Get Out of Town
Tucker, William
"Get Out of Town" Get Out The Yankees are all set to leave New York of Town and no one admits the city is driving them out. ABOUT A MILE FROM MY HOUSE, RIGHT IN THE HEART OF downtown Brooklyn, there's a huge...
...Only Battery Park City has succeeded—and that was because it was built by a state agency exempted from land review procedures and given the power to override local zoning...
...With its usual talent for ignoring the obvious, the New York press insists that everything in the Bronx is just fine and that the whole problem is in Steinbrenner's imagination...
...But the biggest contrast comes with Boston, once considered far more aristocratic than materialistic Manhattan...
...Other Eastern cities have avoided this retrogression...
...Almost unnoted, lower Manhattan's TriBeCa neighborhood (Triangle Below Canal) has been revitalized by young entrepreneurs who have created "Silicon Alley," the center of the creative side of Web sites and computer software...
...The project went down because West Side environmentalists managed to convince a federal judge that tearing down the rusting piers would endanger the Atlantic Ocean's striped bass population, which uses the pylons as a "resting place" during its spring spawning run...
...Rail cargo traveling from Jersey City to Manhattan passes through Albany, 14o miles upstate...
...oil tankers headed for Port Elizabeth must transfer their cargo to barges—infinitely increasing the chances of oil spills...
...And so, George Steinbrenner has his heart set on New Jersey, where he would easily draw 50,000 a night...
...Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who says he still misses the Dodgers, has vowed the Yankees will not leave on his watch...
...As a result, freighters are diverting to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Norfolk, Virginia...
...That huge concrete fortress overhanging right field is the Bronx County Courthouse, where black juries now regularly acquit robbers and murderers because they don't want to put "another brother in jail...
...Walking in from the parking lot to the Seattle playoff game last October, we passed a charter bus loading up people to visit their relatives in upstate prisons...
...Just as the loss of the Dodgers came at the high-water mark of New York City's fortunes, so the departure of the Yankees is coming to symbolize that tragic and irreversible decline...
...Donald Trump has been prevented for nearly ten years from transforming an abandoned freight yard on the Upper West Side into "Television City," a complex of studios and high-rise apartments that would anchor the television industry and put the world's tallest building back in New York...
...The city has never completed its outer ring of highways, leaving Brooklyn and Long Island now virtually inaccessible to freight traffic—one big reason why most of their manufacturing industries have collapsed...
...And so the Dodgers left for Los Angeles and the exodus to the Sunbelt began...
...For $5 he guarantees nobody will break into your car until after the game...
...Embarrassingly, New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman has also joined this lark...
...This year it's down to 22,000...
...Don't believe it...
...ABOUT A MILE FROM MY HOUSE, RIGHT IN THE HEART OF downtown Brooklyn, there's a huge vacant lot with a peculiar triangular shape...
...Yet you can't really blame these nobodies, or even the press that regularly sings hosannas to their "David-andGoliath" efforts...
...But everyone else has horror stories to tell...
...SoHo has become one of the most stunningly opulent art markets in the world, restoring iron-facade buildings that were left over from Thomas Edison's time...
...in the intense, vivid life of New York, adaptability has become almost the key-note of success...
...T]he uncomfortable truth is that we have been living off the legacy of investments of previous generations," said the anonymous authors...
...Yet the team is popular: away, the Yankees drew 28,000 per game, the highest road average in the majors...
...in fact, we have a very nice arrangement with an apparently homeless fellow who runs an informal parking lot in front of the courthouse...
...Funded with $3 billion of private investment, it now attracts suburban tourists...
...In the year 2002, the Yankees will open their season in the New Jersey Meadowlands, probably in a perfect replica of the old House that Ruth Built...
...28 July 1996 • The American Spectator...
...But imagine pulling out your wallet in this neighborhood...
...He wanted to build a new ballpark on this very site in order to escape bandbox Ebbets Field and keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn...
...The Port of Charleston operates without subsidies (as opposed to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is evenlosing money on the World Trade Center...
...Those that are still serviceable are being used to store towed cars...
...Ten years ago, a handful of Manhattan environmentalists who probably couldn't fill a good cocktail party scuttled New York's future by sinking the Westway, a brilliantly conceived underground highway along the Hudson that would have created 200 acres of park and renewed the waterfront, which now looks like the ruins of some ancient civilization...
...Thunderous blasts tore into the city's rock foundation, and did no small amount of damage above ground...
...You go against them at your peril...
...New York is not a place, after all, but a kind of game, or better, a dream —an adventure...
...Oik The problems in the harbor and on the West Side highlight how isolated from the rest of America New York has become...
...Boston has revived downtown with its Faneuil Hall Marketplace and is halfway to re-opening its waterfront by burying its entire arterial highway system...
...All he wanted from New York City was zoning permission...
...As developer Dan Rose recently said, "It would have had the same impact on Manhattan that Central Park had in the nineteenth century...
...In doing so, he has run up against the most formidable anti-growth lobby in the country—the Manhattan elite...
...Ten years later, the same forces are coming out of hibernation to oppose the new Yankee Stadium...
...Oh, I know, you're going to hear a lot of brouhaha over the next few years about how this or that politician is going to strongarm George Steinbrenner into staying in New York...
...We just got all the environmentalists and neighborhood groups in one room and hammered out an agreement," says Fred Salvucci, the former state transportation secretary who conceived the $io billion, 2o-year project...
...We thought the site was too important for a ballpark," confessed Mayor Robert Wagner years after it was too late...
...Out of twentyeight major league teams, they ranked fourteenth in home attendance (24,00o), BY WILLIAM TUCKER 26 July r9 9 6 • The American Spectator behind such stalwarts as the St...
...Which begs the question of how the fish survived through the eons before the piers were built seventy-five years ago...
...Nearly every one suffered inconvenience and even financial loss, but on the whole, took it philosophically because it was the price of progress...
...Standing at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, you can almost imagine yourself at home plate, with a shadowy right field bleachers rising out near the soon-to-be-abandoned Daily News printing plant...
...All this does not mean nothing is happening in New York...
...In 1996, the Regional Plan Association, the blue-blooded organization that originally proposed the Westway, published "A Region At Risk," a gloomy assessment of New York's future...
...The "New Media," as it is called, already employs 18,000 people, surpassing New York's publishing and television industries...
...Forty years ago, Walter O'Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had the same vision...
...SoHo and Silicon Alley didn't break through the logjam until budget problems forced the city government to cut back on zoning inspections...
...A 1995 federal study showed no toxins collecting in game fish at the century-old Mud Dump Site, five miles off shore...
...He didn't get it...
...They are simply representative of the aristocratic anti-commercialism that now dominates New York culture...
...Who knows...
...Is what they're doing illegal...
...Orioles Park at Camden Yards has simply been the icing on the cake...
...Lower Manhattan had long lain dormant because of zoning restrictions that reserved properties for "heavy manufacturing" that was obviously gone forever...
...If I were the only person on earth who was opposed to the Westway, I could have stopped it all by myself...
...Last year, even the Wendy's right across from the stadium boarded up...
...Step out of the subway and you're immediately accosted by young hoods shouting in your face, "Tickets...
...But no matter—the piers are now a critical environmental habitat...
...He is currently trying to relocate the team in a stadium that would be built atop the Pennsylvania Railroad's West Side train yards, just west of Madison Square Garden...
...T]he next few years could [see] the beginning of a long, slow, and potentially irreversible and tragic decline...
...Cleveland is also undergoing a downtown renaissance with the construction of Jacobs Field and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...
...It's no place for anyone who wears a suit and tie...
...Indeed, virtually every major project to re-develop parts of Manhattan in the past fifteen years has been stymied by citizen opposition...
...Written anonymously for The Manhattan Company, forerunner of Chase Manhattan, it is a celebration of "a city built on commerce": The face of the city is constantly changing...
...The city has never built a proposed freight tunnel across the Hudson River...
...In the first New York Times article assessing its prospects, Ketcham was the first person quoted...
...New York Harbor is rapidly filling up with silt and is no longer accessible to large cargo ships...
...The new generation of double-decker freight trains now being used to haul Asian imports cross-country cannot even be serviced in New York...
...Science has taught the world that the organisms that adapt themselves most readily to new conditions and demands are the ones that best survive...
...You delay and delay and pretty soon the project disappears...
...Everybody knows how these things work," he told me, "and nobody knew how to do it better than I. You comb through the environmental impact statement and try to find flaws...
...The only thing that has never changed in the brief three centuries of its building is the tune to which stones have been set in place, torn out, and set again 27 in a new pattern...
...The construction of the subways, for example, now touted by environmentalists as the only worthy form of transportation in New York, caused the following "distressing period of dirt and disorder": A great open ditch bordered by rough fences was dug through some of the busiest streets...
...Wagons hauled away dirt and stone...while along the subway route it looked as if an earthquake had visited the rocky island of Manhattan...
...Battling for the playoffs last September, the Yankees were playing before crowds of 4,00o...
...We dealt with their objections, but they acknowledged the need for the project...
...They turned up David Wallace, a Philadelphian, who re-invented the Inner Harbor as a thriving agglomeration of waterfront parks, shops, and office buildings...
...Charleston, South Carolina, has just doubled the capacity of its harbor, creating a new recreational island out of the dredge spoils and doubling its port capacity...
...Anybody want to buy tickets...
...Morton Zuckerman, the developer-publisher, has wasted $50 million trying to re-develop the unused three-story New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle...
...Another Westway veteran, Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers' Campaign, commented: "These West Side community groups, when they see a site proposed for massive development, they become giant-killers...
...I've never been personally robbed...
...Killing the project was typical of the New Yorkers who continue to undermine the city's economy...
...In April, the newspapers were celebrating a survey which "proved" that "8o percent of New Yorkers want the Yanks to stay in the Bronx...
...The problems in the harbor and on the West Side only highlight how isolated from the rest of North America New York has become...
...Today, the Flatbush property—which sits atop six subway lines and the Brooklyn terminal of the Long Island Railroad—is still vacant...
...Yet because the Clinton administration raised the toxicity standards after 1992, two-thirds of the Harbor's dredge spoils cannot be disposed there...
...In those innocent days before the invention of municipal sports authorities, O'Malley was even proposing to build the stadium with his own money...
...One suburbanite, writing to the New York Times, described getting caught in the inevitable post-game traffic jam and being forced to buy $i.o cans of beer from a local gang of tire-iron-wielding entrepreneurs...
...In the 1950's, the CEO's of Baltimore's fifty largest corporations commissioned a nationwide search for an imaginative urban planner to redevelop the fading downtown...
...Ketcham was brutally candid...
...Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers...
...In 1929, the anonymous authors of Manna-Hatin wrote: No plot of ground has escaped this constant demand of New York that its geographical features, as well as it people, be adaptable...
...For at least a decade I've known the team's current South Bronx location was doomed...
...Ten years ago, just as the Westway was going under, I interviewed Brian Ketcham, leader of Citizens for Clean Air, which had spearheaded the opposition...
...Yet, as the New York Times recently pointed out in a front-page story, all these developments occurred in spite of opposition from the government and its anti-development constituencies...
...All this is worth mentioning only because New York City is about to lose another piece of its storied past, the New York Yankees...
...The American Spectator • July r 99 6 wall environmental organizations, are blocking the disposal of the dredge spoils...
...On my desk I have a book published in 1929 called MannaHatin: The Story of New York...
...Yet none of these people ever show up for games...
...Yet the Clinton administration's EPA, plus the federal courts and a few hole-in-theWILLIAM TUCKER is TAS's New York correspondent...
Vol. 29 • July 1996 • No. 7
