PROSPECT HEIGHTS — Residents brought many questions and concerns to a presentation this week of a design plan for a public school to be built inside a new tower at the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park complex.
Architect Jonathan Marvel presented his design for the 26-story building at 664 Pacific St. at a community meeting Wednesday night, focusing most on a seven-story, 100,000-square-foot public school to be located inside the tower’s first five floors and two subterranean levels.
Though the city chose the school's site in May and the location of the tower has been planned for some time, Marvel’s presentation was the first detailed glimpse the public has seen of the building and its 616-seat school.
In the meeting, the architect was careful to accentuate several design choices his firm made to bring down the scale of the building, which will be built directly next to many existing four- and five-story apartment buildings and townhouses.
“We carved out a center portion on both sides of the building to create a smaller scale breakdown,” Marvel said of the tower’s geometric design.
The plan also includes setbacks larger than those required by city zoning; for example, the tower will be built 23 feet from the edge of the street, eight feet more than the 15-foot setback required by land rules, Marvel said.
But even with those concessions, many at the meeting appeared rattled by the renderings of the 26-story tower, with one resident pointing out that “everybody behind [the building] is going to be in shadow.”
Several others brought up concerns over the siting of the public school at the corner of Sixth Avenue between Pacific and Dean streets, where traffic from the rear entrance of the Barclays Center and a nearby firehouse and police precinct clog up the road.
“You called it a civic street,” said Regina Cahill, president of the North Flatbush BID, to Marvel. “We want to call it a chaotic street.”
Others pointed out a need to hear from representatives of the Department of Education and School Construction Authority about plans for the building, especially in regards to the details about what kind of school it will be and how it will be designed internally.
“We can’t have a really great, thorough vetting and discussion without our partners from the DOE or SCA,” said Rob Underwood, a member of the Community Education Council for District 13, in which the school will be located, who has been active in an effort to lobby the DOE to dedicate the school’s 616 seats to middle schoolers.
On Tuesday, a DOE spokesman told DNAinfo no final decision has been made about which grade levels will have use of the school.
To residents’ many concerns about the school’s future, Marvel pointed out that Prospect Heights is “the luckiest community in Brooklyn,” a comment which drew derisive laughs from the audience of locals who have railed against the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project for years.
“Everybody else wants a school in their neighborhood and you’re getting one," he continued. "The challenge is that it’s a small footprint for a 100,000-square-foot school. What’s naturally had to happen is, we’ve had to really squeeze and accommodate a very big program onto a small blueprint.”
The developer of 664 Pacific St., Greenland Forest City Partners, agreed to build the school as part of commitments made in an environmental agreement made with the city in 2009.
Preliminary site work including demolitions of three pre-existing buildings on Dean Street has already begun to make way for the new tower, which is the sixth residential building currently under construction in the 22-acre Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park project.
