Bruce Ratner has finally made it official: Frank Gehry is out as designer of the ill-fated Atlantic Yards Project. Turns out the celebrated enabler of titanium dreams is just too expensive so Forest City Ratner has turned the cornerstone of the project, a basketball arena for Ratner's Nets, over to the firm of Ellerbe Becket, builder of big boxes.

Gehry was never the focus of the opposition. The arena has always been a stalking horse for the skyscraper superblocks the Ohio-based developer really wants to build. All along we knew Ratner would drop Gehry once the project was approved. Still the New York Times' architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, in a scathing critique, labeled the bait a "bit of window dressing intended to give the project an aura of enlightenment" and the switch "a shameful betrayal of the public trust."

"At this point the Atlantic Yards plan has nothing to do with the project New Yorkers were promised," the Times concluded. Gehry was always just the shiny bauble, or maker of shiny baubles, that hypnotized some well-meaning citizens.

"Have you been to Bilbao?" they would say, referring to the magnificent Guggenheim museum Gehry designed and built by the river in an ancient Spanish city. Which is how many of the architect's fans think of Brooklyn: as a foreign province that could use a good dose of world-class culture, like it or not.

I was at a benefit for the Brooklyn Museum not long ago, seated between a couple of well-heeled museum supporters - both from the Upper East Side - when one of them mentioned how much she loved Jhumpa Lahiri's last book. I mentioned that Lahiri had done a reading at my house to benefit Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn. An awkward silence followed. "We're all for not destroying Brooklyn," one of them finally said, "but we also care about The Future."

For her The Future meant a big behemoth, representing progress, the kind that cultural missionaries have always brought to ungrateful primitives like us. The fact that the wheels are coming off Gehry's glimmering gift gives me qualified pleasure. I guess we'll just have to make do with the blossoming food and music scenes here; the non-stop party on Fulton Street; BAM; and the culture created by countless artists, musicians and writers who have chosen to make this area their home, despite the absence of World Class Architecture. Somehow we'll get by.