West Side Story

"Will someone tell the mayor it’s not 1966? The West Side doesn’t need a colossal stadium. Just look a bit downtown to see how urban development really works...You would think that given the opportunity to turn thirteen Hudson riverfront acres into a complicated, stirring, living, breathing new piece of Manhattan, this city and mayor would see the plain wrongheadedness of filling that precious space with a gawky, meretricious, $2 billion monolith whose raison d’être is 40 hours a year of football...The stadium is, of course, the cornerstone for a New York Olympics...it seems pretty tenuous justification for such a suck of money and municipal energy in this already glamorous, robust city. So he is attempting, in disingenuous Rube Goldberg fashion, to make the stadium seem essential and inevitable by insisting that it’s the linchpin for every necessary West Side improvement."

Thanks to Melissa Chow