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January 11, 2006
Tastes great! Less filling!
Go to enough stadium hearings, and they all start to blur together. That was certainly the case at today's New York City Planning Commission hearing on the proposed Yankees stadium, which featured more than four hours of impassioned testimony that pretty much replicated what was said last time (and the time before that):
"As much as we love our present home, it's becoming non-functional. We need a new one." --Yankees president Randy Levine"The community stands to lose two of the most heavily utilized parks in the Bronx for at least five years during construction - this for a community that suffers from an asthma rate two-and-a-half times greater than the city average. ... [Randy Levine has said] that they will make less money during construction if they build at the current site while having to play elsewhere. This is not city planning. Our elected officials are allowing a neighborhood to be destroyed forever simply because the Yankees say they will make less money for a couple of years." --NYC Park Advocates president Geoffrey Croft"We're the greatest city in the world, yet what we're doing right now is taking parkland away from some of our poorest residents, some of our sickest residents, and replacing it with parking lots that will have little fake parks on top." --Bronx Community Board 4 member (and professional city planner) Lukas Herbert
The main attraction, though, was the pre-game show. Halfway through a press conference by the Bronx community group Save Our Parks, about a dozen construction workers disrupted the event with loud chants of "Build the stadium!" (After a bit, some quick thinkers in the crowd began chanting back: "...where it is!") The counterdemonstrators insisted they need the 3,600 temporary construction jobs - permanent jobs would be far fewer, about 900, and many of those part-time - that would be created by construction of the new $800 million stadium, beginning a shouting match that lasted for several hours as the beginning of the hearing was delayed and delayed.
During the interminable wait, I phoned Erika Tarlin of Save Fenway Park! to see how many construction workers the Boston Red Sox had on the job for the $200 million renovation of their ballpark, since I'd always heard that renovation was more labor-intensive than building new. Her answer: 5,500. And that's without displacing the ballclub for even one season.
There had been a study how to renovate Yankee Stadium a couple of years ago. I remember it was conducted by the bronx borough. Is that study somewhere online available? It is just interesting me.
Posted by Felix on January 12, 2006 03:44 AM
I have a somewhat low-quality scanned PDF of the document, which I've just uploaded here: http://fieldofschemes.com/documents/ferrer-report.pdf - I'll try to get a higher-quality version up this weekend.
Posted by Neil on January 12, 2006 08:12 AM
Thank you very much for the pdf-file. I think, it's a great concept. Way better than the actual one from the Yankees. What were the reasons for not doing it. Are all the members of nyc counicl aware of that concept?
Posted by Felix on January 16, 2006 11:18 AM