At 7:30 p.m., on the night of the Nets’ home opener, the TV screens at McMahon’s Public House went dark and then exploded into a bright blue. Staccato drums filled the bar, and to a burst of go-till-you-drop fervor—turn down for what?—the Brooklyn Nets took over the TV screens.
In the bar’s two cavernous rooms, there was not actually much to turn down. At 6:30, McMahon’s had been full of beer-drinking, wing-eating Nets fans. By 7:20, most had paid their tabs and started the block-and-a-half walk down 5th Avenue to the Barclays Center. At 7:40, the bar was empty.
“You going to the game?” the waitress asked the only two patrons left in the place.
This was a Monday, not a night that’s known for carousing. It’s not a problem for McMahon’s that its customers jump ship at game time—what’s most important, said Michael McMahon, the Irish-accented co-owner of the bar, is that these customers come back. According to a transportation survey that Barclays developer Bruce Ratner commissioned several months ago, McMahon’s is just one of what might be called “Barclays bars”—businesses that now live in the shadow of the stadium, some of which opened in the couple of years just before or just after Barclays. And the scenes at those bars, as witnessed on an unscientific basis by Capital, seem to bear out the effect that the Forest City Ratner commission purports to show.arena developer Forest City Ratner commissioned a few months after Barclays opened, on weekdays, 5.4 percent of Barclays’ customers patronized nearby businesses before Nets games; 11.9 percent went out afterward.
A list might include the Montrose and Uncle Barry’s on Fifth Avenue, Mullanes and Mo’s in Ft. Greene, and Woodwork on Vanderbilt Avenue, where Beyoncé once showed up—long enough to take a picture outside, at least. The arena crowd feeds at nearby restaurants, too: Search for “Woodland Brooklyn,” and you’ll find that its defining characteristic, according to Google, is that it’s a “top-rated Brooklyn restaurant near Barclay Center.”
Even if these bars and restaurants don’t define themselves in terms of their relationship to the Barclays Center—many of them strive to be neighborhood joints, with local customers—they’re part of the change that’s crept into this area of Brooklyn in the wake of the arena.
“If you own a restaurant, a bar, a coffee place, anything retail in the hospitality world, you are clearly benefiting from Barclays,” said Carlo Scissura, president of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
He says the chamber has collected internal data that backs up this idea—that some businesses, at least, have benefited from the arena’s presence.
“If you talk to business owners, on nights where there are concerts or games happening, their business is up. Places along Flatbush and 5th Avenue, and the smaller side streets—they are doing very well with Barclays.”
Economists have known for years that stadiums, often proposed as economic game-changers, rarely justify the subsidies their builders extract from political leaders.
“They’re sold as this panacea of economic development—it’s going to revitalize the area, it’s going to be unicorns and rainbows, financially,” said Stephen Buckman, an urban planning post-doc at the University of Michigan who has studied stadium development. “Often, that does not happen.”
Traditionally, the neighborhoods around stadiums suck. On game days, they are filled with streams of bejerseyed fans; on dark days, they are eerily empty of human life.
This isn’t necessarily the fate of all urban arenas, though. Some, even when they are not economic powerhouses, manage at least to avoid being destroyers of neighborhoods.
One of the examples that Buckman has focused on, Denver’s Coors Field, was successful in part, he found, because it incorporated Jane Jacobs’ ideas about what makes city districts work: They must be used for more than one thing and have short blocks, old and new buildings, and a thick concentration of humanity.
When Barclays moved into Brooklyn on a nubbin of land wedged between Park Slope, Ft. Greene and Prospect Heights, the neighborhoods that surrounded it already had these Jacobian features. It was a place that people not only liked to live in but which they felt an allegiance to, and many whose homes were sacrificed to the Barclays vision fought, hard, against leaving.
But space demands in New York can create perversities, like the fact that right now, a thriving neighborhood is not always considered an optimal use of space. Like a smart kid whose parents decide she wasn’t trying hard enough in school, this piece of land, in the eyes of politicians and developers, wasn’t living up to its potential. Close enough to Manhattan, with excellent transportation infrastructure, this was a spot where wealth—and Nets fans—could concentrate.
More than two years after the Barclays Center opened, the neighborhood has undergone a transformation. Before Barclays, more of the shops in the area sold stuff—clothes or furniture or the like. These weren’t the sort of businesses that did well in the Barclays era. On the other hand, the arena employs nearly 2,000 people; approximately 1,600 of them live in Brooklyn, and one-third live in NYCHA developments. The area is still dense and vibrant. There are still old buildings. But in addition to a place where people live, it’s now also place where people go out.
It’s not just Barclays that’s driving this.
“A bunch of places have brought back this whole nightlife scene to Brooklyn, which is very exciting,” said Scissura.
He was thinking of BAM, he said, and Theater for a New Audience.
“It’s that whole downtown Fort Greene entertainment district,” he said.
Academics call this sort of concentration of entertainment a “nightscape”—an industrial district whose product is human pleasure. Its excesses are less toxic than the excesses of the past century’s industry: If you’re choosing, it’s better to have vomit on your street or noise outside your window than a toxic spill in your backyard. (On some blocks of Gowanus, you don’t have to choose.)
As an engine of economic growth, however, arena-driven nightlife might have its limits.
One night, Michael McMahon went into his bar, and it was filled with women. He likes to talk to his customers. These women had come from Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and their children were in the stadium, at a concert. They were staying over in Brooklyn—the moms and their kids both kicking back in the big city, for the night.
This isn’t unusual: While most Nets fans head back to Manhattan or Brooklyn after a game, a good quarter go home to New Jersey, Long Island and the New York and Connecticut suburbs. To some extent, Barclays bars are New Jersey bars and Long Island bars. The places that the bridge-and-tunnel crowds now know as their special spot in the city.
“There are so many supporters for the Nets still from New Jersey,” said McMahon “So many Jersey people come in and support the Nets. Once a Nets fan, always a Nets fan.”
This is an unusual feature of a team relocation. When new stadiums are built to attract teams from far-off cities, there can be some intangible benefit for the residents of the city that snags the team. The Nationals, for instance, brought baseball back to Washington, and Washingtonians duly embraced their new role as Nats fans.
Moving a team from North Jersey to Brooklyn, though, gets into more complicated constructions of regional identity. One of the strange things about New York City is that it’s both a very large city, with a distinct identity and political boundaries, and the core of a much, much larger urban unit that stretches down into Jersey, up into New York State, and into Connecticut. As much as the people who live in this larger city are loath to admit it, places like Hoboken and Jersey City are part of New York City, too; they might be overseen by different politicians, but economically, even culturally, they’re part of New York.
But that connection works more powerfully in one direction: toward the five boroughs. Because it’s easier to get New Jerseyites to root for a Brooklyn team than vice-versa, the Nets’ move has done wonders for the team’s business. Ticket revenue went from 27th in the league to fifth; the team’s merchandise sales jumped from last in the league to near the top—last year, the Nets ranked fourth in jersey sales.
The move has also created new fans: In 2012, with an average of 13,961 fans per home game and total attendance of 460,719, the team came in dead last in the NBA’s attendance report. The next year, the Nets averaged 17,187 fans per game, with 704,702 total attendance, putting them in 16th place, the middle of the pack. (Currently, the team’s holding steady in 17th place; the capacity of Barclays Center means attendance figures could climb only few spots higher, even if every single game sold out.)
These fans now eat and drink in Brooklyn. And while that’s good for the businesses within and immediately around Barclays, it’s not clear that, overall, it counts as economic growth so much as economic shuffling.
“Did people not eat dinner before the Barclays Center?” said Dennis Coates, a University of Maryland-Baltimore County professor who studies sports economics.“Did they not go out to restaurants before the Barclays Center? They did, just not there.”
For those New Jersey fans, for instance, the only change in their allegiance is to where they eat and drink before, during and after the games. New Brooklyn fans were probably just going out to eat and drink somewhere else in Brooklyn.
“You’re attracting business from other places, which is good for you, but it sucks for those other places,” said Coates.
Increasingly, in the case of Barclays, bigger businesses are trying to soak up that spending. International brands, like Uniqlo, and big New York chains, like Shake Shack (which might have started in New York, but hardly counts as a local business any more) are opening up shop within sight of the stadium. Property values in the immediate vicinity—and, with them, rents—are rising, which will make life harder for small, independent outlets.
And as much as Barclays brings business to bars and restaurants in the area, those businesses have to compete with the arena itself, which offers not only food and drink but local, Brooklyn-made food and drink.
“If the eating and drinking happens inside the stadium instead of outside, you’re taking money from moderate income business and giving to wealthy owners,” said Coates, the sports economist. “If you think that’s a good idea, you’re going to be happy with the outcome.”
Forest City Ratner and Barclays have worked to connect the arena’s patrons to the businesses outside. Barclays Center TV points to local shopping; the arena’s app has a list and map of nearby bars and restaurants.
The Nets has hosted viewing parties at nearby businesses (including McMahon’s). There’s a working group that includes local businesses, BIDs, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce and representatives of the arena and of Forest City Ratner. The working group shares strategies that have worked, like connecting with alumni groups, or providing special deals for Barclays employees.
“Our brand is Brooklyn every day of the week,” says Ashley Cotton, Forest City Ratner’s senior VP for external affairs. “Our long-term investments are tied to the success to Brooklyn. We think the more it’s enhanced, the more we are.”
But Barclays and the businesses it’s boosting are also helping to define what Brooklyn’s brand is. The spot where McMahon’s now operates was previously a run-down divey bar called O’Connor’s that had been there for decades. For some Brooklynites, this was the appeal: “The clientele liked the bar because of its dinginess, not despite it,” L Magazine wrote earlier this year.
But that brand of Brooklyn, apparently, didn’t have enough economic oomph left in it to compete.
Michael McMahon and his partners bought the building with the idea that they wanted to open a bar there.
“We wanted to build a real Irish pub in Brooklyn,” he said—a place with a lot of stone, a lot of wood, Irish whiskeys, corned beef and other Irish fare.
Upstairs, the bar also has a spacious, shiny new event space, which alumni might rent out before their college team plays at Barclays or wedding parties might retire to after a ceremony in Prospect Park.
“We spent a lot of money for the location,” McMahon said. “We could have kept running the bar we had there. But it wasn’t suitable for the clientele that were coming to the stadium.”
This article appeared in the December issue of Capital magazine.
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