Every right-thinking Met fan misses Shea Stadium. Not a lot of good has happened to this franchise in the five years (five years!) since old Shea closed, and the old dump looks rosier with every passing year. For Sports on Earth, I dug into the history of Shea's construction, when New York City sold itself out to build a space age stadium that would be obsolete within a decade—signs of a city suffering stadium fever, a malady that continues to afflict the nation more each year.
“On April 12, 1960, the mayor of New York called a press conference to show off a new $14,000 toy. One hundred reporters crowded around to get a glimpse of the plastic model, as tall as the mayor’s hand, which showed a C-shaped baseball stadium with symmetrical dimensions and an outfield open to the sky. Flashbulbs popped as Mayor Robert Wagner turned to a second model, a complete circle, with a gridiron on the field. Two models, two sports, one stadium: A miracle structure that he promised would cost taxpayers a mere $12 million.
”We are going to see this through,” Wagner announced, with the blind confidence of every mayor who has ever caught stadium fever. “We couldn’t turn back now if we wanted to.”
Four years and five days later, Shea Stadium was open for business. It wasn’t the first multi-use ballpark, but it was the benchmark for those that followed — Three Rivers and the Vet, Oakland Coliseum and Busch II — as sports teams forever lost the habit of paying for their own stadiums. Today, they are remembered as an embarrassment, called cookie cutters or concrete donuts, but in 1960 they were the future. As reporters crowded around, the mayor’s message was clear. There was a new world waiting for us, and this ballpark would take us there. ”