Barclaying Up The Wrong Tree: "Brutally Weird" Advertising That Hits “Home” In All The Wrong Ways

Who thunk that one up? (Clunk!) And what were they thinking? What were they thinking?

The other day when we saw the photo below (it’s real- no joke!) in No Land Grab (picked up by Brownstowner from an earlier No Land Grab post) we couldn’t help but reel. The advertising for the proposed Ratner/Prokhorov “Barclays Center” super-subsidized Nets basketball arena is so “brutally weird” to borrow a favorite trademark phrase from Norman Oder’s Atlantic Yards Report.

How incredibly tone deaf can an advertising copywriter be to promote what is one of the most notorious modern icons of eminent domain abuse as:

“Your Home Away From Home”

“Your Home Away From Home”? Who are they speaking to anyway? How in heck can a 675,000 square foot arena be anyone’s “home”? They must be pitching this advert to those they hope to rent the luxury suite sky-boxes to. I suppose those wealthy expense-account people might be lounging around on couches, with their own kitchens, might feel as if they hanging out in an apartment rather than watching a sports competition. If you want to see a rendering of the digs we are talking about go here.

The No Land Grab photo just cried out for a photoshopping correction, and lo and behold, no sooner does that obvious thought present itself than the elves over at the Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn workshop have presented a reedited version (see photo below):

“Taking Your Home Away”

We noticed on Brownstoner that others had the same take and perhaps we should have a contest for what should be the best phrase to substitute as a correction. In Brownstowner comments we saw:

"We take away your home."

"Your home is not your home"

Another hewing to the original foolish copywriter's text might be:

“Homes Stolen Away From Homeowners”

Now we just need to get an army or urban guerillas out there plastering corrections on the actual New York City cabs, sort of like when the traffic sign on Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue was hacked with a correction and got such immediate coast-to-coast attention that within hours I was notified of it in Texas by Austinites paying attention to the national news. Unfortunately the national news didn’t get the whole story, something they would have, Norman Oder at Atlantic yards Report pointed out, if the hack had said

“Construction
For 25 Years”

or

“Fuck Ratner
FOR 25 Year
Construction.”

BTW: One more correction. The ESDC documents say that Forest City Ratner may take at least "25 years" to complete construction on all the property it seized through eminent domain abuse, but former ESDC head Marisa Lago said she perceived construction of the mega-monopoly handed to Ratner to be on a time scale comparable to Roosevelt Island, which would make it over forty years. Brooklyn: Enjoy your 40+ years of dispossession.