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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Mr Mephisto
Wow...
I started this thread to learn more about New York's Olympic bid. Now I'm totally lost in a mire of municipal politics and local sport fans...
I love TFP
Mr Mephisto |
It is amazing to find out that there's so many more layers to it than from the simplest of simplest that on it's face a stadium was going to be built over existing train yards. The idea is deeply rooted in Grand Central Terminal's lynchpin moment of creating some of the wealthiest properties in Manhattan by the creating of "air rights" and selling those rights.
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Grand Central Terminal is born
The plan was expensive. The railroad needed to invest in electrifying its rails, and carve deep into Manhattan's bedrock (workers would ultimately excavate 2.8 million cubic years of earth and rock). The solution to the projected $80 million project budget (roughly $2 billion in today's terms) came from Wilgus as well. Without steam engines, there was no longer a need for an open rail yard. Wilgus proposed that the area from 45th to 49th Streets be paved over and that real estate developers be allowed to erect buildings over the concealed tracks. In exchange for this privilege, developers would pay a premium to the New York Central Railroad for "air rights." Construction in the years immediately after the completion of Grand Central Terminal would include apartment buildings like the Marguery, the Park Lane, and the Montana, and hotels including the Barclay, the Chatham, the Ambassador, the Roosevelt, and finally the Waldorf-Astoria, completed in 1931. (For many years, hydraulic tanks in the basement of Grand Central Terminal supplied power to these buildings.)
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What's even more amazing though is the local players are all hard ball players. The Dolans (Cablevision) had a couple spats with Time Warner and they decided to stop carrying YES networks (Yankees baseball) offerings on both sides of the fence from cable affilliates, to owners not renegotiating with affiliates TWC, thus the people who lost out? the fans....
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