Roll up your sleeves and get out your Anti-Westway tee-shirts, for the ‘Hudson Yards’ gauntlet has been thrown down, the form of a 6,000 page environmental impact statement. Now, the foes are varied, and, currently, not unified. So I’m not representing some consensus vision of why the ‘Hudson Yards’ plan is flawed, or hopeless on its face. I’m just looking to stick a knife into this goofball stadium plan. Let’s see a unifed cost benefit analysis, broken out by segement (housing, train line, etc.). Because though I am sure some groups opposed the renovation plan in toto, maybe the overall vision isn’t entirely foolhardy, only the stadium. And I suspect that is the position of many of the detractors. One of the justifications is that the covering of the rail yards adjoining Grand Central Station made Park Avenue what it is today. That’s a somewhat specious and simplistic claim, but we’ll accept it for the point of this discussion. I don’t know if you have been there recently, but Shea Stadium is not sitting at the foot of Park Avenue. The boulevard they are proposing is not achored in any way by the stadium. Visually is not an argument. We can have that trampy Thomas Krens build a museum there. Programmatically, economically and socially, the stadium does nothing for a new business/residential district in that area. The only evidence that exists indicates that stadiums actually serve as detriments to this type of development. There are other problematic elements to the plan (scale, scale, scale; distribution of housing, perhaps too much a public subsidy for the eventual return, if one looks at Battery Park City — where we are still waiting for that windfall that will supply all that housing Bloomberg needs for the homeless now that he will be charging rent for shelters — as a comparator), but I’m going to make a good faith effort to digest the plan (if I can even get my hands on it) before addressing them. In mean time, remember, that stadium is snake oil, no matter how you mix it.
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A rail line here. A stadium there. Pretty soon, we are talking about real money.
Roll up your sleeves and get out your Anti-Westway tee-shirts, for the ‘Hudson Yards’ gauntlet has been thrown down, the form of a 6,000 page environmental impact statement. Now, the foes are varied, and, currently, not unified. So I’m not representing some consensus vision of why the ‘Hudson Yards’ plan is flawed, or hopeless on its face. I’m just looking to stick a knife into this goofball stadium plan. Let’s see a unifed cost benefit analysis, broken out by segement (housing, train line, etc.). Because though I am sure some groups opposed the renovation plan in toto, maybe the overall vision isn’t entirely foolhardy, only the stadium. And I suspect that is the position of many of the detractors. One of the justifications is that the covering of the rail yards adjoining Grand Central Station made Park Avenue what it is today. That’s a somewhat specious and simplistic claim, but we’ll accept it for the point of this discussion. I don’t know if you have been there recently, but Shea Stadium is not sitting at the foot of Park Avenue. The boulevard they are proposing is not achored in any way by the stadium. Visually is not an argument. We can have that trampy Thomas Krens build a museum there. Programmatically, economically and socially, the stadium does nothing for a new business/residential district in that area. The only evidence that exists indicates that stadiums actually serve as detriments to this type of development. There are other problematic elements to the plan (scale, scale, scale; distribution of housing, perhaps too much a public subsidy for the eventual return, if one looks at Battery Park City — where we are still waiting for that windfall that will supply all that housing Bloomberg needs for the homeless now that he will be charging rent for shelters — as a comparator), but I’m going to make a good faith effort to digest the plan (if I can even get my hands on it) before addressing them. In mean time, remember, that stadium is snake oil, no matter how you mix it.