Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz and City Planning Director Amanda Burden, among others, sawed a log to open the new Red Hook Ikea today.

In this week's print Observer, Benjamin Popper profiles Greg O'Connell, Red Hook's biggest landlord and the de facto godfather of the new big-box.

Amanda Burden, director of the city’s Department of City Planning and chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, has been given a top designation by the American Institute of Certified Planners, the country’s major planners' organization.

Ms. Burden was inducted last night into the organization’s College of Fellows, a designation held by only about 400 members.

Ms. Burden’s work in the Planning Department has been a critical element of the Bloomberg administration’s legacy on development in this city, as she has crafted more than 80 rezonings, allowing for thousands of units of new housing while limiting development in many low-rise neighborhoods.

Even if many of the high-profile mega-projects championed by the city ultimately fail to be realized, the rezonings carry long-term impact, particularly the 2005 Hudson Yards rezoning that opened the far West Side to dense development.  read more »

The City Council as early as tomorrow could approve the Bloomberg administration’s proposed rezoning of 125th Street, as a Council subcommittee lists the proposal on its agenda.

The rezoning would allow for substantially more density around 125th Street in Central Harlem, an action that is expected to bring much new development to the historic African-American corridor.  read more »

"Amanda Burden is rich, rich, rich! You're destroying our community and making it white because you can't find a restaurant! You're a socialite and a horrible person!"

So shouted Harlem residents at Planning Commission Chairwoman Amanda Burden toward the end of Monday's contentious commission meeting about the Bloomberg administration's plan to rezone 125th Street to encourage denser development. The commission voted 11-2 to approve the rezoning. It now moves to the City Council for a final vote.  read more »

Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams just sent over an advisory to let us know he’s bringing the fight over the proposed 125th Street rezoning to the mayor’s doorstep at his East 79th Street townhouse, with plans to protest the proposal at 8 tonight.

Not too far away, and also a target of the protest, Mr. Adams pointed out, is the home of the Planning Department’s director, Amanda Burden, who has spearheaded the rezoning.  read more »

Atlantic Yards opponents in the blogosphere loved reading Dan Doctoroff eat crow in this week's Observer, but Forest City Ratner's admission in a New York Times article that construction of the Nets arena would be delayed until 2010 was greeted with a collective "duh".  read more »

Columbia University’s proposed expansion plan received the City Planning Commission’s approval handily today, but it wasn’t as easy as some expected.

For one, there was the constant heckling of the commissioners before, during and after the meeting.  read more »

The paragraph, which did make it onto the newspaper's Web site, recounted a panel discussion at which Ms. Burden dismissed Atlantic Yards' opponents as "nostalgic and infantile." (Mr. Oder also knocks the Times for giving Ms. Burden credit for reducing the scale of the Brooklyn project, when the developer had proposed the reduction himself.)

"He presented it to all the commissioners, some of whom hadn't had a chance to see it before," she said after a Crain's breakfast this morning at Pace University. Burden wouldn't give her own thoughts, although we have noted before what an intense interest she has taken in minute issues such as whether the doors along Atlantic Avenue will swing outward or not. (She's no foe of large-scale development, although she doesn't seem to like superblocks that much.)

-Matthew Schuerman UPDATE: An earlier version of this post mistakenly said planning commission members met with Ratner Tuesday. It was city commissioners.