New Jersey Nets

The Star-Ledger reports that Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the New Jersey Devils are trying to assemble investors to buy the Nets basketball team from development firm Forest City Ratner.

Should the Nets be sold—Forest City denied that the team is for sale—it would presumably kill the more than $4 billion Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, developed by Forest City under the premise that a new Frank Gehry-designed arena would be created for the Nets.  read more »

The New Jersey Nets basketball team now plans to move to the Barclays Arena in central Brooklyn in 2010. The team originally planned to be in the arena, which is part of the Atlantic Yards project, in time for the 2009-10 season; but, as the Bergen Record reports this morning (via The Real Deal), the Nets missed a deadline for telling its East Rutherford landlord if it would move by 2009 or not.

Sean (Puffy) Combs was on the phone from a yacht in the Bahamas, and he was laughing.    read more »

Sean (Puffy) Combs was on the phone from a yacht in the Bahamas, and he was laughing.  read more »

Rudy Giuliani will be campaigning for New Hampshire Republicans on Oct. 12, his first political trip to the presidential battleground since 2004.

Jeanine Pirro says she's tougher on perverts than Andrew Cuomo.

State campaign contribution limits didn't stop AIG from giving $50,000 to Eliot Spitzer in one day and $90,000 to George Pataki on another.

The head of the Port Authority won't force PA employees to relocate to the Freedom Tower, and once said he'd quit his job over moving employees into the building. Other prospective employees say they don't want to work in the Freedom Tower.

The city's drinking water is being protected from biological weapons by the hardy bluegill fish.

Mayor Bloomberg's plan to fight poverty includes a $1,000-per-child tax credit. The City Council, which needs to approve the overall plan, will hold hearings on Thursday.

Speaking at the New School yesterday, former Sen. John Edwards said, "There is a natural disconnect between market values and moral values."

The Transport Workers Union changed rules on how to elect its union leaders in the run-up to their December elections.

The New Jersey Nets extend their lease at home until 2012, but can move to Brooklyn earlier. Donald Trump won't pay $1.4 million in local taxes on his new project at Jones Beach, which he built but the state owns.

A state senator in New Jersey was paid $35,000 "to lobby himself."

An Associated Press photographer with alleged ties to terrorists is detained by the U.S. military.

And Errol Louis says the normally sedate judicial race on Manhattan's Lower East Side has turned into a mud fight.

-- Azi Paybarah

What if Bruce Ratner never finished his gargantuan arena-and-housing development in central Brooklyn  read more »

Early on the evening of June 13, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson was standing b  read more »

Early on the evening of June 13, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson was standing before a  read more »

Last week, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn asked Letitia James, who represents the Prospect Hei  read more »

... and you can probably take Freddy's out of Brooklyn, too.

The Brooklyn Papers is reporting that at 8 p.m. tonight, the owner of Freddy's, the popular Dean Street, Prospect Heights bar, will pour its last pint of Brooklyn Lager.

The building is slated for demolition in Bruce Ratner's plans for the Nets arena and a surrounding development; it's owned outright by Mr. Ratner, so it's unlikely that without a massive change to the plans, the bar will survive.

Why the boycott? The Brooklyn Brewery is supporting the Ratner plan; they've got a big account with the developer out at the Nets arena. And at the new one, there are likely to be more Brooklyn drinkers than are likely to show up at one of Freddy's popular Adult Spelling Bees. (Actually, that's not a small number. Also in the backroom at Freddy's, there are great live performances. And the place is also home to a bit of a local literary scene.)

Anyway: At Freddy's, you'll get Labatt's Blue now instead of Brooklyn. Ugh.

The bar owner and the brewer kind of slap each other around in the Brooklyn Papers piece.  read more »

- Tom McGeveran

“Oh, Knicks, you suck!”  read more »

“Oh, Knicks, you suck!”    read more »

It looks like Bruce Ratner's New Jersey Nets are not coming to Brooklyn too soon. They're close to signing an agreement with the Continental Airlines Arena to stay through 2010.

Quotage is from Matthew Futterman's piece in today's Star-Ledger:

With delays mounting for their proposed arena in Brooklyn, the Nets and the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority are now in serious negotiations to keep the team at Continental Airlines Arena through the end of the decade.  read more »

Officials involved with negotiations for a new lease for the Nets said the agreement would last at least through the 2010 season with options to continue playing at the arena as long as the Nets need to be there. If the parties reach an agreement on a new lease it would replace the current lease, which is set to expire in 2008.

- Tom McGeveran

After Bruce Ratner sent the plans for his mammoth live-work-play complex in Brooklyn through a state  read more »

What does the "secret" memo, circulated among the city, state and Forest City Ratner and uncovered by anti-Ratner Brooklyn group Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn on Aug. 17, really mean?

The Real Estate is less surprised than The Sun and the Brooklyn Papers (pdf) that the city didn't give this deal much publicity, even though it was reached the same day as an agreement endorsing Atlantic Yards (the Frank Gehry one with the Nets basketball arena).

After luxuriating a fortnight in the memorandum's elegant prose, we think the most important bit is that Bruce Ratner may end up razing the dreaded Atlantic Center mall--don't worry, not the one with Target, but the weird one next door--and replacing it with an office and apartment complex five times as large. Or he might just stick the added bulk on top.

A Forest City spokesman, Joe DePlasco, emphasizes that Forest City has not developed alternative plans, but even Ratner's right hand man, James Stuckey, has said publicly that he dislikes the Atlantic Center, designed to lure chain stores to the Big Bad Brooklyn of the mid-1990's. The place does look a bit like a prison diagram from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

The "secret" memorandum explains that if the Atlantic Yards plan goes through, Forest City would, in addition to building about 7.5 million square feet under the Gehry project, add 1,257,728 square feet to the Atlantic Center site. If the Nets arena plan fails, Forest City would get to develop even more on Atlantic Center—1,586,000 square feet, on top of the roughly 400,000 square feet of retail already there. Forest City would have to pay the city for the extra development rights, and also have to get zoning approval to change the use from commercial to partially residential.  read more »

Good thing we finally got this figured out because this afternoon, Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn has got another story for journalists, who are particularly news hungry at this time of year: a report that alleges The New York Times, which just happens to be developing a new headquarters with Forest City on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, has been "inadequate, misleading, and mostly uncritical" in its coverage of the Brooklyn arena. Stay tuned.

- Matthew Schuerman

When Frank Gehry abruptly pulled out of a 2000 competition to design The New York Times’ new headq  read more »

When Frank Gehry abruptly pulled out of a 2000 competition to design The New York Times’ new h  read more »

The Mayor's after-hours announcement on March 3 of a deal on the Brooklyn arena for the Nets basketb  read more »

Are New Yorkers finally starting to catch on to the fact that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is doing an ou  read more »

Listen carefully and you'll hear a rumbling in the distance.  read more »

About two weeks before Christmas, state officials dropped a present down Charles Dolan's chimney at  read more »

State officials are privately throwing cold water on The New York Times ' plan to build an $850 mill  read more »

Lauren Ambrose is that redhead from HBO's Six Feet Under-some kind of redhead, clearly, as evidenced  read more »

Remember how George Steinbrenner used to have back-door negotiations with Billy Martin that seemed m  read more »

Mark Jackson leaned against his massive Ford Expedition on a recent afternoon outside the New York K  read more »

The talk shows on sports radio station WFAN are typically testosterone-addled affairs, pitting insec  read more »

It's a bitter cold December night in New Jersey, and the chill is seeping into the cavernous Contine  read more »

When a 38-year-old Park Avenue doctor named Mark McMahon decided to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton  read more »

The up-and-coming brokers and landlords who attend the monthly luncheons of the Young Men's-Women's  read more »

When Robert Rubin was Secretary of the United States Treasury, he often wandered around his office w  read more »

Charles Dolan, the reclusive chairman of Cablevision Systems Inc., has a crazy, scary, beautiful con  read more »

Way back in 1979, when Bruce Springsteen played the No Nukes fund-raiser concerts at Madison Square  read more »

Patrick Ewing, the veteran center of the New York Knicks, emerged from the G.M. Building on Jan.  read more »

Patrick Ewing, the veteran center of the New York Knicks, emerged fromthe G.M. Building on Jan.  read more »