.600 is a phenomenal batting average for a major leaguer. It’s a woeful showing for the parking garages around Yankee Stadium, many of which are brand-new and financed by tax-exempt city bonds. And the failure of the garages is one the city could have seen coming.
The operator of the stadium-area garages, Bronx Parking Development, may now default on its bond obligations to the city, according to the NY Daily News. Four out of every 10 spaces in the garages are empty, in a year after the Yankees won the World Series. Among the reasons cited for the lack of drivers: “many fans… lured” to the Metro-North station built specially for the stadium at East 153rd Street.
Sound familiar? Back in 2006, Tri-State, along with 10 other organizations, warned that the new Metro-North station would make the increased garage capacity superfluous. At the time, the organizations said that public money should go to the Metro-North station, not the garages. The new stadium has fewer seats than the old, making the decision to add 3,600 parking spaces even more puzzling.
In addition to the approximately 5,000 fans (a bit lower in other accounts) taking Metro-North, the Daily News notes two other factors contributing to the high vacancies in the garages: cheaper parking nearby and a drop in reserved parking for season ticket holders.
Cheaper parking nearby also built by the NYC EDC! (Industrial Development Agency which financed all the Yankees parking is an EDC subsidiary).
Perhaps the folks who backed the excess parking should have actually traveled to a few games, by car (a nightmare) and by train/subway. I’ve been a partial season ticket holder for 10 years and have never driven, I always take the subway, which is hands down a better ride. The express 4 train sprints from Fulton to 14th street in something like 5-7 minutes and is a 30 minute trip to the stadium max. Maybe the brain trust that over built parking garages can find a way to covert them to low and moderate income housing as was done the sci-fi novel “The Lathe of Heaven”.
Even more ironic, considering that King George was screaming for years that he couldn’t keep the team in the Bronx due to lack of parking…no one would come. Now he’s got more parking, people are coming in droves, yet the parking isn’t needed.
I do hope the Bronx pols keep the pressure on to finish the parkland.
Juan Gonzalez quotes a figure of $10 for parking at the Gateway Center Mall, but the game-rate parking there is actually $21, versus the $23 charge for self-parking at the Yankees official garages. Thus, the savings for parking at the mall is $2, not $13. Unless, of course, you go into the mall to park as a “shopper,” and then happen to decide after parking that instead of shopping you’d rather go to the game. The shopping parking rate is $2.40 per hour. Maybe that’s where he got the $10 rate.
I should also add that even on game nights, there is PLENTY of excess unnecessary parking at the Gateway Center Mall. Everyone goes there by transit, by foot or by livery cab, or else they park curbside for free on the adjacent streets to avoid the $2.40 hourly parking rate.
I tried bringing this whole issue up when I was on the Community Board for the Yankee Stadium neighborhood. While virtually every “neighborhood person” in the room agreed with me every time I brought this issue up, I was always talked down to by the EDC officials or blasted as some “outide protestor” by Adolfo Carrion in the papers (even though the knucklehead appointed me!). While it’s great to be able to look back and say “I told you so!” the sad truth is that now we have all of these empty parking garages taking up space in my neighborhood where the parks used to be. And now that I have the happy occasion to have a wife who is pregnant…..we are looking to move because the replacement parkland that has been built is not to our satisfaction and we’ll have nowhere suitable to take our child once he/she is born. I am hoping I’ll be able to sell my apartment to a Yankees fanatic.