New York Newsday May 10, 2005 Dennis Duggan Column From O'Farrell's, a pub where fake windows in the dining room were covered with lace curtains, to the table outside the Little Pie Co...

Dennis Duggan

It may take overtime but they'll get their way

May 10, 2005

From O'Farrell's, a pub where fake windows in the dining room were covered with lace curtains, to the table outside the Little Pie Co., where four elderly gents traded wisecracks, to the living room of a former Broadway performer turned naturalist, the verdict yesterday was one-third for, one-third against and the other third saying "Get outta my face."

Still, there was an unstated feeling that the boys in the big suits would have their way in the end. Sure, Shelley Silver will make them swing in the wind for a bit and the green folks logging in with their lawsuits will nip at their ankles, but in this town, as in all others, money doesn't just talk, it screams.

On a glorious, sun-splashed spring day when you could look west down many of the streets and catch a fractured view of the Hudson River, diehard dreamers posted bright red and yellow signs urging everyone to come to a protest against the proposed West Side stadium Saturday afternoon.

If you thought Mayor Michael Bloomberg was too rich to be lobbied, you probably didn't realize that he had hired his own lobbyist, a very wealthy gent by the name of Daniel Doctoroff, who feverishly stokes the mayor's dreams of an Olympics here in 2012 using the stadium over the railroad yards as bait.

A critic named Jean Dreece, who lives in a brownstone and has a green temperament, hasn't given in to the Big Suits yet. "You can fight City Hall!" Dreece declares.

"They always show a view of the stadium from the top down so that it looks smaller than it is. Forget it. The stadium will be a Berlin Wall and it will block out sunlight down here," Dreece added.

I sat in the back of a cab driven by Al Musto for a whirlwind tour of the neighborhood.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan grew up on West 31st Street and on tours of his colorful neighborhood where his mother ran a popular bar, he would tell his listeners that the city stops at the third floor. "That's the last floor you can lean out the window and have a conversation with passersby," he would say.

I stopped in to say hello to Jimmy McManus, a colorful veteran of the political wars. His Democratic club is named after him and the current president is a smart Colombian named Carlos Manzano, 38, who is running for Manhattan borough president this fall along with nine others.

"What about this Bloomberg stadium?" I asked McManus.

"I'm for it," he said. "I'm for anything that provides jobs for New Yorkers."

But a few blocks away, on West 34th, I talked with chef Bruce Rogers, who said he was against building the stadium with some of the same crew directing the debacle surrounding the development of the World Trade Center site.

"I'd give it to Trump to build if it has to be built," Rogers, who was preparing for a party last evening, said of the stadium. "It gets me mad," said Rogers, 46, the managing director of a French catering firm called Tentation.

Rogers said his son is a detective in the warrants squad in the Bronx and "he hasn't gotten a raise in several years. And we have firefighters jumping out the windows because we can't afford to give them ropes?"

At the table outside the Manhattan Plaza where four elderly gents -- Marty, Louis, Chris and Elliot -- sipped coffee and traded bon mots, there was unanimous agreement that a stadium would bring more traffic to watch the Jets play. It would also bring noise and cause more beer-fueled sewage to be dumped into the Hudson.

Just before heading to the home office I met Maurice Silverstein, 45, who was riding his bike to a small restaurant on 10th Avenue and 43rd Street called Mr. Biggs.

"It's Monday, a special night for chicken wings -- only 25 cents a wing," he said.

"It would be good for jobs," he said of the stadium.

I asked him what kind of job he held.

"I don't do anything," he said. "God helps me pay the rent."