The idea of a Jets football stadium in Manhattan deserved to be interred by state legislative leaders this week. Now, instead of plotting a resurrection, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the other supporters of the stadium should start thinking about other ways to achieve the good ends they had hoped to achieve with that bad plan.
The people behind the city's 2012 Olympics bid may have sealed its doom by insisting that the Games could not be held in New York without a stadium on the Hudson River, but there is no reason not to begin putting together a smarter plan for 2016. Local officials should also keep trying to get the Jets back in town, in a place more friendly to tailgate parties, like Queens, and in a stadium fully paid for by the team's own money. Most important of all, the Bloomberg administration should continue working to redevelop the Far West Side of Manhattan.
While we congratulated Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver for refusing to vote for the stadium this week, we disagree with his assumption that any West Side development would take away from the work being done on and around ground zero. Mr. Bloomberg had laudable ambitions for the West Side before the stadium plan entangled the Jets, the Olympics and redevelopment into one architecturally unsightly knot. He should return to them.
That means new bids on the development rights for the 13-acre parcel of land that had been intended for the Jets site. This time, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the area, should concentrate on getting full value for the rights, appraised at more than $900 million. Officials need to move on plans to expand and upgrade the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Using the stadium as adjunct space never made sense, and it detracted from the convention center's real need, which is to add exhibition space, meeting rooms and a hotel to accommodate more conventiongoers.
Mayor Bloomberg should throw his energies into a long-stalled public project that could greatly spur West Side growth: the transformation of the Beaux-Arts Farley post office into a train station bearing the name of the man who envisioned it, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A grand terminal on Eighth Avenue would be a fitting replacement for the depressing Penn Station and go a long way toward heralding a West Side revival.