"GAL is a Bronx success story, and any stadium plan must ensure, before anything else, that this company and the jobs they create remain within our borough," insisted Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.

For local politicians like Mr. Diaz, the idea of trading a proven job producer for the risky opportunity to build a stadium that would house a new team playing a relatively unpopular sport is not immediately enticing. But for now at least, GAL claims that the stadium issue is serving only as a mild distraction from its booming business. The company has indeed come a long way since 1927, when a trio of friends pooled their savings of $900 and began repairing and fabricating elevator parts across the Harlem River in Manhattan in the basement of a building at 178th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. By 1970, one of the original three, German-born engineer Herbert Glaser, had assumed full control of the company, and in that year relocated GAL to a space across the street from the first-base line of the old Yankee Stadium. Today, GAL is a multinational concern under the direction of Herbert Glaser's sons, Walter and Herbert Jr., with a fully owned subsidiary in Canada and partnerships in Australia and Asia. At its flagship plant in the Bronx, a large set of elevator doors is being tested on the factory floor, opening and closing at random intervals to reveal only more space behind them. The visual effect of this "elevator to nowhere" could be taken from the opening of a sci-fi movie about time travel, and as such it is an apt metaphor for a stroll around GAL's headquarters—one of the last bastions of large-scale manufacturing in the city. The expansive lower floor houses machinery ranging from enormous units fabricating long strips of steel to small furnaces melting aluminum. The strips will become part of the system that opens and closes the doors. The molten aluminum will be poured into molds for elevator buttons. Meanwhile, in a sterile room upstairs, workers in static-proof paper robes engineer the circuit boards that will be part of the elevator's brain. "They're a very interesting combination of a traditional manufacturing firm and a modern technology firm," said Sara Garretson, president of New York's Industrial and Technology Assistance Corp. "They've been able to adapt to the industry." Today, GAL makes thousands of elevator parts and ships them all over the world. "They are in the Statue of Liberty, and 10 Downing Street," said Doug Witham, GAL's vice president of sales and marketing and a 14-year veteran of the company. Those parts are made by a highly skilled workforce, many of whom are Eastern European or Asian immigrants and are long serving. The company estimates that about a third of the workers at the 153rd Street plant hail from the Bronx. With all that going for it, local officials like Mr. Diaz are keen to see GAL survive. They insist that any contract for the building of a new soccer stadium must include a clause that not only guarantees the company a fair price for its land, but also relocates GAL within the Bronx on the Yankees' dime. Ironically, the bottom line for GAL is that the loss of its longtime home could become an opportunity for it to turn a profit while upgrading its operations. Standing outside the factory's loading bay, which looks down over the Metro-North railway tracks toward the Major Deegan Expressway, Mr. Witham acknowledges that shifting GAL's operations to a new location would be a Herculean effort, but he also sees opportunities lurking in a new home. "We don't have a loading dock," he said, motioning to the narrow, one-level area where GAL can load trucks only with a forklift. "If we had one or two docks in a new location, it would be enormously useful."