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New York Region Finally Kicks Off New Generation of Sports Facilities

As professional sports teams in dozens of markets around the nation built 63 new stadiums and arenas since 1990, the New York metropolitan area stuck to its aging facilities – until now. But the sudden surge of projects raises capacity questions.

By Jack Buehrer

New York sports fans have been living in the past.

While baseball fans across the country have been treated to trendy new stadiums over the last 15 years, Yankees and Mets fans have continued to watch paint peel at their aging, outdated ballparks.

As state-of-the-art venues popped up around the National Football League, Jets and Giants faithful have filled the no-frills, three decades-old Giants Stadium every autumn Sunday. And basketball and hockey fans in New York and New Jersey haven’t seen a new big-league venue since the Brendan Byrne Arena, now Continental Airlines Arena, opened in East Rutherford, N.J., in 1981.

But the tide is changing. Stadium and arena projects worth nearly $3 billion are currently under construction in the New York City metropolitan area, and another $1 billion is under consideration.

Work is well under way on the new $800 million Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and the $600 million Citi Field for the Mets in Queens, both of which are expected to open in 2009. Work also began on a new $1.4 billion home for the Jets and Giants this summer at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford.

Meanwhile, the $375 million, 800,000-sq-ft Prudential Center is set to open this fall in Newark to house hockey’s New Jersey Devils and Division 1 NCAA basketball for the Seton Hall University Pirates, both of which will vacate the Continental arena at the Meadowlands complex.

Work may also soon start on a $435 million arena in Brooklyn that is intended to house the National Basketball Association’s Nets franchise, which also plays in the Continental arena. The new venue, designed by Frank Gehry of Los Angeles, would be part of the $4 billion Atlantic Yards development that Brooklyn’s Forest City Ratner is aiming to start this year.

Even Major League Soccer is in on the act planning the region’s first soccer-only venue in Harrison, N.J., a new $130 million stadium for the New York Red Bulls.

“This is unprecedented,” says Dan Doctoroff, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding. “[Metro] New York sort of missed [the recent stadium boom] the first time around... In the next four years, we’ll have six new facilities.”

One question that arises, with all of the stadium and arena activity coming together at once, is whether the construction industry has capacity to absorb the work – especially when the market is also booming in other sectors.

“The capacity of the contractors will be an issue as these projects move forward,” says Lou Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association of New York. “When you put these major sports venue projects together with the rest of the market, that’s a problem.”

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Planning Beyond the Sports Purpose     

The stadium and arena projects now under development all have individual roots but common elements as well. For instance, several follow previous failed bids.

As far back as the early 1990s, the Yankees made various announcements about the team’s desire to have a new stadium, though the earlier search included the possibilities of moving to Manhattan or New Jersey. The Jets made a high-profile bid in 2004 to construct a $2.2 billion football stadium on Manhattan’s West Side that ultimately failed a year later because of opposition from state legislators.

 “Stadiums always take years to get off the ground,” says Neil DeMause, a New York sports business writer. “[Former N.Y.C. Mayor Rudy] Giuliani ended up laying the groundwork, while [current Mayor Michael] Bloomberg will get his name on the plaques.”

Past failures eventually helped the baseball stadiums come about, adds DeMause, who in 1998 co-authored “Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit.” He says an ill-fated effort championed by Giuliani to move the Yankees to Manhattan in the mid-1990s made it easier for plans to take shape on the current stadium projects, particularly because the earlier bid called for public investment in the stadiums, while today’s plans call for public money for infrastructure around them.

“[Yankees president] Randy Levine and the Yankees were working behind the scenes on this deal since 2001, which is to a large degree why they were able to avoid the public controversy that killed the Jets stadium,” DeMause says.

Yankee team officials refused to grant interviews.

Mets officials say their plans were delayed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I think we would have started [a new stadium] five, six years ago, if not for Sept. 11,” says Fred Wilpon, the Mets COO. “But understandably, we were way down Mayor Giuliani’s list of priorities after everything happened. We realized the city had to recover.”

Once the team got a call from the city in 2005, both sides were ready to go.

At around that time, Newark officials were negotiating with the Devils on the new downtown arena, and Forest City Ratner announced its plans to build the Brooklyn arena. And while the Jets stadium plan died, talks that the Giants were having with New Jersey officials soon expanded to include the Jets in what will be the NFL’s first facility built specifically to be home for two franchises.

“To some extent, it’s a function of good economic times and changes in stadium financing, and, in part, it’s a result of the region having unacceptably old facilities,” Doctoroff says. 

 There is also an element of one big project opening opportunities for others, says Thomas Scarangello, managing principal of Thornton Tomasetti, a structural engineer working for the Yankees, Giants-Jets, Devils, and Nets projects.

“We have seen this phenomenon before in cities – such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, Nashville, Detroit, Denver, and Kansas City – where one team gets their deal done [and] the dominoes fall,” he says. “What is unique about the New York metro projects is their scale and cost, the rapid succession of the new facility openings, and the high visibility and heritage of the venues being replaced.”

Another vein courses through most of the regional projects – a changed thinking about the role of arenas and stadiums. While existing sports facilities in the region are largely unconnected to nearby neighborhoods, all of the facilities currently under construction are considered the focal elements of larger, multiuse developments meant to spur revitalization.

“Stadiums give the communities an identity, but we’re building around the identity,” Doctoroff says. “We’re of the mind that a stadium itself should not be the end result. It should be part of something bigger. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here and [in New Jersey].”

To that end, Newark’s 18,000-seat arena will have retail, dining, and residential elements that city officials hope will bolster a downtown redevelopment.

While the new Yankee Stadium for 53,000 fans is being built across the street from the old venue, city officials have described it as the “anchor” of a planned revitalization of the South Bronx. And officials call the new Citi Field part of a broader redevelopment of Flushing in Queens.

Meanwhile, the arena is the centerpiece of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn that will have residential, commercial, and retail. The 25,000-seat Red Bull Park in Harrison is the hub of its own $1 billion mixed-use development.

Even the new 82,000-seat stadium for the Giants and Jets is intended to link with Xanadu, a $2.3 billion entertainment and retail development under construction at the Meadowlands complex.

Two More Arenas Wait in the Wings

The region’s arena roster may still expand if New York City and Nassau County – and a few developers – have it their way.

The first plan is tied to a major redevelopment of the James A. Farley U.S. Post Office in Manhattan, an $880 million project that was set to start last year, creating the new Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station just west of Pennsylvania Station. But the plans stalled because of the possibility that the New York-based development team of the Related Cos. and Vornado Realty Trust could add another big-name tenant – a new Madison Square Garden within Farley’s footprint. 

Were the plan to succeed, the NBA’s Knicks, NHL’s Rangers, and WNBA’s Liberty would move across Eighth Avenue from where the current Garden stands above Penn Station. The city and developers would be able to build  nearly 5 million sq ft of office space in its place.

Although no plans have been formally submitted and no cost estimates announced publicly, Bloomberg’s administration is on board.

“It’s very complicated,” says Dan Doctoroff, N.Y.C. deputy mayor for economic development. “Not only do you have to move Madison Square Garden west, but you have to rebuild two train stations and add millions of square feet for offices and hotels. Something like that involves many, many players. But everyone would like to see it happen. We're hopeful.”

Meanwhile, on Long Island, Charles Wang, owner of the NHL’s New York Islanders, has formed Lighthouse Development Group with Scott Reckler, a New York developer, in hopes executing a $200 million renovation of Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. It would be part of a $1.6 billion development that would include a residential and retail complex.

“The county is doing its part to make this deal happen,” says Joe Calderoni, a spokesman for Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi. The plan was headed this summer to zoning authorities.

 Broader Impact on Building Industry 

With large construction programs such as the redevelopment of the World Trade Center in Manhattan or construction of the $3.8 billion first phase of the Second Avenue Subway line already in progress, industry observers are assessing the impact of the sports building wave.

The sports work alone won’t bleed the industry of laborers but could worsen a lack of managers, the BTEA’s Coletti says.

“The labor market has an institutional mechanism to deal with shortages with their apprenticeship programs,” he adds. “But you don’t manufacture a good project superintendent or project manager overnight.”

The industry is already seeing fewer subcontractors lining up for major projects, in some cases because firms know there is plenty of work, says Pat Di Filippo, executive vice president of Turner Construction of New York, which is construction manager on Yankee Stadium. Some subcontractors are skeptical of taking on specialized work for stadiums when other opportunities are available.

“If you’re a concrete sub with a company built to go vertical, and you take on a stadium project where every move, every point is custom, there’s going to be some anxiety,” he adds. “As attractive as [the projects] are, they’re thinking, ‘Do I really want to do that?’ A lot of subs...will do what they do best.”

Indeed, Scarangello says stadium and arena projects have specialized elements.

“The sports boom...requires a crash course on the challenges of stadia construction,” he adds. “These include long-span roofs and large stadia cantilevers; unique building geometry; specialized components [such as] precast stadia, light standards, and scoreboards; and the unyielding deadline of an opening day.”

The key to surviving in today’s megaproject climate is for construction firms to know their strengths and limitations, says John Cavanagh of John A. Cavanagh Consulting Services of New York.

“There’s plenty of work out there, but there are plenty of firms out there, too,” he says. “The smart ones aren’t taking on too much at once. The dumb ones are.” 

Carolina Worrell contributed to this article.

The Stadium Specialists by Jack Buehrer As sports fans in the New York City area have watched new stadiums and arenas pop up all over the country, they may not have known that many of the new baseball, football, and basketball venues – including major and minor league, as well as collegiate – were designed by Kansas City’s HOK Sport + Venue + Event. The architecture firm, which spun off in 1983 as a stand-alone affiliate of its parent firm, St. Louis-based Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, has dominated sports venue design in recent years. Now, as the primary architects for the new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, Citi Field in Queens, and the Prudential Center in Newark, the firm is ready to leave its mark on New York. In the region, no other firm is taking on the same scope. The rest include the new Meadowlands Stadium designed by Philadelphia-based Ewing Cole and 360 Architecture of Kansas City; the new basketball arena planned for Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards complex designed by Frank Gehry of Los Angeles; and the new Red Bull Park soccer stadium planned for Harrison, N.J., with interior design by Rossetti Architects of Detroit. HOK Sport was still looking for its signature venue when it broke the mold in designing Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which the Baltimore Orioles opened in 1992. The baseball-only facility, built in downtown Baltimore, changed how the upstart Kansas City-based firm was viewed in the industry. “Camden Yards...brought us into the urban setting that paid homage to baseball’s past, which has become incredibly popular since,” says Bob White, director of marketing for HOK Sport. The sports firm started out with five architects, all of whom had worked for Kivett & Myers, which in the late 1960’s designed the Truman Sports Complex in Kansas City, which includes Kauffman Stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s Royals, and Arrowhead Stadium, home to the National Football League’s Chiefs. In 1987, HOK Sport designed Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium, now known as Pro Player Stadium, one of its highest-profile jobs leading up to Camden Yards. In 1999, HOK Sport merged with London-based LOBB Sports and expanded its reach across the globe. It has now designed facilities all over the world, such as the Taipei Arena in Taiwan, built in 2005, and the new Wembley Stadium in London that opened this year. “We have a healthy market share for which we’re very appreciative,” White says. White says that his firm sees about 20 to 25 “major projects” on the horizon and several older stadiums in need of upgrades. “We knew the industry was headed in a direction of globalization,” he says. “It’s certainly a finite market and we may hit a ceiling, but we think the business is still there.”