Atlantic Yards Report reports on  “Is New York Losing Its Soul?” the first in a series of public programs connected to the  Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York
exhibit and sponsored by the Municipal Art Society. Read more at AYR.

The panelists at the
Donnell Library auditorium, facing an audience of some 250 people,
expressed varying degrees of dismay over homogenization and rising
rents, as well as feelings of impotence in a developer-friendly city.
And Atlantic Yards was again the poster child for unwelcome development.

Leading
off, moderator Clyde Haberman, a New York Times Metro columnist,
brought up the relentless march of chain banks and chain drugstores. “I
suspect history will smile on the Bloomberg administration,” he said,
but “it has yet to meet a developer to which it will say no.” (That’s
not quite true, given the administration’s posture
toward Joe Sitt’s Thor Equities in Coney Island.) The one example he
referenced—noting that panelist Alison Tocci of Time Out New York
wanted to discuss it—was Atlantic Yards.