William A. Shea Stadium was always the official name that nobody used.
It was “Beautiful Shea” and “The Big Shea,” to Mets announcers - Kiner, Murphy and Nelson. To the mere mortals who passed through its turnstiles it was just Shea.
Unlike the revival parks of today, where “fan friendliness” is the mantra, Shea Stadium was built to please one man: Robert Moses.
As New York’s “master builder,” Moses parted neighborhoods instead of seas to realize his vision of making it as easy as possible to drive through Queens, to get to someplace else. Nearly all the highways and parkways that resulted from his machinations went through the site of the 1939 World’s Fair.
It was Moses who decided that, in time for the 1964 – 65 World’s Fair (run by a private company of which he was the chair), a 90,000 seat, Olympic-sized, brick-walled, roofed-over stadium needed to be built near all that good transportation - on the barely-filled marsh, near the northern edge of what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
Of course, it would have to be publicly-owned because it sat on parkland. Because it would be publicly financed, it would have to be utilitarian, and accommodate both football and baseball.
Because money was tight (the city having lent the World’s Fair corporation $30 million) and because not even Moses could create a foundation for such a heavy structure on the tenuous terrain selected for the ballpark, concessions had to be made.
The roof and full grandstand were the first to go; their weight would sink the stadium.
After the occasional 130-foot-long steel tube took two or three blows from a pile driver and then disappeared into the ground in a spout of muddy water, the decision to use bricks was abandoned too.
What was left was the “modern” open design, decorated with “stylish” fiberglass panels on stretched cables, which moaned in the wind - as if they were watching what went on inside.
But National League fans didn’t care - baseball was back - in Queens, no less. For legions of kids whose parents had moved from Brooklyn and Manhattan out to “two-fare” country, it was paradise.
After a bus ride (30 cents round-trip) and a walk from Main Street, for a general-admission ticket ($1.75) you saw baseball, live and in color. The unobstructed views were always magnificent, even when the play on the field made fans wince.
Back in the days of waxed moustaches, when fans couldn’t afford a ticket, they’d find a knothole in the fence to watch. Shea had the biggest knothole in history.
Early on, it was possible to watch the game from a stretch of platform at the Willets Point station of the No. 7 train. As word got around, it sometimes got so crowded that people started falling onto the tracks, and panels were erected to block the view.
This banished intrepid freeloaders to watch from the ramp leading to the station, at the mercy of the elements.
To shoehorn the gridiron into place for Joe Namath and the Jets, the field-level seats were moved on tracks to create plenty of premium seating. But the Jets were there on just a few Sundays, for just a few years. To Mets fans, it was “our house.”
The LaGuardia flight pattern became the 10th man on the team, spooking many a visiting rookie. Up in the cheap seats, the noise level rivaled any discotheque.
Considering that Shea never sold out in its early days (there were even plenty of tickets available for its very first opening day), once you were inside, you pretty much had the run of the place.
The joke at the time was that if you called Shea and asked what time the game started, they asked, “What time can you get here?” Late in the game, when the ushers relaxed their guard, you could get right down to the box seats at field level.
The Mets finally became contenders and started filling Shea. On September 10, 1969 the Mets went into first place and went on to win the World Series.
From the first game, on April 17, 1964 to the last, scheduled for September 28 of this year, it has been the site of unforgettable experiences. It has hosted all the New York teams that play outdoors: the Yankees, Giants, Jets and Mets.
The Beatles - John, Paul, George and Ringo - staged the very first major outdoor rock ‘n roll concert at Shea in 1964.
In the pennant-winning year of 1973, Tug McGraw coined the true fan’s credo: “You gotta believe.”
Six years later, Pope John Paul II preached to a crowd of 60,000 at Shea.
Met fans witnessed miraculous wins, like Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which even overshadowed the Series-winning seventh game. They shared agonizing defeats, like the fifth game of the first “subway series” in two generations, when the 2000 Mets fell to the Yankees.
No matter what great things will come to Citi Field, Shea Stadium will always be a fabled part of New York history.
Long Shea’s Journey into night
By Victor G. Mimoni
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