Trump’s Cards Should Be Played in Brooklyn

A question: Is there anybody out there who really cares if they build a domed stadium a few hundred yards from Shea Stadium? Is there anybody among the common folk lusting to see New York City advance $150 million to millionaire Donald Trump to help him build a stadium that he says will eventually bring untold riches upon the city?

Does anybody, to use an old expression, smell a rat in all of this? Does the word “boondoggle” flash across the sky above Trump’s proposed domed stadium?

Is it a coincidence that Mayor Ed Koch and Gov. Mario Cuomo, fresh from a defeat in trying to put across a new road project that nobody but the contractors and their people wanted, are ready to commit taxpayers’ money to a stadium to be built next to a stadium the city already owns?

Are we all suffering so in not having the Jets or Giants in New York City proper? I am as indignant as the next fellow that the Giants and Jets skedaddled out of the city to take the cushy financial deal New Jersey handed them, but so what? Most of us see the Giants and Jets on television as much as we ever did. And a good proportion of the Giants and Jets’ ticket-holders don’t seem to mind the schlep over to Jersey.

If anybody should be angry about the Giants and Jets in Jersey, it’s the taxpayers of that wonderful state. While a chunk of the money bet at New York race tracks goes to the state, to help pay for programs that benefit the public, most of the equivalent income at The Meadowlands race track doesn’t relieve the Jersey tax burden but is siphoned off to pay off construction on the stadiums that provide such handsome homes for the Giants and Jets and the Nets and Devils. If the Jersey taxpayers are willing to stand for that in their lust to be regarded as big-time, that’s their business. With all their generosity, the poor suckers can’t even get the Giants or Jets to change their names from New York to New Jersey.

Ostensibly, the whole reason for building a new domed stadium is to lure the Jets back to New York. But Trump says for the record that his friend Leon Hess, owner of the Jets, won’t come back to New York. So that means Trump, of all people, is being relied on to come up with some other National Football League team, which is the guarantee the city says it wants before it will commit money to clear land and build access roads for Trump’s new Xanadu.

Does it make sense to rely on Trump, a man who is a power in the rival United States Football League, the league that is suing the NFL, to lure another NFL team here? The man who heads the city corporation that bestowed the stadium deal upon Trump says Trump doesn’t really mean that about the Jets, that it’s just a negotiating ploy. Well, if we discount Trump’s words on that not-so-piddling matter, who’s to say on which items he can be believed?

Just what is going on here? How in the world has this scheme even gotten as far as it has? Do we need an innocent child out there to shout, “The emperor has no clothes?”

In view of the contempt we feel for cities like Los Angeles and Indianapolis for luring franchises from other cities, do we want New York scheming to steal football franchises from St. Louis or Philadelphia? St. Louis is a viable city. If the Cardinals can’t make it there, it’s because they have inept ownership, the decadeds-long bumbling Bidwell family. Why reward the Bidwells for their inadequacies in St. Louis by handing them a free stadium in New York.? San Francisco did that for Horace Stoneham, who ran the New York Giants’ baseball franchise into the ground. He did the same in San Francisco, and that poor burg is still trying to get out from under the Stoneham legacy of failure.

I could go on to point out the almost insurmountable problems the networks would have in attempting to schedule telecasts of three New York area NFL teams on a weekend, but better, a word to Donald Trump.

Donald, you are such a big thinker, such a master builder, it seems to me you are being untrue to yourself in fleshing out this mere 82,000-seat, $286 million dollar domed stadium.

If, despite the objections of us quibblers, you forge ahead on this stadium idea, you should think of more than just a stadium. Consider rebuilding an entire borough.

Forget Queens and think of Brooklyn. Ask anybody who knows Brooklyn--didn’t so many of us know it so well once--and they’ll tell you that Brooklyn went downhill when it lost the Dodgers and Ebbets Field.

Do you see what I am driving at, Donald? If you continue to lust for that stadium, don’t just build a stadium, Donald. Turn your vision on Brooklyn.