October 20, 2004
Big yellow taxi squad
Even as the New York Yankees prepared for last night's ALCS, Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion was announcing his plans to gut Yankee Stadium and fill it with buildings and a Little League field, as part of $1-billion-plus plans to build a new stadium in nearby Macombs Dam Park. The Yankees, meanwhile, would prefer to turn the House That Ruth Built into a parking lot, according to the Daily News.
Details of the plan, first leaked back in July, are still hazy in the extreme - the public's share of funding has been reported as anywhere from $100 million to $450 million - but the New York Sun did indicate one important consequence of George Steinbrenner's hopes to site his stadium in a public park:
The plan to build the stadium at Macombs Dam Park would require taking nearly half of the park's 28.4 acres and an additional 2.9 acres in John Mullaly Park, with a number of ball fields, tennis and handball courts, a running track, and a soccer field being demolished. To remove a city park, the state Legislature must approve the measure, and in exchange, a park of equal size must be built in the same community. This means the Yankees and the city and state must locate a new park in the same South Bronx neighborhood and fund its creation, and the move must be approved by the state Legislature.
Whether the gridlock-prone state legislature would sign off on a plan to funnel state money to a city stadium project is impossible to guess. Suffice to say that assembly speaker Sheldon Silver's 2006 just got even more interesting.
