BY JEROME BURDI
June 12, 2005
When a state board shot down the city's plans for a football stadium on the West Side last week, Copacabana owner John Juliano's family called him in Myrtle Beach, S.C. All at once, the vacationing Juliano's golf swing was that much sweeter.
"The 34th Street stop would have been right in the middle of the Copacabana nightclub," Juliano said, adding he has 25 years left on his 27-year lease. "Eminent domain would have eliminated us here. We employ about 150 people."
While Mayor Michael Bloomberg is continuing his drive for a stadium to house the 2012 Olympics, and while MTA chairman Peter Kalikow says he still would sell the Hudson Rail Yards to the New York Jets, business owners and residents are girding to press for different outcomes.
Nadine Lopez Knudsen, whose custom couture design business is on West 29th Street between 10th and 11th avenues, hopes for a well-designed park to supplant the area's gritty, industrial feel.
"New York is really behind the world in thinking more progressively ahead," she said, adding that architectural renderings of the proposed stadium are "ugly as hell."
John Larson, 40, a physical therapist for dogs who lives on West 29th near Knudsen's shop, would like to see a mix of parks and residential use.
"Something unique, something original that says 'Oh yeah, OK, we're in New York,'" Larson said.
Larson ventured the idea of "high-tech self-sufficient buildings" that would tie into the disused High Line elevated railway, along with creation of multilevel parks.
For Juliano, no stadium means the Copa can continue with live, 15-piece salsa bands every night and such celebrities at the mic as Marc Anthony, Jennifer Lopez and Mets pitcher Pedro Martinez.
Juliano is fine with the 13-acre rail yards staying as they are. He fears residential use would take away parking spots or add complaints in an area where nightclub noise isn't a problem. Even so, it's better to have neighbors with complaints than no neighbors at all.
"If it comes, it comes," he said. "We could live with that. But you can't live here if they rip you down."
Some business owners still are rooting for a Jets' landing on the West Side.
John McGuire, 50, of Gotham Seafood, also on 29th Street, said the stadium or at least some commercial use of the land would lighten his annual real estate tax of $17,500.
But Doc Murdock, 55, said the stadium would make unavailable the stretch along 11th Avenue where about 100 different tour buses wait every day for tourists to finish their shopping trips. Murdock, his Gunther Charters bus idling at 11th Avenue and 33rd Street, makes the 31/2-hour trip from Baltimore to Manhattan once a week.
He had a suggestion for the space -- parking facilities that provide an environmentally sound way "for the buses to dump their toilets."
