Editorial
Party in Our Backyard
For the third straight year, the grand finale of Bronx Week – the Bronx Week parade – will take place on Mosholu Parkway on Sunday, June 26. It’s a wonderful event that highlights not just Bronxites and their many organizations, but also our very own community.  Attendance at the parade has been less than it could be. Maybe that’s because people are not yet aware of the event. If they knew that a parade, food festival, and concert were in their own backyard, we can’t imagine they wouldn’t make plans to be there. So let’s show our community pride and get out to the Parkway!

Bronx Week itself is also an excellent opportunity to discover all the gifts our great borough has to offer.

Stadium Lessons
There are many lessons the mayor might learn from the saga of his failed plans for a Jets Stadium on the west side of Manhattan. The most important is that the outer-boroughs are not outer-space. In all his public statements, even on the day when the entire city seemed to be behind the alternative choice of Queens for an Olympic stadium, the mayor couldn’t help repeating that Queens was not the city’s first choice. The mayor, it seems, found it difficult to believe that Olympians or their fans would enjoy visiting the borough that is already the most international county on Earth.

The other thing we hope the mayor takes from this is that public opinion is not always the enemy. If he had listened to his fellow citizens, he might have championed a Queens stadium in the beginning, in which case he would have carried the torch across the finish line months ago. Instead, he staked his hopes on the ultra-obscure Public Authorities Control Board, which is the same shadowy three-men-in-a-room government (the governor, Assembly speaker and the sate Senate majority leader) New Yorkers love to hate. By doing that, a single assemblyman from a single legislative district (even the Speaker Silver himself admitted that he was acting on behalf of his lower east side constituents) was able to torpedo the mayor’s plan. Even though we’re happy with the outcome, the Control Board, which was created in the 1970s to make sure that other state authorities were not spending more than they had, should not be the place where mayors try to slip bad ideas (or even good ones) past taxpayers.

All this said, we applaud the mayor for taking only a day or so to mope over the demise of his West Side plans. If Rudy Giuliani were still mayor, we imagine he would have thrown a political tantrum, picked up his building blocks and gone home. Bloomberg wore his disappointment on his sleeve but he assailed no one and was quick to get back to the drawing board.

Now that the wheeling and dealing over stadiums is over, we hope the mayor and his administration will turn their attention to other outer-borough economic development projects like the Kingsbridge Armory. Only one small obstacle — finding a new home for the remaining National Guard troops stationed at the landmark facility — remains before redevelopment of the armory can begin. Getting this done would be easy. In an election year, it’s hard to imagine Mayor Bloomberg wouldn’t take the opportunity to take a victory lap around the Kingsbridge Armory.
 

Back to Opinion Index Page

News | Opinion | Schools | Features | Continuing Stories | Home
About Us | Past Issues