NEW YORK, NY June 30, 2006 —A year ago today, the International Olympic Committee chose London to host the 2012 Olympics. The vote marked the end of a ten-year, $30-million effort to bring the Olympics to New York. But while Olympic dreams have faded, the bid itself left a lasting mark on the city of the New York. WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein has more.

REPORTER: A scruffy field on the Williamsburg waterfront doesn’t look like much. There are some blades of grass struggling up through this old industrial site. But what are most apparent are the weeds, and the chain link fence with a sign prohibiting entry.

Contractor: Christian de Palermo? Dipalermo: How are you?

REPORTER: Not long ago I visited this lot of land with Christian De Palermo, director of New Yorkers for Parks.

Contractor: We’re subs, we’re doing the fence. Dipalermo: He does fences. Contractor: Wrought Iron:

REPORTER: De Palermo and I stand about where the NYC 2012 committee envisioned a beach volleyball court. The idea was for the swimming and diving competitions to come here too. Those things won’t happen. But what did occur is a new land use plan for Williamsburg, which includes 40 acres of parkland.

Dipalermo: What we have here is the waterfront, which because of the rezoning will have an esplanade.

REPORTER: The rezoning of a vast swath of the Williamsburg waterfront from industrial use to housing and parkland was approved a little over a year ago. The Bloomberg administration put tremendous energy and focus behind the rezoning. It needed to, in order to have a land use plan that would be compatible with the Olympic bid. De Palermo says much of the initiative for park access in the plan came from the community. But he credits the Mayor for accepting the plan – and running with it.

Dipalermo: It’s one thing to talk about something. But to make a commitment to a parcel of land matters, and this administration used the bid to make commitments to park and open space.

REPORTER: The man who pushed for all that was Dan Doctoroff, who began the Olympic bid in 1994 and joined the Bloomberg Administration in 2002, with the promise he could continue directing the Olympic effort.

Doctoroff: So yup, we’re not going to have beach volley ball in Williamsburg. I always thought that was sort of funny. But we will have instead are literally tens of thousand of people living here hopefully many more visiting this spectacular waterfront location. So do I believe that the Olympics were a catalyst to getting this and many other things done, absolutely I do.

REPORTER: There was the rezoning of the midtown West, spurred by the now-defunct Jets stadium. The rezoning in turn energized the conversion of the High Line from an old rail line to a park. The initial idea was that it was to be a gateway to Olympic Park. In the planned Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island the Olympic mountain biking course remains part of the plan. And in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the pool designated for the Water Polo competition is already under construction, and is slated to be open to the public next summer.

There are other neighborhoods that were swept up by the Olympic plan. Queens West is one of them, a little bit up the East River from Williamsburg. Julia Vitullo-Martin of the Manhattan Institute met me at the Vernon Street subway station recently. We walked down to the waterfront, to see what had changed, if anything.

Vitullo-Martin: The Bloomberg administration tried very hard, to use the Olympics to bring back this area and we’re about to find out if there were any good effects from that.

REPORTER: The street is a mix of homes and low-rise warehouses.

Bernstein: I notice There’s a little French restaurant here – Vitullo-Martin: Yes, Café Henri, which is adorable and I love these flowers up there. There’s a little bit of joie de vivre out here on top of a funny little brick building.

REPORTER: When we get to the waterfront, there’s a pretty landscaped park, set in front of some huge towers. The towers show how the parks spurred by the bid are creating immense value for real estate developers. Vitullo Martin says this location was ripe – it just needed the infrastructure for housing, which is now planned.

Vitullo Martin: The Chrysler Building looks pretty cool. I mean this is an astonishing sight. All of Manhattan laid out in front of us.

REPORTER: As we look south along the waterfront, there are still large temporary tennis courts and other structures.

That’s where the Olympic Village would have gone. I don’t know what they’re doing.

REPORTER: The site doesn’t look much different from what the International Olympic Committee saw when it toured New York City last February . But Vitullo-Martin believes that the Olympic bid focused attention on this neighborhood. Having a land-use plan follow the bid aspirations wasn’t perhaps the way SHE would have come up with a plan.

Vitullo-Martin: But in truth this is pretty much how human beings do something, you have something you really want to do the Olympics you figure out some neighborhoods of the city where these facilities might fit and having done that you do your grandiose plan.

REPORTER: The lynchpin of that plan was to have been the West Side Stadium, to be built over the Hudson Rail yards. Today, the yards remain undeveloped, and, a year after the stadium plan was killed by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, they remain untouched. The Mayor is still smarting.

Bloomberg: The one part of the Olympic bid that didn’t get done the stadium history will show that will have cost us 100’s of thousands of jobs over the years and billions of dollars having said that we still are going ahead with developing the west side the subway line is just about ready to get going. We missed some phenomenal opportunities that we’ll pay for for decades.

REPORTER: But the stadium was unpopular, and while the Mayor was actively supporting it, his popularity was low. He was much criticized for prioritizing the Olympics over rebuilding Lower Manhattan. Christian de Palermo, of New Yorker’s for Parks, thinks the battle over the stadium, spurred by the bid, had some other negative effects.

Dipalermo: Clearly, stadium exhaustion is the reason why Yankee stadium got expedited. It’s no secret we were opposed and continue to be opposed to the plan we took twenty two acres of parkland in 8 days and basically gave it over to the Yankees and got insufficient parkland back in return.

REPORTER: The administration says the community will get more and better parkland in the end.

Another left-over from the bid is the proposed Brooklyn Nets stadium. That plan has drawn community opposition because of its proposed use of eminent domain, and because it would bring the equivalent of three Empire State Buildings to a low-rise area of Brooklyn. But Vitullo-Martin believes that arena plan was quickly embraced by the administration because it dove-tailed with the Olympic plan. There are other criticisms. Many smarted at the Olympic plan because, they felt, it was imposed upon a city from the top, rather than sprouting from community wishes. But Mitchell Moss, an NYU professor and Bloomberg advisor, says the bid spurred the city to get out the maps and look for ways the city’s limited land could be better used.

Moss: This is not a city which was created like a vegetable garden. If you look at New York, we built land on the east river when we ran out of space. They filled in the Hudson for Battery Park City, this is a city which is a result of human initiative, central park didn’t exist we actually created that.

REPORTER: For many New Yorkers, the Olympic bid was something that came and went, sandwiched in time sometime after the West Side stadium was defeated. In 2012, take a drive up the FDR drive and look across the river. You won’t see Olympic rings, but the attempt to bring them here will have left an indelible mark. For WNYC, I’m Andrea Bernstein.