Army Navy Football Games

THE POST-Olympic landscape in Philadelphia would surely look a lot different from the one that came before it - with a made-over Navy Yard brimming with apartments, clusters of new hotels and a world-class natatorium for swimming events.

It's been said that one of the advantages of a Philadelphia bid is that between the South Philadelphia sports complex and Fairmount Park, most of the venues needed for the 2016 Summer Games already are in place.

But several facilities would still have to be built, including a track-and-field stadium and homes for the tennis and swimming competition. Of course, there's the need for an Olympic Village that can accommodate 15,000 people, likely headed for the Navy Yard.

"In scale, the Olympic Village is the biggest thing left behind," Bill Hankowsky, chief executive of Liberty Property Trust and co-chairman of the Olympic bid's facilities committee, said. Afterward, as people fill up those structures left behind, it becomes the city's newest neighborhood.

"The Navy base is as big as Center City," he added, outlining the boundaries. "That's 1,100 acres. It would be like dropping Washington Square or Rittenhouse Square or Society Hill, one of those neighborhoods and the equivalent of that population, at the Navy base."

Yet even Hankowsky says it's not the structures that stand out as he assesses how things would change.

"It strikes me that there would be a variety of aspects of Philadelphia that would be different, and one of those would be the world's view of us," he said yesterday. "Every city that has held the Summer Olympics ends up being similarly perceived as an international city. Suddenly, you're in the big leagues."

A benefit of that elevation is hosting sporting events that wouldn't have been considered before. Atlanta boasts in the 10-year report on the Games it released this week that sporting events have brought an estimated $1.5 billion in economic impact from 1999 through 2005. Many of those events are being held in structures built or refurbished for the Games.

Sydney, Australia, reports similar growth after hosting the 2000 Games: 7.7 million people visited its Olympic Park, home to its Olympic venues, last year.

"What happens is, now it's perfectly reasonable to have an international rowing event on the Cooper River," Hankowsky said, "or an international archery event in Fairmount Park, because we would have established international-quality venues."

And generally, those new buildings housing major sporting events find a new life once the Games leave. Among arenas, only Madison Square Garden grosses more than Sydney's SuperDome. The Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, enclosed since the '96 Games, hosted the NCAA swimming and diving championships this spring.

There's no reason the same can't happen in Philly, already home of the Penn Relays and the Army-Navy football game, and expecting to lure more national events and trials as a community partner with the U.S. Olympic Committee.

One can't help talk about 2017 without paying heed to the experience from both Sydney and Atlanta: It might take five years or more to finally cultivate all that the Games leave behind. Mark Rosenberg, the Sydney Olympic Park Authority commuications director and a former Penn student, said they focused so much on delivering "the best Games ever that there wasn't enough time or resources committed to developing a detailed post-Games plan."

A.J. Robinson, president of Central Atlanta Progress, said the city needed a couple of years to catch its breath. "You just get that one shot and, in two weeks, it's gone, and you do lose some emotion and energy," he said Wednesday. Because of a number of factors "it has only been the last three or four years that we've really exploited the Games in a good way in terms of redeveloping the whole downtown community.

Here, worrying about maintaining momentum would be a welcome problem. That would mean the region would have lured the Games, and in 2017 would be showing off its polished facades and gleaming facilities. And, Hankowsky hopes, forge a stature that outlasts even the structures.

"Physically, [the changes here] would be somewhat dramatic," he said, "but it will be less that. It will be much more about literally how you think about yourself and how they think about you. And it's dramatic. It's dramatic."