The House That Giuliani Wants to Build

NEW YORK —  As he stood near home plate on Yankee Stadium’s festive opening day 75 years ago, Babe Ruth stared quietly at the triple-tiered stands and said: “Some ball yard.”

Today, as they pack the stadium with record crowds, many New Yorkers feel the same kind of awe. The Yankees are on track to win more games than any team in history, World Series fever is building and the House that Ruth Built rocks with good times.

Only a spoilsport could tarnish this golden moment--and several are lining up for the honors.

In a ritual that haunts the Bronx every few years, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is threatening to move America’s richest ballclub out of Yankee Stadium because he says he doesn’t make enough money. To keep him here, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has proposed building a super-stadium in midtown Manhattan, funded in part with tax dollars.

It would cost anywhere from $700 million to $1.1 billion, based on varying plans floated in the media. And Giuliani says it would be worth every penny: A new Yankee ballpark, he suggests, could easily generate millions in city revenue and create thousands of badly needed jobs. “Romantically and emotionally, I would love to keep the Yankees in the Bronx,” he has said.

But a spanking new park in Manhattan, he argued, is the best way to prevent them from leaving the city altogether.

Baloney, says a chorus of critics, giving the mayor’s plan a Bronx cheer. They call his economic projections a pipe dream and warn that a new stadium could trigger nightly gridlock across Manhattan. If Steinbrenner wants a new park so desperately, they say, let him build it himself.

“New York City is on the brink of being sucked into the stadium racketeering scandal,” wrote Daily News columnist Jim Dwyer, summing up the prevailing skepticism. “As soon as they throw out the first pitch, the taxpayers begin bleeding.”

Stadium Debates Echo in Cities

To be sure, other American cities have grappled with the dilemma of losing a popular sports franchise. In recent years, Baltimore and Cleveland built new stadiums to prevent baseball teams from leaving, and San Francisco voters have approved plans for a new park. The issue has provoked hot debate in Seattle, Houston, Minneapolis, San Diego and other cities.

Yet for sheer political intensity and baroque complexity, the Yankee Stadium war is in a class by itself. What might be a vexing issue elsewhere has in the Big Apple become a metaphor for the city’s economic future and a ferocious battleground for some of its biggest political egos.

Yankee Stadium, after all, is an integral part of the city’s history and America’s cultural heritage--a site of World Series games, boxing championships, papal speeches, rock concerts and political rallies. The mere thought of losing the Yankees or abandoning a stadium so rich in tradition triggers strong emotions.

It has also sparked a debate over just how much the nation’s largest city should pay to keep a winning team, at a time when schools are continuing to deteriorate and low-income unemployment is high.

“If you asked cabbies and pretzel vendors, they’d say sure, spend money to keep the Yankees here, it’s conventional wisdom in this town,” said Conn Nugent, director of the Citizens Union, a government watchdog group. “On the other hand, some wonder if this would just make a rich owner even richer.”

Once again, New Yorkers are jousting with Steinbrenner--a hot-tempered, autocratic man who has in the past fired employees on a whim, meddled in the day-to-day play of his team and is now, thanks to “Seinfeld,” enshrined as a national symbol of the Tyrannical Boss. Much of the current dispute is complicated by the fact that the team’s principal owner has hidden his intentions.

Recently, he extended an olive branch to the Bronx, saying that if attendance reaches 3 million this year--a figure that seems increasingly likely--he might stay put. But then, on the Don Imus radio show, he attacked the area, saying: “People have moved and are still moving out. . . . they should get in there and clean up the Bronx.” Muddying the waters even more, the owner suggested last week that Yankee Stadium be completely rebuilt.

Steinbrenner Doubts Stadium’s Soundness

Earlier in the season, after a 500-pound steel beam crashed into the seats hours before a game, Steinbrenner questioned the stadium’s physical soundness. He has also criticized the lack of available parking and commuter train access for suburban fans.

Bronx boosters answer that the stadium is one of New York’s safest areas when games are played, because of a strong police presence. They note that city inspectors pronounced the park safe after the beam fell and argue that New York should make the stadium more accessible rather than explore a billion-dollar alternative.

As the arguments fly back and forth, New Yorkers are burning with speculation: Will Steinbrenner really move the team to New Jersey, as he has long threatened? Or is all of this a ruse to leverage the best possible deal on yet another publicly funded upgrade for Yankee Stadium? In the mid-1970s, New York spent $125 million improving the park, and the new design won generally strong approval.

No one believes the mercurial owner is hurting. His team is worth $450 million to $500 million--compared to the $311 million Fox paid earlier this year for the Dodgers--and it has a $486-million cable TV contract over 12 years, the richest in baseball. Steinbrenner’s lease expires in 2002, giving the city a limited window of time to find a solution.

The debate shows how much baseball and America have changed since the Dodgers and Giants left New York in 1957. Then, public officials did little as the teams packed up for California, refusing to spend money to keep them in town. Nowadays, cities routinely build stadiums and shower teams with tax breaks to prevent them from leaving.

“Baseball used to be a business, but now we see teams as public totems--as symbols to protect,” said Neil Sullivan, author of “The Dodgers Move West.” “And the Yankee Stadium flap is an extreme example.”

It’s a story of greed, ambition . . . and charter reform.

45,000-Seat Park Near Hudson River

Soon after Steinbrenner grumbled this spring about leaving town, Giuliani unveiled his plans for a stadium near the Hudson River. The 45,000-seat park--perhaps with a retractable roof, perhaps not--would be built on a platform over rail yards near 33rd Street and 11th Avenue, an area that the mayor considers ripe for development.

Giuliani will leave the mayor’s office in 2001 because of term limits, and he is widely thought to be mulling over a race for senator or governor. Losing the Yankees is the last thing he wants on his resume.

The new stadium would be financed through an extension of the city’s commercial rent tax, raising an estimated $600 million, the mayor has said. Under an intricate plan, that revenue would also be used to help the New York Mets baseball team build a new park near Shea Stadium in Queens.

Hours after Giuliani’s announcement, Democratic City Council President (and gubernatorial candidate) Peter Vallone vowed to block the Republican mayor’s “boondoggle” with a November referendum. Bronx Borough President (and potential mayoral candidate) Fernando Ferrer also blasted Giuliani’s proposal, saying the city should keep the team where it is.

A week later, Democratic City Comptroller (and mayoral aspirant) Alan Hevesi announced that he would block funding for a stadium in Manhattan if it were funded solely with tax dollars. Meanwhile, New York Gov. George Pataki, a sometime Giuliani rival, said he’d prefer to see the Yankees in the Bronx. And New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman declared that while she doesn’t want to steal the Yankees, she’d welcome them if Steinbrenner leaves town.

“I don’t see anyone joining him [Giuliani] on this push for a new stadium, elected Republicans or Democrats,” said Clint Roswell, a spokesman for Ferrer. “The common sense is plain to see, that if any money is going to be spent, it should be spent in Yankee Stadium. Voters would tell you that clearly.”

Yet they may not get the chance. Responding to Vallone’s threat, Giuliani invoked an obscure city law that would allow him to put a charter reform proposal before voters and bump all competing measures--like a stadium referendum--off the ballot.

And so it is that in a summer of Yankee mania, the future of baseball’s most historic site has become entangled with the deliberations of a charter revision commission. No one is sure what the panel will put on the November ballot, only that the mayor who has not seen reform as an urgent priority is now pressing the issue. His 12-member group is holding sparsely attended hearings throughout the city and its long-suffering members have become a media laughingstock.

Undaunted, Giuliani has stuck to his guns. “I got elected to be a leader, not a panderer,” he said, referring to the stadium issue. “I know most of the public disagrees with me. But I think 10 years from now, they’ll say, ‘Mayor Giuliani made the right decision.’ ”

The way New York operates, though, he’d be lucky to break ground by then. Once, power brokers like Robert Moses sponsored massive development in the city and surrounding areas. Public projects like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Lincoln Center and the Triborough Bridge were greenlighted in the 1940s and ‘50s with the stroke of a pen.

In recent years, however, a coalition of community groups, environmental task forces and other monitors has slowed the large-scale development. Officials abandoned plans to build a new highway on Manhattan’s West Side in 1990, for example, amid endless litigation.

“You’d see the same kind of opposition to a stadium project,” said sports economist and Smith College professor Andrew Zimbalist. Giuliani’s Manhattan stadium “is not going to happen,” predicted Zimbalist, author of “Sports, Jobs and Taxes.”

In a nutshell, he and other economists believe a stadium can stimulate economic activity but mainly by luring spending away from other neighborhoods. The only lasting jobs created by a ballpark, they suggest, would be at the stadium itself, such as vendors, ticket takers and parking attendants.

What New York and the Yankees need is a breather, said Steven Isenberg, former chief of staff to former New York Mayor John V. Lindsey.

Once the political fireworks die down, he says, the issue can be addressed. “My bet is that, in the end, George will drive a very hard bargain. But I can’t believe he wants his epitaph to be: The Man Who Moved the New York Yankees to New Jersey.”