http://noticingnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/05/looking-gift-horse-in-mouth-examination_24.html Above link, part 1, Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth?
An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development Monday, May 24, 2010 Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth? An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development, Part II http://noticingnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/05/looking-gift-horse-in-mouth-examination.html Monday, May 24, 2010 Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth? An Examination of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Terms of the Politics of Development, Part III http://noticingnewyork.blogspot.com/2010/05/looking-gift-horse-in-mouth-examination_21.html by Michael D. D. White. You will learn why Michael calls Bloomberg the off-shore mayor from Governors Island to the Cayman Island and his links in his blog are extremely revealing or as much as they can be when it gets to the mayor's finances and other tidbits.
Please take the time to read Michael's expose, watch my YouTube interview. For me the way Mike Bloomberg has handled real estate and this ruthless tsunami of community crushing development as reckless and stupid as what brought the implosion of Wall Street is about the mayor wanting to do what he wants unchecked. Steve Rattner thought he could do what he wanted to do unchecked and he has been busted.
Here is an excerpt from Noticing New York and it takes patience and time to get to the really, really juicy bits including the Cayman Islands.
"This three-part article, which is principally about the new Brooklyn Bridge Park currently under development, wends a long, more serpentine path through the politics of New York City development than perhaps any other we have written. As you would expect, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's appearance is much more than a cameo. We don’t offer him praise. Inevitably the metaphor of looking a gift horse in the mouth comes to mind when we contemplate the spectacular change to the city’s waterfront that will one day be Brooklyn Bridge Park. Whatever our government agencies ultimately do, the park will provide desirable benefits that will be extremely hard to complain about. But not conscientiously examining “gifts” that government officials deliver just doesn’t work in the political environment of New York. Besides Brooklyn Bridge Park is not truly a gift; it is something that community activists worked for years to obtain. Our elected representatives are, after all, supposed to be working for us. It is their job to properly administer our available public resources. Whether they are doing so requires a conscientious examination. We hope you will find that conscientious examination takes us on an interesting and worthwhile trip. Now, let our wending look at the politics of development begin. The Shuffling of Dates for the Opening of Brooklyn Bridge Park On March 22, an initial part of Brooklyn Bridge Park opened, the Pier One portion in the north near Fulton Ferry. An actual opening is imbued with a faintly amazing aspect given that dates announced for opening the park have been shuffled around by innumerable postponements. The shuffling has occurred in truly big picture terms and it also occurred recently on a more micro level. In big picture terms; the park, which involved decades of planning (funding for which was approved in 2000) was originally supposed to start construction in 2003/2004 and be fully open and complete in 2011 (an eight year construction period). By the end of 2004 the public was being told 2008 would be shovel-in-the-ground year and that the construction would take three or four years to complete (i.e. completion would be pushed out one more year to 2012). Such big picture delay is something that press coverage of the opening necessarily alluded to. The rest of the media did not, however point out the shuffling of the opening date that has been transpiring recently on a more micro level,but we did. In late August, just around back-to-school time, the public was told that two sections of the park would open just four months later in December. (We were quite skeptical.) Then, in November, with three of those four months elapsed, the public was told that it would still be waiting another four months for an opening of just one section of park rather than the two promised in August. Let us restate this in terms of what prompted our own skepticism: At the tail end of the two four year terms served by the Bloomberg administration, just as Bloomberg was running for an unprecedented third term by having overturned the city charter to repel term limits,it was being announced that part of a project funded and approved evenbefore Bloomberg took office, the whole of which was supposed to have been largely completed within those two terms, was finally, finally being started! Not only that; the public was being told that it was going to be opened just a mere days after the election. What do you think happened? A scant 22 days after Bloomberg squeaked by (spending more than a hundred million dollars) to win re-election, it was revealed that the schedule of a four month countdown to completion announced before the election was, as we initially hypothesized, quite fanciful." You will have to go to the blog links above to read all the installments and also don't forget my piece on Mike Bloomberg's techno-dream is the tax payer's Titanic as in CityTime.
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