Fans forgotten part of Yanks’ new park

by patrick arden / metro new york

JUL 3, 2008

The Yankees are building “a stadium for rich guys,” charged Assemblyman Richard Brodsky at a state hearing Wednesday.

Ryan Shiel and Andrew D’amico came down from Connecticut for Wednesday’s game. Ryan’s dad, Bill Shiel, worried the new stadium may be too expensive: “They are pricing youth out.” (Photo: aharon rothschild/metro)

This wasn’t a secret. Team executive Lonn Trost has likened the new stadium to “a five-star hotel.” It will have party suites, a martini bar and a year-round steakhouse.

The city already forecast the average ticket would cost $57, up from $28, though Yankees president Randy Levine sent a letter Wednesday claiming about half of the tickets will be priced at $45 or less.

But the best front-row seats will command $2,500 a game, while seats along the foul lines will fetch as much as $850. Luxury boxes lease from $600,000.

Manhattan Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh wondered whether ticket prices were considered when the city decided to issue $930 million in tax-exempt bonds for

the Yankees. He wants publicly financed stadiums to make 7 percent of seats “affordable.”

“We did not seek any restriction,” said Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, who said ticket prices were weighed only “in the context of whether the stadium, given those revenues, would be affordable to the Yankees.”

“The project was always envisioned to be the most expensive sports stadium in U.S. history,” he said. Without the tax-exempt financing — which lowered the team’s costs — the new stadium would have been “infeasible.”

The Yankees are now seeking another $367 million. Brodsky wondered why the government should finance an “elitist” project, with no job guarantees. New permanent jobs are projected to total between just 36 and 60.

--Three years too late?

Bettina Damiani of the watchdog group Good Jobs New York now puts government subsidies to the stadium project at $800 million. Yesterday she had a hard time getting into the hearing room because five busloads of construction workers beat her there. “We needed this hearing three years ago,” she said.