Ten days ago Bruce Ratner announced he bought the Nets for $300 million with the idea of rehousing them in a massive complex in downtown Brooklyn. The development would include an 18,000-seat stadium, 2.1 million square feet of office space and 4.4 million square feet of residential space–all designed by architect Frank Gehry. The project will cost an estimated $2.5 billion and span 21 acres across and around the ugly Long Island Railroad train yards, for decades a scar on the heart of downtown Brooklyn. The plan has the support of many in the business community and would bring a sports team to Brooklyn (taken alone, the fourth-largest city in America) for the first time since the Bums decamped. “I think it’s the best thing that happened to Brooklyn since 1955 when we won the World Series. Absolutely,” says borough president and lifelong Brooklyn booster Marty Markowitz.

But locals in the abutting Prospect Heights and Fort Greene neighborhoods are promising to fight the plan, which could force between 350 and 900 Brooklynites (depending on whose count you believe) from their homes. They claim their ouster would be illegal and that the project would bring more traffic to already-overburdened streets, ruining the hardscrabble flavor unique to the ethnically and economically mixed area. “This neighborhood went for the better, but now it wants to go for the filthy rich and throw the middle class and the poor people out,” says Joe Pastore, 59, who has lived in his now-endangered Dean Street apartment since 1967. Standing in front of Freddy’s, a pub and local institution, Pastore echoes sentiments scrawled on signs displayed in windows of homes–some distinctly more gentrified than others–throughout the neighborhood: “Develop, don’t destroy,” read some; “Hell no, we won’t go,” read others.

The protesters may be on the losing side of history. Eminent domain, the right of a government to take private property for public use upon payment, is routinely invoked for private enterprise, especially sports stadiums. “That’s the way it’s done all over the country. They’re very hard to challenge because the test you have to meet to stop the person from ultimately being able to condemn [your property] is to show that they’re not going to have a public use,” says Michael Heller, a professor of real-estate law at Columbia University. Invariably, says Heller, stadiums are held in the courts, which tend to shy from second-guessing local legislatures, as public uses. Civic pride, rightly or wrongly, is usually considered a public good. The fight, then, ends up being a political battle rather than a legal one. Not that people aren’t going to try. “I can count maybe 50 individuals who are in the process of obtaining counsel. I am certain that there will be some individual actions as well as some collective action,” says New York City Council member Letitia James, who estimates 864 residents and 400 jobs will be forced out. “This is not about basketball; this is about real estate. This is a land grab.” Forest City Ratner’s vice president Bruce Bender puts his estimate at 389 people, not counting the neighborhood’s homeless shelter, and insists that 10,000 temporary and permanent jobs will be created in constructing, maintaining and running the arena and surrounding residential and retail towers. Ratner himself declined to be interviewed.

Supporters of the plan, while careful to point out that eminent domain is never anyone’s first choice, insist the benefits of rehabilitating an eyesore of a rail yard will far outweigh the loss of a few homes and businesses. “Downtown Brooklyn has the elements of a successful downtown,” says Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce president Kenneth Adams. “But it doesn’t have what many other downtowns have: it doesn’t have a major venue for athletic and entertainment events.” Bernard King, the NBA all-star who began and ended his career with the New Jersey Nets, grew up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where his parents and siblings still live. “If you said to me that my mother and my father had to move as a result of this project, I would still be in favor of it,” he tells NEWSWEEK, pointing to Ratner’s job-creation claims. “That to me is of paramount importance and that would be quite frankly more important than having to move my parents out to additional housing close by.”

RATNER’S RECORD RANKLES

Concerned residents whose homes and businesses are not directly threatened, point to Ratner’s track record in the neighborhood. His big, boxy Atlantic Center Mall, which is directly across the street from the proposed stadium, does not fit in with surrounding architecture, they say, raising fears the new project won’t be much better. Community leader Patti Hagan of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition points out that the skyscrapers Ratner proposes would eclipse Brooklyn’s current tallest building, the 1929 landmark Williamsburg Bank. In a letter to New York Gov. George Pataki, State Senator Velmanette Montgomery wrote “the proposed de-mapping of streets to accommodate these huge structures will result in a permanent barrier between [five intersecting] communities,” and that it is dubious Brooklyn can absorb all that new office space.

This is where Frank Gehry comes in. Hiring the architect behind the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain “was a stroke of genius,” says Adams, the Brooklyn Chamber president. The residential end of the development will include 4,500 low-, middle- and market-income units around six landscaped acres of public space. Ratner, says Bender, has learned from sins committed as a neophyte developer and will atone through world-class design, improving the look and feel of the neighborhood. “We work from the inside out so the exterior has to do with context, has to do with Brooklyn. There are a lot of ways to do it. We’re talking about an open one, more glass, so it’s visible from the street,” Gehry tells NEWSWEEK. “[Ratner’s] company has not been given to making great architecture in the past. But the reason for hiring us is he wants to change that. We’re stepping up.”

Walking along the eastern border of the proposed site, Bender waves his hand at a jumble of unsightly garages and says, “Everything in here just never took off.” (Blaise Sarno, whose Atlas Auto Service has been on the block since 1960, laughs when a NEWSWEEK reporter relays the comment. “I guess we’re just in here killing time.”) Bender says the arena will host year-round concerts and community events and Gehry’s architecture alone will bring tourists in on one of the nine subway lines that cross underneath it (although one consulting service has estimated that the arena as well as other planned construction in Brooklyn, will bring an additional 174,000 cars daily).

A lot still needs to happen before Ratner is allowed to begin construction, and he has said that he will listen to any grievances. “I understand every argument against it,” says Bender, a former city official. “It’s America; it’s a democracy; it’s New York. We should open it up; we should talk about it; we should discuss it; we should try to figure it out. But by the same token, New York wouldn’t be New York if we listened to some people and let them have the predominant voice because there would not be a Rockefeller Center as we speak today. There wouldn’t be a new Hayden Planetarium; there would not be, one of the most controversial projects, the Lincoln Center.” That may all be true. But would Brooklyn be Brooklyn if it wasn’t ready for a fight? Fuhgeddaboudit.