A busy street near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn before a concert this month. More than one million people have visited the arena since it opened. (Michael Nagle for The New York Times)
NY TIMES
It is perhaps telling that the worst commotion the neighborhood has experienced since the Barclays Center opened in Brooklyn has not been stirred up by rowdy Nets fans or hip-hop devotees, but by teenage girls milling for hours outside a Justin Bieber concert in November.
At one point, scores of devoted Bieber fans, echoing those who mobbed Frank Sinatra in the 1940s and the Beatles in the 1960s, chased a bus down Dean Street because they thought the 18-year-old pop singer was inside, their high-pitched screams shattering the nighttime quiet of a sedate residential block.
No, the apocalyptic predictions of crime, chaos and an entire way of life suddenly and irreversibly ruined have not come to pass.
In the nearly five months since the Barclays Center opened in September, in spite of years of vitriolic opposition from many residents in the surrounding brownstone neighborhoods, the 19,000-seat arena at the heart of the borough has enjoyed a remarkably smooth debut.
“I thought it was going to turn this neighborhood into Manhattan,” said Noemi Feliz, 30, who has lived on Dean Street practically all of her life. “But the crowds are not as bad as I thought they would be. There’s a surge, but they clear out fast.”
Most basketball fans and concertgoers visiting the arena, it has turned out, really do come and leave quickly by one of the 11 subway lines that stop at Barclays or by the Long Island Rail Road. In the three months after the arena opened, the four subway stations in the area had 6,400 more riders on average after Nets games and concerts than on nonevent days, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The railroad has reported that on an event night, an average of 3,300 more riders arrive and depart at the Atlantic Terminal than before Barclays existed, a 334 percent increase.
As a result, residents say, the traffic flows as smoothly — or as sluggishly — as ever, with extra traffic agents posted to prevent gridlock.
A surge in crime that some had anticipated has also not materialized. More than one million people have visited the arena since it opened, attending 93 events, but the number of crimes has turned out to be negligible, possibly because of a heavy police presence augmented by Barclays security guards. Detective Cheryl Crispin, a Police Department spokeswoman, said the 78th Precinct registered just six felony episodes connected to the arena since it opened: an assault and four thefts inside the arena, and a cellphone snatching, classified as a robbery, outside the arena. The indoor thefts were mostly of cellphones and credit cards from employee locker rooms. A total of 36 misdemeanors were also reported.
While there have been complaints of public urination, the posting of guards on streets along which fans stream to their parked cars seems to have curbed that somewhat.
“I haven’t witnessed anybody screaming during game nights, and I am outside all the time,” said Richard Polo, 41, a real estate appraiser who lives on Dean Street. “People may tell you that during game night there’s disorderly conduct, and mostly it’s completely false.”
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Many car owners say that when they return from work on basketball game or concert nights, it is almost impossible to find a parking space.
Another nuisance has been the double-parked or illegally parked chauffeured town cars that idle around the neighborhood during high-end events like a Barbra Streisand concert.
And some residents say they are upset by thrumming bass sounds that seem to escape from the arena. During some performances, like Jay- Z’s, residents a block or two away say they can hear or feel the vibrations. Barclays Center received a $3,200 summons for noise violations during a Sensation dance-music event after inspectors from the city’s Environmental Protection Department recorded excessive decibel levels in a loft-building apartment on Pacific Street.
“It’s like having a subway go underneath your apartment,” said David Stevens, 47, a history teacher at St. Ann’s School who lives in the same building.
Ashley Cotton, a spokesman for Forest City Ratner, the arena’s developer, said the company was talking to engineers to see what could be done about muffling the noise. She said the company had tried to address the problem of so-called black cars by designating a parking area for them on Atlantic Avenue south of the arena.
Even enduring critics like N. Wayne Bailey, a resident of the Newswalk building on Dean Street, said he had to give Barclays and city agencies credit for sweeping up arena trash thrown on the streets. (Paradoxically, some residents complain that the noise from mechanical street sweepers wakes them up.)
Mr. Bailey, however, gives most of the credit for any improvement to a watchful network of community advocates who have confronted Forest City Ratner and city agencies and have prodded them to make improvements
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.And more significant changes are coming: the first of 14 apartment towers that will make up the Atlantic Yards complex is rising; and residents on Pacific Street are bracing to have their lives further disrupted by the widening of the Long Island Rail Road rail yards, with 20 trees scheduled to be cut down, more parking spaces eliminated and sidewalks occupied by construction vehicles.
But businesses in the area, particularly restaurants, say the arena has been great for sales. Some residents also say it has made the area more vibrant.