Fever pitch: soccer stadium fight pits BK against Queens

QueensNYC points us to a Post story about Marty Markowitz, no doubt on a high from recently opening Brooklyn Bridge Park’s new soccer fields, trying to lure a proposed Major League Soccer stadium from Flushing to Brooklyn. Needless to say, Queens politicos aren’t too happy about it, with councilman Peter Vallone leading the fight, wondering if Brooklyn will go after the Mets or the Unisphere next. Of course, without R.A. Dickey, the Mets’ indie quotient is way down, so the Mets are probably safe in Flushing for the foreseeable future.

Markowitz wants to put the 25,000-seat stadium in Brownsville or East New York, claiming that the areas are both economically depressed and have the acres of empty land to fit a stadium. Failing that, the borough prez suggested Bushwick, but we’re going to go on record and say that’s an insane proposition. For starters, there aren’t stadium-sized stretches of emptiness in the neighborhood, so people will get displaced. And anyway, Bushwick already has enough problems with a mall coming in, so maybe let them deal with the shock of that first.

And while it may sound like this is lacking the killer instinct required of any true Brooklynite, we shouldn’t antagonize Queens all that much. We’ve previously gone over how nice Long Island City is, and we also want to have Queens on our side to fight the real enemy of the outer boroughs: Manhattan.

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