Queens Reimagined: A Day at CitiField

Today's New York Times included an article extolling the virtues of living in the borough of Queens. The piece walked a line between "successful" new apartment developments, depressingly defined as a $2,000 per month studio, and "bargain" residences that included working fireplaces and enough elbow room to manageably raise a one-child family. In my lifetime, I have lived in two of the neighborhoods the journalist cited: Astoria and Sunnyside. One advantage each area offered residents was its affordability relative to Manhattan's zillionaires playground and the concept known as "Brooklyn".

Florent Morellet,
in front of his eponynous and long-closed restaurant
(Image: blogs.villagevoice.com)

In the same Times issue, a front-page piece talked about Florent Morellet's move to Brooklyn's freshly spawned "it" enclave, Bushwick. The Frenchman used to own a diner in the Meatpacking District that was fun to visit. He finally closed when the neighborhood denizens were fashionistas instead of transvestites and the rent on his establishment escalated beyond any reasonable sum. What became evident in the piece was how selective the notion of "Brooklyn" had become. The former Bushwick of food stamps, gangs, and bad schools was rapidly transforming into a hipster heaven, with wine bars, tablet-armed graduate students, and art walks. Morellet insightfully called this classist dreamscape New York's "East Bank," and he's right about that. (He's not always on the money: Morellet's reverie about the Cypress Hills neighborhood, one of the city's deepest, dreariest Siberian outposts, as resembling San Francisco has to be read to be believed.) Alas, there remains plenty of the Brooklyn the Times routinely ignores, especially the residents chained to foreclosure anxieties, underreported crime, and substandard services.

CitiField, home of the NY Mets baseball team
(Image: nycgovparks.org)

Queens rarely resembles Brooklyn, as I observed earlier this week during a business event at the CitiField baseball stadium. The conference focused on public school librarians' professional development; I attended as a book company sales representative promoting my firm's products. The gathering took place in a large dining/banquet room that included floor to ceiling windows overlooking my former home borough and, in the distance, midtown Manhattan. While the three-hundred-strong librarians listened to a prolonged James Patterson address, my attention drifted to CitiField itself and to the view beyond the ballpark.

Joan Payson Whitney with Casey Stengel (left)
Opening Day, Shea Stadium 1962
(image: artnet.com
original photo: Louis Requena)

This was my first visit to CitiField, and my first to a baseball stadium of any kind this year. (I usually make it a point to see one major league game in person during the season. This year was an exception.) The event's participants walked through the Seaver VIP entrance, named after a New York Mets' pitcher whose best years were nearly a half-century ago. (I can legitimately brag about how I saw Tom Seaver pitch a nearly perfect game in the searing heat of a pennant race against the Chicago Cubs in 1969.) The area featured other nostalgic reminders of a franchise leveraging its past to burnish its Madoff-tarnished present. One of my relatives was general manager of the Mets during their 1969 World Series championship season. (Yes, I did get free tickets and passes to the luxury dining area.) It was a different era, when a Whitney could own a baseball team because it was a sporting thing to do, like owning a race horse. Joan Whitney Payson took more than a sporting interest on which players stayed, played, or sat. Well, it was her team. She also brought Willie Mays back to New York, something my mother, who was raised in a baseball household, deeply appreciated.


Of course, those days are long gone. Looking out toward Flushing Bay, I could see a hint of the World's Fair Marina. It's not exactly anyone's dream getaway, with its proximity to LaGuardia Airport runways, scuzzy water, and a cheerless parkscape bounded by expressways and service roads. Yet, I knew a billiionaire (when there were precious few in the world at the time) who kept his yacht there. My first wife prepared meals for the money man, his wife, and their guests, onboard during the warm weather months. Sometimes, I got to sail on the vessel. Yes, it was nice. Those days are long gone, too.

Main Street, Flushing
(Image: nytimes.com)

A glance to the south showed the outline of the apartment tower where my teen years were spent; to the east, a Flushing where Caucasians enjoy Chinese food and Asians enjoy living. I considered dining there after the library event with my colleague, who had briefly lived in China. However, the grim reality of Queens' late-afternoon traffic created a sense of urgency to get out while we could.

I drove straight home, and wondered how the world had changed to the extent that public school librarians held a meeting at a baseball stadium during the World Series.