Awarded four free tickets, my family attended the New Jersey Nets game Tuesday, Dec. 18, with the Nets falling to the Sacramento Kings–a decent enough game. Attendance was perhaps 7,000.
Despite that modest number, access to and from Izod Arena was, quite frankly, annoying, reminding this New Jerseyan of why he, at least, seldom accesses the Meadowlands Sports Complex, and why he shares no sympathy with his fellow Garden Staters pining for the good old days of the 1970s.
The Meadowlands Sportsplex is, in fact, a brilliant autocentric monument to looping round and round for miles and minutes when both are expendable. Great for the 1970s; not so good, perhaps, for the 21st century.
To be fair, such autocircling probably is far more tolerable (and less a percentage of the overall auto trip) for those traveling from greater distances — Monmouth or Morris counties, for example. The writer, however, lives in Hoboken and — dare I say it — if an HBLRT spur served Izod, light rail would have been competitive going home. And it would have won, hands down, getting TO Izod.
The writer notes this even after allowing that his home is 1/2 mile from the nearest HBLRT station. But that’s about the distance the family walked from its parking spot, near Giants Stadium, into the passenger overpass tube and over the road, into the next parking deck (preferential parking; that’s OK, no problem) and down the ramp to the arena. That had to be (also) 1/2 mile. Lots of people do it, perhaps knowing they can reward themselves with a hot dog or popcorn following the maximum exercise many of them will get this day.
My wife, normally locked into “windshield perspective,” had the ability to nonetheless see some of the nonsensical nature of the setup. My au pair, from Leipzig, Germany, found the setup highly amusing and just one more example of American extravagance. For my part, I vocally pondered why so many New Jerseyans dread the awful two-block walk from Newark-Penn to Pru Center — yes, I know, history, the nabe, etc. — but think nothing of a half-mile trek through a scenic parking lot in the swamp.
The place is changing, be it the superstructure for the ski slope (”just like I used in Dubai,” one man told me after asking what it might be) or the passenger rail station that finally is arriving at the site, three decades late. Perhaps Xanadu will reinvent the area. Rail couldn’t hurt and, I now think, light rail might be a good add, too, for us closer-in locals.
It won’t be there to serve the Nets, of course, bound for Brooklyn, or the Devils, already in Newark. Some sports fans remain cranky and believe — sincerely, in many cases — that the management of both franchises have erred in their migration. Here’s one observer who disagrees; after going through the motions last night, I’m surprised, in a small way, it took this long for the change to occur.
Posted at 4:18 pm by Douglas John Bowen.
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