Prepared Remarks of Tom McMorrow to
City Council Committee Meeting,
June 14, 2004

 

My name is Tom McMorrow. I was born in Manhattan, I’ve lived in New York City my entire life and have been a Chelsea resident for the past 30 years. Since the day I was born, and indeed, for many generations before, there has been a 26 acre hole in the ground that we call the Hudson train yards. This 26 acre wasteland separates Chelsea from Hell’s Kitchen, and Manhattan from the Hudson river. I am the founder and head of WestSideStadium.org. We have over 300 members, all New Yorkers, about half of whom reside on the West Side of Manhattan. We believe it is time to close that 26 acre hole. I founded this organization on my own nickel, so to speak. None of our members get paid. We keep it going through our own sweat and tears. With me on the panel today are fellow members Richard Breslaw, Lowell Kern and Frank Ford.

 

As far as funding goes, the only donations we have received are two donations from the New York Jets, for T-Shirts, and for a banner which Richard Breslaw flies from his building on 11 th Avenue. It is the dedication and faith of our members that keeps WestSideStadium.org going. Our members, particularly those of us who reside or work on the West Side, want to make it clear that our elected officials do not speak for us when they oppose this project. We recognize that currently on the west side, we may be a minority, but we believe that when one finds oneself in the minority, that is the moment at which one must speak out.

 

Let me talk first about the stadium aspect of this project, and the hypocrisy of its opponents.

 

For the first half of the 20 th Century, stadiums for professional sports were built inside the urban centers of America. In the 2 nd half of the 20 th Century, this country changed. Everything was built around the automobile, including our stadiums. Large areas of land were needed for people to park their cars when attending stadia events. Now we are in the 21 st Century, and we’ve come full circle. We all know that the world is running out of oil. It is no longer a mystery. We all know that in our lifetimes, we will see gasoline at 5$ or even 10$ a gallon. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. This stadium is the first of its kind, but it will not be the last. It is a green building, producing its own electricity through solar and wind power. And, of course, it says to its customers, “leave your car home.”

 

One of the problems with this debate is the uniqueness of the structure. Writers and scholars I respect greatly, such as Jack Newfield and Andrew Zimbalist, have made written against the stadium, comparing it to other stadiums built in the USA over the past decades. There is a constant refrain from the opposition that a stadium can’t make money. Public money for stadiums is called by some corporate welfare. In general, I agree with those statements. The problem here with that argument is that there really is no other stadium that has ever been built that has the earning potential for its host city that this one has for New York.

 

New York City is the world’s capital. Just ask any of the five million foreign or the 30 million American citizens who visit this city every year. Equating an open air stadium built in, say, Baltimore to an enclosed stadium built in the world's capital city, which will finally open that city to large scale winter events, is a misleading comparison, in and of itself. New York City is the one northern city in the world that visitors will come to in the heart of winter if given a good reason, and the promise of not being frozen to death in the process.

 

A misleading factoid constantly sited by the opposition states that this debate is over whether New York City should spend 300 Million dollars to pay our cops and teachers, or to build a stadium for the Jets. The opposition never bothers to clearly differentiate the difference between operating and capital expenses. The $300 Million here is bond money, not money taken from the city's revenue flow. It is no different than the decisions that we all have to make in our personal lives regarding money.

 

If you borrow money to buy a new house, that is an investment in the future, as well as the present. You need to examine the house you are buying, and the terms of the loan to determine if it is a good risk to take.

 

If, on the other hand, you borrow money to pay your electric bill, while you are fixing an immediate crisis, you are creating an even greater crisis right down the road. Borrowing money to pay current bills is a suicidal financial road, one which no municipality should journey on, and one which this city traveled a generation ago. That is, in essence, what Cablevision/MSG and the opposition are encouraging New York City to do. This is not a debate over whether we should give money to cops or to a stadium, and to try to make it so is to be deceptive, at the very least.

 

At the hearing of June 3 rd, Gerald Schoenfeld of the Shubert organization stated that this stadium does not belong in Manhattan. I am curious as to how many Broadway type theatres the Shuberts have built in Queens in the past fifty years. Location matters.

 

A generation ago, New York City came to the realization that it needed to build a sewage treatment plant on Manhattan’s west side. The question was, where? Now, if you look at an aerial view of Manhattan, there are very few points along the river that the construction of such a plant would not have a radical impact on the blocks immediately east of the project, due to the high density of residences and businesses. One of the few exceptions back then, as now, are the Hudson train yards. At least there, you would have had 26 acres of train tracks before the odor of the plant came in contact with local neighborhoods and businesses. But, instead, it was placed in Harlem.

 

Now, I can’t imagine that there was any local support in Harlem for that project at all. I don’t think there was a “BringThePoopieHere.org” set up by local residents. I do imagine that, if it were possible to do so, many of Harlem’s residents today would gladly trade that sewage treatment plant in exchange for this stadium. If such a trade was possible, I assume that my good neighbors who comprise the local stadium opposition would embrace the trade. After all, we can argue over the merits of a stadium, but sewage treatment is a necessity. And of course, they would not have to worry about traffic. What I want to point out here is the hypocrisy of the stadium opposition. A small group of West Siders, many my neighbors and my friends, have had an undue influence over city policy over the past forty years. They have stopped project after project after project. They claim to be concerned about the spending of tax dollars, yet they are taking money from Cablevision to fund their organizations. Cablevision is a monopoly that makes its money by denying consumers free choice. Cablevision owns Madison Square Garden. Madison Square Garden has not paid one cent of real estate taxes in 22 years. That adds up to 166 million dollars, according to the Daily News. That’s real money to pay our cops, money to pay for firehouses, money to pay our teachers. Instead, Cablevision is using our money, our taxpayer money, to finance a million dollar campaign to defeat the one proposal in 100 years to develop the train yards.

 

My question is, where are the politicians? Where is the outrage? I hear Councilmembers speak of the risks involved on bonds that are investments in the future, yet stand by mute about the real money the state and city are being denied by this tax scam. As a citizen of this city, I beseech you, good council members, to do whatever is in your power to force this monopoly to finally pay for the cops who protect it. And support the construction of this project, which will, over the course of this century, bring billions of dollars in spending into this city. It is time to close that 26 acre hole in the ground.