The West Side Stadium (also known as the New York Sports and Convention Center) was a proposed football stadium to be built on a platform over the rail yards on the West Side of Manhattan in New York City.
The arena would have been an all-weather facility with a retractable roof, allowing it to be used as either a 200,000 square feet (18,600 m2) indoor convention hall, or an 85,000 seat (75,000 post-Olympics) indoor/outdoor sporting event stadium. It was to be the new home for the New York Jets of the National Football League, who at the time of the proposal played at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey and were junior tenants to the New York Giants. The stadium was to have served as the centerpiece of New York's bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, but, after heated debate, the proposal was defeated a month before the International Olympic Committee was to make its decision.
The site was to link the transportation, hotel and business hub centered on Herald Square and Madison Square Garden with the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center. It was promoted by New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Congressman Charles Rangel, but opposed by most of the local elected officials representing the area. The centerpiece of the city's bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics, the stadium would have been part of a larger project to revitalize a long-underdeveloped area, including an expansion of the Javits Center and the 7 Subway Extension. It was going to host Super Bowl XLIV in 2010 along with a college bowl game with a Big East team to be known as the Big Apple Bowl.
Read more about West Side Stadium: Public Funds, Mixed Opinion, Television Ads, Yankees, Bidding, Politics, Olympic Decision, Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words west, side and/or stadium:
“These emblems of twilight have seen at length,
And the man red-faced and tall seen, leaning
In the day of his strength
Not as a pine, but the stiff form
Against the west pillar....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature,—here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It’s no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the Yankee Stadium of ancient times.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)