Retail in Brooklyn
Atlantic Terminal Retail Complex Built Over Transportation Hub

By Amy S. Choi

Logistical nightmare is one way to describe the construction of the Atlantic Terminal Retail Complex.

Not only did the developer and construction manager, Forest City Ratner Cos., Brooklyn, N.Y., have to deal with the usual dozens of subcontractors and consultants, but there also were the logistics of building a 375,000-sq.-ft. retail complex atop the largest public transportation hub in Brooklyn.

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The Long Island Rail Road, nine Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway lines and four MTA bus lines link at Atlantic Terminal, which is also the third-largest hub in New York City. Add to that mass of people about 1,000 construction workers.

The $120 million, four-story center is on a 3.6-acre site adjacent to the 400,000-sq.-ft. Atlantic Center Shopping Center and an office tower housing the Bank of New York. The job broke ground in February 2002 and is expected to be complete in March, 2004.

The retail complex will be anchored by a 194,000-square-foot Target store. Other retailers include Payless Shoesource, Rockaway Bedding, Daffy''s and Avenue, a women''s clothing store. These stores will join Macy''s, Pathmark, Old Navy and Circuit City, which are already in operation at Atlantic Center.

Forest City's construction team works under stipulations from the MTA and LIRR, which own the site. From the beginning of the process, the agencies had two needs: for the trains to run safely and on schedule and for the design to suit the terminal.

As such, the MTA and LIRR issued design guidelines via its architect, DiDomenico & Partners LLP, New York City.

"The most difficult part of this project is trying to construct the building over an active railway," said Bob Sanna, executive vice president of design, development and construction at Forest City, which is based in Brooklyn. "There is a very limited amount of time to work. We have to have everything at a particular location and a particular time, with very little tolerance because the trains have to run."

(While the terminal retail complex was going up, the Atlantic, Culver and N/R rail lines were all also going through renovation. There was nearly $1 billion in construction in the area.)

One of the major tasks of the construction team was to take the existing foundations and structural steel that held up the original railroad terminal, which was demolished in the late 1980s, and incorporate them into the new development. Research was done on the existing structure and survey work in order to adapt and transfer the structure, but there were still some surprises.

Some of the surprises lay in inaccurate documentation. The Ives Group, Architects/Planners, Fair Lawn, N.J, for example, was given design drawings of the subways from 1903. "These were really helpful because in those days they drew things to death and workers followed them," said Allen Weitzman, partner at The Ives Group, the architect of record on the project. "But over the years changes were made by various New York City administrations and the information wasn't necessarily recorded." Swanke Hayden Connell, New York City, is the design architect, and Hardy Holzman Pfieffer Associates, New York City, is the façade architect.

Sanna said it's not unusual for workers to find things they don't anticipate. "When we actually got down into the tracks, we found that some of the foundations weren't constructed as they were in the drawings, which is often the case in some of this railroad-related work," he added.

Still, the differences between the actual structures and the drawings were relatively minor.

"We had the occasional hiccup, but the drawings were fairly accurate," said Stan Wojnowski, project engineer from Dewberry-Goodkind Inc., New York City, one of the project's structural engineers. Canto Seinuk Group, New York City, is the other.

Once the structures were mapped out accurately, the construction team had to coordinate with the Transit Authority, which had restrictions on where loads could be placed. None of the loads from the retail structure could be transmitted and placed above the railroad, so the inner structure of the retail complex was essentially split in two parts.

Additionally, the engineers, who had to reuse the existing foundations, had to adapt the foundations to make them code compliant with new seismic regulations.

Despite the physical constraints, coordinating the needs of the different agencies remained the most difficult aspect of the long engineering and design process.

"There were so many entities involved in every decision, whether it was the city of New York, the MTA, the Transit Authority, the state of New York," Weitzman said. "Everybody had their own agenda, and we were all trying to find a common ground that would satisfy everybody. We literally would meet with them once a week by phone for probably three years."

Aesthetically Speaking

The Fort Greene community that houses the new complex also shaped the development of the property, which Forest City took on in 1992 as a part of an urban renewal push by the city.

The aesthetic challenge stemmed from integrating a retail shopping mall, typically a big-box structure situated in a parking field, into the urban environment of the historic district of Fort Greene. The architects that worked on the façade of the retail complex, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates LLP, used a number of tricks to create a pedestrian-friendly environment with a small storefront feel. They also collaborated with DiDomenico & Partners on the architecture, materials and streetscape.

"We agreed that there was an issue of transparency," said John Fontillas, senior associate at Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer. "This is not a suburban site, it is an urban site, and it was important to the MTA to create pedestrian walkways. Each retailer needed windows that pedestrians could see into, which was a big issue for retailers that weren't used to being in an urban setting."

Target, for example, is one of the anchor tenants in the complex. However, like many big-box retailers, its traditional exterior design and need for display opportunities outside of the store did not fit into the urban setting of the terminal.

"Most of these merchants are national merchants," Weitzman said. "New York City is not their bailiwick. None of the traditional elements exists here, and there's not a lot of proven data as to how to make a vertical shopping center work."

Big-box retailers usually require blank walls for signage and displays, but Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer wanted all facades to have some sort of texture or relief in order to create interest. Traditional masonry work, however, would have been prohibitively expensive.

The architects relied on panels, contracting Artex Systems Ltd., Ontario and Eastern Exterior Wall Systems Inc., Bethlehem, Penn. The exterior façade was broken into panels that could be fabricated and placed on the building, allowing the team to control the look and texture of the panels. More importantly, the panels allowed the team to close up the envelope of the building quickly and safeguard the project from the external elements and prevent any disruption of the four bus lines that stopped in front every day.

Collaboration among the different operational elements and organizations involved in the project proved to be difficult but rewarding.

"It really is a testament to Forest City that they could actually pull this off," Fontillas said. "There were a lot of developers that tried."

Keith Itzler, assistant branch manager for Dewberry-Goodkind, said it was important to go over and consider all points of view. "Ultimately, everybody agreed, and we came out with a reasonable solution," he added. "The project has taken many metamorphoses, and we really take our hat off to Forest City and the whole team for having the wherewithal to take a lousy piece of property and make it into something spectacular."

And perhaps most important: "The railroad and subways continued to run," he said.