New Improved Brooklyn

“We want a new and interesting skyline viewed from the Manhattan side of the East River,” says Amanda Burden, director of the Department of City Planning and chair of the Planning Commission. “An undulating, interesting skyline rather than all towers of the same height, and a lot of space between the towers.”

Burden is talking—and it takes a minute to realize this, even when you’re asking the questions—about Brooklyn, specifically the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfronts, an area whose current “skyline” consists of stilled cranes, parked trucks, blocky concrete warehouses, and the Williamsburg Bridge. Brooklyn’s tallest building, the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, was built in 1929—a banner year for skyscrapers—and has never had a rival. “The mayor and I went and looked at the Williamsburg waterfront the year before he was elected,” says Burden. “There are almost two miles of waterfront, it has been derelict for decades, and it is an enormous opportunity, one, to provide housing and, two, to provide a great waterfront for the people of Brooklyn.”

Burden’s plans, enabled by two lengthy rezoning proposals, could add more than fifteen new towers, 4.5 million square feet of office space, and 8,500 new housing units. The city’s plans would have been enough to herald a major conceptual shift, but then, in October, developer Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner announced that he had hired Frank Gehry to design an arena for what will become the Brooklyn Nets over the MTA rail yards at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues. The less-examined portion of Ratner’s plan for the Atlantic rail yards adds residential towers for 4,500 people between Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. Across the street, Ratner is rushing to complete the Atlantic Terminal, a mall that includes a Target in a big box below and 1,500 Bank of New York employees in a tower above.

Two blocks away, the BAM Local Development Corporation has just announced a second Frank Gehry project: The Theatre for a New Audience will be housed, sometime circa 2007, in a building designed by Gehry and echt–New York architect Hugh Hardy. The theater will share a triangular site with a public Visual and Performing Arts Library designed by up-and-coming Mexican architect Enrique Norten.

Smaller developers are repurposing Downtown Brooklyn office buildings into housing, and creating mega-neighborhoods with residential developments between Park Slope and Gowanus, Downtown and Boerum Hill. The piers under the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges will someday be an emerald necklace of parks, Whole Foods is going in at Third Avenue and 3rd Street, Fairway will and Ikea may touch down in Red Hook. And then there’s Coney Island, where some would like to see more sports-themed development around the annually sold-out Cyclones minor-league baseball stadium.

Brooklyn’s development has always followed the skeletal lines of the subways—the artists weren’t the first Lower East Siders to discover the L train; Wall Street workers decamped to Brooklyn Heights long before the twenty years of gentrification that differentiated Park Slope from Fort Greene, and Boerum Hill from Carroll Gardens, in the minds of most New Yorkers. Including cabdrivers. The new development plans are no different, centering on transit hubs at Borough Hall and Atlantic Avenue that are, as any commuter could tell you, already jam-packed.

“Brooklyn is a delicate growing neighborhood,” says Gehry, whose daughter recently bought an apartment—an expensive apartment—in Carroll Gardens. “The arena is like the ostrich swallowing the basketball, it seems like. However, it’s possible to work the edges of it to make it compatible with the neighbors.”

Of course, what the neighbors tend to say about Ratner and his development are far from delicate. Twenty years of skirmishing over gentrification has been subsumed into a larger struggle, one where the mostly white, highly affluent stroller set is for once allied with the rainbow coalition of longtime residents. On one level, this is simply the mother of all NIMBY (not in my backyard) battles—since Gehry’s stadium and its accompanying towers will literally be built in some Brooklynites’ backyards. And Brooklyn’s potent, sometimes cloying nostalgia for the way things were—dese and dose, egg creams and spaldeens—can fuel a knee-jerk rage at any change at all. But now there’s another force at work. In the past five years, Brooklyn has reached a new maturity and self-confidence. Gehry is arriving at a moment when the borough is fashionable, even by Manhattan’s exacting standards. Who wants to live on the Upper West Side when you can live in Park Slope? Who needs the East Village when you can socialize on Smith Street? Ratner and Burden seem to want to raise the borough up, make Brooklyn take a quantum leap, create a new kind of city—one that more closely resembles Manhattan. Which seems wrongheaded to many current residents. The real topic here is, what is Brooklyn?

Chatel is one voice in what is becoming an increasingly organized multicultural army opposed to the city’s and Ratner’s plans for many of the same reasons. At first they were just angry, confused, questioning. But recently they have begun to articulate their own vision of the future of Brooklyn, building on its history—that of the hundred-year-old brownstone and that of the three-year-old boutique. A group of Prospect Heights residents has hired Norman Siegel, former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, to represent them; City Councilwoman Letitia James sponsored a neighborhood-planning workshop; a coalition of Greenpoint-Williamsburg groups is going toe-to-toe, and chart-to-chart, with City Planning to preserve industry and open new parks. Every week there’s a meeting, a rally, a fund-raising concert.

“Tourists come over the Brooklyn Bridge to see historic neighborhoods, not glass-and-steel construction,” said Cathy Wassylenko, a member of Community Board 2. There’s a sob in her voice as she rattles off a list of structures, including an 1860 clapboard rowhouse, that would be replaced by towers in the rezoning.

“Why should we destroy small businesses that have proven their loyalty to Brooklyn and replace them with corporations whose loyalty to Brooklyn is as large as the subsidies they receive?” asked one impassioned man, shaking in his gold-buttoned blazer.

But residents, the city says, are refusing to see the greater good; in the post-9/11 era, the boroughs need to play their part in what is delicately referred to as “business-continuity planning.”

“When you look across the Hudson River, you can see all the jobs that should have been in New York City,” says Amanda Burden. “Downtown Brooklyn has every advantage and is completely underzoned right now for development.”

By increasing the possible heights on several city blocks, and assembling large land parcels that include the lot on which Chatel’s house sits, City Planning hopes to create sites for four new towers, of 18 to 40 stories each. Its goals are to knit MetroTech, Ratner’s earlier, much reviled project, on Adams, to the bustling retail corridor along Fulton Mall, creating a tall, tight Downtown business district and to connect this new, improved Downtown to Boerum Hill and Cobble Hill.

Residential expansion will go on the east side of Flatbush Avenue, replacing a ragged, albeit popular strip of auto-body shops, car washes, and Kennedy Fried Chicken outlets. “Flatbush Avenue needs to be a gateway to Brooklyn,” says Burden. “When you come off either one of the bridges, you should say, Wow, this is where we want to be.”

By focusing on all those jobs in New Jersey, City Planning may be aiming too high and too bland; one alternate vision for the borough builds on the trove of boutique owners, writers, and architects who wouldn’t mind moving operations out of their apartments. A garment district of sorts has already sprung up above Bridge Street’s row of fabric stores; Sandra Paez, owner of the Smith Street boutique Frida’s Closet, has an atelier on Lawrence where she sews her own designs plus the odd custom gown for Brooklyn’s many brides. Thousands of artsy professionals have flocked to Brooklyn, rehabbing their brownstones as a form of creative expression—why couldn’t there be a D&D building in Downtown Brooklyn?

One positive development to come out of the plan’s public-review process is a focus on preserving the architecture of Downtown Brooklyn—the Landmarks commission and City Planning are now looking at a dozen prospects along Fulton Mall, which, if preserved, could become artist live-work spaces or small offices. Burden is all for preservation—luckily, none of the potential landmarks are on development sites—but she sees this refurbishment as one part of creating a 24/7 urban texture. “We’re not Houston,” she says. “We are a city that walks. We love the mixture, the vitality of the old and the new, the intimate, the large, the small, and the medium.”

For Gehry, the project is a challenge and a privilege. “I studied city planning and all that when I was younger and never really got a chance to do stuff like this,” says Gehry. The challenge is the tight urban site. “The only arena that’s like it is Madison Square Garden, but we’re even going to be tighter, where the arena part is going to be tighter into the architecture of the buildings around it. And we’re hoping that the buildings around it are going to be beautiful.”

Gehry’s ostrich-swallowing-a-Spalding metaphor (in fact, the old Spalding factory at Sixth Avenue and Pacific Street will be demolished to make way for the Ratner arena) now makes more sense: the court is the ovoid core of the project, to be seen bulging through the metallic feathers that animate the streetscape, and extending upward into office towers and residential buildings. In the published renderings, the egg is glass, ringed with walkways that spiral up to a rooftop piazza, open to the public.

The other portion of the plan—the two eastern blocks that will be built as residential enclaves—gives its landscape architect, Laurie Olin, more room to maneuver. “Frank and I both feel that it is really important to be able to walk in off the street and find these open spaces, to have the sense that you’re still in New York but gone to something new and different,” says Olin, no household name but the designer of Bryant and Battery Park City’s parks.

“It won’t be like a forest, but there will be these groves of trees,” Olin says. “I have proposed two major clearings, one of which has a sunny mound in it, one of which has a large water event. There’s this yearning we all have in the middle of cities to have something soft and have some grass.”

It is this desire for groves and lawns, a true escape, that pushed the architects to ask for the closing of Pacific Street, and the creation of what looks very like a sixties superblock. Olin dismisses this criticism—“We’re not going to build thirties towers in a greensward. We’ve learned in the last 30 years about seeing and being seen”—a paraphrase of “eyes on the street,” one of urban theorist Jane Jacobs’s most valuable insights.

The most contentious issue is the displacement, via eminent domain, of the 200 to 400 people who live and work on and between Pacific and Dean streets. Ratner says he has to condemn these blocks of brownstones, condominiums, and small businesses, because the arena won’t fit any other way. Bender says the market has been given enough time to repurpose the old bakeries, the mini storage centers.

“I can’t blow my own horn, but I am going to do my best to make it beautiful,” says Gehry with a modest chuckle. “I don’t usually do schlocky stuff. I’m not going to start now.” Gehry and his associates have already begun holding videoconferences with members of the affected community, and the design is evolving from the publicized model. “It’s a shifting plan because they have community meetings. They call and say, We’re going to leave this building and that building and What if this happens? and What if that happens? We do a lot of what ifs, and ands, and buts.”

Like the Downtown Plan’s rendering of Willoughby Street as a second Rockefeller Center, Ratner’s idea of residential towers—however elegant—seems airlifted in from the other bank. “It’s a Battery Park City,” says City Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents Fort Greene as a member of the Working Families Party. She, practically alone among the better-known Brooklyn politicians (Marty, Chuck), has vehemently opposed Ratner’s plan, speaking against the arena, against eminent-domain abuse, for affordable housing, for jobs for Brooklynites. The Atlantic Yards plan is largely out of the city’s hands, on state-owned land, funded by a private developer. But it could have as great an impact, and as many towers, as the Downtown Plan: home to the Brooklyn Nets, 2.1 million square feet of office space, 4,500 housing units, and 300,000 square feet of retail space. The tallest projected tower, at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, would top out at 620 feet—108 feet higher than the Williamsburgh Savings Bank building.

Poised, attractive, and by now something of a local folk heroine, James is quickly able to work up a rhetorical head of steam. “Our tallest building is the Williamsburgh bank building, and now you are going to destroy that? You want to build luxury housing in the middle of a working-class community? Why? Because of our proximity to a transportation hub, because of our proximity to Manhattan. This is really to appeal to Manhattan, to appeal to commuters. This has nothing to do with Brooklyn.”

James’s, and her constituents’, issues aren’t attractive: eminent domain, traffic, asthma, housing, parks. They are the nitty-gritty of urban life, uncloaked by the glamour of professional sports or globe-trotting architects.

Like Walentas, BAM LDC chairman (and longtime Brooklyn impresario) Harvey Lichtenstein is one of New Brooklyn’s founding fathers. Unlike Walentas, Lichtenstein thinks theaters, not condos, are the engine of change. BAM’s aesthetic cachet has been a key factor in luring Manhattan’s cultural elite across the East River. “The idea is to take advantage of being an outer borough and have a little more daring to it. You are not as constrained as institutions are in Manhattan.”

Now Lichtenstein wants his beloved Fort Greene neighborhood to become Brooklyn’s cultural hub, a goal he believes is now well within reach. Every year, a larger percentage of BAM’s audience (visibly younger and hipper than that of Lincoln Center) comes from the borough. “It is great for Brooklyn to be on the outside,” he adds. “Places like that have a special kind of energy. The Dodgers were out of the mainstream, and that’s happening now in a different way. Brooklyn shouldn’t just be a copycat.”

BAM lies at the center of neighborhoods to which artists, writers, and musicians priced out of Manhattan have fled. Brooklyn has taken over some part of Manhattan’s national role as an incubator of talent, a place to be not-yet-successful among like-minded people.

“We talked about the difference between Manhattan and Brooklyn, looking between the two places to try to identify what is the Brooklyn thing,” says Charles Renfro, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro partner who was team leader for the firm’s BAM LDC master plan. “We researched how many artists lived there, and Brooklyn has way more artists than Manhattan. The reality about Brooklyn is that people are living there and doing their stuff and not screaming out for attention.”

In March, the BAM Local Development Corporation announced a Gehry project of its own: a 299-seat theater, co-designed with Hugh Hardy, for the 25-year-old Theatre for a New Audience, to be built, beginning in 2005, just two blocks from Ratner’s arena.

The choice of Gehry by both the BAM LDC and Bruce Ratner is not, as it happens, coincidental. The BAM LDC is run by Lichtenstein, BAM’s founding director, and Ratner is a former member of BAM’s and the BAM LDC’s boards of directors (as well as the owner of one of the LDC’s development sites). The theater project has been in the works for much longer than the arena, so Ratner stole a bit of its thunder—and more than a bit of its publicity.

An emphasis on excellent architecture—cutting-edge, and brand-name—is written into BAM LDC’s mission statement, along with the project’s overarching goal: creating a mixed-use cultural district around BAM’s Opera House and Harvey Theater. Its master plan was masterminded by architectural stars Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rem Koolhaas.

“The idea was that the district itself would necessarily be totally experimental,” says Lichtenstein. “It would not be conventional. It would honor the need for public space and open space. We would make it as transparent as possible so that the buildings wouldn’t be intimidating and people would have some sense of what’s going on inside.”

Lichtenstein envisions Brooklyn as a younger-skewing alternative to Manhattan’s Museum Mile, with the culturally adventurous seeing a matinee at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, dining on Smith Street, shopping on Atlantic, and making it to BAM for an 8 p.m. curtain. The Brooklyn Museum, newly awakened to the marketing possibilities of not competing with the Met, could be another stop, not to mention Rafael Viñoly’s canary-colored addition to the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (opening 2006).

Enrique Norten, of the Mexico City–based TEN Arquitectos, won an NEA-sponsored competition to design a new Visual and Performing Arts Library. Norten’s stunning design emphasizes the flow of Flatbush, its multicolored glass wall—which Norten has described as a billboard—striated by horizontal lines. “My library reconstitutes the texture of the city. It fills in a very broken condition. It is missing a tooth,” says Norten of his site. “The design brings in new urban spaces, spaces of gathering, and a new space of urban identity.”

Rather than setback restrictions and shaded squared-off blobs representing future development projects, Diller, Scofidio, Renfro, and Koolhaas came up with a spiritual mission statement for the neighborhood. “How do you spur development that’s a little more naturalistic,” says Renfro, “a bottom-up approach, as opposed to one that’s top-down?”

As it happened, naturalistic or not, many of BAM’s neighbors saw the plan as gentrification by another name. As adventurous as BAM was, it was still seen as Eurocentric. And of course it attracted white people—who displace, of course, people of color. That conflict is still and always the most complicated and intractable of the issues surrounding Brooklyn’s development.

“The Fort Greene district lies at the crossroads of all these different forces—how do you make something interesting that’s not dictatorial?” Renfro says. “How do you make something that deals with the scale of the city while not being banal? How do you reinforce it but also make it more interesting? We made images which tried to evoke a spirit, an experience of the place, as opposed to a look.”

Open spaces, like the one Norten describes, were a part of that spirit, as was an attempt to remove as few buildings as possible. “It is certainly a contrast to the Atlantic Yards development, which is exactly the kind of thing we tried not to do—a wiping clean of the blocks, and a top-down megastructure placed in it,” Renfro says.

In this vision, the architecture and development ornaments and accessorizes what’s already there, rather than replaces it. In place of the Gehry spirit, a Brooklyn spirit. It’s a vision that makes a lot of sense—livable, comfortable Brooklyn, with the aesthetic overlay that’s grown up in the last twenty years, combined with a sensitivity—hard-won, it’s true—to the people that were living there first. That’s something that’s not happening in Jersey City.

It may have started as a defense mechanism, the idea that anyone would prefer to live in Brooklyn—no one likes to admit being priced out of the promised land. Brooklyn ten years ago was acceptable, but hardly prime, real estate. Park Slope tended to Birkenstocks, non-trendy babies, and Ultimate Frisbee. But in the past five years, that outer-borough embarrassment has disappeared. Many of the fields that make New York New York—art, theater, design, architecture—are centered, residentially if not from nine to five, in Brooklyn.

It shouldn’t take towers along the waterfront to recenter our mental maps of New York on the East River, not at Central Park. Brooklyn is already different, inextricably linked, but equal. It shouldn’t be back-office territory, but front-office space for smaller businesses. Those potential Williamsburg towers really are on the Fifth Avenue of the future. Enrique Norten’s library, Frank Gehry’s theater and arena are equivalent to Herzog & de Meuron’s South Bank Tate Modern—jewels in the setting that is Brooklyn, rather than alien presences.

The trick, then, for Brooklyn’s neighbors is to negotiate with the city, with the developers, with the architects, from a position of strength. Know neighborhood character, and admit its weaknesses. Point the Manhattan developers to real instances of blight. Look to the development that has been and is now already occurring, without benefit of tax breaks and zoning incentives.

The fear of Manhattanization is not, in this case, knee-jerk nimby-ism, but the sense that many chose to Brooklynize instead—to move here from other places, to stay here for multiple generations. What is attracting all this top-down money is work that has already been done by people happy to say, when asked at a party, No, I don’t live in New York. I live in Brooklyn.

Stepping Out

The student projects arranged on the floor, walls, and benches and hung from the upper-deck railing in Gund Hall at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) are hardly architecture. There is some lingerie—ribbons of blue fabric like a shredded teddy sliding off a hanger; jointed wood dolls outfitted in stretchy Trekkie caftans; origami paper reinforced and folded into pods, tubes, and parabolas. A chicken-wire mannequin wrapped in cloth dangles from above. One group seems to have cheated, entering with a cardboard-and-foam-core box that splits apart like a 3-D puzzle. But this—despite its suspicious resemblance to a Rem Koolhaas building—later turns out to be merely a mold for a fiberglass-reinforced bentwood chair.

Big Plans, Small Houses

The fifties ranch house, the sixties theme restaurant—these and other familiar postwar building types are approaching the magic age of 50, when they become eligible for the National Register or local landmarking. But will they reach the half-century mark? Modern preservationists are trying increasingly aggressive (and diverse) tactics to ensure that our parents’ houses—the average as well as the sublime—aren’t obliterated by this generation’s mania for McMansions.

“Publicity is probably going to be the most effective means” for saving Modernist houses from demolition, says Peter Moruzzi, chair of the Palm Springs Modern Committee. “Given how much exposure we were able to generate for the Maslon House, if we become aware that there is a chance someone is going to demolish a serious Modern house, the owner is going to face negative publicity.”

Queens Modern

"This is not Archie Bunker land," says Rochelle Slovin. "MOMA moving to Long Island City proves that Queens is cultural."

Slovin, founder-director of the American Museum of the Moving Image, is only one of the Long Island City pioneers who are welcoming the Museum of Modern Art and its institutional muscle into their neighborhood. "Long Island City is actually closer to a lot of Manhattan than Chelsea is," adds P.S.1 founder Alanna Heiss. "It's such a short distance from Times Square that you can hardly draw your breath."

Welcome to -- they hope -- New York's newest destination neighborhood, one rebranded not with bars and artists' lofts (like Williamsburg) or bistros and baby carriages (like Cobble Hill) but with art and culture. Long Island City -- home of P.S.1, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Noguchi Museum, and the Socrates Sculpture Park -- has long been selling itself as the eastern counterpoint to Chelsea, with more space, more light, and less glamour. So what if it's on the other side of the river?

But the argument is taking on new force with the June 29 arrival of the museum-in-exile version of MOMA, which is taking over a former Swingline stapler factory that's being referred to as the "big blue box." And it's bringing a constellation of other high-rent refugees with it: The SculptureCenter, another longtime Upper East Side resident, acquired a space in Queens last fall and has hired architect Maya Lin to renovate it. A chic new building, with room for three galleries, has opened blocks from P.S.1. The Julia Roberts–produced television series Queens Supreme is set to be filmed at LIC's 1908 courthouse (Sex and the City and The Sopranos are already shot at the nearby Silvercup Studios). A few Manhattan-style restaurants have begun to appear, intermixed with the area's cherished Italian spots. And rents have begun their inexorable rise.

"There's a point where the sound on your stereo goes from being barely audible to very loud," Slovin says. "MOMA's move has turned up the volume."

MOMA may have brought its own spotlight -- the museum is planning a major marketing campaign for itself as well as for the whole concept of an artsy Saturday in Queens -- but Long Island City is one of those neighborhoods whose moment has arrived over and over again. First when Heiss opened P.S.1 in 1971, then when quiche was sighted in 1985 (an event considered worthy of a tongue-in-cheek New York Times neighborhood profile), and again when the Citicorp Building was built in 1986.

But the landscape hasn't changed much. It's still a sprawling terrain of gritty avenues populated with factories and row houses inhabited by middle-class families -- historically Italian and Irish, now Indian and Hispanic. Even though MOMA is technically moving to the same neighborhood as partner P.S.1, you'll still need a car, a bike, or the No. 7 train to get from one to the other.

P.S.1, at five stories, is one of the tallest structures in the triangle known as Hunters Point. The area is a mix of small-scale brick and stone buildings, old and new, and is bisected by Vernon Boulevard, the main commercial strip. Adjacent garages have been converted into rental apartments, offices, and the occasional artist's studio. But the mood of the neighborhood is still small-town; the local brick-oven pizzeria, Manetta's, keeps a list of people who are looking for apartments.

Across the Sunnyside rail yards from P.S.1, MOMA's new neighborhood is anything but homey. Block after block of blank, earth-tone boxes contain envelope factories, vitamin manufacturers, auto-body shops, and, it's rumored, T-shirt sweatshops. Signs of artistic life tend to take the form of color: the red Soho-style façade of brand-new bistro Tournesol, the Noguchi Museum's safety-orange banner, the riot of (permit-required) graffiti on the New York Center for Media Arts. And, of course, MOMA's brilliant blue stucco, a reference to Swingline's original azure brick.

Artists have been here all along, arriving not in waves but singly, drawn by the area's factory buildings, proximity to Manhattan, and abundant light. Many aren't residents but commuters. Maria Iosifescu, an art restorer and photographer, moved her studio from a Tribeca loft (which is now a luxury condo) to LIC with a group of artist friends. They pooled their money and renovated half a floor of a still-functioning manufacturing building; each spring and fall, they try to put on an open house, papering the hallways with renderings of their incredible Manhattan view.

Andrew Miller, referred by a painter friend moving to California, runs his L.I.C.K. Ltd. Fine Art gallery from a four-story concrete loft building that's half art, half industry. The trophy manufacturers on the third floor have been happy to make him assorted plaques and signs over the years; the resident writer on the fourth floor lends his extra square-footage to guest curators to mount their own shows.

Sculptor Joel Shapiro, whose last exhibit was on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, has recently purchased a building just south of the Queensboro Bridge. A former power plant, the brick structure will provide 22,000 square feet of studio space for Shapiro and his wife, painter Ellen Phelan. "It has this nice raw quality," he says of the area. His next-door neighbor is a machine shop, which can come in handy for a sculptor who works in metal. "It feels fresh because it is not about retail, which is what everything in Soho is like."

It's that raw quality -- and the attendant low rents -- that drew MOMA there in the first place. At the time, before the P.S.1 merger, MOMA was just looking for long-term storage not too far from 53rd Street. But after it realized it would have to close the original MOMA, all that empty, high-ceilinged space began to look less like a warehouse and more like a gallery.

For three years, as the museum expands and revamps its midtown location, collection highlights like Warhol's Marilyn, Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, and Van Gogh's Starry Night will be on display only in Queens. This summer, it will also display its entire car collection, in a show called "AUTObodies," along with vroomy art. (This would seem awfully Guggenheim-like, were it not for the fact that MOMA was the first museum -- ever -- to have a car exhibition, in 1951.) It's also programmed a nod to its new home: Rudy Burckhardt's early-forties photographs of then-exotic Astoria.

If the Demoiselles alone isn't enough of a draw, February 2003 will bring the blockbuster-to-end-all-blockbusters: "Matisse Picasso," a show juxtaposing masterpieces by the two beloved modernists. That's the kind of show art lovers travel to Washington or Chicago for -- or even western Massachusetts, where the Mass moca showcases contemporary art in a similar warehouse-grand space. Queens, however, is only a subway ride away.

"We draw these very arbitrary distinctions of 'You have to cross a river, you've got to cross a bridge,' " MOMA director Glenn Lowry says. "It gets exploded: People on the East Side think going to the West Side is far away, and people on the West Side think Chelsea is far away. It is all psychological. None of this is far away by L.A. standards." The tough, pared-down architecture of the MOMA space also recalls another famous contemporary-art venue -- Frank Gehry's renovated police-car garage for the Los Angles moca. MOMA, no fool, hired Los Angeles–based Michael Maltzan, a former Gehry employee, to design the new outpost's public spaces. (The rest of the facility has been designed by Scott Newman of Cooper, Robertson & Partners.)

To get over the psychological barrier, one might start calling the whole area QNS -- that's how Lowry suggests people might refer to his museum's temporary quarters, and early adopters like the Noguchi's Amy Hau have already picked it up. "Being close physically to QNS is certainly a nice plus," she says of her museum's temporary move to a serene loft space four blocks from the big blue box. The Noguchi's newly renovated building (complete with working clock tower) is turning into a mini-museum itself: The Museum for African Art will move into the floor above the Noguchi in September, decamping from Soho while its permanent home, designed by Columbia architecture dean Bernard Tschumi and architect Yolanda Daniels, takes shape at Fifth Avenue and 110th Street. Daniels is also designing its loftlike LIC space, whose layout is identical to the Noguchi's. "We really very purposefully selected Long Island City," says deputy director Anne Stark. "It is a very exciting new destination for culture, and a great opportunity for collaboration with other arts institutions. We're a little on our own down here in Soho. It is not the art destination it once was."

The SculptureCenter, an exhibition and education organization, is banking that the architecture of Maya Lin -- whom it's hired to transform its Purves Street factory -- will help to draw visitors. Director Mary Ceruti looked in Dumbo, near BAM, and in Chelsea before settling on Long Island City. "None have this combination of accessibility and mutually supportive organizations," she says. Although SculptureCenter isn't opening until the fall, it will greet MOMA's arrival with a witty curbside installation by Nina Katchadourian: a flock of three specially marked cars, outfitted with oversensitive alarms that play birdsongs when touched.

If people won't get on the subway or take advantage of the free Artlink bus service -- which was started last summer and travels from what we now might call MOMA Manhattan to MOMA QNS, with a loop to AMMI, Noguchi, P.S.1, etc. -- those at MOMA claim they aren't worried. "As the French say, tant pis," Lowry remarks with a smile. Lowry has said he expects attendance to be about 400,000 people (last year, it drew about 1 million), and the museum will open its galleries only five days a week, from Thursday through Monday. Other LIC museums report an increase in visitors over the past two years. P.S.1 now gets approximately 200,000 per year, half of that over the summer months (when it offers the hipster-magnet outdoor Warm Up concert series), while AMMI gets 70,000, and began selling out weekend-evening screenings for the first time last fall.

Plus, even without a Starbucks, Long Island City is on the international map. P.S.1's reputation has made it a stop for curators coming from or going to the borough's two airports; they will drop off their luggage in the lobby. One rarely visits P.S.1 without seeing a couple of Invicta-backpack-wearing art lovers -- clearly not from around here. "Last week, I spoke to a woman who is South American and who is having her portrait painted by Francesco Clemente," says Andrew Miller. "Long Island City came up and she said, 'That's the new art center.' So the buzz is out there."

Although institutions are attracting most of the press attention, Miller is one of three gallery owners in P.S.1's immediate vicinity. In January, the Dorsky family opened a gallery in a sleek building designed to hold two additional art spaces. A rotating array of international curators will mount group shows downstairs, while the family runs its secondary art business upstairs. Eugene Binder (who spends half his time in another remote art capital, Marfa, Texas) shows local and Lone Star artists in a third-floor space close to the piers; he's been there for seven years, relying on the intrepidity of loyal clients.

The art boom could even inaugurate a migration of designers from the meatpacking district. Tucker Robbins, known for his rough-hewn furniture referencing Asian, African, and Latin American indigenous crafts, opened a 20,000-square-foot showroom and workshop two blocks from MOMA this spring. He rented it on only his second trip to LIC -- the first was to the Noguchi Museum. "I was terrified," he confides, proudly showing off the Manhattan skyline from the party-ready rooftop of his building -- he's planning a happening for MOMA's opening weekend. "But now all my friends are lusting after this exuberance of space."

The arts, however, are only one element of Long Island City's future. The business and real-estate communities, also just across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown, have had their eye on the low-rise area around the Citicorp tower for years. Last July, a 37-square-block area around Queens Plaza was rezoned to promote mixed-use development and allow for the construction of more skyscrapers, and developers quickly snapped up available lots.

Even after September 11, the plans have continued. MetLife has already moved 900 workers to offices in the Brewster Building and will, after the construction of a twelve-story tower (due to be completed in October 2003), add 600 more. Recently, the Arete Group received the go-ahead to build 4 million square feet of office space on the site of a municipal garage as well as a space across Jackson Avenue. The Department of City Planning has already received funds to improve lighting and signage and create better bike and pedestrian routes through the area. "The gateway to Queens needs an image," says planner Penny Lee.

Not surprisingly, new housing in the area is primarily aimed at midtown-Manhattan workers, not artists. The Avalon Riverview recently joined the Citylights Building along the southern waterfront. Rockrose, the development company that is in the process of acquiring the rights to the Pepsi-Cola property, plans to erect seven residential buildings on the site. It will break ground this winter and hopes to complete its first tower within eighteen months. Rockrose also has its eye on built-up areas closer to the Citicorp Building, envisioning renovated loft-style apartments aimed at the downtown, rather than the midtown, market.

"A chic set of people were already going there, even before MOMA and the SculptureCenter," says Rockrose director of planning Jon McMillan. "You're going to have pioneers who struggle a little to buy groceries, but already along Vernon Boulevard the nature of the retail is changing. You have fewer tire-fix-it shops and more coffee shops and cafés."

For some longtime residents, the prospect of change is unsettling, whether in the form of office workers or gallerygoers. Increased traffic brings higher rents; old ethnic communities begin to disperse. "There is an art community here, but it is not an artist neighborhood," says installation artist Javier Tellez, who likes the fact that he can eat at Five-Star Punjabi with the taxi drivers or play chess with local Filipinos at the neighborhood park. "I could never live in Williamsburg, where you go to the supermarket and everyone is an artist."

Although Tellez's rent -- $1,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment-slash-studio -- is regulated, other artists are already feeling the pinch. Lucy Fradkin and Arthur Simms (she's a twenty-year resident, he's an eleven-year resident) once shared a studio on top of the Eagle Electric plant overlooking the courthouse. When the factory was sold last year, likely for an office development, they were kicked out, and Fradkin has been forced into a 200-square-foot shared studio, for which she is paying the going rate of $2 per square foot.

They've begun the search for the next artists' neighborhood. Where? They aren't telling.

The Towers That Will Be

The refrigerator is Sub-Zero, the cooktop is Thermador, and the dishwasher tucked under the granite countertop is Miele. The dining-room table, with its homespun linen tablecloth from Bergdorf Goodman, is set with iridescent Calvin Klein glass bowls and white chargers. Smoky goblets glinting behind the glass-fronted cabinets are also by Klein. The votive candles on the Kohler sink in the marble-tiled bathroom are from Takashimaya. All this — and a 10021 address — can be yours for $600,000 to $6 million. (Did we mention the restaurant downstairs that will be manned by a star-spangled chef, the Equinox gym-spa that will have its own resident acupuncturist, and the valet bike service?)

But “all this” is currently a three-story-deep hole on the corner of 65th Street and Third Avenue, where the Related Companies is building a superluxe postwar building with prewar amenities like crown moldings, Juliet balconies, and multipane windows. The hole has a name: The Chatham. And a name architect: Robert A.M. Stern.

Such upscale product placement in the Chatham’s showroom shouldn’t come as a shock. The Related Companies’ goal, in building this 94-unit condominium, was to burnish its superluxe new building with the added equity of superluxe appliances and the considerable skills of Stern. But Related didn’t think it could sell million-dollar apartments without something for buyers to see and feel and touch — hence the showroom’s fully equipped bathroom and kitchen in a nondescript brownstone on East 66th. “People judge the quality of the building by the attention to detail,” explains David Wine, president of Related’s residential-development division, walking a visitor through the spec kitchen. “We didn’t want to do a complete stainless-steel thing — it would be too expensive — so we decided to use top-of-the-line products instead. We’re saying, ‘This is important.‘ “ Pointing to the Sepco faucet in the gray-and-white marble powder room, he notes, “Brushed nickel is in.”

Call it a trend-in-progress: developers asking big-name architects better known for single-family homes or billion-dollar commercial complexes to work their sorcery on condos and rentals. The architects see it as an opportunity to grab part of the celebrated Manhattan skyline. The developers see it as a way to hitch their names to a glammy product and a serious architect. Stern’s office is also designing two additional high-rises, which are shaping up as less-luxe rentals: the cast-iron-style Tribeca Park, a massive 400-unit rental building in Battery Park City, and the Seville, on 77th and Second, for rival developer RFR/ Davis. RFR/Davis, led by former architect Trevor Davis, also has the Impala, a rental at 76th and First that will be blueprinted into existence by fellow postmodernist Michael Graves. One person involved in the development quipped that you could call these buildings “the Disney Collection,” given both architects’ affiliation with the Magic Kingdom. (Stern co-planned the oldfangled town of Celebration, Florida; he also designed the cartoonish Feature Animation Building in Burbank, California, and the Casting Center in Lake Buena Vista, Florida; Graves executed the Fantasia-worthy Dolphin and Swan Hotel there.)

Suddenly, developers are growing a collective aesthetic conscience. It’s a by-product of booming residential sales and the plethora of well-designed goods for the home. A few years ago, a rumor went around that Ralph Lauren was going to offer model-home plans — the only surprise is that the idea never turned into reality. Postmodernists Stern (known for his gray-clapboard, white-columned mansions) and Graves (known for his overblown classical vocabulary and Tuscan palette) are stepping into the breach, trying to turn themselves into equally recognizable brands. Stern has been designing a line of “classically styled” original furniture for years, and Graves realizes he’s better known for his Alessi teakettle than for, say, the Portland Building. The teakettle is considered the apogee of the eighties kitchen status symbol, and he’s taken the concept into the nineties with his recent line for Target. The swoopy new kettle costs $29.99 instead of $112. And Graves, who earlier in this decade designed a pricey South Beach condo development, is back in populist mode with this competitively priced luxury rental building.

But will people actually pay more for the architect’s name?

“I know it helps to sell teakettles,” says Graves, laughing immodestly. “I think people might be more curious, at least to go and look at the place, and then it should sell itself without anybody’s help.” Graves has been at the forefront of architectural branding — and he’s clear about his reasons for wanting his name on a building: “To get better work, to get an article in your magazine, to get people to buy apartments, to engage us all,” Graves says, only semi-facetiously. “It’s a bit like what Gerry Hines did in the seventies when he hired I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson to design office buildings. Gerry said he had to pay the architects a little bit more but he got it back in spades — the office-building-design stakes were raised almost overnight by Gerry’s success.” By contrast, developers tend to get too used to working with one architect, putting up building after building using the same formula. That’s how the city got its fleet of (justly unappreciated) white-brick buildings.

Stern, who worked for Mayor John Lindsay’s housing department after he graduated from the Yale architecture school, remembers that “there was no market for my skills or the skills of any architect of my generation” in the late sixties. “Battery Park City, if it does no other thing, was the key to changing it. Amanda Burden, Richard Kahan, David Emil, and Stephanie Gelb some of the authors and enforcers of Battery Park City’s architectural code realized that neighborhoods are going to be made by buildings that have some distinct qualities. In the early days of BPC, they made the developers and architects live in the buildings for a month after they were finished. Often we design these buildings and we never experience them for ourselves.”

And now they can. Graves, who already owns a unit in a Miami Beach high-rise he designed (he also appeared on a billboard for the building), says, “When I don’t have a specific client, I do everything as though it was for me.” If this project turns out well, he says, he’ll consider renting one of the apartments himself.

And even Wine couldn’t have imagined the additional publicity value of Stern’s moving into one of the Chatham’s most coveted spots — a sixth-floor apartment overlooking the Joneswood Garden, which is maintained by the brownstone owners of 65th and 66th Streets. Stern is moving only because the view from his 77th Street apartment (where he’s lived for nearly twenty years) is being ruined by Davis and his partners. The Empire is obliterating half of the Cottages, a picturesque thirties development that Stern the preservationist labored to keep from being torn down. Stern is sanguine about the change: “RFR/Davis is building a very nice building. I am not the architect, but looking at it I think, Oh, this isn’t going to be so bad.“

Both architects see these buildings as a chance to redress some of the wrong done to New Yorkers (including themselves) over the years. “I’ve always been interested, as most good architects are, in the prewar buildings,” says Graves. “What I most like about those buildings are their plans. It’s always striking to me when people in prewar buildings make SoHo lofts out of them by stripping them of detail and knocking down walls. In the anonymous towers, the plans are awful. They are often turned on the bias so when you open the front door — boo! — there’s the view of the East River. There’s no mystery to it whatsoever.” You can almost hear Graves shaking his white head. “People don’t understand pacing — how to hold back and give it to you in smaller doses.”

The building’s entrance also consumed much of Graves’s attention. Although the building isn’t luxurious, the lobby will be maple-paneled, with a limestone floor. He’s also planned an outdoor courtyard between the front desk and the elevators. Davis plans to fill it with bronze statues of impalas — the African antelopes, not the Chevrolets. “Coming to your house is an important event in anyone’s life, and this reflects that,” he says. The outside of the building also plays with childhood notions of home: Graves has arranged the windows in four-square groups, like a child’s drawing of a windowpane, which makes the building seem much shorter (two floors read as one) and gives the edifice as a whole a building-block appeal.

Stern also stresses the point of entry; at the Chatham, he’s installed a modest oval lobby reminiscent of the one in the Carlyle. The black silk throw pillows at the sales center — they’ll make their way onto one of the lobby’s settees eventually — have been sewn up in a diamond pattern that matches the ornamental grillwork on the front door. “I said to both clients, ‘Let’s have a quiet lobby; let’s prepare people for their apartments,’ “ Stern says. “It shouldn’t be a broken-field run through a marble hall. Lobbies should be small and intimate, like living rooms for the buildings.”

Stern tinkered with the developer’s standard plans, adding details that his mansioneer clients appreciate. He picked a neutral palette for the bathrooms, adding the wide molding that rings the rooms, and started the living-room windows a foot below the ceiling line (so that curtain rods and valances can’t be seen from the street).

“The kitchens reflect the kind of kitchen I’ve done in people’s houses — nicely appointed, white and black, not an assault by all the different kinds of marbles you can buy in the world. I want the most important thing in the room to be you, and if not you, your vegetables,” says Stern.

As soon as the Chatham is finished, the brownstone housing the restrained kitchen-and-bath showroom will be demolished to make way for the Chatham’s garage. But the faux home seems to be working — in one month, 50 percent of the Chatham’s 94 units have sold, and while no one has actually offered to buy the sample kitchen’s striking black-and-white wicker table and chairs, or the Calvin Klein glasses, Stern’s carefully styled stage set is doing half the agents’ work for them.

Until the late sixties, when funding dried up, an architect’s first commission was occasionally federally funded housing. Le Corbusier did it in Marseilles; Richard Meier did it in the Bronx. It’s a building type that Stern and Graves undoubtedly studied in school, but they were unable to find anyone who wanted to pay for their thoughts — until now. If the Seville and the Impala rent swiftly, Davis says, he’ll hire more name architects. The Related Companies may soon be branching out from postmodernists: The company is talking to a list of modern architects, selected by Cooper Union’s architecture faculty, in a competition to design a boutique-hotel-and-cinema complex that will go up in the parking lot next to the Public Theater.

In this brave new, celebri-designed world, “the buildings will have different personalities and aesthetics,” Stern says. “To quote Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, ‘Not only do they have names; now they have faces.’ “