAM HALL “If I lived in Manhattan, I could drive around for an hour and not find a parking spot. Most of the time in Brooklyn, I can. And Brooklyn has the character I like. When I was growing up in Bushwick, I could bike over to Shea Stadium. I could do it in twenty minutes. I would get on Myrtle Avenue until it became Cooper Avenue, and I’d cross to Queens Boulevard and go up to 108th Street and take that to Roosevelt Avenue and make a right. I’d lock up my bicycle and go to the game. I never needed a car.”