Farewell to the Subway Olympics That Never Were

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

With the London Olympics approaching its end, City Room traveled this week to sites in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that would have been utterly transformed had New York City won its bid for the 2012 Games. Neither idle nor abandoned, these waterfront areas today are home to new parks and recreational areas, light industry and heavy construction. But they are also raw-edged works in progress, where whole swathes of land stand behind chain-link fences topped in razor wire. They present a very different scene than those described by the captions in the slide show, which are quoted from the official 2004 Olympic bid package.

Some New Yorkers may rejoice at their good luck in having dodged the Olympic bullet of eight years' disruption followed by a month of citywide gridlock and lockdown. But others may look at the weeds poking through the cracked pavement at what was envisioned as th e Olympic Village and the Olympic Aquatic Center and wonder wistfully, what if?

The Olympic Stadium and Olympic Square would have occupied an area bounded by 10th and 12th Avenues, 30th and 33rd Streets. The Olympic Village would have occupied the Hunters Point peninsula in Queens, south of Borden Avenue and west of Vernon Boulevard. The Olympic Aquatic Center would have occupied the waterfront in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, west of Kent Avenue, from Seventh to 14th Street. The Bronx Olympic Velodrome and Arena would have been on the Harlem River, west of the Major Deegan Expressway, north of 149th Street.