Herbert, NYT: Feed the Billionaire, Starve the Students

[Rose Siding]

The juxtaposition of the two articles, one in the news section and the other in sports, was instructive.

We learned from a page-one story in last Thursday's Times that pupils at Public School 63 in the South Bronx have to take their gym classes in the school's lobby. They don't have a gymnasium. Their teacher, Rose Gelrod, has marked a jogging path on the lobby's floor. These makeshift classes, as reporter Susan Saulny informed us, "are regularly interrupted by foot traffic to bathrooms and deliveries to the cafeteria."
.........
Ah, but on the front page of the Sports section of that same paper comes a different story. It was a profile of the pampered billionaire owner of the New York Jets, Robert Wood Johnson IV, who is known as Woody to his close friends and those many public officials who stumble all over themselves trying to kiss his ring.

The very people who are crying poverty as they deny gyms and playgrounds to the city's schoolchildren - starting with the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and the governor, George Pataki - are pulling out every stop in an effort to round up and hand over hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to their friend Woody so he can have the grandest, most luxurious, most expensive sports stadium the country has ever seen...........

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/15/opinion/15herbert.html?oref=login&hp

[smirkymonkey]

1. As a New Yorker and taxpayer this makes me absolutely

sick and I will do everything I can to fight this stadium (many groups here in NYC are already on it). They want to use $600 million in TAXPAYER money for a stadium on the west side and Bloomberg keeps telling us that basic services must be cut because the city is broke!

Not only that, but Manhattan can't afford the traffic and chaos that this staduim will bring. I hope to hell Bloomberg and all his cronies get voted out come next election.

[Rose Siding]

2. We've been through this twice in Seattle

When Sports is involved it's a whole new...er, ballgame. Reason and responsibility flew out the window, so get ready for heartbreak.

We voted the first one down but our Dem gov overrode that detail. Paul Allen spent enough seed money to guarantee a special election for the second. Oddly, the red portions of our state were opposed. I don't recall all the funding sources, but I know if you eat downtown, you pay for the stadium with a new tax.

We have two shiny cathedrals to the games, constructed entirely of someone's out sized (and very costly) erector sets. We can view the homeless from practically every portal and tsk tsk about closing women's shelters and rape crisis centers. We even blew up the *old* stadium, which hadn't been payed for yet.

I guess someone can afford to attend the games but I've never understood the claim that good jobs were created. The bulk are spottily seasonal at best, of benefit only to the desperate or the underpaid (like TEACHERS) Oh, and welcome to planning your life around team schedules, if you value punctuality at all. Or getting home from work in a timely manner.

But that's just me, the ever disgruntled minority. More mindlessly narcotic TV entertainment for the masses, please.

[Danmel]

4. Safeco and Qwest Fields

We were in Seattle this summer and went to a game at Safeco. Took the tour and all the tour guide talked about was how much each seat cost and how luxurious the luxury boxes are, comp
The other thing I noticed about the place is that there is NO mass transit to the games to speak of, they stop the buses after the game so the cars can get through! How ass backwards is that? How did they build two stadiums next to each toher in a city with NO MASS TRANSIT?????


The parking was $20. That's more than twice what it costs to park at Yankee Stadium,. When the parking costs more than it does in NY, somethings wrong.

I think the West Side Stadium is a horrific idea (and I think trying to get the 2012 games is even stupider). The fans who have been going forever will not be able to afford it, they can't tailgate, it;ll bring the already ghastly traffic to new dimensions of horror and it is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.

So I'm sure it will happen.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. What's the New York feeling about the Olympics?

Enthusiastic? Pissed off at how much money it would cost? Does anyone believe New York could win the bid anyway? In London and the UK, enthusiasm seems luke warm at best.

[Danmel]

5. And why would we want it?

THe people who are pushing this thing are not the people who will pay for it or be inconvenienced by it. Who needs the Plympics here? We aren't ENOUGH of a TARGET. Why not just paint a giant bulls eye on Manhattan and say, "Here we are, in case you've forgotten. Come and get us"