Journalist pens fictional AY account

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From left: Atlantic Yards, Forest City CEO Bruce Ratner and Stephen Witt

Journalist Stephen Witt, who covered the Atlantic Yards project for local Brooklyn papers such as Our Time Press for years, has now penned a novel inspired by the massive project, which he is shopping to publishers, the New York Daily News reported.

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Witt calls his account “a gonzo telling,” of the project by a character named Thaddeus Hoover, a thinly-veiled Bruce Ratner, chairman and CEO at Forest City Ratner. He said he thought the years of discussion and negotiations leading up to the $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project being greenlit lent itself to fiction, rather than a scholarly book.

“I didn’t want to go over every nuance,” Witt told the News. “The story itself, between the NIMBY types, the opponent types, and the major capitalist types, I thought was a very New York story.” [NYDN]