Queens to Amazon: Drop Dead-*

432 Park Avenue offers a digital New York salute

The hissy fit by Amazon reminds me of one of the best things that has happened to my home town -- not getting the 2012 Summer Olympics.

This happened in 2005, when the City Council voted down a stadium that would have been plopped down on the far west side of Manhattan to accommodate the Typhoid Mary of sports events.
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Since the Games were given to London, the Hudson Yards area of Manhattan has grown, without having to work around a neighborhood killer of a stadium.

I say that as a sports columnist who was a very early critic of the proposal.

My memory was just jogged by the rising up of people who resented the $3-billion tax benefits to be given Amazon, which wanted to build a “campus” in the Long Island City section of Queens.

Rather than negotiate with critics – show some respect for the locals -- Amazon turned tail and ran. The political aspects have been well reported in the Times and elsewhere. Experts and business people say Amazon really would have meant 25,000 new jobs in the city, but I say they would have been jobs for new people, out-of-towners, with technological skills, eager to pay the gouge prices in new high rises in formerly lumpen Queens.

As David Leonhardt points out, Queens already has jobs:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/17/opinion/amazon-new-york.html

As a native of Queens (who lives just to the east these days), I love the boom all over my home borough -- the languages and energy and skills and food: Oaxaca restaurant in Corona; Korean restaurants along Northern Blvd.

I’m not sure Queens needs the great favor Amazon was going to bestow. Many people living near the proposed “campus” would have been displaced by the land rush and the rent-grubbing and the price-raising. (See: “Brooklyn, hipsters.”)

To Jeff Bezos, I would say a few things:
1. Thank you for the Prime delivery of a 64-ounce container of kitchen-drain cleaner rather than my having to run to the store during the deep freeze this month.
2. Please, keep reporting on that disturbed person in Washington with your wonderful paper, The Washington Post.
3. When local activists express their concerns, please, learn to negotiate. This is Noo Yawk, for goodness’ sakes. (“If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” Guess you didn’t.)
4. And while I think of it, please read your own paper’s electronic files about the stupidity of people who take intimate selfies.

This uprising by “progressives” – whatever that means – seems to have come as a shock to Gov. Cuomo and Mayor DiBlasio (who keeps changing his story, as in his 180-degree swerve in the Times on Monday.)

I would give some advice to these illustrious public servants. (The same would apply to former mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani.)
1. Fix the damn subways first. Help working people get to work.
2. Pay attention to the rising seas, because the disturbed President has no clue.
3. Pay attention to those dreaded “progressives.”

These guys are always running for President rather than fixing New York. They need to know that New Yorkers don’t like out-of-towners telling us what the deal is.

Jeff Bezos, say hello to the New York Echo:
Visitor:  Hello-o-o-o-o!
New York Echo:  Shut the f--k u-u-u-u-p!
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​*-Homage to the greatest headline any of us will ever see, written by William J. Brink, managing editor of  the New York Daily News, when President Ford did not help the city during the 1975 financial crisis:
FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

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