Editorial: A slam dunk for Brooklyn

SLAM DUNK FOR BROOKLYN

The Nets have made it official. The team – which moved to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center in September, 2012 – will also be moving its training center from New Jersey to the borough, right in Sunset Park.

This is good news for Brooklyn in general, and southwest Brooklyn in particular. Barclays and the Nets have been huge economic engines since their debut, bringing increased business, increased luster and increased visibility to the borough.

However, until now, most of that benefit was concentrated downtown near the arena, which, thriving, has hosted numerous concerts, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony and the MTV Video Music Awards, and which the city recently offered up as the anchor for hosting the Democratic National Convention in 2016.

With the elaborate training center the Nets have planned, more attention will now be focused on Sunset Park, one of the few remaining viable manufacturing areas in the city, which savvy biotech firms and culinary startups have already recognized as the perfect place to base their operations.

As Barclays has proven, a major development can have an immense impact on the surrounding neighborhood. In Sunset Park, Industry City and Jamestown Properties, the powerhouse corporation behind its redevelopment, have the potential to accelerate the process which is clearly already underway.

That’s great news for residents of the borough as a whole and Sunset Park in particular, where the economic ripples will likely be the most pronounced.

CELEBRATE THE FOURTH

Independence Day is a great American holiday, an opportunity to revel in everything this country has to offer, and party a bit while we are at it.

This year, Brooklynites will be able to celebrate on two fronts – with fireworks returning to the East River, and also taking place at the other end of the borough, in Coney Island.

The Home Reporter and Brooklyn Spectator would like to join our neighbors in celebrating the birth of this great nation, and in saluting a government that was founded, 238 years ago, to be “of the people, by the people, for the people,” in the immortal words of one of the United States’ greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln.

The country that was born in Independence Hall on July 4, 1776, thanks to the collective wisdom of this country’s founding fathers, remains a shining star and a beacon of hope around the world, and that is truly reason to rejoice.