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As New Yankee and Met Stadiums Go Up, So Do Costs and Disruption

March 27, 2008

When Mets and Yankees fans arrive for the start of the new season, the teams’ past and future will be on display side by side—and not just Pedro Martinez and Johan Santana or Andy Pettitte and Joba Chamberlain. At a record-shattering price tag of more than $2.5 billion, twin homes for New York’s ball clubs are being readied for their 2009 openings—and in the Bronx in particular, the repercussions are affecting not just the city treasury but the local neighborhood.

At the time of the two teams’ ignominious exits last fall, the new stadiums were still little more than skeletons. Since then, decorative arches—granite for the new Yankee Stadium, brick for the Mets’ Citi Field—have mostly taken shape, and the seating bowls are in place. Sharp-eyed fans will note the wide gap between the outer and inner structures: As in most modern stadiums (but not relative oldsters like Shea and Yankee), the façades are mere shells around the actual ballparks within, the better to fill the space in between with concession-y goodness.

The similarities, however, stop at the ballpark walls. The Yankees’ project has gotten more attention not just because it’s displacing more hallowed ground—the biggest controversy for Mets fans has been whether the team will preserve Shea’s 1980s-vintage plaster home-run apple—but because it’s far vaster in scale. Where Citi Field is going up in a parking lot, the new Yankee Stadium is being erected in the former Macombs Dam and Mullaly parks and, with its accompanying garages, is already transforming its South Bronx environs. It’s one reason why the Yanks’ costs are so much higher: nearly $1.9 billion, compared to the Mets’ comparatively thrifty $850 million. Of that, taxpayers are covering almost half, mostly via tax rebates and other goodies; the latest estimates for total public subsidies, according to figures compiled by the Voice, are $833 million for the Yankees, $449 million for the Mets.

Hidden costs like tax-exempt bonds are to blame for much of the subsidy bloat, but the soaring costs afflicting all city construction come into play here, too. When Mayor Bloomberg first announced the Yankees plan in June 2005, he projected that it would cost $135 million just to replace the parks being demolished for the new stadium (as well as to raze the old stadium and move a water main). By last year, that figure had risen to $195 million, thanks to what the city called “contingency funding,” and apparently those contingencies weren’t enough: Last week, the city’s Economic Development Corporation reported its current projections had reached $190 million for the parks alone, plus another $52 million for “infrastructure.”

The signs of all that money being spent are everywhere around the intersection of 161st Street and River Avenue as opening day nears. To the north, in the former Macombs Dam Park, cranes lift into place the final pieces of the new stadium—slightly shorter than the old, but much broader, a salad bowl rather than a tureen. To the southwest, what was until recently a set of ballfields adjacent to the team parking lot is now a sea of earth movers, prepping the land for one of three new parking garages. The decorative frieze—the bit of scrim that architecturally challenged sportswriters usually call the “façade”—is mostly in place atop the stadium’s rim, while giant baseballs have been engraved into the underpass beneath the Macombs Dam Bridge approach.

Source: Village Voice to read the full article click here

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Written by NY Politics · Filed Under Real-estate, Taxes 

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