So, amid all the unhappiness about playing dead with the Angels in town, I keep remembering something: Did we just get a new stadium [1]?
Privately financed. $180 million in infrastructure moolah from the city. Next to Shea. Would open in 2009. Gets built even if New York doesn't get the Olympics.
I seriously can't quite believe this — and the reaction has been very, very quiet. Normally that would make me think some horrible thing will derail it, but what? It's built with private money. There won't be any of that typical NYC community-board wackiness, since chop-shop owners and feral dogs are notoriously underrepresented in city affairs.
I mean, holy cow. A new stadium. For us. Us!
I hope it's the Ebbets Fieldy Shea II, immortalized over there with the other linky things on the left — though minus the retractable roof (rain's part of life) and that crazy field that cantilevers out over the parking lot, since we all know it would get stuck or something equally preposterous. True, if the Olympics do arrive (which won't happen) we'd spent 2012 playing in Yankee Stadium II, but that's a small price to pay. Heck, I'd watch a full season in some ancient battered leaky wreck of a stadium filled with busted escalators and squat, hostile vendors if it meant that we got a new park.
Oh yeah. Never mind.
A new stadium? For lil ol' us? Can it really be?