Olympic panel steps into a brawl

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is having a dinner party this week at his East Side mansion. The honored guests are 13 members of the International Olympic Committee who are in town to assess whether New York is up to hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics.

We know from the way Bloomberg entertains that there is likely to be candlelight and comfort food and an impressive crowd of New Yorkers arrayed around his oblong dining room table. Bloomberg, the billionaire who serves meatloaf and ice cream sundaes on fine china, always throws a swell party.

But for all the mayor is up against right now in a struggle to get the Olympics here, there might as well be a broken stove in the kitchen, a fire on the third floor and a gang outside his East 79th Street town house poised to toss a brick through the window. At the precise time Bloomberg should have everything lined up to impress the IOC in the competition against Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow, there is screaming discord in New York.

The mayor, who is up for reelection this year, is getting it from all sides: Die-hard neighborhood groups are rallying against him; editorial writers are questioning his ethics; Democrats are lining up to challenge him; even his own party has put a candidate to oppose him in a Republican primary.

But the hardest punches are being thrown by opponents of a new stadium on Manhattan’s far West Side. The mayor has said the city needs the stadium as bait to get the Olympics and later for the New York Jets. He has spent the last year muscling a private deal with the property owner under the notion that you have to be a leviathan to get anything done in this city. But frazzled neighborhood types don’t want thousands of cars descending on them every weekend for games.

Now on the eve of the Olympic evaluation team’s visit, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which owns and controls the subways, has decided to invite others to bid against the city and the Jets. Cablevision Service Corp., which runs the nearby Madison Square Garden, wants to stop the stadium at all costs and has bid to build a housing complex on the moonscape’s 13 acres. It’s offering six times what the city and the Jets have put on the table.

In a moment of high tension, the mayor effectively called Cablevision un-American: “This company says ... ‘We don’t care. We’ve got a monopoly and we’re going to try to keep it.’ ”

There are a lot of corporate and political crosscurrents in this battle. In fact, just about every major politician and every legislative authority from City Hall to the state Capitol has a hand in it. Depending on whose rhetoric you buy, 8 million New Yorkers are being asked to choose between a new football stadium and a subway fare hike or between hosting a world-class sporting event and getting more residential housing.

Then of course there’s New York’s byzantine politics. There are plenty of politicians putting their oar in these muddied waters for reasons that have nothing to do with football or housing or subways or the Olympics. For example, Joseph L. Bruno, who represents Rensselaer and part of Saratoga counties in the state Senate and lives 180 miles from the stadium site, is trying to slow down everything, saying New York should first see if it gets the Olympics before it decides what to do about the stadium. But it’s more likely he’s waiting to see if Dean G. Skelos, who represents Long Island and lives 24 miles from the stadium site and opposes it, has the juice to challenge him for the leadership of the Senate.

Old-fashioned brawl

So whether they know it or not, members of the Olympic evaluation team are stepping into the middle of a class-A, old-fashioned political brawl, the kind made famous by the late powerbroker and city planner Robert Moses, who is currently the subject of a scathing downtown musical. (Sometimes it feels like everything in New York is fodder for a scathing downtown musical.)

For now, the Olympic evaluators are spending the next four days mostly holed up at the Plaza Hotel, no doubt in rooms with glorious views of Central Park and its temporary orange-fabric art exhibit, Christo’s “The Gates.”

In between long meetings, they’ll be escorted around the five boroughs in buses, trains and ferries to view current facilities as well as swamps and empty rail yards that New York is promising will be transformed for Olympic events. They’ll see an armory in Harlem that would be used for boxing; a site for a yet-to-be-built aquatics center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a field for equestrian events in Staten Island.

“They are here basically to talk to us and see if we can deliver,” said Mike Moran, senior communications counselor for NYC2012. “They don’t rank or score cities at the end of visits. They simply make a report ahead of the entire commission vote in July.”

The mayor’s people want to show the evaluators a good time and a welcoming environment. They say it isn’t pandering, but it comes close -- the routes they travel will be decorated with NYC2012 banners as will windows of several iconic stores, including Macy’s and Tiffany & Co., which is around the corner from the Plaza.

There will also be 31 Olympic athletes to greet them at every site (all together or at each site) and to participate in a massive pep rally this afternoon at Rockefeller Center. A few of the athletes will probably turn up at that swanky dinner party at the mayor’s house and at a special concert after dinner at the new Lincoln Center jazz hall.

But in between meetings and dinners, the problem of whether New York can deliver, as promised, a 75,000-seat stadium no doubt will come up. “The [evaluators] are smart people and they’ve seen all the stories and they’ll ask the questions,” said Moran, who expects that the mayor and Daniel L. Doctoroff, a deputy mayor and Olympic point person, will undoubtedly tell them: “We are confident there will be the stadium. Period.”

To be sure, at the same time city officials are trying to put their best foot forward, opponents have no plans to stand idly by. But it’s a fine line they walk: Nobody wants to be seen as against something as globally good-willed as the Olympics.

So opponents of the stadium apparently are planning press conferences on the steps of City Hall aimed at raising doubts about the West Side development and pointing out that there is an alternative in Queens.

“The assumption is that everyone will behave, but this city is an echo chamber and there are many ways to drive activities that would drive stories on the front pages of the tabloids that the IOC may see,” said an advisor to the anti-stadium coalition. Certain headlines will be hard to miss. “OLYMPICS GO HOME” is the boldfaced headline on this week’s cover of the New York Press, a give-away tabloid that is offering a list of 88 things the IOC should know about New York City before making a decision about 2012.

The list is ridiculous but amusing: “#1 We already have an ‘Olympic Shooting Center’ in the Bronx. It’s called the Bronx”; “#28 We can’t let anyone run through our streets with a torch. We did that back in the ‘70s”; “#36 Our dog feces contain toxic amounts of Ebola.”

It goes to show that this city is not all Carrie Bradshaw and smoke-free bars and orange bedsheets in Central Park and a Disney-fied Times Square. New Yorkers are engaged. In their frenzied instant messaging every night, my 12-year-old son and his Jet-fan friends are debating nuances of the stadium deal I bet haven’t even occurred to Mayor Bloomberg.

I also saw three women on the subway the other day wearing buttons with big red slashes through “West Side Stadium.” For once, New Yorkers are not about apathy or terror. It’s civic challenges and political intrigue that absorbs them. It’s a real city, with real politics.