by Neil deMause
Not that that stopped those present from providing plenty of feedback. The overflow crowd in attendance complained that it would be five years before new parkland could be built on the old stadium site (“I’m concerned with our youngsters not having to wait until the Yankee stadium is up before they can play in these parks”), about increased traffic from new parking garages (“It’s absurd to bring more cars to this neighborhood when all the kids are sick with asthma”), about how construction would affect residents of apartment buildings on Jerome Avenue across from the proposed stadium site (“I feel like I’m being forced out of this neighborhood, and I’ve lived here thirty-five years.… I don’t know what the plan is, but I don’t think the plan is for a lot of us to remain”). The final speaker, a Jerome Avenue resident named Daniel Tavares, pointed to his tank top as evidence of his frequent use of the Macombs Dam running track. “This is not a stadium that’s for the Bronx,” he thundered, noting that most local residents can’t afford high-priced tickets. “If this is not a done deal, we have to march around that stadium fifty thousand times”; the rest of his remarks were drowned out by thunderous applause.
Soon, local residents, including Antonetty, Herbert, and several other Community Board 4 members, had banded together to tell the city and the Yankees that if they needed to build a new stadium, it shouldn’t be in their park. Joyce Hogi, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who would become an integral member of the group, had attended several meetings of a local nonprofit concerned about the approaching stadium but had been turned off by the group’s focus on “what the community could get out of this.” (It didn’t help that the group held its meetings during the day, when she, like most other neighborhood residents, was at work.) “One day I was walking the dog,” she recalls, “and I saw a flyer on a car windshield, and I picked it up. And it was about a meeting about the Yankee Stadium project. It was that evening, so I thought, oh, I think I’ll go. It sounded a little different.”
Calling themselves Save Our Parks, the group set out to build community awareness, slipping flyers under doors and gathering thousands of signatures calling for changing the stadium plan to preserve the parks. Mostly, though, the nascent organization turned out residents to pepper Yankee and city officials with questions about the need for the project. At a rally on the steps of the Bronx County Courthouse, with the Yankee Stadium light towers visible two blocks away, neighborhood resident Dilsa David wondered to reporters: “If they’re not allowed to build a stadium in Central Park, why should they be allowed to build in our park?”
At one community board meeting, New York City Economic Development Corporation vice-president Hardy Adasko seemed surprised at the intensity of the audience questions, sputtering when asked for economic-impact figures that “the city considers the whole deal a major net benefit—I don’t have the numbers.” Asked why the Yankees couldn’t stay put at a refurbished Yankee Stadium, Adasko insisted it would be impossible to provide “an adequate number of ladies’ rooms,” drawing a burst of incredulous laughter from the mostly female crowd.
The inadequacies of Yankee Stadium were a constant theme in presentations by Yankee execs. At one “town hall” meeting, facing a crowd of more than two hundred Bronx residents who had greeted Borough President Carrion with angry chants of “You work for us!” Yankees president Levine insisted, “We love the present Yankee Stadium [but] it’s not going to last ten years”—conveniently ignoring the findings of the city’s own buildings commissioner in 1998 that Yankee Stadium could last another seventy-five years if maintained properly. “As much as we love our present home, it’s becoming non-functional,” Levine declared at another public hearing. “We need a new one.” On still another occasion, Levine insisted that the team would have to knock down the elevated subway line that ran behind the right-field bleachers in order to have room to renovate.
In fact, Carrion’s predecessor as borough president, Fernando Ferrer, had commissioned a study in 1998 on renovating Yankee Stadium that determined the old ballpark could be upgraded and restored to its pre-renovation look for just $189 million. (The architects, Beyer Blinder Belle, had just completed overseeing the restoration of Grand Central Terminal.) Members of the community board, meanwhile, suggested that any new stadium should be put south and west, near the planned Bronx Terminal Market mall—another project that had been pushed through with little community input just a few months earlier.
Under the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process—the public process that the Jets’ stadium had evaded by being run by a quasi-public state authority—the community board for the affected district was required to cast a vote on all city planning projects. Community Board 4 debated the Yankees plan for three and a half hours, during which just one out of thirty-six speakers spoke in favor of the project. Though there had been reports beforehand that the borough president was heavily pressuring the board to back the plan, the final vote was sixteen to eight, with five abstentions, to oppose the proposed new stadium.
As the count was announced, the meeting room at the Bronx Museum, packed with more than two hundred local residents, broke into a sustained whoop of applause. Afterward, community organizers gathered in a local diner, where one was heard to exult: “We beat the Bronx machine!”
No one knew it at the time, but it was to be the Bronx opposition’s high-water mark.
Eight Days in June
The first sign that the Yankee Stadium debate wouldn’t follow the same leisurely pace as the Jets project had come just eight days after the press conference announcing the new stadium plans. On June 23, the next-to-last day of the state legislative session, the legislature passed a bill “alienating” twenty-two acres of Macombs Dam and Mullaly parks. From the perspective of the state government, they were no longer parks at all, just plots of land ripe for development.
Steinberg, a former state senate staffer, was dumbfounded that the legislature didn’t hold off on alienating the parkland to strike a better deal for the community, as was common practice. “In eight days, the state legislature proposed the bill, debated it, got a home-rule message from the city council, and passed it. And just like that, twenty-two acres of parkland in the South Bronx no longer belonged to the people.”
During those eight days in June, Steinberg later discovered, the state legislature had sent a request for the city council to issue a “home-rule message” approving the alienation bill. This request arrived in the council “preconsidered”—which meant that no public hearings were required. Meanwhile, the council’s finance division provided members with a fiscal-impact statement indicating “no impact on [city] expenditures resulting from the enactment of this legislation”—though by the city’s own admission, it was to be on the hook for more than $135 million in land and infrastructure costs. According to council minutes, council members barely discussed the issue before unanimously approving decommissioning the parks. (Brooklyn arena opponent Letitia James abstained.) Three days later, the state legislature passed its alienation bill, and the Yankees had their land.
“No alienation has moved as fast as the Yankees’,” Christian DiPalermo, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, later recalled. The requirement that the state formally alienate land, he noted, was put in place to prevent land-scarce cities from turning parkland over to developers whenever they needed a large plot of land. He observed, “Obviously the taking of parkland is going to be the cheapest option, because it’s public land. It’s not like eminent domain where you’re taking private land, and you have to pay somebody. We think it should be the last choice. It’s fast becoming the first choice, and that gives us a lot of concern.”
Back at Community Board 4, no one had heard a word of these machinations. “All of that was done behind closed doors,” says Antonetty. “We didn’t even know that was going on. There were no public hearings at all before the parks alienation, so we found out about that after the fact.”
While the city land-use process required public hearings, r
esidents soon found out that public input was another matter entirely. The community board’s vote was only advisory. Next the plan went before the City Planning Commission, which swiftly approved the city’s draft environmental-impact statement—a seven-hundred-plus-page tome that, residents complained, was unreadable to the Bronx’s many Spanish speakers. While by law the EIS was required to include citizen comments, these were mostly dismissed with a perfunctory wave of bureaucratese. (Sample text: “The commenter’s assertion that the proposed project is ‘laden with hidden public subsidies’ is outside the scope of [this] analysis.… Neither the City nor the State will have any obligation to pay for construction of the new stadium. Thus, there are no hidden public subsidies.”) The final report also dismissed rebuilding on the current site as a proposal that “would not meet several key project objectives”—first among them, bizarrely, that “the House that Ruth Built, the 1923 stadium, would be entirely obliterated.”
The Mets stadium, the city had decided, was covered by a Giuliani-era environmental study, and so was exempt from further public hearings. Therefore, with the Yankees’ EIS complete, the final stop for the twin stadiums was the city council, which was scheduled to take up the matter at a single public hearing in March. The day before, taking a page from Bruce Ratner’s playbook, the Yankees announced a “community benefits” package that would donate $800,000 a year to Bronx nonprofits—and that had been negotiated solely with the Bronx legislators who already supported the plan. (Yankees officials claimed that the agreement would also provide $8 million to improve Bronx parks, though it was later revealed that this would actually come out of the city budget.) In addition, the team sent canvassers door to door in the neighborhood with a “Stadium Plan Frequently Asked Questions” sheet asserting that “the taxpayers of the City of New York are NOT paying the approximate $800 million cost” and “it would cost more to renovate the old stadium and make it handicapped accessible than it would be [sic] to build a spectacular, new, state-of-the-art Yankee Stadium.”
At the council hearing, after the public had waited more than three hours to speak, Save Our Parks member Hogi testified, “We’re not opposed to economic development, but this project is not about economic development—it’s about a land grab from a disenfranchised community. There is no amount of community benefit agreement that can mitigate the giving up of public parkland to a private enterprise.” Shortly thereafter, the committee chair in charge of the hearing announced that everyone would have to walk across the street to a tiny meeting room in another council building—another committee needed the room. The next day’s press coverage would be dominated by the appearance of Yankees great Reggie Jackson, who had admitted that “the Yankees have not always been a good partner with the Bronx” but promised that from now on, things would change.
It would be the sole opportunity for council members to hear from the public before voting on the stadium projects. The morning of April 6 began with unseasonable snow flurries swirling outside the City Hall windows. Inside, news reporters, Bronx neighborhood activists, and pro-stadium construction workers cooled their heels for over an hour waiting for the deciding council meeting to begin. Word quickly spread: Christine Quinn, who’d succeeded the term-limited Gifford Miller as council speaker, was downstairs whipping the Democratic caucus into toeing the line on the stadium deal.
The vote itself was anticlimactic. One by one, council members insisted straight-faced that they’d given “extensive deliberation” to the matter of handing over city cash and parkland to the world’s most lucrative sports franchise, before voting in lockstep to approve the plan. The project “will bring eighteen acres of parkland to the Bronx,” raved Quinn, carefully not mentioning the twenty-two acres of parkland that would be displaced; Manhattan council member Gale Brewer, a frequent critic of corporate-subsidy deals, gave an eloquent speech detailing the “many questions” that remained about the plan, before voting yes. Bronx council member Helen Diane Foster, whose district included the apartment dwellers along Jerome Avenue whose windows would look out directly on the new stadium, cast one of only two no votes, but not before publicly apologizing for listening to her constituents and not her party leaders. “I tried to find a way to say yes, [but] I don’t believe this is the best deal for the community,” she said. “I believe it’s the best deal for the Yankees.” One council member’s entire speech consisted of “I have always liked the Yankees, and I will like them even more now.”
The final vote was forty-five to two, with two abstentions. In thanking her committee for the one hour of work that it put into discussing the Yankees’ plan that morning before the vote, land-use chair Melinda Katz declared, “The one thing this project has shown is that folks are listened to.”
It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
There were still two more hurdles facing New York’s baseball stadium plans. In the 1980s, the city had received federal money for renovations to Macombs Dam Park—and federal regulations required that the National Park Service sign off on any demolition of federally funded parks, to ensure that replacement parkland of equal “value and utility” was being provided. To Bronx residents, this was a no-brainer. “The replacement parkland that they’re building is almost a mile away on the waterfront—you’ve got to take this scary pedestrian bridge to go over there, across some railroad tracks, underneath an elevated expressway,” argued Herbert. “It’s going to be really difficult for senior citizens and kids to get there. It’s not equivalent. Right now, you walk out your front door, and the park is right there.”
The other remaining obstacle affected both teams and involved the $1.56 billion in tax-exempt bonds that would be used to raise money for construction. Ever since the 1986 Tax Reform Act, it had been considered illegal to use federally subsidized bonds for projects where more than 10 percent of the cost would be repaid by a private entity. The Mets and Yankees stadiums were to use 100 percent private money to repay the bonds—but, the city claimed, these payments were technically not private but rather “in lieu of” the property taxes that the teams were not going to have to pay.
It was a distinction fine enough to raise more than a few eyebrows among development experts. One national bond expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the city’s argument “a transparent end run around the 1986 provision saying stadiums cannot be financed with private-activity bonds. We have simply interposed an empty box into which the Yankees’ stadium-related revenue would be placed, labeled that box ‘PILOT,’ and transformed black into white. If only solving the problems of real life were that simple.”
Dan Steinberg recalls a meeting of the city council’s finance committee where members split unprecedented semantic hairs over the difference between “public” and “private” money. “The entire point of the hearing was to determine whether or not the council was comfortable using money that the city would normally collect,” he says. “But meanwhile, throughout this very hearing, you had council members defending the project by arguing that it was privately financed. I remember thinking, if the IRS were in this room, and heard the arguments that the council members were making, it would be very difficult to justify the use of payments in lieu of taxes.”
Tax experts questioned the legality of the bond plan (the city Independent Budget Office called it “a very, very aggressive interpretation of the IRS code”), and Park Service officials promised, “There are no shortcuts—we have a responsibility to follow the law.” Nonetheless, in the course of one week in July, both federal agencies approved the project without comment. Four weeks later, the official groundbreaking ceremony was televised on the Yankees’ own cable network, while a few dozen protesters were herded into police pens a block away from the televised groundbreaking ceremonies. Within a week, the park had been bulldozed, trees chainsawed, and an enormous rock hill at one end pulverized into gravel. The residents of Jerome Avenue began keeping their windows shut tight, even in the heat of summer, to keep out the dust.
And there w
as still one final indignity to be visited upon the Bronx residents. The $5 million a year in “stadium-planning” rent credits that Mayor Giuliani had handed out back in 2001, it turned out, had gone to pay for more than just architects and engineers. Included on the expense reports the Yankees submitted to the city were portions of the salaries of top executives, including Randy Levine and several members of Steinbrenner’s family, plus such high-priced lobbyists as former Republican state chair Bill Powers, who’d handpicked George Pataki for his successful 1994 gubernatorial race and raised $1 million for Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign, and Stephen Lefkowitz, who’d also worked on the Jets’ and Nets’ campaigns. Even the lawyers who drew up the sweetheart lease in the first place, it turned out, had been billed to city taxpayers.
It was an “alarming” revelation, noted Dick Dadey, director of the good-government group Citizens Union, calling it “like padding the expense account, but the people who pay are the taxpayers.” Common Cause’s Megan Quattlebaum agreed: “You’ve created this weird circular situation where the city is, effectively, paying with taxpayer money to have itself lobbied for potentially more taxpayer money. Taxpayers would not be pleased at all to hear that the city is subsidizing someone to come back and hold their hand out to lobby for more.”