Battle for the Heart of a Park ... and the Soul of a Borough

PART II - NYC Stadiums: Battle of the Titans

The NYC World's Fair: 1964 - 1965 in Flushing Queens

January 21, 2013 / Queens Neighborhoods / NYC Parks / Gotham Buzz NYC.

Click here for Part I of our report series on Developments in Flushing Meadows Corona Park where we journeyed back to the Corona Ash Dump, immortalized in the Great Gatsby, and later transformed into a World's Fair utopia by Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and the 1939 World's Fair committee.

The 1939 World's Fair attracted over 40 million people, but lost over $100 million, as it opened the year Nazi Germany beganinvading its European neighbors, and while Japan was busy invading China. Nonetheless, in spite of a financial failure for the 1939 World's Fair bondholders, the fair had enabled NYC and Robert Moses to complete phase one of his vision to transform the Corona Ash Dump into NYC's premier city park, and build a whole new network of highways around it.

Ebbets Field in Brooklyn & The Brooklyn Dodgers

We resume our story, after WWII, as a young lawyer in Brooklyn began working for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers played at Ebbets Field just east of Prospect Park in what is the now Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. The year is 1943 as a 40 year-old lawyer, Walter O'Malley, leaves the Brooklyn Trust Company where he had oversight responsibilities for troubled companies, including the Brooklyn Dodgers.

You can click here to read Part II of our report on proposed developments in Flushing Meadows Corona Park entitled NYC Stadiums: Battle of the Titans.

Or click this link in the meantime to view Part I of our report series entitled - Out of the Ashes Rises the Phoenix - about the beginnings of Flushing Meadows Corona Park and the 1939 World's Fair.