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Difficulty of Work Blamed for Delays Replacing Park Space Lost to Yankee Stadium

A parks department official, called before the City Council to explain why an effort to replace recreation space lost to construction of the new Yankee Stadium has been plagued by delays and cost overruns, said on Tuesday that the department’s inexperience with such complex projects was partly to blame.

The city was required to build new parks in the Bronx after Macombs Dam Park and a portion of John Mullaly Park were chosen as the site of the new stadium. State and federal law dictate that a similar amount of parkland of equal or greater fair market value replace the old parks.

The Parks and Recreation Department originally said that seven of the eight replacement parks would be completed by April 2009, in time for opening day at the new stadium. The eighth, Heritage Field, planned for the site of the current stadium, had been scheduled to open in December 2010, after the stadium is demolished, but that date has been pushed back to 2011.

Earlier this year, the agency said the completion of some of the parks would be delayed for as long as two years and cost $174 million, up from an earlier estimate of $95.5 million. The new figures prompted the City Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee to call for a hearing.

On Tuesday, council members asked Liam Kavanagh, the parks department’s first deputy commissioner, a series of pointed questions, including whether the agency had been dishonest about its original cost estimates.

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Erotic artwork bares ‘SoBro’ culture clash

“Hyde Park ” (2008) by South Bronx artist Emily Stedman. Ms. Stedman’s paintings were exhibited at Bruckner Bar and Grilll in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx. The paintings were subsequently removed following local opposition to their erotic nature.

Some creative types streaming across the Harlem River in search of the city’s “next” neighborhood are starting to find their new home to still be more South Bronx than “SoBro.”

At least that’s artist Emily Stedman’s conclusion after her show, “Erotic Watercolors,” was pulled off a neighborhood gallery’s walls when patrons at adjacent restaurant deemed it offensive.

“I expected it to be an anything goes, sky’s-the-limit, open kind of place,” said Stedman, 59, who left her loft in TriBeCa for Mott Haven in December after tiring of hearing people at gallery openings talk more about real estate prices than art on the walls.

“I’ve been in New York a long time and there’s always a neighborhood where people move to — a Williamsburg or a Long Island City, and it seemed like Mott Haven was going to be the next place. I don’t know if that is still going to happen.”

Her show features soft watercolors of couples or threesomes in various states of embrace. The opening earlier this month at the Bruckner Gallery attracted dozens of art patrons.

But the owner of the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a hip new dining spot which owns the gallery, ordered the show to come down after some of the neighborhood old guard — who rented out the space for golden wedding anniversaries and the like — considered the paintings pornographic.

“A lot of young people have moved here, but you still have a lot of old timers coming in for parties or what not,” said Alex Abeles, the bar’s owner. “We didn’t want to take it down but you could see that it collided with the ideas of people.”

Stedman, who has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at galleries in Chelsea, said she was shocked that the show was closed, and added that it was hard to imagine something like it happening in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

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Who Says: We should have known this was coming. Just wait until the start tearing down the old stadium and find that the land is contaminated from an oil leak from the stadiums oil tanks..

Time and Cost Rise for Yankee Stadium Parks

 Anthony Santiago, left, and his twin brother, Christopher, playing in a temporary park at Jerome Avenue and East 161st Street.

 Cost estimates for eight small parks around the new Yankee Stadium have almost doubled.

The cost of replacing two popular parks where the new Yankee Stadium is being built has nearly doubled. At the same time, several of the eight new parks, which were supposed to be completed before the new stadium opens next spring, have been delayed by as much as two years, according to city documents.

The price of the new small parks — which are to replace tennis and basketball courts, a running track and baseball and soccer fields eliminated to make way for the new stadium — is now projected to be $174 million, almost one-seventh the cost of the $1.3 billion stadium itself. The original estimate had been $95.5 million. The increase comes amid skyrocketing costs for construction projects, both public and private, around the city.

The stadium is being financed by the Yankees with city subsidies, while the eight new parks for the South Bronx, which range in size from 0.24 acre to 8.9 acres, are being paid for by the city.

None of the replacement parks have been completed, and construction on several has not yet started; however, the parks department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area, opened a ball field this spring at a school almost a mile to the east, and is building a sports field at a recreation center about a mile to the north.

The city was required to build the new parks after it selected the 28.4-acre Macombs Dam Park and a portion of the 18.5-acre John Mullaly Park as the site of the new stadium in 2005. State and federal law dictated that a similar amount of parkland nearby of equal or greater fair market value be built to replace the parks that would be lost.

Some residents have been critical of the trade-off. While Macombs Dam and Mullaly Parks were almost contiguous stretches of grass and trees amid the concrete topography of the South Bronx, the replacement parks are small parcels scattered around the area. The sites include sports fields atop a planned stadium parking garage and a park along the Harlem River, which is on the opposite side of the Major Deegan Expressway.

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Bronx Hospitality, Unnoticed by the Tourist Guides

The folks who published AAA’s 2008 New York tour book had a hard time recommending any hotels in the Bronx. They could only find one, in fact, a rather bland-looking building a mile north of Yankee Stadium by a service road to the Major Deegan Expressway

Hey, the hotel fared better than restaurants, since the automobile club’s guide does not list a single place to eat in the Bronx. As far as the guide goes, Arthur Avenue, Morris Park Avenue or City Island do not exist.

This 45-room Howard Johnson is the only hotel listed for the Bronx in AAA’s 2008 New York tour book.

It is an odd distinction for that lone hotel, a Howard Johnson of no particular architectural distinction. And given the borough’s long battles against hot sheet motels that rent rooms by the hour, a casual observer might assume this place was no different.

But it is a real hotel catering to real tourists. One day last week, the parking lot was filled with cars from out of state, most belonging to guests who had come to see the Yankees play Cleveland. Retirees from Oklahoma and families from upstate New York eagerly hauled suitcases upstairs as they prepared to change into baseball jerseys and take in a game.

Chadd Morris and Brandon Bebout had driven eight hours from Cleveland to score game tickets. They asked a local police officer for the nearest hotel and were directed to the HoJo.

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One Bad Apple Won’t Spoil the Whole Green Bunch

To mark Earth Day on Tuesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued its second annual “Green Apples and Bad Apples” report, which identifies five promising environmental developments and five things or places that aren’t so good for the environment. One of the biggest complaints: businesses that leave the doors open while running the air-conditioning at full blast. Our colleague Clyde Haberman has complained about this phenomenon in his NYC column, in 2006 and 2007, but it was interesting to see a leading environmental advocacy group take up the banner.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said in its report:

Whatever benefits it may have as a customer lure, this practice has significant adverse energy and air pollution impacts. According to the Long Island Power Authority, retailers increase their electricity consumption by 20 percent to 25 percent when they leave their doors open. And increasing power demand on the hottest summer days also leads to increased air pollution, as the auxiliary backup power supplies are called upon to meet peak demands. Unnecessarily boosting summer peak power demands can even make occasional brownouts more likely. In short, this is a practice that places personal business considerations over societal needs.

Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, has proposed legislation that would forbid businesses from leaving their doors open while air-conditioners are running. It is hard to say what the bill’s prospects are.

The defense counsel listed these other “bad apples”:

* The M.T.A.’s recycling program. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority does not provide separate recycling receptacles for paper and for metals, glass and plastic, as the transit systems in Chicago, Washington, Boston, Montreal and San Francisco do. The M.T.A. does perform “post-collection separation” — picking through the trash, after collection, to cull out recyclables — but that process, in which recyclables are mixed in with food waste and other trash before being separated, “inevitably leads to higher levels of contaminated recyclables,” according to the council. (The M.T.A. has provided large paper recycling bins at Grand Central Terminal for Metro-North Railroad riders.)

* The New York Organic Fertilizer Company and Hunts Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, both in the Bronx. Under a city contract, the fertilizer plant, which opened in 1992, treats several hundred tons a day of sludge from city sewage plants, drying the sludge and turning it into “pellets” for eventual use as fertilizer. The wastewater treatment plant, a few blocks away, treats raw sewage from parts of the Bronx (and from Rikers Island and City Island) before discharging it into surrounding waters.

* The former site of the Ridgewood Reservoir in Queens. The Ridgewood Reservoir was a major source of drinking water for Brooklyn in the middle and late part of the 19th century and into the 20th century. After 1900, as city relied more on its Catskill and Delaware system, the Ridgewood Reservoir was used and less; its last use under regular repair service was in 1959. The complex was transferred in 2004 to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, which wanted to turn much of the area into recreational like bike paths and artificial-turf ball fields. “But the Reservoir’s water storage basins, empty for decades, now provide a unique area for observing the process of urban reforestation,” the council said. Read more..

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