New York City has already built several billion dollars of new sports venues for the Yankees, Mets, Brooklyn Nets, Brooklyn Cyclones, and Staten Island Yankees, much of it with public money, but why stop there? There’s still that talk of a $400 million NYC F.C. stadium at the most inaccessible tip of Manhattan, plus why even limit yourself to teams that actually exist?
The idea of a 5,000-7,000-seat indoor entertainment and sport facility with a harbor view hit a nerve with Staten Islanders.
Some folks loved the idea of an Island building large enough to house a minor league hockey franchise and also play host to big-time entertainment.
A few hated it.
Others thought it impossible.
But plenty are interested.
Admittedly, this appears to be less an actual plan than just a Staten Island Advance columnist with a crazy idea and a soapbox. I wouldn’t even have mentioned it, in fact, if not for this quote from a College of Staten Island finance and accounting professor:
“Why not an arena?” asks [Jonathan] Peters, who tried virtually single-handedly for years to get the city seriously interested in a revival of commuter rail service on the Island. “Staten island is the same size as Detroit and Miami. Would people in those cities be surprised if something like that was built in their town?”
Where to even begin? I could start with the fact that Staten Island (population 472,621) isn’t anywhere close to the population of metro the city of (sorry, you know what I meant, right?) Detroit (688,701), but that’d be missing the main stupid here. I hate to even have to point this out, but: The city of Miami (which is indeed about the same population as Staten Island) is at the center of a metro area population of six million people. Staten Island is at the center of a population of 20 million people, of course, but it’s an area that already has multiple sports arenas, and a couple dozen existing sports teams, all of which people can choose to go to instead of the hypothetical Staten Island Ice Weasels. In fact, let’s take a look at what happens when you drop a Staten Island baseball team into a market with five to ten other baseball options, depending on where you draw the lines for “market”:
That’s a whole lot of meh, there.
Anyway, I mostly mention all this just to shake my head sadly at what can make it into the newspaper these days. So long as you can find some half-baked policy claims to point to (“Development drives down crime”!) and some local officials willing to say it’s not a totally crazy idea, that is. If you’re just a regular person who wants to build a space elevator in your backyard, don’t try this at home.