New York Times April 3, 2005 THE New York minute is fabled for its brash double-time urgency. Wait till you see a quarter of a year whiz past in New York...

Our Wise Old Egg, Tom, Sr., worked with George's brother, Peter, at the Daily News, and has nothing but respect and admiration for Peter and, for that matter, George.

One of our members had a long and detailed conversation via email with George V., and despite the fact that we don't agree with George on the stadium, George Vescey's position on the stadium and particularly, the Olympics, has logic behind it.

We believe the stadium makes sense, as is, and doesn't need the carrot of the Olympic Games to make it worthy.

Forget the 2012 Olympics for a second, and focus on the larger Olympic question: If the Olympics were awarded to NYC in, say, 2016 or 2020, could this stadium still be expanded into an Olympic mode? It is well and good for Dan Doctoroff to speak for the current administration, but, keep in mind, NYC has a two-term limit on the Mayor's office. Mr. Doctoroff can not and should not speak for future administrations. If the Mayor of NYC in, say, 2019, wants to pursue the Olympic Games, does he have a stadium on the West Side or doesn't he?

We understand that the expansion of the stadium to Olympic mode would cost nine figures, to be picked up by private donations. And we know that George V. does not care for the Olympics in NYC in any way, shape, or form. But George V. does address the larger question, that is, does the stadium make sense, although he goes off in the wrong direction.

George V. says, " In a sane world, the Jets and the Giants would be forced, out of shame and economic good sense, to share the current Giants Stadium; nothing wrong with it, apparently, except it lacks luxury boxes where people can pretend they are in a fusion restaurant rather than at a football stadium."

No. In a sane world, the New York Jets and the New York Giants would be forced, out of shame and economic good sense, to share West Side Stadium, located in New York City, which would have luxury boxes as well as the coveted "Club Seating" that draws in the big bucks, keeping both teams on top of, as opposed to their current state of being on the bottom of, the NFL, economically, on the island where bottles of $2,000 wine are sold to the shakers and movers celebrating the latest big score like Pepsi at a company picnic. $2,000 bottles of wine may not be my cup of tea, or cup of beer, for that matter, but to each his own.

Remember, the Tisch's are both leading supporters of this project as well as co-owners of the Giants.

A tip of the cap to George V.: You may be on the other side, but we're on your side, just the same, even when you're wrong.

April 3, 2005

SPORTS OF THE TIMES

Stadium Clock Speeds Up in a New York Minute

By GEORGE VECSEY

HE New York minute is fabled for its brash double-time urgency. Wait till you see a quarter of a year whiz past in New York.

It is barely three months until the International Olympic Committee will choose the host city for the 2012 Summer Games. The Bloomberg administration is obsessed with turning the ignition on the bulldozers before the I.O.C. meets in Singapore on July 6, but lawyers from stadium opponents will take a knee and run out this clock better than any quarterback ever did.

It has been fascinating to watch the machinations on many sides of the West Side stadium issue. The Bloomberg administration has played on the fool's-gold appeal of the Olympics. The Dolan people? Well, you know what they are about.

Maybe sports columnists are supposed to fall in line behind anything that sounds like gold medals and large crowds and tear-jerker stories about athletes who overcame terrible adversity.

But if you open your eyes and walk around Manhattan, you get the feeling there may be better things to do with our energy and space and time and money than build a looming stadium along the riverfront. The docile, appointed board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted, 14-0, on Thursday to accept the bid by the Jets to help finance a $2.2 billion hybrid stadium and indoor arena and convention center.

It was always about real estate in a borough where the average price of a dwelling has reached $1.17 million, up 11 percent in the most recent quarter. New Yorkers go crazy over a few extra cubic feet for their cat or their plants or their DVD's, or even the occasional human child existent in Midtown.

This debate, by the way, is more than just about a place for the Jets to play their games. In a sane world, the Jets and the Giants would be forced, out of shame and economic good sense, to share the current Giants Stadium; nothing wrong with it, apparently, except it lacks luxury boxes where people can pretend they are in a fusion restaurant rather than at a football stadium.

If you really had to build a new stadium, put it in the Meadowlands or Flushing Meadows, but let's get one thing straight: anybody saying Shea Stadium could be converted into an Olympic/football/soccer stadium has obviously never been inside Shea, which was a dump in April 1964 and remains a dump today.

Maybe Shea's skeleton would make good scrap metal. Maybe. But thinking of it as a converted Olympic stadium is another form of fool's-gold.

Instead, the Bloomberg administration has gambled a great deal of credibility on a hybrid stadium on the West Side. The huge cost is due not only to the platform over the railroad tracks, but also because of the need for a gigantic structure that could support a retractable roof for the multiple purposes of an arena and an adjunct to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

And speaking of an indoor arena, here is where any possible widespread moral and political opposition to this boondoggle has failed, so far: Not only did the Bloomberg administration keep the project from a public referendum, but the most visible opposition came from the Dolans of Cablevision and Madison Square Garden fame. As the saying goes, with friends like these. ...

Even people not dependent on Cablevision can sense the arrogance and self-interest of this lot. They make it hard to exercise populist and common-sense instincts.

The fun part of these stadium follies has been watching both the Bloomberg people and the Dolan people lurch into the housing business. The administration has been forced to seek real estate developers to pay lip service to affordable housing in Manhattan, whatever that means.

On the other side, the Dolans have sounded as if they spent their younger days reading the collected works of Jane Jacobs, the great urban thinker. One could almost picture the Battlin' Dolans, père et fils, morphing into Jimmy Carter, a hammer in the loop of their baggy carpenter jeans, a few penny nails handy between their lips, erecting a regular Habitat for Humanity on the West Side. Nah.

Speaking of construction, another great story line has been the enthusiasm of the building trade unions for this stadium. I guess there are no construction jobs in the building of apartments, schools and hospitals.

The threatened stadium still looks like some bigger-is-better Soviet Union project of the late 40's. My own observation is that sports stadiums choke urban street life. I don't trust the trickle-down economics of the Bloomberg people. Don't trust the Dolans, either.

I do trust the intrinsic wisdom of the New York minute, as we tick our way toward July 6, when the I.O.C. chooses Paris or one of the three other bidding cities, and reality sets in.