Let’s Build an NFL Stadium on Randall’s Island for the Jets

Friends, family, and football teams—we’ve all seen them flee New York for New Jersey. We smile politely as they whine about their need for more space, better schools, and taxpayer funded sports complexes. They almost never return. But, on the forgotten and forlorn slice of NYC that is Randall’s Island lies hope that maybe, just maybe, the Big Apple can have its own football team again.

And it’s the Jets, not the Giants, who should come crawling back through the Lincoln Tunnel. Mainly because the Giants, who were the first to abandon New York back in 1973 (with a brief return in 1975), have never seriously flirted with leaving New Jersey.

Good, let them have it. It’s the Jets, not the Giants, who have made concrete moves to escape Jersey’s swamp. Were it not for James “The Bluesman Born on Third Base” Dolan and Sheldon “Easy Rider” Silver, the Jets would already be playing in a stadium over Hudson Yards. And of course, to add insult to injury, it’s Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross who now lords over the land the Jets coveted.

Culturally, the Giants had a perpetually quarter-zip clad Eli Manning sipping Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in his Hoboken condo while Joe Namath ruled Manhattan from his infamous Upper East Side bachelor pad. A home of their own would help the Jets have the unique identity they enjoyed with Namath again. Because right now, all the Jets are known for is losing.

The woeful facts are oft-repeated but still staggering. Simply making the playoffs, the bare minimum for franchise competency, is the low bar that the Jets haven’t cleared in 15 years. Current college students have no memory of the Jets playing in the postseason. 27 NFL teams have appeared in a Super Bowl since the Jets last won theirs 56 long years ago, so long ago that there was an 8 train bringing fans near Yankee Stadium and the 7 train out to Shea was colored a pale orange instead of its current Grimace-ian hue.

The Jets own the longest championship dry spell in all of New York’s voluminous sports history—which is all the more depressingly impressive considering the fact that tristate fans have already endured more epic droughts than any other major city in the world.

The Brooklyn Dodgers faithful were crying “wait till next year” into their Schaefer beers for 52 long years until winning their one and only World Series over the hated Yankees in 1955. Ranger fans are still deaf from all those “19-40” chants raining down on them during those 54 years without a Stanley Cup. Only a little more than half the country had color TVs the last time the Knicks won a title in 1973, although there is hope they can reach the promised land this year. Dr. J was still operating when the Nets won the last of their ABA titles 50 years ago. Those same Islander fans who mocked the Rangers with those “19-40” chants are now staring at their Nassau County property tax bills wondering where the 43 years have gone since their last Cup.

But what all the other losers around town have that the Jets don’t is a distinct identity. The Giants are the team of the establishment, the team of the uptight, the team with fans like Andy Rooney, the team that is lousy about as often as the Jets but still boasts eight championships across a lengthy history dating back to Tim Mara buying the franchise with $500 obtained from his dubious businesses.

The Yankees are the franchise for frontrunners and transplants. Or as Gay Talese said, “God, Brooks Brothers, and United States Steel are believed to be solidly in the Yankees’ corner.”

Knicks fans front as if the team has the gold-plated history of the Yanks when they haven’t even been as good as the Mets. But it’s a hubristic identity born of both being the only game in town for nearly 70 years and of playing in the “Mecca” and the “World’s Most Famous Arena,” despite the Knicks themselves having nothing to do with those monikers. The Rangers have historically drawn a wealthier crowd than the Knicks, the Patagonia-vest wearing finance bros from Westchester and Long Island where hockey is played. Or, as former Knicks and Rangers owner Irving Felt put it in a 1973 New York Times article, “The hockey crowd is more an Ivy League type of crowd. We get more people who live out of the city.” Whereas the Knicks fan base is “a New York crowd—the earthier, more sandlot type of kid grown up.”

The Nets hump their Brooklyn branding hard, complete with a Biggie Smalls banner hanging from the rafters at the Barclay Center to distract from yet another decade down the drain because of a disastrous trade.

The Mets? Jimmy Breslin put it best when he said, “You see, the Mets are losers, just like nearly everybody else in life...It is the team for every guy who has to get out of bed in the morning and go to work for short money on a job he does not like. And it is the team for every woman who looks up ten years later and sees her husband eating dinner in a t-shirt and wonders how the hell she ever let this guy talk her into getting married. The Yankees? Who does well enough to root for them, Laurence Rockefeller?”

The New York Liberty and Gotham FC are the rare tristate teams with the entire region to themselves. And while the Islanders, Devils, NYCFC, and the Red Bulls may have modest fan bases they at least have their own turf to represent.

But the Jets? Where do they represent that’s any different than the Giants? How would the team answer the existential questions posed by Admiral Stockdale, “who am I? why am I here?”

A stadium of their own on Randall’s Island would finally allow them to definitively answer those questions. The Jets would represent NYC, while the Giants would be relegated to representing the suburban wastelands. No matter their record, the Jets would have an air of dignity about them instead of debasement while playing in this sleek jewel nestled on the banks of the Harlem River. Artists as disparate as Bobbi Humphrey and Kevin Morby have paeons to the Harlem River – no songs nearly as great exist for the Hackensack River.

A Jets stadium on Randall’s Island would be the envy of the league, and the world, rather than one of the most reviled and mocked. And they’d gain a new fanbase in a city starved for a football team that doesn’t require taking at least three trains across two separate transit systems to go and see.

If Woody Johnson has any courage, if he has any vision for having the Jets truly soar, then he can rekindle that love between fans and the Jets by building the grandest stadium in the NFL on Randall’s Island.

Garo Gumusyan is a longtime Upper East Side resident and architect. His son, Aram, who was raised on the UES, is a TV producer.