The Imperial City

Too Big Not to Fail

The stadium is, of course, the cornerstone for a New York Olympics, and, in all likelihood, vice versa. As much as providing a place for the Jets to play in Manhattan, it is the prospect of hosting the Olympics that seems to be driving Bloomberg. But the mayor is smart enough to understand that while the sports-venue case alone—ten Sundays a year of football, three weeks of spectacle and tourism in 2012—might carry the day in a place like Buffalo or St. Louis, it seems pretty tenuous justification for such a suck of money and municipal energy in this already glamorous, robust city. So he is attempting, in disingenuous Rube Goldberg fashion, to make the stadium seem essential and inevitable by insisting that it’s the linchpin for every necessary West Side improvement. If you don’t like candy mints, it’s also a breath mint, a floor wax as well as a whipped topping.

The Javits Center is too small to get the country’s biggest trade shows—so the Jets would build a retractable roof that could transform the stadium into a southern Javits annex when necessary. But only a year ago, Bloomberg and Governor Pataki unveiled another plan for nearly doubling the Javits Center to the north, toward 42nd Street, a sensible scheme that would obviate the need for more convention space—and only a little more space at that—in the stadium to the south. As for the $2 billion extension of the 7 line west from Times Square and then south under Eleventh Avenue down to the stadium, a truly visionary city might instead spend half as much to build three three-block-long “light rail” trolley lines connecting Eighth to Eleventh along 23rd, 34th, and 42nd streets.

Finally, the mayor has whipped up working-class support for the stadium by promising it will generate thousands of jobs, in construction, as well as service positions for the long haul. But whatever is built there will create jobs—and better jobs, one might imagine, than part-time peanut vending and ushering.

So what might be built instead of stadium seats that will sit empty 99 percent of the year? Unlike at ground zero, architects would be burdened by no quota of destroyed office space and underground shops to reproduce, no particular iconography (freedom, requiem, rebirth) to incorporate, no ghosts to propitiate. And unlike the prosthetic Manhattan appendage on which Battery Park City was built in the eighties, this site is not horribly walled off by an eight-lane highway (which the authorities announced last week will not, alas, be turned into a tunnel as part of ground-zero reconstruction). Cablevision’s competing anti-Bloomberg bid was transparently self-interested, so no one took its hastily concocted scheme—apartments, a hotel, a small park—seriously. But why not, as the transmogrified High Line helps propagate the Tribecafication of the adjacent blocks, imagine a tightly woven extension of the southern and eastern neighborhoods into the rail-yards site? Why not build apartments and hotels and theaters, a better, funkier Battery Park City? Or a big park? Or the second Guggenheim Museum? Or a campus for New School University? Why can’t this city assemble a brilliant team of designers and entrepreneurs to dream up a thrilling new piece of New York—people with as much visionary gusto as, say, the man who started a new kind of digital data and news company a quarter-century ago? It wouldn’t be finished in five years, because creating great new places that people are eager to visit and live in is not easy or fast. But wouldn’t it be better to be driven by the ambition to create a 21st-century Rockefeller Center than by a deadline to hold the 2010 Super Bowl and a 2012 torch-lighting ceremony?

There’s only one more (unelected) New York administrative entity, the Public Authorities Control Board, that needs to sign off on the Jets stadium plan, and though there are some politics to be played there, the inside betting is that Bloomberg will get what he wants. That isn’t the end of the story, however, because on July 6, another unelected administrative entity will vote—the International Olympic Committee, which will choose between New York and four other cities to host the Olympics. That’s the real reason for the rush on the stadium, why the de facto deadline for breaking ground is only eleven weeks away. Absent that, the IOC vote will certainly go against New York. And if we don’t get the Olympics, it’s a good bet the stadium will not be built after all.

Personally, I would be happy to have the Olympics here, especially if we can start calling the games by their supercool proper name, the XXX Olympiad. But I don’t want to waste a glorious piece of Manhattan land on Bloomberg’s big, dumb, old-school scheme. Therefore, at the risk of seeming an unpatriotic American and disloyal New Yorker, in July I’ll be pulling for Paris or London or Moscow or Madrid—anyplace but here.