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Oh, for the love of street vendor hot dogs: Gothamist LOVES the insanity that is the bidding process for the MTA's West Side railyards. Yesterday, the energy company, Trans Gas, bid $700 million for the railyards to build a power plant. This bid is not only $100 million more than the Cablevision bid (and $600 million more than the Jets' bid), but Trans Gas would want the MTA's help to build another plant in Williamsburg plus a contract to use Trans Gas for power! Next, Gothamist expects Ted Turner to bid on the space to move some of his bison over here - it's getting so out of control.
It's seems that the Trans Gas president, Adam Victor, has had problems with Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, who is one of the architects of not only the Jets West Side Stadium deal but the NYC 2012 Olympics bid, too, but Victor says this bid is not revenge. Oh, please, Gothamist has heard that one before. There are a couple problematic things with this bid: It doesn't really address a need for residential living (which the Jets and Cablevision bid purport to do) and the design looks like some bad modernist rendering of Coney Island. If this rendering from Philip Johnson/Alan Ritchie Architects is any indication, apparently power plants of the future will look like Gymboree play areas.
Gothamist on the development of the West Side railyards.
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Every time I read another story about this I just get a little bit (okay, a lot) more crazy. So, today, some funny little thing from a children's book about alligator's or crocodiles or whatever that I read a long time ago came to mind and I don't remember the words exactly but apparently the resident creatures were also doing the quadrille or something and going Tra la, tra la, too lay too lay, hop a doodle, hip a doodle, flip a doodle day!
They'd have better luck in convincing the sheep about building a stadium if they named it something like the Freedom Dome, or Democracy Plaza.
This gets funnier by the day. A power plant? That's certainly unexpected.
What other uses can that space provide? A 6 Flags Amusement park?
My thoughts keep drifting back to my intro to Economics courses. Seems to me if the stadium plan was such a brilliant moneymaker for everyone involved, it would already exist. It wouldn't need a kick in the pants--and financial help--from the city. Private concerns would have already built it in order to rake in all those alleged incredible profits.
I wonder if we could squeeze a little airport in there....
This is genius - if there were ever a way to make a stadium look good, even to the folks who don't want it, it's giving the neighbors the "option" of a power plant instead. Let's see if one NIMBY proposal can out NIMBY another...
actually, it looks like the bid isn't to build a power plant in Manhattan. I fyou read the article carefully, transgas wants to build the plant in brooklyn. They don't asay what they want to do with the railyard, but don't preclude building a stadium there.
Fact is, NYC does really need another power plant - ask yourself what's been done since the blackout of 2003? Not much, if anything. And while it looks goofy, that TransGas plant has been on the drawing board for Greenpoint for what seems like a very long time now... BTW - I wouldn't consider the Jets stadium proposal really addressing the residential demands on the project. Take a look at the RPA website if you're interested: http://www.rpa.org
Yeah, that rendering is of their proposal for the Williamsburg power plant site.
The 2003 blackout was not a result of insufficient local power. It was a glitch in the grid that originated in the midwest.
I live in West Chelsea and would take a well-designed, environmentally friendly power station over a stadium any day.....what about windmills?
I'm not going to go into depth on this, but the blackout's causes went a lot farther than a snafu in the Midwest. Considering that the grid New York City gets its energy from extends all the way west to Cleveland, south to Florida, and north well into Canada, it was the miscoordination of investment into power transmission and switching controls that led to the blackout's severity. That said, if New York had quicker break-points and more substantial local generating capacity (like the TransGas plant in question), the city either would have avoided a large-scale blackout altogether, or resumed power much sooner. As a New Yorker, you ought to look into where your power is coming from - it's not just somebody else's problem. That's an attitude that spawns a lot of local opposition to generating plants, and it's a misinformed one.
By the way, there are a ton of offshore wind power stations planned for the New York region - both off the south coast of Long Island, and further north. Check it out: http://www.awea.org/news/news030122lipa.html