STADIA MANIA.(stadiums)

A couple of weeks ago, after parliamentary maneuvering killed the Mayor's plans for a football stadium on Manhattan's West Side, a lament went up, among city planners and real-estate developers, that it had become impossible to get things done in New York. Oh, for the bulldozer days. So it was a little startling when, just a week later, the city announced deals with the Mets and the Yankees to build new ballparks next door to their current ones. This brought to four the number of giant sports projects in store for the city, the other two being an arena for the Nets in Brooklyn and an eighty-thousand-seat racetrack for nascar on Staten Island. So much for impossible, or even hard.

Between stadium announcements, a new voice inadvertently joined the fray of those in favor and those opposed, though the combatants were hardly listening. Ry Cooder released an album, a song cycle called "Chavez Ravine," about the Mexican-American neighborhood in Los Angeles whose residents were evicted in the fifties to make way for Dodger Stadium. (The Dodgers, of course, went to L.A. because they had failed to get their dream stadium, a Buckminster Fuller dome, built in Brooklyn.) Cooder's album, which, in the spirit of his "Buena Vista Social Club" project, features old musicians from East L.A., chronicles this buried bit of Angeleno history from the point of view of participants real and imagined: the public-housing official and huac victim Frank Wilkinson, the power broker and red-baiter Fritz Burns, a demolition man, a zoot-suiter, a parking attendant's ghost. There is also a "space vato"--a space dude--who, hearing some pachuco pop on the radio of his spaceship, touches down in Chavez Ravine, looking for fun. The idea is that this was a blessed little slum, "a poor man's Shangri-La," where life was good and music filled the air, until the muddleheaded utopians and greedy grandees plowed it all under.

As for New York's stadium dramas, consulting Cooder is a bit like calling in that space vato. For one thing, Cooder is an L.A. cat. For another, none of the projects proposed here would do to a neighborhood what Dodger Stadium did to the Ravine, though the Nets' plan, which envisions a monolithic entertainment complex along Atlantic Avenue, calls for the demolition of some residential buildings. (The Yankees will take over a park; the Mets a parking lot; nascar an abandoned oil-tank farm.) Still, sometimes a space vato, if he has a little Jane Jacobs in him, helps you see the big picture.

"I got the idea that there was some kind of ...