Nothing says Slowhopes quite like these two words: Shea. Stadium.
Let’s face it: it’s a dump.
And how bizarre is it that — to paraphrase Bogey in Casablanca — of all the gin joints of years, they had to choose to knock down Shea Stadium the same damn year they chose to demolish Yankee Stadium, which, let’s face it, give or take Fenway & Wrigley Field, is pretty much the Angelina Jolie of ballparks: what bone structure! What a mouth! What a bat! What a monument field!
I will say this much about Shea: I am not a fan. I lived in New York in the early 1990′s, for seven years. I did ride the 7 train out to Queens to watch the Mets, although to be perfectly honest, mostly under duress. I would say for the most part–a dark moment during a mostly pitch black 48 year span of forgettable August and Septembers overlooking that stupid World’s Fair globe–I would venture out to Queens on getaway day, the afternoon game the Mets played before departing on a roadie, because it was an excuse to drink during the daylight hours.
Not that Roger Kahn or whoever that New Yorker dude who writes the tone poems about the postseason in the New Yorker couldn’t spin a haiku out of that much information.
But for so much of that half-century, the Mets just stunk.
Are you kidding me?
The Mets are the MGM Studios of MLB: a team constantly in search of its identity who spend too much time reacting to the activities of its Angelina Jolie-looking, big-lipped, narrow-waisted, sexy sibling franchise over in the Bronx.
What can you say about the Mets, except knock the place down!
Oh! Before it’s completely gone. In 1980, I was 18 and a mad Expos fan–a Canadian baseball fanatic. I travelled on the Greyhound to Montreal to see a pennant race up close, and when the Expos went on the road to NYC, I hitch hiked to New York to watch ‘em.
It was about 50-50 whether I’d end up chopped up into little pieces, but I lived and found myself in Bryant Park one late autumn afternoon, watching some ballet dancers rehearsing, when two women — young, attractive, thoughtful, did I mention young & attractive? — invited me to a community meeting that was actually a Moonies’ recruiting meeting.
It was in midtown. There was free grub. They didn’t mention they were Moonies, who were a scourge of all ’70′s families–they kept brainwashing children and staging mass weddings of 50,000 couples in Yankee Stadium–so finally I said, ‘Well, I’ll come check it out, but I have to go to Shea Stadium to see the Expos play later on.”
No worries.
Obviously, they’d been briefed on the aesthetic treasure that Shea Stadium wasn’t.
So over we went, to some office on W. 45th or something like that. In I went to a room, where I discovered a load of compassionate types holding hands. I held hands too. We all sang “If I Had a Hammer”, a song I wasn’t familiar with. I mumbled in solidarity. I was pretty sure a circle-jerk of “If I Had a Hammer” was a bad sign, but I still hadn’t been fed.
We ate. Vegetarian spaghetti. OK. Two strikes.
After, we were asked to gather in a room. There were about 50 of us
Then, we’re in this room, it’s jam-packed and we’re talkin humanity–remember, it’s 1980. Humanity still had some credibility as a topic. And frankly, I’m digging the speech. These guys get up at 5:30.They distribute food to the homeless. What people really need to do is pay more attention to the stranger sitting next to them –
There’s a farm these guys own. They show some slides. We can go to the farm. We can reinvent the wheel. We can become fully functioning humans–
It’s 6:30pm.
I stand up.
“Excuse me,” I say. I’m 18–and I look about 14. “This is great–but I have to catch a train to Shea Stadium.”
The Moonies look mortified.
They’re in the middle of a brainwashing, anti-bourgeois, anti-materialistic sales pitch, and I’m standing up in the middle of it, announcing that the Mets matter more.
Buh-bye.
Then it’s out to Shea, a pitiful, lonely, decrepit, dystopian, alienated, skeevy old Shea.
There are about 3500 people there. It’s not a very nice night in late September. The Mets suck again. The Expos win handily. The guy in front of me spends the whole game chanting: “Moo-kie! Moo-kie!”
I can’t wait to get the hell out of New York.
Today in the Times, Richard Sandomir chronicled the demise of ugy old Shea. It’s sorta beautiful. (You can read it below)
And that’s the thing about a ballpark: they contain so many of our youthful memories. Even frowsy old Shea is full of them: Tommy Agee catching that sinking liner in the 1969 Series; the 1973 Mets, who won 82 games and nearly won the World Series; Game 6 of the 1986 World Series v. the Red Sox. The Bobby Valentine years. (The Mets should have won the 2000 Series v. the Yanks too–but that’s part of following the Mets. They do just enough to lose).
This summer, I found myself in Seaside Heights, on the Jersey Shore. It was all boardwalk, Italian sausage, classic rock and Mets caps. The place was full of Mets fans. When I’d go out running at 7am to beat the heat, the boardwalk was full of 72 year olds having their power walk, wearing Mets gear. I got to listen to WFAN on my transitor-Boomer and Carton, who are the new Mike and the Mad Dog-brimming with confidence as the Mets went on a winning streak and the Yanks tanked.
It was all good.
Then one Wednesday, I rode the bus into New York. Caught a Broadway matinee–August, Osage County (go see it!)–and had a chance, coming out of the theatre, to climb on the 7 train and go to Shea one last time.
It was an absolutely gorgeous night–75 degrees–and I thought of that old concrete barn way the hell out there in Queens. I was staying with my United Nations lawyer pal from Winnipeg, who was willing to make the trek but you could tell not the slightest bit enthusiastic. He lives in Boerum Hill. His kid plays junior hockey. He never passes up a chance to see the Rangers play at MSG–but you could just hear him thinking, there are so many better ways to spend a gorgeous August night in New York.
And then I thought, in a weird way, that’s the perfect way to pay tribute to Shea Stadium on your trip to New York City: don’t go there.
Bye Shea!
Here’s Richard Sandomir’s story:
Demolition Takes Shea Stadium Piece by Piece
The carcass of Shea Stadium, still standing, awaits its final destruction.
The seats have been extracted, flattening three tiers into two colorless dimensions.
The bullpens are gone, leaving the rancid memory of last season’s meltdown by the Mets’ relievers. A sheared-off stump of steel that once held their bench remains.
The batter’s eye came down Saturday.
There isn’t much left of Shea anymore. Part of it disappears every day as the Mets move toward opening day at Citi Field in April.
Already 10,000 of 16,000 pairs of its seats have sold for $869 each.
The 105-foot-tall foul poles will be cut into pieces for sale by the MeiGray Group in addition to all the Shea memorabilia it is marketing.
The home run apple is being shined for its display outside the new stadium. On Wednesday, the left-field bleachers were demolished so quickly that by late afternoon, nearly all traces had been carted off. Every day, trucks haul away the fragments of 44 years. Dumpsters stand by outside the skeletal remains of Shea.
Despite the rubble around it, the oversized Dunkin’ Donuts cup still stands.
The scoreboard is now a gnarled nest of steel. A small piece of it, with the circuitry that helped it flash numbers and letters, rested crookedly in center field.
The infield dirt, unwatered, is cracking. The outfield grass is beset by pattern baldness.
The track on which stands once slid to make Shea a football stadium has been unearthed. The twin light towers will be taken down any day to further clear the area beyond the outfield so the Mets can build the plaza wrapping around Citi Field.
“They’re so high, and so close to Mr. Wilpon’s new baby,” said Toby Romano, a vice president of Breeze National, the demolition subcontractor, said of the towers’ proximity to the nearly finished Citi.
“Nice and easy, we’ll pull them down,” said Danny Collins, a Breeze foreman.
“If it were me,” said Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer, who wants Shea to be gone as soon as possible. “I’d just go in and bring them down.”
Collins, a veteran of demolishing skyscrapers, nonchalantly said the Shea razing was “like any other demolition,” but then called it a “great challenge” to tear down a place where, “I used to spend a lot of time with my uncles.”
In the outfield, wide tire tracks created by heavy equipment have furrowed the sod of Beltrán, Delgado and Wright. On the dirt infield sat three of the project’s Bobcats, the compact bulldozers that have been knocking down walls, concession stands, bathrooms, closets, clubhouses and offices.
Inside the field level, Bobcats have wrecked everything.
The lights were dim or absent, the concrete floor wet and muddy. It stank of demolition. Exposed wires hung from the ceiling.
Chunks of concrete were obstacles to anyone but the operator of a Bobcat.
Wilpon wanted to show the Mets’ clubhouse, now darkened and turned to rubble. But the menacing growl of an approaching Bobcat altered his route. Close by was the rear entrance to the ticket office. A large, ragged gash in a cinderblock wall made it appear that the Incredible Hulk had vented his frustrations over the work of Aaron Heilman.
The old ticket office led, unencumbered by walls, to the stadium’s old main office entrance, and to where the elevator once moved with maddening slowness. It is gone.
“The shaft makes an excellent garbage chute,” said Daryl Mattis, a project supervisor for Hunt-Bovis, the Mets’ construction partner.
A Bobcat pulled up in what was once a corridor.
Inside the tight cab sat J. W. Colucci, an operating engineer.
How does it feel, he was asked, to be wrecking Shea?
“Sometimes,” Colucci said, a smile on his dusty face, “it feels better than sex.”
Wilpon added: “I’d love to drive a Bobcat, blasting through this place.”
He confesses to a wee bit of nostalgia for the good times he and his family have had at Shea. But his priority is Citi Field. “You have to tear Shea down to get where you want to be,” he said, on the field where parking for 2,000 cars will be created.
The stripping of Shea has revealed even more of Citi, its elegant brickwork, archways and entrance rotunda. Until the final game, fans had to look past the scoreboard and home run apple to see it, but the view to the nearly finished ballpark is now unobstructed.
The letters of Citi Field light the night sky, so unlike the extinguished neon that colored the baseball characters on Shea’s outer wall. Soon, ramps created out of the stadium’s excavated concrete will let giant grapplers reach the upper deck’s exposed steel and pull it down. And Shea moves inexorably toward its end.
