Now picture it with Rings. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Watching the London Olympics this week as a native New Yorker it’s hard not to think about what might have been had the International Olympics Committee accepted New York’s bid to bring the games here.
Asked on Tuesday about how he felt watching London host the party that might have been his, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, one of the biggest boosters of New York’s bid said:
“London has done a spectacular job…I’m sorry that we lost our opportunity, we gave it our best shot, and lots of people gave money and worked very hard to bring the Olympics here…It would have been wonderful, but we didn’t get it. But we didn’t go and cry. What we did is we built a very big percentage of the things we would have built anyways, if we had had the Olympics.
“I just wish it were here.”
My (yes, very shovenistic, New Yawka-centric) take: Me too, Mr. Mayor. It would have been way better than London. Way better.
Why? First off, a recap for those who didn’t follow the whole soap opera:
Starting back in the 1990s, Daniel Doctoroff, then a managing director at private equity shop Oak Hill Capital partners, decided to make a go of landing the games after supposedly being impressed by a World Cup match he’d seen at Giants Stadium in 1994. On his own, he organized NYC2012, scouted out imaginative locations and got incredibly cool-looking renderings made up to show how New York might host the games.
Newly elected Mayor Mike Bloomberg came aboard on the idea, bringing Doctoroffaboard as director of economic development for the city, with the idea of using it as a springboard for a slew of redevelopment projects, including Manhattan’s eternally barren far West Side, home (then) to hookers and rail yards and the leaky-roofed Jacob Javitz convention center.
(Doctoroff is now CEO of Bloomberg, LLP. I called him , and Mayor Bloomberg, for comment, maybe they will at some point and I’ll update if they do.)
Bloomberg proposed building the Olympic stadium there, over the rail yards, as home to the NFL’s Jets. It would, he said, ignite a boom there. New train lines, new energy, new businesses. A lot of the sites proposed for the games were seen as similar economic stimuli. Lower Long Island City, a fading industrial district in Queens across the East River from the UN had always been fated to be the next big neighborhood. And it never happened. But what if it housed an Olympic Village for the athletes? That would be turned into housing after, a sweet bit of waterfront real estate reclamation. In Brooklyn, an railroad area known as Atlantic Yards would be transformed into a booming new neighborhood with a new arena at its heart, home, one day, to the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets. And so on.
NYC2012’s (unabashedly boosterish) prediction for the economic impact of the Games on the city of New York and the surrounding area: $12 billion, with a cost of about $3.2 billion.
WNYC, the city’s NPR station, has a nice rundown of all the proposed venues—and what’s happened to them since the games went to London (story here):
