Wailing Into The Void

Stephen A. thinks the Yankees should sign Manny, which is reason enough to convince me they shouldn’t.

Hank and Hal are breaking the bank, committing roughly $426 million to three free agents over the last 10 days or so.  The economy in NYC should suck next year but the baseball should be good.

Making the most of my unemployment, I took a bike ride out to the half-destroyed Shea Stadium and nearly finished Citi Field earlier today.  Riding up 126th St. it’s impossible not to notice the odd juxtaposition of the sparkling, upscale entertainment complex that is Citi Field on one side of the street and the row of sundry auto repair shops on the other.  I was amazed that these businesses were still there, and can’t imagine they will remain there much longer.

A quick search of the internet indicates that they won’t.  The city has already bought up over 60% of businesses in the few blocks adjacent to Citi Field and the city council has voted to permit the use of eminent domain to seize property from any remaining holdouts.  This is all part of a $3 billion development plan that is supposed to revitalize the area, although these promises of revitalization from politicians smack of the same hooey that the city used to try to shove the Atlantic Yards down our throats here in Brooklyn.  They also talk about the new Yankee Stadium being the centerpiece of a plan to revitalize the South Bronx.  Don’t hold your breath on that one.

While my observations are admittedly casual and unscientific, it seems that any type of sports or entertainment complex serves as a poor centerpiece for an economic revitalization project.  The most reliable foundation of any economic revitalization is the availability of good-paying jobs, and these types of projects don’t provide that to the surrounding community.  People will come to Citi Field, yes.  They will drop a lot of money there and probably in whatever chichi bars, restaurants and shops spring up in the area immediately surrounding the stadium, but once you get beyond that tiny enclave the impact of this influx of cash will be negligible.

Forest Hills’ LIRR station isn’t looking so hot these days.

Sure, the city claims that it doesn’t issue any kind of parking ticket quotas to its traffic cops, but if that’s the case it makes you wonder how something like this can happen:

Critics of the city’s enforcement policies say that some agents, under pressure to produce numbers, write bogus summonses by, for example, “dumping” them repeatedly on abandoned cars. City officials say such instances are isolated. But the data do present some curious situations, like the 267 tickets, all unpaid, issued to a 1989 Nissan that was parked near the Brooklyn Navy Yard for the past 17 months. Most of the tickets were issued by a police officer, although several traffic agents had also left summonses on the car. The fines now total $32,964.

City marshals and sheriffs are authorized to tow cars with at least $350 in delinquent parking tickets. But this car was tagged repeatedly for the same three or four violations, even after it had two flat tires and no visible license plate and was parked about two blocks from the Brooklyn Tow Pound.

After The Times began asking about the car, it was towed away by the police.

Mayor Bloomberg’s approval rating has dropped nine points in the last month.  He’s still at a very healthy 59 percent, but there are signs trouble may be brewing:

Significantly, 47 percent of voters said they believed the city was headed in the wrong direction, compared with 45 percent who said the city is on the right path. By comparison, two years ago, in a March 2006 Marist survey, 64 percent of registered voters said the city was moving in the right direction compared with 30 percent who thought it was going the wrong way.

Oh joy.  In order to balance its budget, the MTA is proposing severe cuts in service coupled by a rise in fares:

Mr. Sander said the route alterations “will result in extra transfers, longer travel times, longer wait times and longer walking time.” Trains would be more crowded. Subway cars would be cleaned less frequently. Station booths would be closed. Bus service would be cut back on weekends and at nights. The express-bus fare would rise to $7.50 from $5. The cost of the Access-a-Ride paratransit service for disabled riders would rise.

All these crazy measures are being proposed because the MTA is required by law to pass a balanced budget, regardless of general economic circumstances.  I don’t know enough (but I plan to start learning) about the laws to know if there are any feasible means for waiving this requirement in the face of dire circumstances, but if there are they ought to be considered.

This photo is not of Yankee Stadium, Google. C’mon.  It looks like the Polo Grounds to me, although I’m not positive about that.

Google now has the LIFE photo archive up.  I’m grateful for the new time-waster but wondering who’s in charge of the captioning these photos.  I’m pretty sure the photo below is of the Williamsburg Bridge, not the Brooklyn Bridge as Google is trying to tell me.

It turns out Mayor Bloomberg won’t be putting a halt to those $400 rebate checks to homeowners as he announced a few weeks ago.  He needs City Council approval for such a move.  Whoops.  I’d hate to be the person on Mayor Mike’s staff who’s responsible for this screw-up.