Wednesday Applesauce

i graduated from chaminade in ’01. never played baseball, but played hockey all four years.

True, the identity of the Mets—whose colors combine the blue of the Dodgers and the orange of the Giants—has thrived on a magpie element, but there’s something a bit dishonest about naming the rotunda for Jackie Robinson, who never wore a Mets uniform. A pastiche of the Dodgers’ former field in Brooklyn pasted onto the façade of a different team’s twenty-first-century ballpark in Queens is less a historical tribute than it is an act of make-believe.

Practicality concerns aside, I strongly agree with the article’s author that the Mets and the city would’ve been better served by a new stadium closer to the urban core than on the extreme outskirts:

It’s a pity that the Mets didn’t build on the far West Side of Manhattan, where Colonel Ruppert first thought of putting Yankee Stadium, ninety years ago, and where the Jets recently tried to build a football stadium. A football stadium doesn’t need to be in the middle of a city, but a baseball park, smaller and used much more often, does.

I remember, from the recent HBO documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush, that Walter O’Malley wanted to build a new stadium in Brooklyn (somewhere near the present Atlantic Yards project, if I’m not mistaken). Robert Moses, who had a tremendous amount of power in the city at that point in time, was very much a car-oriented planner and tried to push O’Malley to accept land in Flushing Meadows Park instead, believing it to be more important that a new stadium be accessible by highway and have a vast amount of parking in order to be accessible from the suburbs, which were a quickly growing population center at that point in time. (Disclaimer: My narrative here may be colored here by the fact that I am very much not a fan of Robert Moses.) At an impasse, O’Malley took what was, really, a very generous offer from the Los Angeles city government and moved the team. A few years later, Moses got his wish, a city-owned multi-use stadium in Flushing surrounded by acres of parking, near the site of the World’s Fair, and the Mets (and, for a time, the Jets) to play there.

Well, my point is, it’s not the middle of the 20th century anymore; the Robert Moses era is thankfully in the past. The suburbs are no longer the wave of the future. I don’t want to get into a whole long discussion of urban planning here, but I think it’s apparent that a lot of people (of various age groups, but especially young educated people) are seeing the appeal of revitalized urban neighborhoods rather than less densely populated suburban areas where you have to get in your car to buy so much as a quart of milk.

Because of this, I think the Mets missed an opportunity by building their new stadium out in an area that was originally selected to cater to the Long Island suburbs. I don’t know whether they looked at locations closer to the middle of the city, but they should have. Bloomberg was, at one point, all about a stadium on the West Side; one of the biggest criticisms of that proposal, that it was too much work and too much money for a stadium to host ten games a year, could’ve been knocked out of the park if it were being built for the Mets instead. Alternately, the Mets could’ve done true justice to the Dodger legacy the Wilpons love so much by building in Brooklyn: on the Columbia Street waterfront (my dream plan; you could actually build a stadium that faced the lower Manhattan skyline), or around the Gowanus Canal (an area that badly needs to be cleaned up and redeveloped), or even at Atlantic Yards (where O’Malley wanted to build a new stadium in the first place).

We’re all used to the fact that it’s a pain in the ass to get to Shea, and there’s nothing to do there before or after a game, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Redeveloping Willets Point into a “ballpark village” is a neat idea, sure, but it will be a pale replica of a real neighborhood surrounding a stadium that’s been interwoven into a community (Wrigleyville, or Kenmore Square, or South Beach, or LoDo), and nobody is going to mistake it for the real thing.

Whew, that went on for a while. My congratulations to you if you made it through the whole thing.