Village Voice: Series Returns to Bronx, Bringing Thin Trickle of Business to Local Merchants

The surprise here should be that anyone is surprised. “What a shocker!” exclaimed sports economist Robert Baade of Lake Forest College when he was told that Yankee neighbors are suffering. “When you look at this new generation of stadiums, they’re little walled cities. They’re trying to capture as much spending as possible inside the stadium, and that really works against spillover to the neighborhoods. Why go out into the neighborhood if you can get everything you want right there?”

Joyce Hogi, a Grand Concourse resident who was one of the leading opponents of the Yanks’ stadium project (and who warned in Congressional testimony two years ago that the new eatery-packed edifice could hurt local businesses), says it’s “regrettable” that many local merchants testified in favor of the project, thinking it would help their bottom line. “We tried to show them how the plans were drawn up to shepherd fans from the garages and trains right into the stadium,” she says. Sure enough, she continues, this season “from the first day, the police put up barricades and would not even let fans walk up the street.”

Meanwhile, there are worries that things could get even worse for local stores, thanks to a rezoning of 161st Street that was quietly pushed through the city land-use process and approved by the city council last month. In zoningspeak, the new district replaces much of the 161st Street shopping corridor’s old C8-3 designation (no housing, only low-scale commercial) with a new C6-3D zone, allowing residential or commercial buildings with a floor area ratio of 9 — which in practice could mean a 20-story condo tower rising on the site of Stan’s Sports Bar. But we’re sure that if that ever happened, they’d bring the ghosts with them.

Nooo…not Stan’s! (must return and demand back a tiny liver shard I left behind)