Games bid not complete loss

BY PAUL D. COLFORD
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

New York missed the gold in its bid to land the 2012 Olympics, but the city did get a few big consolation prizes in the process.

Major developments in Manhattan's West Side and Queens - all fueled by the city's Olympic dreams - will go forward, experts said.

The Hudson Yards rezoning, which will dramatically reshape a 42-block swath of the far West Side, could bring as many as 13,600 apartments and 26 million square feet of office space.

"I think the area is going to boom," Neil Binder, a principal of Bellmarc Realty in Manhattan, said yesterday. "The keyis that it's been rezoned so that the density of housing will make it economically viable."

Days after a state panel nixed a West Side stadium plan, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled his Olympic Plan B, including a new Mets ballpark next to Shea Stadium. The proposal is going forward, and could spur even more development in Flushing.

The new Mets' mecca will transform adjacent Willets Point - now a 48-acre outback of auto-body shops and junkyards, Bloomberg has said, predicting it "to be one of the hottest areas for development in this city."

In nearby Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, a $42 million facility housing an ice hockey rink and an Olympic-size swimming pool, where water polo was to be played during the 2012 Games, will still be built.

But it was less clear what impact the loss of the Olympics will have on the Queens waterfront, where the Olympic Village to house the athletes was to be built at Hunters Point, opposite the United Nations.

The mostly low-rise village would have sheltered 17,100 competitors and officials in 8,550 double rooms.

The complex was to be converted afterward into 4,600 apartments - an instant neighborhood just south of the larger Queens West residential development slowly taking shape along the East River.

Queens West Development Corp. will hire a consultant "to study whether any plans for the village can now be incorporated into the general project plan for Queens West," Charles Gargano, chairman of the state Economic Development Corp., said yesterday.