Folks outside of New York – hell, folks outside of
Queens – are probably not aware of the Flushing Meadow Park, except in snippets
they’ve seen on the TeeVee during the US Open or perhaps NY Mets baseball
games. It is the largest park in Queens, spanning nearly 1,300 acres, and is
bordered by three highways. It was the site of the 1939 and 1964-65 World’s
Fairs, and is most famous for the Unisphere (featured in more movies located in
New York City than you can shake a stick at), a Cold War relic that celebrated
the first Mercury flight to circle the globe.
It’s also flat. And open. This is one big reason it
was used for the World’s Fairs: walking (as well as running and bike riding) is
really easy. Now that most of the structures have been demolished, the park
serves as one gigantic playground for the working and middle classes. On a
weekend in good weather, you can find marathoners and cricketers, soccer games
and football games, pitch and putt golfers and cyclists. There are a few trees,
many bushes, and precious little landscaping because there’s no Flushing Meadow Park Conservancy the way
Central Park has. This is a park built on what F. Scott Fitzgerald called a
“valley of ashes,” so its enjoyment by hoi polloi is a perfect complement to
that legacy.
There’s a public aquatic and skating center, a
museum, a small zoo featuring North American animals, a small farm – seriously!
-- a boat rental at Meadow Lake, as well as a theatre that hosts many local and
ethnic theatre organizations. In short, it’s pretty much a people’s park, right
smack in the center of a working class neighborhood in a working class borough.
From the end of Meadow Lake are clear sight lines
all the way to the other end of the park, including Citifeld and the Arthur
Ashe Stadium in the Billie Jean Tennis Complex.
It was two years
ago that a match at the United States Open was interrupted because an 18-inch
hairline crack developed along the service line in the middle of a game. “Of
course, it was all captured on TV,” recalled Daniel Zausner, the chief
operating officer of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens. “It
was an embarrassment.”
The crack was
indicative of the condition of two of the center’s three stadiums, which date
to the 1964 World’s Fair. The United States Tennis Association, which runs the
Open, has a solution: a $500 million plan to replace the two stadiums, while
adding 7,000 seats, new retail space, parking and expanded walkways. But to
achieve that, the Tennis Center, which occupies 42 acres inside Flushing
Meadows-Corona Park, needs a .68-acre strip of parkland from New York City.
[…]The request
for less than an acre of land in the borough’s largest park would seem simple
enough. After all, the United States Open generates more than $750 million a
year in economic activity for New York City, employs 6,000 seasonal workers and
operates tennis programs for children and adults 11 months of the year. The
land in question is now a paved pathway outside the center’s fence, used by
pedestrians and emergency vehicles, and the association has promised the city
that it will pay for capital improvements in the park.
But opposition
to the association’s plan has been heightened by two other proposals for
Flushing Meadows-Corona. Major League Soccer wants to build a 25,000-seat
stadium in the center of the park, and the Related Companies has proposed a
shopping mall on a parking lot at Citi Field, also in the park. Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg has expressed support for all three projects.
You can see the problem. For one thing, the park is
limited on the slip of land that the stadium wants by it abutting a Long Island
Railroad station, and a NYC subway yard. To expand in that direction leaves
little to no room for an already barely-adequate access road (so slender that
it’s nearly impossible to fix the potholes that crop up without closing off the
road entirely, something the Tennis Center does annually to accommodate the
media center, which is situated on that strip of land.)
More, to open the park to development by one
wealthy organization leaves the door open for all manner of developers to come
knocking. As noted by The Times, Major League Soccer is interested in a stadium
smack dab in the middle of the park to house what would probably end up being
the renaissance of the New York Cosmos, a legendary professional soccer team of
the 1970s (Pele played for them, and brought soccer in America for a while.)
I have less of a problem with that than with
expansion of the Tennis Center, to be frank. A soccer stadium would be more in
keeping with the tenor of the park’s usual visitors. But I digress…
In short, there are plenty of better and more
neighborhood friendly uses for the park than to give rich people easier access
to a three-week event that in the grand scheme of things causes more headaches
for the local residents than it benefits them, what with the traffic and the
entitled assholes who think they own wherever they deign to place their feet.
After all, three weeks of minimum wage work just ahead of the start of the
school year is peanuts compared to what could be done with the site that
enhances the neighborhood as a whole.
Flushing Meadow Park demands planning with
foresight and an eye towards the shifting demographics of the area, and not
catering to an elite that would give the surrounding bodegas and delis about as
much thought as they give the shoeshine guy.
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