N.Y. has Olympic-sized hopes

Alexander Garvin, a Yale professor, wants to invite the world to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. Garvin, a native New Yorker and planning director of New York City 2012, presented his plans to an audience of about 100 students and faculty on Thursday evening in Meyerson Hall. "[I will] go to no end of lengths to figure out how to do this," he said. According to Garvin, there are three main criteria that the planning committee must meet in order to have a competitive chance at gaining the Games. The first of these requirements is finding a single site within the urban jungle of New York City to construct an Olympic Village able to accommodate more than 15,000 athletes and coaches for the duration of the Games, as well as a site for an Olympic Stadium that can accommodate 80,000 spectators. In Sydney this past summer, the city accomplished this by constructing a suburban Olympic Village 15 miles from the central business district. This would be unacceptable in the New York scheme. "The 2000 Games were a suburban Games," Garvin said. "In New York, we would want to have an urban Olympics." New York would also have to construct an efficient transportation system that could carry an extra half-million people -- the number of visitors that the Olympic Games usually bring to a city. The third and most essential requirement is financial feasibility. "To hold the Olympics in New York, it would be necessary to do it without spending a penny of the taxpayers' money," according to Garvin. Audience members were skeptical about the plausibility of this goal. "The money won't add up," said Dan Campo, a doctoral candidate in city planning. "The committee will have to solicit a lot of money from corporations and it isn't true that it won't cost taxpayers a dime." Garvin's proposal, a 600-page, three-volume bid packet, will be reviewed by the United States Olympic Committee in June 2001. The USOC will make its decision from a pool of seven other applicant cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Cincinnati, Tampa and the Baltimore-Washington area. Carrie Rothfeld, a student in the Graduate School of Fine Arts, said, "Compared to other cities, it's a good argument, but I wonder about the politics." Politically speaking, the C ity of New York will contend with a number of challenges. Garvin's proposal calls for the construction of several new subway connections, a new football stadium and a full ferry mass-transit system on the East and Harlem rivers. All of this construction would have to be completed in less than seven years, after the International Olympic Committee makes its final decision.

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