NEW YORK, NY

by Neil deMause

November 6, 2002, was a triumphant day for NYC2012, the committee of movers and shakers charged with bringing the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York City. After years of jockeying for advantage over several other U.S. cities, after blanketing Manhattan with banners and placing a giant welcome message on the Times Square Jumbotron for visiting Olympic dignitaries, the decision was final: New York would be the U.S. candidate, fighting it out in an international competition with the likes of London, Paris, and Istanbul to be the 2012 host city.

The New York mayor's office, which had pushed the Olympic bid hard, erupted in glee at the announcement, the mayor himself embracing the nearest person at the time, who happened to be Billy Crystal. And now, in the City Hall's Blue Room, a squadron of former Olympic athletes had lined up for the city's official coronation by the U.S. Olympic Committee. "If there's any place that's demonstrated the power of hope," intoned USOC head Lloyd Ward, "New Yorkans have done that."

Close enough.

Amid all the celebration, only the most churlish pointed out that while much of the games preparation - resculpting two Queens lakes to equip them for slalom canoe races, transforming the industrial Williamsburg waterfront into a site for beach volleyball, and so on - would be paid for by the Olympics themselves, the centerpiece, an Olympic stadium that the mayor and his planners hoped to build atop a rail yard on Manhattan's West Side, would require about $3 billion in public money. The important thing was; New York was on the road to Olympic glory.

All that was left now was to find $3 billion.

December 17, 2002

Like so many public buildings, New York's City Hall used to be open to the public. No longer. Now, the majestic steps and broad plaza, once crowded with office workers on their lunch breaks, are off-limits, a pair of police checkpoints ensuring that only those on official business may enter. This is a relic not of 9/11, but of Giuliani Time: early in the mayor's eight-year reign, he had ordered City Hall surrounded by fences and gates, the better to keep protesters and other common folk from muddying up his front stoop.

Even most of the lunching office workers had likely never ventured into City Hall itself, where a curving central marble staircase leads to the City Council chambers, all polished wood and oil portraits and cheap folding chairs. It is here that the fate of the city's massive Hudson Yards project - replacing the West Side parking lots, its tenements and soot-caked warehouses, with blocks and blocks of office buildings, an expansion of the Jacob Javits Convention Center, a new subway line, and oh yes, an Olympic stadium - will be decided. Or would be decided. Because most of the project is expected to be under the state's jurisdiction, the city council has been left largely powerless. But they're here to hold hearings, so hearings they will hear.

David Yassky, a former lawyer for Congressman Charles Schumer who was elevated to power when term limits forced out his predecessor - thanks to term limits, fully two-thirds of the current council are rookies - starts off the debate by declaring: "I am convinced that bringing the Olympics to New York City would be a good thing." Just in case any of Yassky's colleagues might remain unconvinced, though, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff takes the podium, along with a Powerpoint projector. Deputy Dan - former president of NYC2012, minor West Side landholder, major investment banker, with more than a passing resemblance to a young Albert Brooks, down to the shit-eating grin - seldom appears anywhere without his Powerpoint projector.

Doctoroff immediately launches into the Soccer Story. It was a hot July afternoon in 1994, he recalls, and Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands was packed with fans for the big Italy-Belgium World Cup soccer semifinal. "The passion and intensity absolutely floored me," he says, and you can see it in his face as he says it. "When you injected national fervor into the event, it totally changed its character." To some people, this realization would bring to mind Leni Riefenstahl; to Dan, it made him dedicate his life to bringing New York the Olympics.

"Let me talk about the plan we've developed to host the games here," he says, and instantly the screen fills with the image of two men with swords.

His presentation surges ahead, all superlatives and rippling muscles. Hosting the Olympics would transform the city, Doctoroff reassures, with new parkland and velodromes and ferries to shuttle tourists to and from events. There are images of the new office towers that would rise as part of Hudson Yards, looking vaguely like a matte painting of the Cardassian homeworld. The deputy mayor has been warned, along with everyone in the room, not to mention finances, since the hearing on finances is strictly for another day; but like everyone in the room, he can't help himself. The new development will be built like Park Avenue, he says, which was converted from an ugly open railroad cut to a fashionable address through the magic of selling development rights. There are significant differences - where Doctoroff's plan would use city property taxes, Park Avenue was a private project paid for by selling the new lots created atop the decked-over train tracks - but no one brings this up, perhaps because no one here was on the council when Park Avenue was built in 1889.

The slideshow ends. Doctoroff turns expectantly to the council, his audience. "This plan," says councilman James Sanders, head of the economic development committee, charged with analyzing the financial feasibility of this plan, "is breathtaking." Queens rep John Liu adds: "This is the sixth time I've seen this presentation, and it gets better and better each time." His boroughmate Eric Gioia chimes in: "You use Powerpoint the way Picasso used a brush," and this time even Gioia's fellow councilmembers burst out laughing, as Gioia looks around wondering just what he said that's so funny.

This all goes on for a long while. Eventually, members of the public do take the stand. But by then most everyone - Doctoroff, most of the elected officials, the press - have left.

April 29, 2003

They came dressed in street clothes and suits, sneakers and scuffed dress shoes, carrying all the accoutrements of protest: buttons, flyers, signs reading "Hell's Kitchen Says 'Hell No'". They are strewn across those sunny limestone steps of City Hall, allowed into the no-man's-land on a day pass. They have come here today, they say, to oppose the construction of a stadium in their West Side neighborhood. At least, that's what one assumes they say: the speakers are inaudible from a distance of more than a few feet. Afterwards, the demonstrators hand out cupcakes with "No New Stadium" written in icing across the top.

Inside the hearing chamber, one entire sea of folding chairs is filled with young adults in hardhats. These are carpenter's union apprentices, here to show support for the jobs that Hudson Yards has promised to drum up for their union. As the hearing lurches fitfully forwards, they mostly show support by struggling to keep their eyes open.

Originally scheduled back in January, this council hearing has been delayed for three months at Dan Doctoroff's request. With the expected cost of the project now at $3.7 billion, and naysayers beginning to question whether the original plan - sell city bonds, then pay them back with the increased property-tax revenues once the new buildings were built (known as tax increment financing, or TIF) - was hopelessly speculative, the deputy mayor has been said to be hard at work on a new financing plan. It's hard to say, though, because Doctoroff has chosen not to show up.

In his place, a panel of high-level city planning department functionaries and NYC2012 executives - "a stellular panel," exults committee chair Sanders - assure the councilmembers that the Olympics "will unify the city." (Neither the pro-stadium union apprentices nor the anti-stadium Hell's Kitchen residents in the crowd seem to appreciate the irony; or perhaps they've all just dozed off.) The council, meanwhile, freed from having to weigh heavy thoughts on such matters as bond ratings, charges ahead with a happier pastime: Divvying up the spoils. "I don't hear anything about the Bronx!" "Why beach volleyball in Williamsburg, when we have beautiful beaches in Coney Island?" Distraught that the newly renovated Kingsbridge Armory in his district will go unsullied by Olympic sport, Bronx councilman Oliver Koppell thunders, "We have this golden opportunity to make my dream come true, and you've ignored me!" His colleagues ignore him.

The slow-motion feeding frenzy drags on, pausing only for Sanders to announce that the "carpenters union apprentices need to return to school," at which point they all dutifully shuffle out. Both Sanders and another councilman, majority whip Leroy Comrie, are wearing tiny lapel pins. They're hard to make out from a distance, but finally one makes out the lettering: "NYC 2012."

June 5, 2003

Back in 1975, when the environmental movement could still fairly be said to be burgeoning, the governor of New York introduced a bill called the State Environmental Quality Review Act, which would for the first time require oversight of the ecological impacts of construction projects within the state. The SEQRA bill passed handily, despite the objections of those like New York City's housing and development commissioner Roger Starr - later to be infamous for his advocacy of "planned shrinkage," the withdrawal of city services from poor neighborhoods - who complained that the new law would subject construction projects to the whims of "private vigilantes." For ever after, New York developers would be required to file environmental impact statements on their projects - and hold public hearings.

Today's SEQRA-spawned hearing is officially a Public Scoping Presentation of the Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement - in plain English, a presentation of how big the project will be, and a time for the public to comment. The public, on this day, looks to consist mostly of union members, decked out in the red-and-black garb of UNITE, the garment workers union. Some carry signs reading "Save Our Jobs." Across the auditorium, a staffer for another union, a stadium opponent, quietly groans: Have the construction unions arm-twisted their comrades into backing the stadium plan?

The hearing begins, a handful of bored-looking Metropolitan Transportation Authority executives presiding. (With the new subway line the linchpin - and main budget item - for the Olympic project, it's largely fallen under the MTA's auspices.) After a Powerpoint presentation that wouldn't make even the most genuflexive councilmember think of Picasso, the hearing is opened to public comment. One of the MTA flunkies begins calling the long list of names of people who have lined up at the table in the hallway outside to sign up: "Beverly Dolinsky, Marty McGregor, Michael Slattery..." For those not scheduled to speak, it has all the excitement of jury duty, only without the suspense of waiting for your own name to be called.

The first speaker is Steve Thomas, of the Garment Industry Employers Association. "I am here to speak in opposition to the Hudson Yards rezoning proposal," he begins, laying out how the stadium project could drive up rents, dooming the nearby garment center. The union staffer exhales. The garment workers are there to bury the stadium, not to praise it. In a rare show of labor-management solidarity, the UNITE members cheer Thomas' every word.

"Marcy Benstock, Roxanne Warren, Michael DiPalma..." Local business owners who are for the plan; local business owners who fear the plan; local business owners who just want to know what's in it for them. Edgar Romney of UNITE, who declares, "This rezoning plan is the city's administration telling New York's garment workers to drop dead!" to a round of applause. Gerald Schoenfield, representing the Schubert Organization, owners of several theaters on the West Side - about the last person on earth you'd expect to start quoting from an economic text, and yet that's just what he does, handing out excerpts from the work of stadium critic Andrew Zimbalist to the MTA staffers, who take them politely if with disinterest.

The parade of speakers continues on late into the night. It's impossible to tell if the MTA officials on the podium are interested, or listening. Out in the back rows of the auditorium, a former city planning official, now a private real estate lawyer, is deeply engrossed in a book on hunting. He turns to the chapter entitled "Mule Deer," and continues reading.

To be continued...

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Neil deMause is the editor of HERE magazine, and co-author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit. He is covering the West Side stadium plan for the Village Voice.