Let’s Resume Pursuit Of Jets Football Stadium In Queens

Here at the Gazette , we are supreme optimists. For that reason we still cling to a shred of hope that the deal made by the New York Jets football team and the New York Giants team owners to share a new stadium in New Jersey’s Meadowlands will somehow come apart and the Jets will come home to Queens where they belong.

Diehards that we are, new life was sparked into these hopes last Friday by a report which said that L. Jay Cross, the Jets’ president, was retracting one aspect of the Jets–Giants new stadium agreement, the one which called for a retractable roof.

“We believe in the purity of the game in the Northeast and that it’s an outdoor game,” Cross was quoted in the New York Times story. “Our fans like it that way. Both teams have a history of playing outdoors.”

Giants Executive Vice President John Mara also seemed to pull back on the retractable roof idea, which was generally believed to be part and parcel of the announced agreement.

Mara’s comments indicated he was concerned by the cost of the roof, listed as $200 million. He said his organization had not officially ruled it out and “I’m not philosophically against it, but I don’t see how it works financially.”

An official of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, which brought the teams together to make the stadium deal, said he was surprised by the new glitch.

This new development alone would have been enough to fuel our hopes that the new New Jersey stadium deal might be coming apart over this seemingly minor point.

But the article went on to represent Cross as speaking very highly of a deal that had been developing prior to or parallel with the New Jersey agreement, a deal to build a stadium for the Jets in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.

“We had a very legitimate proposition in Queens that was really very intoxicating,” he stated. “It went from nowhere in June to being very real by August.”

Cross said the Queens deal had the support of state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Governor George Pataki, and it was felt that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver would get behind it because he had said several times that the Jets should build in Queens.

Borough President Helen Marshall had taken the lead in getting the Jets back to the negotiating table. Many Queens elected officials were publicly supporting it. Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg had spoken favorably about the idea.

The only negative aspect from Cross’s perspective was the necessity to take 15 acres of parkland for the $1.3 billion stadium, a key point that aroused community opposition to the proposal, which needed state legislative approval.

However with Pataki and Bruno on board, and assuming Silver were to get on the bandwagon, there would be no problem in demapping the 15 acres. There were several precedents for this, one in the same park where land was taken to build the National Tennis Stadium, and in The Bronx, where the New York Yankees are taking a public park as the site for their new stadium.

However, the Queens deal was cast aside when New Jersey acting Governor Richard Codey refused to grant the Jets a 60-day extension on the Meadowlands deal. The Jets would have had the option to come in as a partner after the Giants went through with the deal, Codey said, but then the Jets would have no input into the location and design of the new stadium. They jumped into the partnership deal with the Giants, and left Marshall and the others behind-and bereft.

The history of the Jets stadium proposal in Queens being what it is, the fact that it was on track toward coming together with very favorable chances of being approved, strongly encourages Marshall, Pataki, Bruno, Silver, Bloomberg and Cross to pick up the pieces and make a Jets stadium in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park happen.

New York City, the greatest city in the world, must seize this opportunity, this final chance to bring a major football team or two back to Queens where they belong. Let us not make the same mistake we did when we let the Manhattan West Side stadium slip through our fingers. If we don’t make the Queens football stadium happen, we can forget about any future prospect of getting a stadium here and say goodbye to all the financial benefits and prestige it brings our city, to say nothing of the enjoyment football fans would derive from a stadium in their backyard.