In the Bronx, a bumpy season has been cushioned by nostalgia as the Yankees play their final games at Yankee Stadium before moving to a new stadium next year. A few miles south, in the Borough of Queens, a less-heralded stadium also faces demise. The Mets are playing their last season at Shea. Unlike the venerable Yankees, who seem timeless, William Shea and his stadium are the remnants of a singular era. Shea was a midcentury fixer, a wise man who mixed a civic cocktail of public interest and personal fortune like a virtuoso tending bar. The Mets’ new Citi Field—like other new stadiums around the country—will be a monument to a different age, one in which games and players, hot dogs and Cracker Jacks, are the careful calibrations of a “branded experience.”
Shea Stadium is probably best known for the Beatles’ concert there in 1965, shortly after it opened. My own most vivid memory of the place doesn’t involve baseball, either. When Shea reopened after 9/11, I suggested we take in a game and take the kids, leaving my wife with a look of stupefied horror. Life felt shaky enough without making obvious targets of ourselves. Yet Shea was jammed that night. In the stands, people cried at random, no explanation needed. I don’t think anyone had come for baseball. We just wanted to show that an old game was more central, and more sacred, than the new fear. Beneath the artificially illumined sky, over the course of nine seemingly inconsequential innings, vulnerability was transformed into defiance. And in honor of our enemies, the fans delivered a branded experience rooted in the Yankee environs to the north: a Bronx cheer.
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