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Neighborhood rubble or renaissance?

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON | STAFF WRITER

8:11 AM EST, April 1, 2005

What might the future on the far West Side look like?

September 2012. The Olympics are over, and West Siders emerge from their high-rise 11th Avenue condos to reclaim their neighborhood. They stroll past the Olympic stadium, which after spending two glorious weeks as a global architectural icon, is now reverting to its role as convention center and getting ready to welcome 45,000 pharmacologists. Meanwhile, teenagers sun themselves on the lawn across the street and mill around the clothing and music stores in the stadium's ground floor. A group of rollerbladers on their way through Hudson River Park pause for a snack and the view from one of the waterfront cafes. A family ambling along the new, elevated High Line Park funnels into the stadium's public walkway, down an escalator and out into the green market next door.

Or:

September 2012. The Olympics are over, and the West Side is quickly reverting to its pre-Games desolation. Trucks and cars emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel clog 11th Avenue. On 34th Street, a lone luxury apartment tower sits, semi-vacant, because how many New Yorkers will spend $7,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment across the street from a stadium, but a 20-minute walk to the nearest source of edamame? Long Island teenagers who emerge from the LIRR in the new Penn Station on Eighth Avenue invariably drift east toward the Jumbotron jungle of Times Square, not west to the stadium's echoey mall where, when the shopping gets tiresome, there is nowhere else to go.

Neither of these scenarios is foreordained. Even if an unlikely constellation of events occurred -- if the Jets' $720 million bid for the Hudson Rail Yards glided through the approvals process, if the team flicked away the swarm of lawsuits and protests, if the International Olympic Committee chose New York City as the site of the 2012 Olympics and if the stadium's chief paladin Mayor Michael Bloomberg won re-election in November -- the urban future of Manhattan's West Side would still be shrouded in murk.

I doubt that the stadium/convention center would inject new juice into a neighborhood that now exhibits all the vitality of the long-term parking lot at JFK. But it's possible, and sustained good planning could increase its likelihood.

Among the stadium plan's disinterested cheerleaders is the estimable architect Frederic Schwartz, who as the designer of the Staten Island Ferry's Whitehall Terminal, knows something about stitching streets and subways into an architectural design. Schwartz believes that far from becoming a glowering, glitzy bunker surrounded by acres of grit, the Jets stadium as designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox could trigger a West Side renaissance.

"This design has retail and activity surrounding it, so it will be a building that's truly integrated into a city block," Schwartz said. With ground-floor stores and sidewalk-facing restaurants, the behemoth will convert Hell's Kitchen into a real estate magnet, while the stadium's form -- reminiscent of a metal shawl draped over a box frame -- will grace the postcards of Manhattan.

That is a fine dream, and I wish I could share it with conviction. But I side with Jeremy Soffin, communications director at the Regional Plan Association, whose reaction to the Jets' urbanistic aspirations ranges from disgust to disdain. The stores, he insists, are a sop. In reality, the stadium will erect a colossal barrier between the city and the riverfront and draw what street life 11th Avenue can muster off the sidewalk and into the mall. Nor is he impressed with the notion that a stadium doubling as a convention center would bring much vim to the surrounding blocks. The Javits Center, after all, is a hunkered monstrosity with all the charm of a penitentiary, and there's no reason to think that it would improve by expansion.

"The idea of a convention center is to suck people inside and trap them there," Soffin said. "You don't want them leaving for a walk at lunch, because they might not come back."

So much for the vision of 45,000 pharmacologists pouring into the streets of Hell's Kitchen, looking for a good time.