This is an excerpt of a piece that originally appeared in full on The Brooklyn Bureau in conjunction with City Limits.

In December 2003, developer Bruce Ratner stood in the old Brooklyn council chambers at Borough Hall and presented a dream that, he promised, would remake the borough’s future. The dream was called Atlantic Yards, and as Ratner envisioned it—and celebrity architect Frank Gehry promised to make real, accompanied by a few hastily-assembled balsa-wood models—it would deck over an old Long Island Rail Road yard to make way for housing and office towers, plus an arena to lure the New Jersey Nets to the borough. Rap superstar Jay-Z, newly anointed as a minority Nets owner, offered a brief statement as cameras flashed; “We are on the threshold of restoring Brooklyn to its rightful place on the national stage!” roared Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, shortly before tearing up while recalling his boyhood sorrow at seeing the Dodgers depart for Los Angeles.

Atlantic Yards certainly put Brooklyn on the national stage, but not in exactly the way that Markowitz envisioned it. What came next was eight years and counting of very public neighborhood strife: protests and lawsuits by residents angered at the use of tax dollars and state eminent domain powers to tear down two city blocks of buildings to benefit a private developer; accusations and counterclaims in the wake of Ratner signing a “community benefits agreement” to promise jobs and affordable housing to local groups in exchange for their endorsing the project; cameos by high-profile local opponents like actor Steve Buscemi and novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose “open letter to Frank Gehry“ in Slate raised Atlantic Yards to national attention; and on and on, all documented religiously in the borough’s numerous blogs (in particular journalist Norman Oder’s voluminous Atlantic Yards Report and leading to an award-winning documentary, “Battle for Brooklyn”).

All that—aside from a few straggling lawsuits — is done now, and the Barclays Center basketball arena is now taking shape at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush, with its grand opening set for this September. (The first act: A concert by Jay-Z, to be followed by the arrival of the newly minted Brooklyn Nets.) Almost everything else about the project, though, has changed. “Miss Brooklyn,” the 500-foot office tower that was supposed to anchor the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, has been scrapped. The 6,430 units of housing—2,250 of them at “affordable” rates, though many critics have noted that most of the discounted rates would still be well out of the reach of most Brooklynites—are uncertain, with no groundbreaking set for even the first tower. Both Gehry and his designs are gone, replaced by a cheaper building that features a facade of rusted steel girders in place of the legendary architect’s glass-walled plan.

Lost in all the tabloid headlines has been a deeper question: Now that the first stage of Atlantic Yards is set to arrive, what will Brooklyn get for its near-decade of discord? What will the project—possibly the biggest single change to arrive in the borough since Robert Moses rammed the BQE through a half-dozen neighborhoods in the 1950s and 60s—mean for Brooklyn residents, workers and businesses?

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