By Jim McCarthy Jan 9, 2009 0 comments

This is the Brooklyn Nets Century…or at least it should be!

Via The Gothamist, The New York Daily News reports that the new arena being built in Brooklyn (called the Barclay Center) for the New Jersey Nets will be scaled down:

“A source close to the developer says that [Bruce] Ratner simply won’t be able to build an arena for the proposed $1 billion. He tells the News that raising that much is ‘probably not going to happen.  It can’t be built if that’s the price tag.’”

There are few things in professional sports less glamorous than playing in Newark, New Jersey.

Before I go any further, I want to say that I’m not one of those who reflexively bashes the Dirty Jerz, as Gary Vaynerchuk might say.  Quite the opposite.  New Jersey is a lot better than most of you think.  So there.

Still, being a Newark-based team is not.  Being located in Newark is usually the owner’s way of telling you that they’d rather be in New York, but parking was inconvenient, so they moved to Newark.

Moving the team to Brooklyn and building a landmark new arena (this one’s being designed by Frank Gehry of Disney Hall and Chicago’s Millennium Park fame) is, in the long term, a stroke of absolute brilliance.  In ten years, when Gen Y is coming into its prime earning and spending years, this kind of investment in Brooklyn is going to pay off big time.  If you’re not familiar, Brooklyn has undergone a startling renaissance over the last couple decades and in many ways is a very cool place to live.

Far be it from me to set a budget on a giant construction project, but I will go on record as saying that cutting this project down to the point where it doesn’t reinforce Brooklyn as a coming hub of NYC’s creative class of the future (and therefore benefitting from all the Live 2.0 goodness to come) would be a big mistake.  Build an ordinary, boring arena, and you’ll sell a few basketball tickets.  Build a major cultural asset and you’ll make the market you’re selling to (that is, Brooklyn) more valuable.

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