Metro

Dig it!

After seven years of ups and downs starts, Bruce Ratner was poised to break ground on his $1-billion Barclays Center on Thursday, a mega-project that will radically change 22 acres in the heart of Brooklyn.

A deep bench of Atlantic Yards supporters were expected to attend the symbolic event, including Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz, and rap mogul Jay-Z, a part-owner of the Brooklyn-bound New Jersey Nets.

Notably absent from the festivities is Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire whose deal with Ratner last year to become the majority owner of the basketball team is credited with pumping in enough money to resurrect the project when it was still very much in doubt.

The gathering of roughly 500 invited guests and reporters was to be held in a tent on the sprawling project site, much of it an open railyard between Flatbush and Vanderbilt avenues, and from Dean Street to Atlantic Avenue.

Other adjacent land is being cleared after purchases by Ratner, the city and through the controversial use of the state’s eminent domain power — the subject of several lawsuits.

The arena, designed by the firms SHoP Architects and Ellerbe Becket, will accommodate 19,000 fans, as well as 104 luxury suites. It is slated to open during the 2011-2012 NBA season.

Forest City Ratner executives say that the first residential building — whose design has not been announced — will begin construction next spring, the first of what Ratner says will be 16 skyscrapers containing more than 2,000 units of housing, a portion of them set aside at below-market rates.

Opposition groups were planning a counter protest, with its epicenter at Freddy’s Bar on Dean Street.

Ratner’s official groundbreaking is the symbolic delivery for a $5-billion project that has had a difficult birth.

Opponents of the project sued repeatedly, challenging the state’s seizure of properties in the project’s footprint and a “cursory” environmental review that superseded the city’s normal process.

Those suits were not successful in having the project thrown out in court -— in fact, a state Supreme Court judge ruled on Wednesday in favor of the Empire State Development Corporation, and against project opponents, in the final major case.

sbrown@cnglocal.com