Park and Deride

NYC Parks Advocates have posted the following on their website-and they are really concerned about the possible use of city park land for the proposed Mets mall on the west side of CitiField. As their spokesman Geoffrey Croft points out:

"Alienation Of Parkland? A rendering of 126th Street, with Citi Field on the left and a revitalized Willets Point on the right. The Bloomberg administration's Willets Point plan includes handing over acres of public parkland in Flushing Meadows Corona Park adjacent to Shea Stadium (CitiField) to be developed into a massive shopping mall. The current plan calls for erecting “Willets West” on the existing Citi Field Parks Department owned parking lot and turn it into a million- square-foot retail and entertainment center with more than 200 stores, movie theaters, restaurants, a parking structure and surface spaces for 2,500 cars."

The park advocates are also raising a seious question about that alleged 1961 agreement that the city is using to justify the transfer of this property and the drastic alteration from its current use:

"Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corp., claims a 1961 agreement with the Mets allows the parkland to developed. No word yet whether or not the "agreement" was approved by the state legislation which would be required in order to use the public park land for a non-park purpose."

If this purported agreement can't stand up to scrutiny it would put a severe crimp in what we call Bloomberg's Folly.