A Stitch in Haste

Mayor Bloomberg and his West Side Stadium / 2012 Olympic minions endlessly chanted the Politics of the Mobius Strip: "We need the stadium for the Olympics, and we need the Olympics for the stadium."

Or maybe not:

Leaders of the fractured bid to bring the 2012 Olympics to New York City are re-examining earlier options for a stadium in Queens, three people familiar with the discussions said yesterday.

Two options involve a partnership with the Mets, one to refit Shea Stadium for the Olympic Games and the other to build a new stadium in the Willets Point area nearby, they said.
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Olympic organizers scoffed at a Queens stadium site until the rejection of the West Side stadium proposal Monday. Since then, they have been scrambling to produce a viable alternative...
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The idea of a temporary structure for the Olympics is one of many possibilities that have been raised this week, said three people with knowledge of the discussions.

Now wait just a minute. All this time Bloomberg insisted that the West Side Stadium was the only option for securing the Olympics, and now all of a sudden alternatives not only might be available, but were available when the Olympics proposal was first being drafted. Which invites the question: why weren't multiple contingency plans put forward at the outset?

Simple. Bloomberg lied. He intentionally played the brinksmanship, all-or-other card in the hope that it would pressure politicians into approving the West Side Stadium plan.

Note also how Bloomberg & Co. lied about the tie-in to the Javits Convention Center, another "critical" aspect of the boondoggle plan. Now that the West Side Stadium proposal is dead, dead, dead, suddenly a stadium in Queens, with no renovation or expansion of the Javits Center, would also be okay. Go figure.

Oh and here's lie number three: A major "benefit" promised under the original proposal was that there would be permanent enhancements to the neighborhood, long after the Olympics were gone. Now — presto! — a plan for temporary facilities that would be dismantled after the games are over would be perfectly okay too. Go figure.

He lied. He gambled. He lost. Time to move on.

As for the Mets and Shea Stadium, the same standard should apply to them as to the Jets. Let them build whatever they want, wherever they want — so long as it's with their own money and not with any taxpayer subsidies.

Meanwhile, John Tierney skewers the politics of stadiums:

[T]he creation of "sacred space" ... gives people a sense of identity with the city. In Ur, it was the shrine of the moon god, Nanna, a 70-foot-high ziggurat towering over the Mesopotamian plain. In Athens, it was the Parthenon. In Venice, it was the Basilica of San Marco.
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But does anyone think that New Yorkers will have an identity crisis if the Jets and the Olympics don't come to Manhattan's West Side? The proposed stadium would have been a generic hulk like most other new arenas and convention centers, sitting empty most of the time and preventing the surrounding area from becoming the kind of space that urbanites really revere: a neighborhood with homes and businesses and street life.

Exactly. Today's urban stadiums and convention centers are not comparable to the Circus Maximus or the Parthenon. They are more analogous to the pyramids — the ultimate expression of the petty vanities of leaders like Bloomberg who want to live forever.