Loud, Fractious and Alive

This week I had a meeting with Caron Tschampion, a lovely young executive with Oxygen, about a project. It was our first meeting and in the course of our conversation she mentioned that she had recently moved back to New York from Los Angeles after a five year absence. As all people do who have lived in both places, we commented upon the differences between them.

Caron and I laughed as we discussed how LOUD New York is compared with Los Angeles [except for the LAPD helicopters that are omnipresent over crimes scenes]. Caron is living over in Clinton, the tony new name for Hell’s Kitchen, which, like everything in Manhattan, is constantly being renovated.

I told her we had abandoned SoHo for the quiet of Battery Park City, the one neighborhood, I think, in New York that is reasonably quiet most of the time, isolated as it is by the West Side Highway and its largely residential ambiance coupled with relative distance from a subway.

Los Angeles is certainly not as noisy as New York, particularly Manhattan. The quiet has driven several dedicated New Yorkers back to the volume of Manhattan and has also resulted in some New Yorkers I know who have moved to Los Angeles to vow never to return. I genuinely believe that Los Angeles is as intense as New York; it’s just spread out over a much larger area so its hum isn’t as loud.

The civic noise is loud in New York also, particularly around the city’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics. To do that, the city has decided they need to build a stadium in Manhattan on the West Side that will be a multi-purpose venue. One of those purposes will be to be the home of the Jets.

Now Cablevision, the folks who own Madison Square Garden, aren’t in favor of the stadium because, apparently, some of the multi-purpose uses would infringe on things the Garden already does – like host conventions and concerts and sporting events. So they have been putting up a very hard offense against the stadium. MILLIONS have gone into the television campaign to stop the stadium. MILLIONS have been spent campaigning against Cablevision’s campaign.

Cablevision recently decided to up the ante. Commercials were not carrying the day. So they offered to buy the land the Jets were bidding for by tendering an offer that was SIX times as large.

The land in question is owned by the MTA [the bus and subway folks]. Faced with this sudden turn of events and a half billion more dollars on the table the cash strapped MTA decided that they would now put the land up for open bid.

Now inquiring minds want to know: shouldn’t that have been done in the first place?

But, in the amazing world of New York – or, in fact, probably any American city – no, that isn’t what happened. What happened was what now looks like a cozy inside deal that might well have been good for the city in general is now blown wide apart.

The court of public opinion wasn’t enough. It didn’t manage the outcome as well as the players expected so now let’s get down to the real game: the money. If we can accomplish our goals with an ad campaign that’s great! What’s twenty million?

The campaign didn’t work so Cablevision decided to go another direction —a straight buy out of the MTA land at a price that far exceeds anything on the table.

So, at the end of the day, New York is still being what New York is about: loud, fractious, and alive. All about money; all about being a player in the game – whatever that game is. All about being New York.

Twenty one years ago, Los Angeles did the Olympics well. But New York doesn’t have a Peter Ueberroth to pull it together. It just has itself: fractious, aloud, alive, divisive and determined to play but lacking a central character to guide the city to its goal: to host the 2012 Olympics.