NEW YORK -- In the course of two decades, a new city could rise on the far west side of the slender and densely packed island of Manhattan.
Skyscrapers nearly as grand as the Empire State Building would border a pro football stadium with a retractable roof -- unkind critics have likened its design to that of a giant shoebox. A tree-lined boulevard would stretch across blocks now home to hookers, gas stations and strip joints. There would be two new subway stations, 13,600 apartments and an elegant ribbon of parkland along the Hudson River.
Railroad trains sit idle on the far west side of New York, where the city, the state and the New York Jets are close to a deal to build a $1.4 billion stadium.
(Dean Cox -- AP)
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The zone in question is bordered by 43rd Street on the north and 28th Street on the south, between 10th and 11th avenues. Once this was a neighborhood of slaughterhouses and warehouses, part of the area known as Hell's Kitchen; now it carries the more elegant title of the Hudson Yards. Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff, who talks with the fervor of a door-knocking evangelist, forecasts more uplift.
The football stadium, he says, might be the jewel in the crown of the city's bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
"It's a plan for golden-age New York," Doctoroff said several months ago. "There's no plan like it in any city in America."
But grand vision comes married to grand cost. New York City, which faces near-perpetual fiscal problems, could end up paying close to $4 billion to give flesh to this vision. Key officials privately worry that plan will compete with the rebuilding of Ground Zero. Neighborhood residents complain, loudly, that the development offers too few apartments for middle- and working-class New Yorkers.
And the city and state could wind up paying $600 million to help the billionaire owner of the New York Jets construct the most expensive football stadium in the United States. (The Jets would pay $800 million.) Independent budget analysts say the stadium would create "barely half" the jobs -- and generate less revenue -- than claimed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R).
"It's is a thoroughly inappropriate use of public money," said Richard Ravitch, a member of the public corporation that helped bail out New York during the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. "It's not fiscally prudent given the many real infrastructure needs of this city."
At its heart, this is a time-honored battle. To what extent should New York, the nation's largest and arguably most international city, expend billions of dollars on speculative luxury development when a quarter of its citizens live perched on poverty's edge? New Yorkers this year face subway fare increases, a critical lack of affordable housing, and public schools without enough classrooms, desks and books.
On the other hand, if city officials fail to dream and plan and build, might the city face a future in which it can no longer generate jobs, and so slide into obsolescence? An echo of this debate is heard in the District about the plan by Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) to build a baseball stadium in Southeast Washington.
"You make public investments or a city dies," said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor at New York University and an adviser to Bloomberg. "New York needs a place where large numbers of people gather, just as cities have from the days of the Roman Colosseum to today."
One must distinguish between the two pillars of the West Side plan. The Hudson Yards development is vastly ambitious, but most of the public dollars would be plowed into meat-and-potato services: The city wants to extend a subway line west from Times Square and then south to 34th Street. Officials would pay to condemn properties -- about a quarter of the Hudson Yards is vacant or unused -- and construct parks and boulevards.
"It's an extraordinary plan for a site that's largely dead now -- there might as well be tumbleweed rolling down the streets," said Vishaan Chakrabarti, Manhattan director for the Department of City Planning. "Iconic buildings are encouraged."
That prospect does not reassure. Manhattan grows more gilt-edged each year, but the neighborhoods near the Hudson Yards remain spotted with tenements and prewar apartments. Many middle-class artists and actors, Puerto Rican cops and Irish American firefighters, and bodegas and Italian bakeries still eke out a living here.
