WINNING THE WEST.(The Talk of the Town)(battle over whether or not to construct a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan)

Both sides have started punching harder lately in the brawl over whether or not to build a seventy-five-thousand-seat football stadium over the Hudson rail yards on Manhattan's far West Side. The New York Jets, who would own the place, will be taking computers from the mouths of needy schoolchildren if the state and the city are forced to provide the six hundred million dollars that would be their part of the deal--or, at least, that's what the television ads paid for by the Dolan family, the owners of Madison Square Garden, say. Nonsense, say the Jets and their supporters, who include Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Pataki, and the construction unions. The stadium will be such a financial success that it will end up giving computers to needy schoolchildren. Opponents say that the stadium will sink New York City's bid to host the 2012 Olympics (the International Olympic Committee does not like controversy). No, say the stadium's backers, it is the centerpiece of the city's Olympic hopes.

Either way, the stadium is part of a much larger development plan for the far West Side, which would include an extension of the No. 7 subway line, a major expansion of the Javits Convention Center, a park, a museum, many office buildings and apartment buildings, even a large new boulevard that would run for nine blocks south from Forty-second Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. The total cost of the project would be several billion dollars. Not surprisingly, many neighborhood groups are opposed to it. So it didn't really seem like a stretch when Newsday reported recently that "the fight over the stadium is shaping up to be the most pitched battle"--the most pitched battle?--"since the Westway project."

Except who remembers Westway? A straw poll of otherwise well-informed New Yorkers--conducted last week, with a margin of error of, oh, about fifty per cent--suggested that almost no one does. "An elevated highway?" was the most common response. Even a man who described himself as having been "a strong Westway supporter" said, "An elevated highway?" No. The West Side Highway was an elevated eyesore for forty-odd years, and it rotted until a truck fell through it, around West Twelfth Street, in 1973. Then it was torn down. Westway was the proposed replacement. It would have been an underground highway, running beneath landfill just off the present Hudson River shoreline. The street grids of Chelsea and Greenwich Village would have been extended one block west and ended in parkland. The federal government had agreed to pay for ninety per cent of this multibillion-dollar project. The State of New York was committed to pay the other ten. The city would have paid zero.

A number--very small, at first--of community activists opposed Westway. Their ranks grew, while rationales for opposition evolved, from support (healthy) for mass transit to loathing (justified) for greedy developers and, in the latter stages of the battle, concern (sincere, in many cases) for a striped-bass habitat. For some people, the mere fact that Presidents, governors, mayors, senators, C.E.O.s, and other powerful types all wanted Westway built ...