Hanger Wan

About the only thing that can rouse me from my blog torpor these days, aside from Doom Metal, is the latest series of exciting gyrations at the Atlantic Yards project.

I happened to be out of the country acting as a heritage management professional when Senator Perkins called a massive public meeting about the project but neglected to stock it with any useful questions or event security. The result was a meeting that by all accounts managed to be both rowdy and substance-free, not unlike the empty theater that is the city's rent-review process.

I'm still unsure about the provenance of the people who were so insecure about the Atlantic Yards rationale that they needed to drown out a rather milque-toast set of interrogations. I read variously that they were genuine unionised construction workers or a mob assembled by the community groups that Ratner has paid to support the project. That said, I have an enduring fascination with the iconography of the American hard-hat. That the use of the hard-hat in the practice of wedge politics still has an edge even as America's native working class has largely abandoned the construction sector to recent, usually non-union, immigrants, and the country's heavy industry sector has hollowed out.

I thought about this as I read Rick Perlstein's wonderful Nixonland, and his account of the occasion when the city's construction workers acquired a taste for hippy blood. Perlstein's book has been much praised by bloggers, usually as way of explaining the yawning cultural chasm that exists in American politics. I liked it because my entire knowledge of the politics of 60s and 70s America comes from Hunter S. Thompson books, and I know, deep down, that that isn't healthy.

Some of the most fascinating bits of the book are those that illuminate just how culturally divided New York City was. I'm referring, of course, to a period before the flight to the suburbs, a time when the city was host to a huge white working class population. Sorry, I should have said, huge violent white working class population.

I'm thinking about the photo from 8 May 1969 of the stockbroker and hardhat apparently joining forces to beat up a student protester. You can see it here. I'm not going to be crass enough to compare arguments over an undistinguished basketball arena with the Vietnam War, but it's a nice and visceral illustration of the marriage of labour and capital in action.

The hard-hats kicked off the beating, and the white-collar worker joins right in. It illustrates the coalition that Nixon assembled to power his two presidential victories despite being massively weird, old and dishonest. So why does this tactic still endure in the Brooklyn of 2009? I mean, this is Old Skool.

It's possibly not that weird though, since Bruce Ratner learned his lessons about urban development as director of a Model Cities program for the Lindsay administration, which was the hapless bystander to the unrest of the late sixties in the city. He presumably learned the value of keeping labour onside, as well as, presumably, the value of dubious, though deniable, racial rhetoric in undermining opposition.

I doubt, though, that portraying construction workers as the stooges of capital would have any more force now than it did in 1969. It would probably be even less effective than following the marshmallow-brained Marty Markowitz about while dressed as a gigantic phone and screaming "MARTY! IT'S BROOOOOOCE" every time he tried to get on television (it's a reference to a moment in a New Yorker article when he had a very obsequious phone call with Ratner. Oh, never mind.)

I was tempted to carve out the news about the replacement of Frank Gehry with the hanger-building hacks into its own post, but the pub beckons, and I don't have much to say about architecture.

I'll just leave you with this datapoint. Last year, the Louisville Arena Authority started construction on a $238 million arena with a capacity of 22,000 seats. That can host ice shows, concerts and swimming. Even after tossing Frank Gehry's design and "value engineering" the hell out of the arena, they've managed to come up with an $800 million arena that won't host ice hockey and has a capacity of 18,000. AND IS UGLY AS HELL.

I'm not going to go over the model again. I'm not even going to argue about whether New Yorkers are going to pour three times as much love into a second-rate NBA basketball franchise as the good people of Louisville will into their top-ranked NCAA basketball franchise.

Let's remember the lower naming rights payments from Barclays, the slowing economy, the lackluster suite sales, the crumbling political support and say: Good. Luck. With. Your. $800 million. Hanger. Brooce.

[Addition: It occurred to me, several days after completing the post, hitting the pub, and trolling for link love, that there's an excellent way to tie the two halves of this post together. There reason why Ratner is saddled with an $800 million hanger, despite plumping for the most functional design he could get away with, is the cost of his unionised construction workforce. Those same guys who wrecked the Perkins hearing. That, my friends, is karma.]