NYC 2012

New York’s proposal to host the 2012 Olympics is moving forward. The Times reviews the preliminary plans in advance of the final decision in June, 2005 and supplies some details:

Iconic oldies would make new stages for some Olympic events. The triathlon would fill Central Park – swim the reservoir, bicycle four laps on the road, run a double lap on outer footpaths. Olympians would play baseball at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, basketball at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, football at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, and tennis at the home of the United States Open in Queens.

Handball would go to Nassau Coliseum, field hockey to Columbia University’s Baker Field. Pentathlon and shooting would be staged, on different days, at Pelham Bay Park, now a lead-contaminated brownfield and police shooting range.

A new waterfront park on a 35-acre industrial site in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, would feature an aquatics center for swimming, diving, synchronized swimming and water polo, and a beach volleyball arena with seating for 14,000 and a view across the river to the Empire State Building.

Soccer matches would be held in stadiums in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington before the men’s finals in at Giants Stadium.

. . .

After the games, the committee said, New York would be left with new world-class sites for sporting events. These include rowing, canoe and kayak courses, seating 25,000 on a dredged, purified, man-made, 168-acre lake in a 1,255-acre Olympic Park in Queens [I think this means Flushing Meadows]; a new park for equestrian events built over Fresh Kills, formerly the nation’s largest landfill, on Staten Island, seating 32,000; a cycling velodrome in the Bronx velodrome that could seat 5,600; and an archery range at Flushing Meadows Park, seating 5,000.

Bonus points: NYC2012 Website.

See also, Olympic Village Site, Hunters Point, Queens: