WHAT, exactly, was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he said the other day he’d “consider” building a new Jets stadium in Queens rather than in Manhattan?
While there are good arguments for and against building the New York Sports and Convention Center on the far West Side above the MTA rail yard, there is no good argument for building it in Willets Point, near Shea Stadium.
An NFL stadium, after all, is used for football only 10 days a year. The whole point of building one in Manhattan is to use it as a convention/exhibition/entertainment venue the other 355 days – letting its facilities and extra space supplement those at the Javits Center next door.
Northern Queens is a fine place, but it is hard to imagine trade shows flocking there. So what was on Bloomberg’s mind?
True, he quickly backtracked from his remark in answer to a question at a Crain’s breakfast, saying the International Olympics Committee was counting on a stadium in Manhattan. But the damage was done. As TV judges so often chide: “You opened the door, counselor.”
Bloomberg has long been on the defensive over the NYSCC, and the battering-ram opposition finally exposed a chink in his armor.
For more than a year, the mayor held fast to the necessity of a far West Side stadium for the city to have any chance of landing the 2012 Games. He and Olympics-mad Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff ridiculed the idea of moving the Jets to Queens, where the team itself has said it has no interest in going.
Bloomberg clung to the position through a malicious anti-stadium jeremiad financed by Cablevision and promoted by The New York Times (each of which has good business reasons to kill the West Side deal).
But the near-daily salvos did not go unnoticed in Albany – where the state’s banana-republic junta (Gov. Pataki, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno) must authorize the use of bonds for the project.
Silver was always openly ambivalent. Among other things, he’d rather encourage public investment in his Lower Manhattan district. But who wants the blame for killing off the Olympics dream?
So the NYSCC seemed very much alive until this week.
Even the “competitive” bidding for the rail-yard site is only a minor threat: The MTA insists that bidders be bound by current low-density zoning restrictions – which pretty well put the fix in for the Jets, for whom the state and city have agreed to make a zoning exception.
Maybe the media pressure got to Bloomberg, or perhaps he’s more worried by the possibility of blowing the Olympics. Whatever it was, his remarks Tuesday effectively gutted his own case.
Silver’s comment yesterday is particularly relevant: The speaker said he found Bloomberg’s consideration of a Queens alternative “encouraging.”
The mayor’s perplexing concession is all the opening the stadium’s foes needed: Now the local politicians, neighborhood NIMBY types and the Times can bleat that even Bloomberg recognizes an alternative.
Right or wrong, Bloomberg has shown rare strength and guts persevering for the stadium in an election year. What an unworthy outcome it would be for the plan to go down over a few carelessly chosen words.
