connect Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara FallsTopography

a weekly concept magazine about connecting the dots

April 6, 2009

what makes the times so great?the sheer amount of content.across countless topics, countries,and years.but that breadth can also be pretty overwhelming.

connect takes the content offeredfrom a classic source of news andorganizes it in a fresh, unexpected way.our goal is to help you connect the dots.just bring a pen or a pencil.

KEY MAIN TOPIC TANGENT CONNECTION

E ven at a time when major league sports have become a cartoon of financial excess, the pro-

posed new home for the Yankees is breathtaking in its audacity. Excluding land value, a multipurpose mausoleum on Manhattan's West Side would cost a billion dollars.

The debate has centered on two questions: Are sports facilities economically worthwhile? And should the stadium be single-purpose or multipur-pose? A more fundamental question is why cities provide large subsidies to teams in the first place.

The Yankees have little economic effect on New York City. True, most fans would never visit the South Bronx were it not for the team. But few tourists come to New York just to see the Yankees. Thus, the Yankees generate a huge increase in eco-nomic activity within 100 yards of the Stadium, but not within the metropolitan area.

Nearly all spending at the Stadium is simply shifted from other forms of entertainment like restaurants and movies. Yes, the Yankees do draw suburbanites into the city, but many of these people would spend money in Manhattan or go to Mets games if the Yankees were not an option.

The city does make money by taxing tickets and concessions, but such revenues wouldn't come close to covering the Stadium's debt service. Even if the Jets agreed to play their home games on the West Side and the two teams combined drew four million fans a year, the city would need to collect an unrealistic $20 in taxes from each fan just to meet the mortgage payments.

FROM THE ARCHIVEOp-Classic: Wild Pitchby Roger G. Noll, 1996

WASHINGTON

Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara Falls Topography

“At the same time we are doing this, we are starving our public parks for money. We used to have all sorts of programs in this country after WWII for young men and young women on Saturdays and during the summer and school holidays, where even if you didn’t have the money - you could go to any one of a half-dozen different places, and there were organized activities to keep you out of trouble. After all, idle hands are the devil’s worship is not exactly a radical new idea. Well, we’ve cut and cut and cut those programs to fund two different sub-sidies: one to sports teams’ owners and one that goes to Tyco, General Electric, Honeywell and some other big companies. And, lo and behold, we’ve had a big rise in urban vio-lence because of the vacuum being filled by young people who no longer have these organized activities”

DAVID CAY JOHNSTONauthor of “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (And Stick You with the Bill)”

URBAN VIOLENCE

then

Independent studies of sports facilities invariably conclude that they provide no significant eco-nomic benefits. A sports team does increase overall income in a community slightly, but the increase never offsets the stadium's financing and operat-ing costs. And because a team has relatively few (but very highly paid) employees, it usually causes overall employment in a city to fall because it can drive other entertainment businesses to cut back or close.

Stadiums are bad investments, which is why the teams themselves are never willing to pay for them. New York City would generate more cash by put-ting the money in a savings account.

Assuming that New York decides to build the sta-dium, a multipurpose facility would make the most financial sense -- if the Jets and Yankees would agree to share it, which is unlikely. Single-purpose stadiums are more attractive and draw more fans. And the teams want their own stadiums so they can control and profit from other events in them. The city, of course, gains nothing by letting the teams have their way.

Why do cities pour hundreds of millions into new stadiums? With intense competition for sports franchises, not even New York can keep a team without subsidizing it. New Jersey and New York have at various times fought over the Giants, Jets, Yankees and Mets. The sad thing is that the states need not be competitors: Fans could easily support a third team in both football and baseball. But each league is a monopoly doing what monopolists do best: making the product scarce to hike up the price.

There is a far cheaper way to keep the Yankees. Bribe them. A new stadium could give the Yankees an additional $10 million in profits each year. So instead of spending $80 million annually to finance and operate a new stadium, New York could just hand the Yankees $10 million. Or, even better, the city could pay $100,000 for each game won, with a million-dollar bonus for winning the pennant.

This plan would save the city money, improve the Yankees' bottom line and benefit fans, who would be less likely to have a team that collapsed in the stretch.

Roger G. Noll was visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution at the time of publication.

SPORTSThe Long Buildup Before

Team’ New Buildingsby Richard Sandomir

April 2, 2009

now

T he Yankees announced their intentions in the mid-1980s, regularly and loudly demanding a

renovated home in the Bronx or a new stadium — and threatening to leave for New Jersey if the city failed them. The Mets came next, nearly a decade later, quietly seeking a replacement for Shea Sta-dium.

Plans were drawn and financing schemes pro-posed.

Mayors — including the Yankees fan Rudolph W. Giuliani — entered and left office.

But recessions intervened. The era of financing ballparks with massive infusions of public money faded. Costs rose. And George Steinbrenner’s inde-cision — would he keep his Yankees in the Bronx, ship them to Manhattan’s West Side or cross the river to New Jersey? — not only delayed making a deal for his team, but one for the Mets as well.

Meanwhile, 19 baseball teams opened new ball-parks starting in 1990 — and only one major sports facility was built in the five boroughs in that pe-riod: Arthur Ashe Stadium in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, the legacy of a tennis-loving mayor, David N. Dinkins.

Before that, it was Madison Square Garden, which opened in 1968.

Building new stadiums in New York would prove to be as complex and difficult as developing other megaprojects, partly because of the scrutiny on high-profile ventures with public investment.

“Starting with the fiscal crisis in the 1970s, we starved the public sector in building all sorts of infrastructure except for the Javits Center,” said Mitchell L. Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. He added, “Elected officials were afraid of them and commu-nities were apprehensive of them.”

Still, there was no shortage of stadium plans, most

— with a grand slam: a nonbinding proposal to split the $1.6 billion cost of two stadiums. But his successor, Michael R. Bloomberg, quickly canceled the plan as impossible during a recession, and once again the stadium issue turned dormant.

Jeff Wilpon said he is certain that absent the Sept. 11 attacks, Bloomberg would have proceeded with Giuliani’s plan and stadium construction would have soon begun.

Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, said: “I real-ized the gravity of what was going on. There would be no direct city participation in the financing of the stadiums.”

The realization prompted the Yankees in 2004 to develop a financing plan that had as its centerpiece the shifting of revenue that would normally be shared with other major league teams to pay for largely tax-exempt bonds that would be issued by the city.

Here, the Yankees, in the city’s view, moved ag-gressively past the Mets. By the spring of 2005, Daniel L. Doctoroff, then the deputy mayor for economic development, said in an interview, “We were pretty close to a deal with the Yankees and nowhere with the Mets.” Wilpon said, “The Yan-kees kept moving on and we sort of held back.”

But the baseball stadiums needed a catalyst and got one unexpectedly through a third stadium: the $2.2 billion football complex that was being planned by the Jets on the same West Side site that Cuomo had once recommended to the Yankees.

The massive stadium was to double as an Olympic stadium if the city were chosen as the site for the 2012 Summer Games. But a state panel’s rejection of the stadium in June 2005 sent the Bloomberg administration and Olympic officials racing for an alternative to satisfy the International Olympic Committee before it named the 2012 host city.

They cast their eyes from Manhattan to Flushing, and, over a frantic few days, made a deal with the Mets for a ballpark that would expand to Olympic size in 2012 and contract afterward. The Mets had the deal whether the city got the Olympics or not.

“In three days we brought the Mets up to parity,” Doctoroff said. The Yankees got their deal done over the same period, partly because of how close it had been to completion, and also agreed to host the Mets during the Olympics, if necessary.

of them for the fickle Yankees.As the governor, Mario M. Cuomo proposed build-ing a stadium and garage over the Long Island Rail Road yards on the West Side of Manhattan in 1993 and then, facing criticism, tacked weeks later to suggest a renovation of Yankee Stadium.By 1996, Giuliani was pushing the West Side op-tion as easy to finance, plus a new Mets stadium in Flushing — a double-barreled proposal that he felt would help a New York bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics. Over two terms, he offered three financ-ing plans, all with the city paying about half the cost of the stadiums. None advanced.

Publicly, it appeared that satisfying the Yankees was the city’s and the state’s main priority. While Steinbrenner blustered about parking, safety, traffic and attendance in the Bronx, Fred Wilpon, the Mets’ principal owner, never looked to move beyond Shea’s parking lot.

“The Mets were on the radar,” Cuomo said. “I was talking to both teams, and it was my understanding that Fred should sit back and whatever the Yankees got would set a precedent for the Mets. He had nothing to lose. You couldn’t do them simultane-ously, it would have been too much, so we concen-trated on the Yankees.”

Jeff Wilpon, the Mets’ chief operating officer, said the Mets were not on a parallel track with the Yan-kees until the team submitted a proposal for a $457 million, 50,000-seat, retractable-dome stadium next to Shea, with an Ebbets Field-like rotunda, in 1995. “We weren’t looking for the same dollars as they were, but something equivalent,” he said.

In 1998, Giuliani’s plan to use the commercial rent tax to finance the city’s half-share in the stadiums — which died in a nasty political battle with the City Council speaker Peter F. Vallone — was fol-lowed days later by Fred Wilpon unveiling a model of his ballpark.

But neither Wilpon’s miniature stadium nor the Yankees’ second World Series championship in three seasons was capable of spurring ballpark construction.Giuliani tried to leave office at the end of 2001 — three months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks

Citi Field and the new Yankee Stadium are finally open, the culmination of nearly two decades when it appeared that no ballpark could possibly be built in New York City.

1

2

3

4

7

8

9

1

0

11

5

6

1

4

1

5

1

6

1

7

1

8

12

1

3

2

1

22

23

24

2

5

19

20

28

29

30

26

27

Su

M

T

W

T

h

F

Sa

2

3

4

5

6

9

1

0

11

1

2

13

7

8

1

6

17

18

19

2

0

14

15

23

24

25

2

6

27

21

2

2

30

1

28

29

Su

M

T

W

T

h

F

Sa

1

2

3

4

5

6

9

1

0

11

1

2

13

7

8

1

6

17

18

19

2

0

14

15

23

24

25

2

6

27

21

2

2

30

1

28

29

Su

M

T

W

T

h

F

Sa

1

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

tea

r o

ut

ya

nk

ees

sch

edu

le

Levine said that even without the Jets/Olympic stadium’s demise, it would have taken little time to complete a Yankees deal. Wilpon agreed. “If they did deals for the Jets and Yankees,” he said, “what were they going to say, ‘You can’t have anything’? ”

The two stadium deals were announced in 2005 within three days of each other — and three weeks later the 2012 Summer Games were awarded to London.

Construction began in 2006 in Flushing and in the Bronx, and fans can now judge Bloomberg’s sports legacy: ballparks that cost their teams $2.3 billion but were made possible by almost $1.2 billion in city and state-funded infrastructure and tax breaks.

NY TIMES ONLINEfor an interactive panorama view of the new stadium from home plate, center field, and the stands, visit:

nytimes.com/interactive/2009/sports/

1 2

3

4

7

8

9

10

11

5 6

14

15

16

17

18

12

13 21

22

23

24

25

19

20

28

29

30

26

27

Su

M T

W T

h F

Sa

2

3

4

5

6

9

10

11

12

13

7

8

16

17

18

19

20

14

15

23

24

25

26

27

21

22

30

1

28

29

Su

M T

W T

h F

Sa

1

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

2009

Opening Day 1923 2009

Field Dimensions Left Field 318' Left Field 318’ Left Center 399' Left Center 399’ Center 408' Center 408’ Right Center 385' Right Center 385’ Right Field 314' Right Field 314’

Total Seating 56,886 52,325 Capacity Seat Width 18" to 22" 19" to 24"

Leg Room 29.5” 33” to 39” Between Rows

Cup Holders N/A all seating in the general seating bowl

Home Plate 72’ 4” 52’ 4” To Backstop

Private Luxury 19 56 Suites

Party Suites None 410

Average 17’ 32’ Concourse Width

Concession 298 total 444 total Stands Restroom 1 for every 89 Fans 1 for every 60 Fans Fixtures

Family-Style N/A 12 Restrooms Stores (Square Ft) Approximately 6,800 Approximately 11,560

Main Scoreboard 25' by 33' 59’ high by 101’ wide 25MM (Standard Def.) LED 16 MM True HD LED Elevators 3 16

old newstadium stadium

Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara Falls Topography

American stadium design has been stuck in a nostalgic funk, with sports franchises recycling

the same old images year after year.

Still, if you have to go with a retro look, New York City could have done worse than the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. Both were designed by Populous (formerly known as HOK Sport Venue Event) and are major upgrades over the stadiums they replaced, which had been looking more and more dilapidated over the years. Both should be fine places to spend a few hours watching a game.

What’s more, each stadium subtly reflects the char-acter of the franchises that built them. Yankee Sta-dium is the kind of stoic, self-conscious monument to history that befits the most successful franchise in American sports. The new home of the Mets, meanwhile, is scrappier and more lighthearted. It plays with history fast and loose, as if it were just another form of entertainment.

Yankee management started talking about re-placing the old stadium more than a decade ago, and this seemed to be the tougher challenge: the stadium sparkled with the memories of 26 World Series championships. Architecturally, however, the stadium was charmless. Renovation in the 1970s may have made it more comfortable (fans loathed the painful wooden seats of the original version), but it also destroyed many architectural features. The original copper frieze that lined the stadium’s upper deck was ripped out. (A partial concrete replica was added later.) The monuments that had once stood in the deepest recesses of cen-ter field were moved to an insipid space behind the left-center field fence and named Monument Park. The little personality the stadium had came from its site: a tight urban lot framed by elevated subway tracks on one side and a city park on the other.

The new stadium, which stands across the street from the old one, spruces up that image while reviving some of the lost history.

The towering arched windows that dominated the original exterior, an echo of the Roman Colosseum, have been recast in a mix of limestone, granite and cast stone, and they are as imposing as ever. A

small urban plaza, raised just above the level of the sidewalk, faces the bars and souvenir shops along River Avenue and the entry to the elevated train, strengthening the structure’s relationship to its urban setting.

The city has also promised to build a park and several ball fields just to the south of the stadium in an effort to put a more community-friendly face on the project. A broad pedestrian walkway will even-tually link the stadium to the fields and a Metro-North station farther to the south.

The biggest improvements, however, are the inte-riors, which have been organized with an eye to the fans. The concourses are broad open spaces, with concession stands set along the perimeter so that they don’t obstruct views down to the field. More seats are concentrated below the mezzanine level, closer to the action. Even the luxury suites, which suddenly look like a holdover from the era of cor-porate excess, are discreetly set back so that they don’t detract from the shared intimacy of watching the game.

There’s history here, too, or at least a facsimile of it. The Yankees have brought back the old manu-ally operated scoreboards in left and right field, a feature that was last used in the 1960s. A replica of the old frieze sits along the top of the upper deck.

Best of all, the slot that separated the scoreboard from the right-field stands in t he old stadium has been recreated, so you can still catch glimpses of the subway rumbling by — a reminder that the sta-dium has been carved out of the heart of a living, thriving city.

All in all, the new Yankee Stadium may be an aus-tere, even intimidating place, but there’s nothing tacky about it. It’s straightforward, paint-by-num-bers architecture.

Getting to Citi Field is a more drawn-out aesthetic experience. Descending from the elevated 7 train in Queens, you have to cross a wide landscaped plaza before arriving at the main entry gate. A sea of parking stretches out in both directions. A pile of rubble (once the old Shea Stadium) currently lies just beyond the parking to the left.

The building fits comfortably in this setting. Yan-kee Stadium’s facade is dominated by vertical lines, which emphasize its monumentality. Citi Field’s facade, which is loosely modeled on Ebbets Field, the former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, is more low-key. Its brick cladding gives it a warmth that Yankee Stadium doesn’t have. A pre-cast concrete band cuts across the arched exterior, breaking down the structure’s scale and emphasizing its

horizontality.

History also feels less heavy here. Like the Yankees, the Mets built broad concourses that open up to the field so that you feel close to the game even while you’re standing in line for a beer. But the design is far more eclectic. A porch that cantilevers out over right field is modeled on the old Tiger Stadium. Big steel trusses conjure the structure that supports the nearby elevated train. A soot-colored pedestrian bridge that spans the bullpen behind center field is a miniature version of the Hell Gate Bridge. Even the color of the seats — dark green — was copied from somewhere else: the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants baseball team played and the Mets played their first two seasons.

The casual mood is reinforced by a number of spaces that have little to do with watching a base-ball game: an auditorium, a Wiffle ball field — even an event room for weddings or parties.

What saves the design from becoming completely hokey, however, is its openness to the real world outside. Most of Queens, from the faded remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair to the Whitestone Ex-pressway and the muddy waters of Flushing Bay, is visible from the main concourse level. Farther up, you can see the Manhattan skyline several miles away. The visitors’ bullpen has a view of dilapidat-ed garages and auto body shops across 126th Street to the northeast. The reality of this working-class landscape tempers the artificiality of the interior.

Even so, most serious architects today strive to create buildings that reflect the values of their own era, not a nostalgic vision of the past, no matter how open they may be toward their surroundings. And in that regard both stadiums will be a disap-pointment to students of architecture. For us, the buildings are just another reminder of the enor-mous gap that remains between high design and popular taste.

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW Two New Baseball Palaces,

One Stoic, One Scrappyby Nicholai Ouroussoff

April 2, 2009

T he familiar tokens from the Monopoly board game are getting a modern — and, some might

say, mercenary — makeover.

An updated edition of the venerable game, sched-uled to be introduced on Thursday, will include tokens that are styled after name-brand products. Five of the eight tokens in the new Monopoly Here and Now edition will be branded, offering game players the chance to be represented by miniature versions of a Toyota Prius hybrid car, an order of McDonald’s French fries, a New Balance running shoe, a cup of Starbucks coffee or a Motorola Razr cellphone.

Those who consider playing games to be too seri-ous to be commercialized need not fret. The maker of Monopoly, Hasbro, says that toy stores, discount stores and other retail outlets will continue to sell the original edition of the game, based on the clas-sic version brought out by Parker Brothers in 1935, alongside the new edition.

The 11 tokens in the classic version — including the battleship, cannon, iron, shoe, thimble and top hat — will remain unchanged.

The branded tokens are part of a reinvention of Monopoly that Hasbro executives hope will offer consumers modernized references more relevant to them than the elements of the game that date to the Great Depression.

For instance, rather than collecting $200 each time Go is passed, in the new edition the player collects $2 million. The four railroads on the Mo-nopoly board — B&O, Pennsylvania, Reading and Short Line — will be supplanted by the country’s four busiest airports: Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Kennedy in New York, Los Angeles and O’Hare in Chicago.

And the properties of Atlantic City that compose the game board will make way for real estate from Boston and Washington to Las Vegas and Holly-wood.

“So much of American pop culture today is rep-resented by products that people use every day,” Mark Blecher, senior vice president for market-ing at the Hasbro Games unit of Hasbro, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “We thought, let’s try to get iconography that’s much more relevant to people today,” he added.

The new tokens are indicative of a marketing trend known as branded entertainment, in which prod-ucts are woven into the contents of popular culture including the plots of movies, television shows and novels; song lyrics; and video games.

Until now, there has been relatively little evidence of commercial trappings in traditional board games like Monopoly. The arrival of such elements wor-ries some experts.

“It’s part of the insinuation of the commercial culture into every aspect of our lives,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director at Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization in Portland, Ore., that seeks to curtail what it deems to be creeping commercial-ization.

The coming of branded tokens “turns Monopoly into a giant advertisement,” Mr. Ruskin said. “It’s a shame Hasbro has chosen to go this low road.”

Unlike advertisers that typically pay to be included in branded-entertainment projects, the five mar-keters whose products are becoming branded to-kens did not ask Hasbro to be included in the new edition nor did they pay Hasbro a fee, Mr. Blecher said.

Rather, he said, the company sought out the mar-keters because their products will help the new ver-sion offer “a representation of America in the 21st century.” “We’re recasting the entire game as if we were creating it today,” Mr. Blecher said.

For many years, Hasbro has sold special themed versions of Monopoly with the boards, tokens and other contents changed to salute films like “Star Wars,” TV series like “The Simpsons” and sports teams like the Boston Red Sox. For example, the Red Sox edition had tokens shaped like tiny base-ball caps. But the themed editions are sold only in limited quantities, Mr. Blecher said, unlike the Here and Now edition, which is intended to be a mainstream product.

Although Hasbro does not discuss specific sales fig-ures, Mr. Blecher said, the original version of Mo-nopoly sells “several million copies in the United States every year.” Hasbro expects the new version to also sell millions of copies a year, he added, and expects only “a minor amount of cannibalization” of sales of the vintage version.

Monopoly is considered the most popular board game ever, with more than 250 million copies sold.

The Here and Now edition will cost about $30, Mr. Blecher said, compared with $12 to $20 for the original edition. A multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to promote the new version is scheduled to begin this week, he added.

Marketers chosen by Hasbro to be part of the new edition said they were not worried about percep-tions that their inclusion would commercialize the game.

“We see a lot of products that are No. 1 in their categories became part of the consumer lexicon and culture,” said Brian O’Mara, senior director for United States marketing at the McDonald’s USA division of the McDonald’s Corporation in Oak Brook, Ill.

“Monopoly is one of our customers’ favorite promotions,” Mr. O’Mara said, referring to the many collaborations of McDonald’s and Hasbro on sweepstakes with Monopoly themes, “so we felt this was a natural.”

George Neill, corporate vice president for global marketing at Motorola in Schaumburg, Ill., said: “We were just really flattered they thought of us in contemporizing the game and identifying the iconic products of this age. This recognizes what Razr has done for us, and what Motorola can be to people.”

Mary Nickerson, national marketing manager for advanced-technology vehicles at Toyota Motor Sales USA in Torrence, Calif., said she welcomed the Prius token because of Monopoly’s status as a game that children and adults often play together.

“It’s great from a marketing perspective because it creates an opportunity for conversations to take place in the home about hybrids,” Ms. Nickerson said. “We hope it will encourage more use of hybrid technology.”

Of the five branded tokens, the Prius replaces the vintage race car in the original version and the New Balance sneaker replaces the shoe. The other three branded tokens do not directly replace any original tokens.

The three new tokens that are unbranded are: a jet, which replaces the battleship; a Labradoodle, which replaces the Scottish terrier; and a laptop computer, which does not directly replace an origi-nal token. Hasbro chose not to brand all the new tokens, Mr. Blecher said, to minimize concerns that the new edition would be too commercialized.

The new properties in the Here and Now edition were chosen by consumers who voted online last spring as part of a promotion Hasbro sponsored. More than three million votes were submitted, Mr. Blecher said. There will be 22 cities represented in the new version, compared with just one, Atlantic City, in the original.

I have been playing Monopoly since before 1950.

Aside from the fun, it provides one of the best ways to introduce the idea of marginal to an intro economics class; and because I’m not teaching my giant section of intro microeconomics this year (the first time since 1980/1981), I miss both teaching and Monopoly.

Each Monopoly property gives a payoff when an opponent lands, with the pay-off rising from double the rent if you have a monopoly with no houses, up to a maximum total return with a hotel (five houses).

On a given property, each house costs the same; for example, on New York Av-enue, my favorite property, a house is $100. But the marginal return to a house is not constant: it rises steadily with the first, second, and third houses and then falls with the fourth and fifth.

This dictates strategy: if you have two monopolies and limited resources, even though the big red hotels are pretty, you are better off building equal numbers of houses on both monopolies, rather than hotels on one and nothing on the other.

Here’s one other economics lesson that is well known to Monopoly veterans: better a monopoly on the farther end of each side of the board; the houses cost the same on each side, but the payoffs at the farther end are greater.

FREAKONOMICSFrom a Monopoly Veteran

by Daniel HamermeshAugust 29, 2008

Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara Falls Topography

Over the years, Hasbro has changed some aspects of the original version. For example, the character of the wealthy well-dressed gentleman who per-sonifies the Monopoly game was long known as Rich Uncle Penny Bags. He is now referred to in the game as Mr. Monopoly.

The campaign to promote the Here and Now edi-tion will include TV, print and outdoor ads by Grey Worldwide in New York, part of the Grey Global Group unit of the WPP Group. Online ads are being created by Tribal DDB, part of the DDB Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.

The branded tokens are “the latest version of that, things people think are representative of today,” said Tim Mellors, president and chief creative offi-cer at Grey North America. “A Starbucks coffee cup is more relevant than an iron.”

ADVERTISINGWould you like Fries With That Monopoly Game?by Stuart ElliotSeptember 12, 2006

We’re recasting the entire game as if it were created today. A Starbucks cup of coffee is more relevant than an iron.

T ourist destinations fall in and out of favor — Prague, Ibiza, the Dalmatian

coast — but for more than a century, Niagara Falls has held a certain quaint, some would say corny, allure.

Jim Williams, head of the Niagara Parks Commission, said the panel did not unfairly help Maid of the Mist avoid competition.

One company has operated the Maid of the Mist boats ferrying poncho-draped tourists to the falls’ thundering base since 1884, the Maid of the Mist Steamboats Company. It looked as if it would keep its effective monopoly until last month.

The renewal of the lease has set off a legal and political storm over one of tourism’s most venerable franchises.

It all started with two letters from Ripley Entertainment (of “Believe It or Not!” fame) and was fueled by a former magazine publisher’s interest in the water under the falls.

Despite the vast changes to tourism over the last 125 years, tighter border restrictions after 9/11, and the falling global economy, the wholesome, if drenching, amusement provided by the Maid of the Mist generated about $23.3 million last year. But the Niagara Parks Commission awarded a new contract to the company without seeking competitive bids.

That led Bob Gale, a local gas station owner, to resign as the head of a commission committee. His subsequent complaint to Ontario’s integrity commissioner resulted in a recommendation last month that the parks commission review its decision.

That so much money could go to one company in an noncompetitive process has led many here to question the coziness of the parks commission with local businesses.

“I had one guy from the outside say to me: ‘Thank God, you’re breaking up the old boy’s club,’ ” Mr. Gale said. The Maid of the Mist owes its unusually longstanding lock on Niagara Falls’ tourist boat trade partly to topography. The fierce rapids to the north and the falls to the south make conventional boat navigation in or out of the base of the falls virtually impossible. A small area of land on the Canadian side is the only location suitable to dock boats overnight and store them in the winter.

That land belongs to the Niagara Parks Commission, which was set up in 1885 by the Province of Ontario to clean up the freak shows and garish attractions that were encroaching on the falls.

From the beginning, the commission has not financed its operations with taxpayer dollars. Instead it relies on revenue from the Maid of the Mist lease payments and several attractions the commission operates directly.

Jim Williams, chairman of the commission and a former senior federal official, said that Maid of the Mist asked to start lease renewal talks in late 2004. (The current agreement expires in November.) By April 2008, the commission approved a 25-year renewal.

During an interview just before the release of the integrity commissioner’s report, Mr. Williams emphasized that because Maid of the Mist holds only a lease, the commission did not have to request bids — as is required for service or procurement contracts.

The integrity commissioner’s report recommended that the parks commission review its decision, but concluded the commission did not act improperly.

CURRENT EVENTSAt Niagara Falls, Controversy Rises

over a Tour Company’s MonopolyNIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO

by Ian AustenApril 3, 2009

SUSTAINABLE TOURISM

“I think it’s fair to say that ‘sus-tainable tourism’ is an oxymoron, “In a sustainable world,we’re probably not flying all that much, or flying to ski, for example, or taking cruise ships to the Antarc-tic. But the problem now is, we don’t have a moral magic wand that allows us to banish certain energy-intensive activities — like skiing, and even if you had that magic wand, where would you draw the line?”

AUDEN SCHENDLERexecutive director of sustainability at Aspen Skiing Co. in Coloradoand author of “Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.”

TOP TOURIST DESTINATIONS: 1. Time Square, NYC 2. National Mall, Washington D.C. 3. Magic Kingdom, Orlando FL 4.Trafalgar Square, London 6. Golden Gate, San Francisco CA 7. Notre Dame, Paris 8. Disney Land, Paris

“There’s been a partnership with the Maid of the Mist, its current owner-operators and its predecessor for well over 100 years,” Mr. Williams said in a commission restaurant, its windows icing over with spray from the falls.

“There’s no other model. You’re asking for someone to say, ‘We want you to build the space station.’ Well, there’s only one of a kind.”

Another deciding factor in granting the renewal, he said, was a provision in the current contract — though neither Mr. Williams nor the Maid of the Mist would disclose what the clause stipulated, or any other aspect of the lease. Mr. Williams said the clause meant the commission would have run the risk of a lawsuit and “significant financial liability” if it had selected another operator.

Two letters from Ripley Entertainment transformed a routine lease renewal into a controversy.

Ripley, owned by the Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison, who has other tourist holdings in Niagara Falls, asked for a copy of the Maid of the Mist lease under freedom of information laws. It also asked about submitting its own offer.

Those letters reached the commissioners only shortly before the final vote on the new lease last year. Mr. Gale, whose term on the commission expired in February, said the letters made him realize that the renewal might not have been handled properly. He asked the commission to delay its decision.

Mr. Gale, whose wholesale diesel fuel customers include Maid of the Mist, said that his objections were not directed at that company or the family that owns it.

“This is about process,” Mr. Gale said in a cluttered office far from Niagara Falls’ tourist zones. “This process has been dirty for the people of Ontario.”

After the commission approved the lease anyway, Mr. Gale resigned in protest as chairman of the marketing and events committee and subsequently filed the complaint with the integrity commissioner. His appointment as a commissioner expired in February.

The complaint soon caught the attention of William M. Windsor, a former trade magazine publisher. Mr. Windsor had clashed in federal court in Atlanta with the Maid of the Mist in 2005: the boat operator won an injunction prohibiting Mr. Windsor’s son’s company from selling tickets to the Maid of the Mist through its online ticket brokerage.

Although Mr. Windsor has no experience in tour boat operations, he soon filed a request with an Ontario court for a judicial review of the lease renewal. If successful, he hopes to bid on the business, perhaps with a partner.

“I love the idea of getting that business because I don’t like, don’t trust Maid of the Mist,” Mr. Windsor said from his home in Georgia.

Christopher M. Glynn, the president of Maid of the Mist and son of its owner, James Glynn of Niagara Falls, N.Y., said he was confident the lease renewal would stand. But he is disturbed by suggestions that his family owes its lease to connections or influence.

“Nothing went on,” he said of his company’s dealing with the commission, sitting in the company’s Canadian office, decorated with photos of royalty from Europe and Hollywood stars aboard Maid of the Mist boats. “Everybody wants to own the Maid of the Mist. Who wouldn’t? But they don’t. I’d like to own the New York Yankees.”

A confidential briefing document prepared for the commissioners and leaked to several reporters shows that Maid of the Mist currently pays the parks commission 15 percent of its gross revenue and other fees.

In 2006, according to the document, Maid of the Mist had gross revenue in Canada of 17.6 million Canadian dollars and returned 4.9 million Canadian dollars in rent and other charges.

The new lease, the document indicates, has a sliding rate of up to 17.5 percent depending on revenue. Mr. Glynn declined to specify revenue but said that the American branch of the company accounted for another 25 percent of its business.

Exactly what will happen next is unclear. Ontario’s ministry of tourism, which oversees the Niagara Parks Commission, has started an audit and a review of the commission’s tender practices. In a statement, the parks commission promised to take the integrity office’s advice and review its earlier decision, without committing to any change.

“N.P.C. will comply fully with this recommendation, and will continue to apply the principles of good faith actions and sound business judgment as it undertakes these deliberations,” the statement said.

Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara Falls Topography

TOP TOURIST DESTINATIONS: 1. Time Square, NYC 2. National Mall, Washington D.C. 3. Magic Kingdom, Orlando FL 4.Trafalgar Square, London 6. Golden Gate, San Francisco CA 7. Notre Dame, Paris 8. Disney Land, Paris

Working in the vicinity of Rochester are F.W. Baldwin and three assistants of the United States Geological Survey of Washington. They are engaged in work on the topographic map of the United States, a job that the Government began about twenty years ago and which, it is thought, will require about one hun-dred years more to complete, says The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

The undertaking was begun in 1882. The work is being carried on in co-opera-tion with the States; New York Sate for instance appropriating some $20,000 to $25,000 yearly for the past few years toward its share. The work of co-opera-tion in this State was begun ten years after the work was started in the country. As yet only about one-fifteenth of the area of the country has been completed.

The has never been a topographical map of the United States published other than rough sketches, which are of little value. Hence in 1882 the Government stated one of hte biggest surveys ever made. An estimate of the cost of the work complete has not been made public, but it is conclusive that it will be millions of dollars, although the co-operation of the States cuts the expense to the Government down about half what it otherwise would be. The map of this State alone will cost at least $1,000,000.

The States are not compelled to make any apporpriation for their share of the ex-pense, but so far several of them have done so. In one or two instances they began the work entirely on their own responsibility, but it is believed that afterward the Federal Governemnt reimbursed them. One-half of the field work of the survey is all they are asked to pay. The engraving and publishing are done entirely at the expense of the Government. The States are very well satisfied to stand their half.

They have found out that the maps are of great value to the States in many ways, especially in the matter of highway improvment in different parts of the State, and with the work of the Forest Preserve Board in the portions covered by the maps and in the examination of water supplies for existing and proposed canals and for the great cities. The State is getting a fine class of work at a comparatively low cost.

It is a revelation to the lay eye and mind to look at the work. It is possible to tell the ex-act nature of every part of the country; the location of the cities and their general ap-pearance, and the towns, the streams, the railroads, and even the common roads. All the boundaries between States, counties, and even townships are shown on the map.

“Eternity and a Day'' won an overdue Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes International Film Festival for the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, whose style of drifting metaphysical reverie is at its most accessible here. All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently gran-diose ''Ulysses's Gaze,'' the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it. ''Eternity and a Day'' is simpler, the haunting poetic valedictory of an artist whose memory leads him across the landscape of his life during his last day on earth.

This filmmaker's eloquent, abstract, trance-in-ducing work so eschews the mundane that it can barely be watched in any earthbound way. So at the screening I attended, a man who had shown signs of vigor as he entered the theater began conspicu-ously fighting sleep as the film got under way.

Take that as an indication of the film's method, not its merit: Mr. Angelopoulos's meditation on the meaning of one man's life is genuinely hypnotic in its way of transcending ordinary narrative. The camera casts a spell as it wanders gravely through the central character's most essential thoughts.

The main role in ''Eternity and a Day,'' that of a soulful, weary pilgrim named Alexandre who has deep ambivalence about his past, was meant to be played by Marcello Mastroianni, who grew too ill to undertake the film. Instead, it is played by Bruno Ganz, who gives it a palpable sense of the weight of this man's experience. Language is so secondary to image and memory here that it makes little dif-ference to learn that Mr. Ganz's performance was delivered in German and dubbed into Greek. He brings the quiet authority of a man patiently, fear-lessly searching for his life's final meaning.

Characteristically, Mr. Angelopoulos erases all temporal and spatial boundaries as Alexandre roams through the film. His long-dead wife appears as a young woman; she is about the same age as Alexandre's grown daughter, who has just decided to sell his family's ancestral home where so many of Alexandre's most primal experiences occurred.

His mother is both a fading wraith and a strong voice speaking to Alexandre in his boyhood. His work as a writer remains unfinished, just as his links to loved ones now seem incomplete, yet Mr. Ganz projects the character's deep acceptance of what he has done and been. In the course of his wanderings, he is joined at times by a young Albanian boy whose more political exile mirrors Alexandre's spiritual condition.

thenCentury of Work for Map Makers;

Topography of Every State to Be Accurately Shown - A Government Plan

October 5, 1902

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Yankee StadiumMonopolyNiagara Falls Topography

Figures appear unexpectedly in the light gray mist that cloaks part of the film, or at the seaside where its more joyous, distant memories come to life. Like Ingmar Bergman, whose sense of an intricate-ly interwoven present and past is echoed in such a fluid, liberating way here, Mr. Angelopoulos gradu-ally turns the whole of his protagonist's life into something far greater than the sum of its parts. Eventually Alexandre is ready to ask, ''Tell me, how long does tomorrow last?'' And the filmmaker is ready to conjure one last transcendently beautiful image of love and farewell.

Produced and directed by Theo Angelopoulos; written (in Greek, with English subtitles) by Mr. Angelopou-los, Tonino Guerra and Petros Markaris; directors of photography, Girgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos; edited by Yannis Tsitsopoulos; music by Eleni Karain-drou; released by Merchant Ivory Films. Running time: 132 minutes. This film is not rated.

FILM REVIEWThe Topgraphy of One Man’s Lifeby Janet MaslinMay 28, 1999

Famous Canadian Mountains, a line of 10 canvas rugs based on topog-raphy, was recently introduced by Patricia Baun, a Vancouver designer who owns a company called Maude Décor. Ms. Baun hand-paints each rug, covers it with sealant and then cuts it to match the footprint of a particular mountain. “Topography offered variations in proportion, design and shape that were highly irregular without being contrived,” she explained. Although “when most people think of painting mountains, they think of something more picto-rial,” she said, her rugs are abstract, like the 6-by-9-foot Three Sisters ($2,984), right. Sizes range from 4 1/4 by 7 feet (Mt. Tremblant, $1,761) to 8 by 8 feet (Mt. Temple, $3,536). Information: (604) 879-7775 or maudedecor.com.

ART & DESIGNMountain Topography as Abstract Art

by Tim McKeoughMarch 13, 2008

On the Web, anyone can be a mapmaker.

With the help of simple tools introduced by In-ternet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos.

In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to be both richer and messier than any other.

They are also turning the Web into a medium where maps will play a more central role in how information is organized and found.

Already there are maps of biodiesel fueling stations in New England, yarn stores in Illinois and hydrofoils around the world. Many maps depict current events, including the detours around a collapsed Bay Area freeway and the path of two whales that swam up the Sacra-mento River delta in May.

James Lamb of Federal Way, Wash., created an online map to illustrate the spread of graf-fiti in his town and asked other residents to contribute to it. “Any time you can take data and represent it visually, you can start to rec-ognize patterns and see where you need to put resources,” said Mr. Lamb, whose map now pinpoints, often with photographs, nearly 100 sites that have been vandalized.

Increasingly, people will be able to point their favorite mapping service to a specific location and discover many layers of information about it: its hotels and watering holes, its crime statistics and school rankings, its weather and environmental conditions, the recent news events and the history that have shaped it. A good portion of this information is being con-tributed by ordinary Web users.

In aggregate, these maps are similar to Wiki-pedia, the online encyclopedia, in that they reflect the collective knowledge of millions of contributors.

“What is happening is the creation of this ex-tremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,” said John V. Hanke, director of Google Maps and Google Earth. “The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.”

This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insid-ers call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars involving Google, Microsoft, Ya-hoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services — and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps — these companies have created the tools that are allowing people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

“It is a revolution,” said Matthew H. Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.”

Online maps have provided driving direc-tions and helped Web users find businesses for years. But the Web mapping revolution began in earnest two years ago, when leading Internet companies first allowed programmers to merge their maps with data from outside sources to make “mash-ups.” Since then, for example, more than 50,000 programmers have used Google Maps to create mash-ups for things like apartment rentals in San Francisco and the paths of airplanes in flight.

Yet that is nothing compared with the boom that is now under way. In April, Google un-veiled a service called My Maps that makes it easy for users to create customized maps. Since then, users of the service have created more than four million maps of everything from where to find good cheap food in New York to summer festivals in Europe.

More than a million maps have been created with a service from Microsoft called Collec-tions, and 40,000 with tools from Platial, a technology start-up. MotionBased, a Web site owned by Garmin, the navigation device maker, lets users upload data they record on the move with a Global Positioning System receiver. It has amassed more than 1.3 million maps of hikes, runs, mountain bike rides and other adventures. On the Flickr photo-sharing service owned by Yahoo, users have “geotagged” more than 25 million pictures, providing location data that allows them to be viewed on a map or through 3-D visualization software like Google Earth.The maps sketched by this new generation of cartographers range from the useful to the fanciful and from the simple to the elaborate. Their accuracy, as with much that is on the Web, cannot be taken for granted.

“Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools,” said Donald Cooke, chief scientist at Tele Atlas North America, a leading supplier of digital street maps. “But you can also go hiking with your G.P.S. unit, and you can create a more ac-curate depiction of a trail than on a U.S.G.S. map,” Mr. Cooke said, referring to the United States Geological Survey.

April Johnson, a Web developer from Nash-ville, has used a G.P.S. device to create dozens of maps, including many of endurance horse races — typically 25-to-50-mile treks through rural trails or parks.

“You can’t buy these maps, because no one has made them,” Ms. Johnson said.

TECHNOLOGYWith Tools on Web,

Amateurs Reshape Mapmakingby Miguel Helft

July 27, 2007

now