Shea Stadium - New York Mets

Shea Stadium

Hot Dog Vendor

Agee Marker

Shea Stadium Scoreboard

Shea Stadium Night Game

     We begin with my original "home" ballpark, a doomed Shea Stadium in its final season of 2008. It was knocked down and hauled away the following winter. (OMFG!) My father, an old Brooklyn Dodger fan, took me to my first baseball game there in 1966, when I was nine years old. This is a final look back at a childhood memory, as meaningful to me as anything I could ever photograph.

     Shea Stadium was named after a human, not a bank. It had Jane Jarvis the organist, the sign man, the nastiest ushers in baseball, and announcers Lindsay Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner. It had different color decks to commemorate the old New York National League teams: Brooklyn Dodger blue and N.Y. Giant orange. Loud airplanes flew constantly overhead from La Guardia Airport, but no one really seemed to noticed them after a couple of seasons. (Except for opposing pitchers.) The Mets held regular Banner Days at Shea for many years, because, in the old days, whenever a disillusioned Met fan would pause and reflect on the meaning of life, or would contemplate his place in the universe and in the National League standings, he would therapeutically write it all down on a bed sheet. The old place had Cow Bell Man, who now looks lost because Citi Field was built without main isles. Old Shea had a deafening loud speaker system that cost a lot of us our hearing, and rumor had it that it was installed way back for the Beatle concerts. And of course, Shea Stadium had Mr. Met.
     That first game I attended in 1966, Ron Swoboda beat Juan Marichel and the San Francisco Giants with a walk off home run. I went to Willie Mays Night in 1973. The day Thurman Munson died, I was attending a twi-night doubleheader against the Phillies. That same night, Jose Cardenal of the Phillies was traded to the Mets - between games of the doubleheader. Poor Jose actually had to walk through the tunnel under the stands to switch dugouts.

     Photos: The Stadium was a much handsomer place in the early days ("You can look it up." - Casey Stengel), before they took down the outside decorations and replaced them with gobs of blue paint. You'll be happy to know that the vendors at new Citi Field still use the same ancient Nathan's hot dog carriers, but sadly the Tommie Agee marker in the old upper deck is long gone. The old scoreboard was a modern marvel in its day, where one could follow all the important out of town scores during those few and far between years the Mets were in the pennant race. In the last picture, new Citi Field lurks in the shadows during a late season night game in 2008, ready to take over the following spring. 

      The only travel involved here is a trip I've made hundreds of times, on some of the crummiest roads in the nation, from my home in New Jersey through Manhattan to Queens, where one pays dearly to cross the Hudson and East Rivers on expenses bridges bogged down with endless construction. I've been to every one of the lower 48 states this past decade, and these roads are the easily worst in the U.S.A.