Yankee Stadium replacement parks delayed

5/25/2008 1:17 PM

NEW YORK (AP) - The cost of replacing two Bronx parks torn down to make way for the new Yankee Stadium has nearly doubled - from $95.5 million to $174 million.

Meanwhile, the opening dates for several of the eight new parks have been postponed by as much as two years, according to city documents cited in Sunday editions of The New York Times.

The Yankees' new stadium is scheduled to open next year. It is being built next to the old stadium on land that was Macombs Dam Park and part of John Mullaly Park.

The Yankees are financing the $1.3 billion stadium, while the city is paying for eight new parks to replace the lost parkland.

None of the new parks has been completed, and construction on some of them hasn't yet started. The city Parks Department has built a temporary replacement park on a parking lot in the area.

The trade-off has drawn complaints from neighborhood residents and parks advocates.

``We've lost our biggest park, and what we've been reduced to is this parking lot,'' local resident Anita Antonetty said. ``We lost hundreds of trees that were 80 years old, and now there's this monstrosity of cement across the street from where people live.''

Parks Department officials say rising construction costs and unforeseen problems - such as the discovery of buried oil barrels at one of the sites - are driving up the cost of the new parks.

``This increase to city funds covers conditions we have recently encountered that simply could not be anticipated beforehand,'' the department said in a May 12 report provided to the Times.