if i’m unhappy about anything, it’s tsjc’s suggestion that my position would be different if the community was full of “rich white” people who complained. that’s an unsupported comment intended to color my position racist. this isn’t about color, it’s about whether the construction delays are a screw job vs. a typical but unfortunate nuisance. understand that if the yanks tried to back out altogether from building the parks, i’d quickly join in the public outrage against them.

“EXPLICIT PROMISES TO THE COMMUNITY” is irrelevant. massive construction projects USUALLY incur delays, outside of the control of the owner. you can choose to deny that whether you live and work there or not, but it, too, is historical fact. two years from now this little parkland delay will be forgotten. but i’ve seen community groups in action before. they’re frequently selfish, poorly educated on the project, and greedy.

in the end, i do hope the metro N station helps the community (tho i’m not holding my breath that it will have any immediate impact). but the ills of that destitute area are not the responsibility of the yankees. if the south bronx community can’t rise up with a parade of consumer dollars in their hood 81x a year, then they should work on learning to exploit that immense business opportunity which any other poor ‘hood would love to have, rather than pointing fingers and complaining about construction noise.

Well, that quote says they took apart the field after they demolished it. Perhaps that has meaning to you. It doesn’t to me.

I’d be willing to bet that it should have read: “The New York Mets, the day after the end of the season, started taking down their field.” I didn’t think it was too hard to figure that out, maybe I’m wrong.

That’s all well and good, but has nothing to do with whether the Yankees should have started demolishing the old stadium earlier.

It does if your only argument for claiming that Yankee Stadium should have been demolished sooner is because Shea was demolished sooner.

That’s a straw-man, nobody is claiming that they Yankees should have demolished earlier only because the Mets did so. It’s just a parallel situation that can be pointed to in order to ask why the Yankees have waited so long to start demolishing the old stadium.

Both teams built during the winter, and the Mets also demolished during the winter.

Yankee Stadium construction was scheduled so that indoor work was done during the winter months.

That’s nice, but irrelevant on this topic.

Citifield probably wasn’t, as the location overlap probably prevented that from being an option.

So then you agree this work can, in fact, be done during the winter. The reason (overlap) is speculation and is irrelevant to me.

Most of the demolition work for Shea Stadium was done in November and December, before the worst parts of winter. And again, Shea Stadium was done on the schedule it was because that was the only possible way to have CitiField ready for opening day. That does not mean they would choose that schedule if they had other options, as is the case with Yankee Stadium.

The Yankees also could have started in November/December, and any explanation offered here for why they didn’t is, at this point, nothing more than pure speculation. As I said above, I don’t think the second and third sentences above are relevant to the issue at hand.

I have a good reason why the Yankees should have started demolition sooner: There’s no reason for the old stadium to still stand (it’s an empty, abandoned building) and the community is waiting for the Yankees to live up to their agreed-upon obligations.

(b) You used it as one of many points made to undercut and attack the quoted party, so whether you were just pointing out that it didn’t make sense or actually making a substantive comment is irrelevant. You were using it to tear down the quoted party and imply that the quoted party is unintelligent/incorrect/etc. I just think that’s a weak way to argue, you can argue the substantive points without resorting to that. If something is unclear, argue the intent, not the typo or mistake.

There were three stakeholders brought to the table at the outset of this: The City, the Yankees, and the SoBro community. The SoBro community didn’t ask for a Metro North stop because they didn’t want it, didn’t see the use or need for it, and thought it would probably do the community more harm than good. The City didn’t ask for a Metro North stop because they didn’t want to build it or pay for it or have it slow their existing network and didn’t see it as a benefit to the community.

Only one stakeholder asked for a Metro North stop and put the issue on the table: The Yankees. That should tell you something.

Seriously, I work in this neighborhood. These people are our customers. I interact with them on a daily basis. There are no residents of the South Bronx who have any interest or see any benefit to a Metro North Stop by Yankee Stadium. None.

your position comes off as a belief in SoBro residents’ entitlement to yankee presence and yankee dollars, on the resdents’ terms. in reality, those residents are entitled to nothing. they aren’t the yankees, they don’t make the team happen, they don’t own the land, they’re not native to the area…they just live nearby. they pay no more stadium tax $ than i do from bklyn, but they have a parade of consumer dollars in their hood 6 mos/year. that’s a boon, not a plague, and it’s not their birthright.

If you lived and worked here, you would know how wrong this paragraph is. The stadium isn’t a boon or a drain, it’s a noisy neighbor. Were the Stadium some great economic panacea, than 80+ years of Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx likely would have lead to this neighborhood being an economic boontown or at least a solidly middle-class neighborhood. It’s not, it’s the poorest neighborhood in the city.

this parkland construction delay is a non-story, it’s the nature of the screwed up construction industry and multi billion dollar projects. there is no cause for outrage here.

Had the Yankees not MADE EXPLICIT PROMISES TO THE COMMUNITY AT THE OUTSET, maybe you would be right. But they did. And they’ve broken them at virtually every turn. This is historical fact.

Uh-oh. I feel a “unions” rant coming on. I better leave the thread. It would have gotten ugly.

At this point, do you really expect anything different from the Yankees? They already have shown they have no shame in screwing over their own fan base and long-time ticket holders. And they have NEVER given even the slightest of shits about the citizens of the South Bronx.
In their minds, those people don’t even exist.

“I’m a Yankee fan who is reasonable enough to know the team I root for is unequivocally in the wrong here.”

And you had to know it was coming. Nobody could have really believed that the Yankees would all of a sudden become cognizent or their Bronx neighbors. That was all just flimsy, phony talk to sell this whole new stadium idea, and to land the scratch needed to build it.
Good ol’ belly rubbing.

the parkland is going to be a year or two late. what people don’t seem to realize (and “community activists”, stoked by local politicians, are supreme here) is that construction projects in excess of $1 Billion are immensely complex. they rely on a very long chain of contractors, subcontractors, financers and suppliers, and any one of them faltering can set off a domino effect of change orders and delays. in this economy, it’s a small wonder that a project of that size is going to be done, mostly on time. to gnash teeth over not having a local park for one year, or two — and to make it an issue of white and brown people — is scapegoating and ignorant. it shows you don’t know how big development projects work, so you suggest racial bias. i call foul.

if you don’t think so, go check into how many projects in “rich, white” neighborhoods suffer real delays, or how many huge real estate deals in “rich, white” neighborhoods are dead in their tracks, pure eyesores b/c the financing collapsed. just walk around manhattan if you want the proof. i worked on one deal that’s bigger than yankee stadium in total cost, and it’s dying a slow death, on a prime manhattan intersection. i assure you, it’s not about skin color.