An 800,000 square-foot mall will be built on the Citi Field parking lot (right), followed by a 680,000 square-foot mall on the edge of Willets Point (left). Because who doesn't want to go shopping after the Mets lose? (Bing Maps)

The original plan, going nowhere fast. (NYC EDC)

It may be a strike for the mayor, but Steve Ross and Fred Wilpon have scored big time with the latest Willets Point do-over.

It was revealed earlier this month that after a year of weighing competing proposals, the city had selected the Related Companies and Sterling Equities to redevelop the Iron Triangle, albeit in vastly revised form. Housing and other development would be put off in favor of a large mall.

Make that two malls, surrounding the new-ish throwback stadium, a veritable retail double play.

According to both The Times and The Journal, before much gets built in Willets Point, the 62-acre swath of chop shops and heavy industries just east of Citi Field, a mall will be built on the west side, on the site of the current Mets parking lots. Per The Journal:

The first step for the developers would be to take on a costly 20-acre environmental cleanup and build the new parking lots for the stadium [on the Willets Point side to the east], the people said. They would also be required to build a hotel and a small amount of retail just to the east of Citi Field.

Then they would be able to build more than 800,000 square feet of retail on the parking lots to the west of the stadium. Only then would construction begin of the new neighborhood first envisioned by the Bloomberg administration, with the construction of the 400 apartments and 680,000 square feet of retail. That aspect of the project could grow, the people said.

The Times said the cleanup could cost more than $40 million, but also notes that the added development is seen as a positive, not a negative, to the plan.

According to the executives, Related Companies joined forces with Sterling Equities to come up with a new proposal that embraced Citi Field. Proponents argue that the city will get what it had always planned at Willets Point, but the timeline and sequencing will be different.

How long it will take for any of this to ever be built is an open question, though there is said to be a $35 million penalty if no housing is completed by 2025. How much housing, beyond the initial 400 units planned, remains to be seen. All four developers reportedly argued that the project, with 5,500 units, a third of which were meant to be affordable, is too complex to complete as originally planned.

That took a grueling City Council review, another of which will be due for parts of this project. Which also raises the specter of the Kingsbridge Armory, where retail unions successfully defeated the Related Companies bid, with the help of local pols. Could that be a problem here, too?

The developers had better be wearing their lucky jock straps to pull this one off.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Late-night heroics didn’t appear to be anywhere on the horizon, but the Mets broadcasting triumvirate of Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling were on TV, and—as has often been this case during this disappointing season—were picking up the slack.

Keith: Ahh-chooo!

Gary: Bless you.

Keith: Did you hear that? I put on my cough button!

Gary: You were a little late.

Keith: I was tardy?

Ron: Were you tardy?

Gary: Your sneeze was in the catcher’s mitt.

Keith: It’s one of those sneezes that sneaks up on you!

A minute passed, and Mr. Cohen said, “Do you have something in your hand, Keith?”

The camera turned to the Mets broadcast booth above home plate. There was Mr. Hernandez, glasses pinched at his nose like a librarian, but still unmistakably the former star Mets first baseman from the 1980s—bushy mustache, a jock’s chest, dark hair, a head the size of a melon—holding a tiny silver box with a big red button in the middle.

The camera shot eventually turned back to the field. The announcers didn’t.

Keith: You know what happened to me once? I pressed the wrong button, and I thought I had the cough button on and I didn’t.

Ron: You pushed my button!

Gary: In other words, something went onto the air that wasn’t supposed to.

Keith: It wasn’t anything that got me into trouble.

Ron: On TV, Keith, you can say anything once.

Gary: Yeah, that’s true.

Keith: Are you sure?

Ron: Yeah, I’m sure!

Gary: You can say whatever you want right now! We just might not see you tomorrow.

The old adage for a good broadcast is that when things are going well, it’s like you’re having a conversation with the viewer at home.

Keith and Gary and Ron have done just that over the past four years, for 60 games a season, and about another 90 games using some combination of two of them. But the viewer they’re talking to is jaded, and cosmopolitan, and, not infrequently, a little bored with the Mets.

Keith and Gary and Ron don’t pull for their team. They remark, cruelly and accurately, on the Mets’ poor play. They voluntarily discuss the Mets’ horrific collapses of the last two Septembers. They digress.

This wouldn’t work in St. Louis, where approximately 100 percent of the supposed best fans in baseball wear red to the games, or on the North Side of Chicago, where there is a rich tradition of homerism in the booth. Nor would it work in the Bronx or in Boston, where the fans crave reinforcement of a smug certainty that their organization is different, and special, and superior.

What Keith and Gary and Ron do is something less obvious, and more difficult.

“They reflect the Mets fans’ mentality,” said Greg Prince, co-author of the excellent Mets fan blog Faith and Fear in Flushing. “Being a Mets fan is recognizing reality and accepting sometimes that things are too funny to be sad and sometimes too sad to be funny. It comes across in the three of them.”

Back in the booth, Mr. Cohen took a stab at returning to baseball.

“The Mets are trying to avoid being one-hit for the first time in nearly three years,” he said.

“We’re trying to avoid the highlight of this program being the audio-box display,” Mr. Darling responded.

IN MANY BOOTHS around the league, the announcers have clearly defined roles: The play-by-play man with a broadcast-ready voice stares at the field and describes what happens to the baseball. The ESPN (and former Mets) announcer Dave O’Brien is perhaps the model straight man: great, deep voice; no affect. Balls, strikes, hits, double plays.

The announcer next to him, almost always a retired player, explains why the baseball went where it went. Today’s color analysts are typified by ESPN’s Joe Morgan and (disastrously unsuccessful former Mets general manager) Steve Phillips. Too often, they are heavy on cliché and manufactured attitude, and light on original insight.

On the Yankee-owned YES Network, there is Michael Kay—a fast-talking, abrasive former newspaper reporter. He is usually put on air with people like David Cone and Al Leiter, former players who were beat-reporter favorites.

During a lull in a recent Yankees-Mets game, Mr. Kay, Mr. Cone and Mr. Leiter spent two minutes debating the designated hitter rule in earnest. It was nothing a 10-year-old fan wouldn’t have heard a dozen times.

On Sports Net New York, the four-year-old network started by the Mets, Gary, Ron and Keith were talking, intensely, about the aesthetics of their favorite out-of-town scoreboards. It was strange and funny.

ALL THREE MEN are instantly familiar to Mets fans. Mr. Cohen, 51, has been the sharp, intellectual and crisp-voiced announcer for the Mets radio station WFAN since 1989; Mr. Hernandez, 55, and Mr. Darling, 48, were the star first baseman and a star pitcher, respectively, on that ’80s team. Two-thirds of the booth attended Ivy League schools. (Mr. Cohen went to Columbia; Mr. Darling, a native of Hawaii, attended Yale until after his junior year, when he was drafted.) Mr. Hernandez was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1971, when he was 18, but affects the sardonic air of an intellectual hippie. He is from San Francisco.

Gary is competent; Ron is incisive; Keith is subversive.

“The moment of revelation for me was when I realized that we are better as a threesome than any combination of the twosome,” said Mr. Cohen.

It was a few hours before the cough-button incident, and the Mets and Yankees were gearing up to take the field. We were inside the SNY broadcast booth at Citi Field, which is cramped, but right above home plate with an expansive, nearly perfect view of the field. Mr. Cohen was sitting behind a desk filling out the lineups on his scorecard; Mr. Darling was sitting to his right; and Mr. Hernandez was pacing around, quietly groaning about pain in his leg.

“Somehow it works,” Mr. Cohen said. “We don’t script any of it. There’s not one word for three hours we’re planning, but somehow it all works. It’s more … It’s more? What do you say? Free-form jazz?”

“Yeah, Yeah! It’s free-form jazz,” said Mr. Darling. “There are producers that will literally say, ‘Gary, I need you to get Keith right now.’ We don’t have that.”

Mr. Hernandez let the back of his head bounce gently against a wall.

“I had always been warned about traffic,” Mr. Darling continued. “Traffic, traffic, traffic. ‘In a three-man booth, there’s going to be all this noise and you gotta watch out never to talk over each other.’ That’s something that hasn’t happened here and it hasn’t happened since day one. I think that’s unusual.”

It is.

Tom Seaver, the Franchise, the Mets’ only Hall of Famer and maybe the most popular player in team history, took over the booth in the late ’90s, and it was a terrible bore. He was condescending, he talked down to players—you’d never get away with that in my day—and his ego dominated the broadcast.

The current team prides itself on being uncompetitive about airtime.

“To me, the game comes first, and everything else springs from there,” continued Mr. Cohen. “It’s not like I’m thinking, ‘I have to get an anecdote in or I have to talk about this.’ It’s not the way it works. Something happens in the game and Keith says something that makes Ronnie think of something that makes me think of something and then we get focused on the game and then we get back to where we were and then before you know it the inning is over.”

During the sixth inning of the game that night, Yankees pitcher A. J. Burnett was working on a no-hitter against the Mets until Alex Cora delivered the Mets lone single, a solid line drive that landed in center field.

Gary and Ron talked about how deflating it is for a pitcher when he’s working on a no-hitter and loses it. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the time the Mets—who have, amazingly, never had a no-hitter—came their closest to one: a game in July 1969, when Tom Seaver was two outs away only to surrender a left-center hit to the Cubs’ reserve man, Jimmy Qualls. 

“Seaver looked like he wanted to go and strangle Jimmy Qualls,” said Ron. “That’s the look he gave.”

Silence.

Keith: “He’s a winemaker now—Thomas.”

Ron: “Don’t forget Nancy Chardonnay.”

It was a reference to the wine Seaver named after his wife.

Keith: “It’s Nancy Fancy—it’s a red.”

Ron: “Oh, it is? I thought it was a char.”

Keith: “It’s like a petite sirah, almost.”

Gary: “Are you oenophiles done?”

Ron: “It’s a blend, right?”

They all laughed.

Keith: “Sorry, Gar.”

Gary: “It all tastes the same to me.”

More silence.

Keith: “I had a splendid Joseph Phelps the other night!”

Gary: “Reyes down swinging, and that’s seven strikeouts for Burnett.”

MR COHEN, a tall, balding, pencil-necked New York native who used to call soccer games with George Stephanopoulos at Columbia, is the passionately opinionated baseball historian. He was trained as a radio guy, only switching to television in 2006.

“From the beginning, I remember just looking at him and being like, ‘Oooooh! That’s pretty darn good,’” said Ron Darling. “His call is so strong.”

For years now, when a ball flies over the fence, Mr. Cohen won’t say “It’s gone!” or “It’s a homer!” or “Kiss that baby goodbye!” It is always, always—Mets or opponent—“And it’s OUTTA HERE.”

“There was a game in Flushing at Shea,” Mr. Darling said, “that Carlos Beltran ended a 16-inning game against the Phillies and it had been a long game, but a great game, and Gary’s call was ‘It’s outta here! And we’re going home.’ Was that the call, Gary?”

Mr. Cohen looked up from his scorecard and nodded.

Interestingly, Mr. Cohen does a number of things wrong when he calls games on TV. When you’re on the radio, you announce that the catcher is set up on the inside corner and the pitch is a back-door slider and the hitter is jammed and the ball goes down the third-base line and David Wright back-hands the ball and makes an off-balance throw that Daniel Murphy scoops on one hop to beat the runner by a step. On television, where the producers and the cameramen do the hard part for you, you probably should say nothing other than: “Grounder. Back-hand. Out.”

Mr. Cohen often forgets this.

“I still think in radio,” said Mr. Cohen. “I have to translate in TV, which means talking less and playing with others.”

MR. DARLING HAD a rough transition at first to the broadcast booth. After a stint with Fox Sports at the beginning of the decade, he called games for the Oakland A’s, and then for the Washington Nationals.

“When I watched that demo tape from Washington, I said, ‘Oooh! We gotta lot of work to do,’” said Gregg Picker, the producer of Mets games on SNY.

Mr. Darling is now invluable: a pitching specialist who has gotten very good at explaining the overall mechanics of the game to viewers. But he is still the most self-conscious of the three in the booth. During the Yankees game, he began a story with two outs—a no-no—and actually said, “Oh, I’m starting a story with two outs. O.K., well …”

Mr. Hernandez is the least predictable element. He was known for his intensity as a player, but his participation in the broadcast is … casual.

Consider this moment in 2006, preserved on Metsblog.com, when the Mets were playing the Rockies and leading 10-3 in the top of the ninth inning:

Hernandez: Are you getting hungry?

Cohen: No, actually, I had a pretty big dinner. You?

Hernandez: I’m starved.

Cohen: You’re always starved. … And there’s ball four.  … You know, they have really good food here at the ball park.

Hernandez: No …

Cohen: Would you like me to go out and get you something?

Hernandez: I’m gonna head over to the steakhouse after this …

Cohen: Because they have really good fajitas in the back.

Hernandez: … and I’m gonna order a bottle of wine, with my daughter, and my wife, and I’m gonna savor it, after this debacle of a game.

Cohen: Are you saying you haven’t enjoyed the quality of play tonight?

Hernandez: No, I have not … but I will enjoy the quality of the red wine.

Cohen: Would you like to have tonight’s winning pitcher pick it out for you?

Hernandez: No, no, I can pick it out myself.

Cohen: O.K., I just didn’t know if your wine-picking credentials were up to snuff. … Nothing and one to Jose Valentin … A red or a white?

Hernandez: Oh, a red, a big, hearty, heavy, spicy red, maybe a red zinfandel … My stomach is growling, I’m so hungry.

Cohen: Wow, that’s out there. … Zero-one to Valentin, who’s one for four on the night … Now, are you thinking rib-eye, or …

Hernandez: No, I never eat heavy at night. … I may drink heavy, but I never eat heavy at night.

Cohen: O.K., thanks for sharing. … See you in the morning. … One-two to Valentin … Maybe have some shrimp … The Mets looking to tack on, they lead in the ninth.

Hernandez: [sighing] Wait, there’s nobody out? [sighing]

Cohen: You just noticed that? Oh, boy.

Last month, late in a game that took place a week before the Mets’ 5-0 loss to their crosstown rivals, the Yankees were beating the Mets 15-0.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Darling were talking about historic Mets blowouts in which the team, out of desperation, or indifference, brought position players in off the bench to pitch: Matt Franco in 1999 against the Braves; Derek Bell the following season. Mr. Darling revealed a secret about Darryl Strawberry having thrown 80 miles per hour from the mound before a game in Montreal and hurting his arm for a few days. Purposefully dorky stuff.

Gary: So there’s plenty of history on the line. You don’t want to tune away and miss something historic. Right?

Ron: It won’t be for our call of the game!

Gary: Besides, you never know what Keith might say.

Keith: I wasn’t paying attention.

[laughter]

Ron: Right answer!

Keith: You guys lost me a while ago.

jkoblin@observer.com

A year later, they performed the very first concert ever held at Shea Stadium.

This week, Paul McCartney is back to christen that arena’s replacement, Citi Field. And while in town, he’ll be heading to the Ed Sullivan Theater July 14 to play for that theater’s new inhabitant, David Letterman.

The concerts and Late Show appearance kick off Mr. McCartney’s latest U.S. tour, which will take him across the country.

It’s somehow fitting that, both really and virtually, Mr. McCartney is returning to these epochal venues.

At times, Mr. McCartney’s most recent reinventions have, if anything, strained for the trappings of 21st-century relevance and ended up being pure nostalgia. At the end of the summer, both Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan will be featured in the Beatles version of the video game “Rock Band,” slated for a Sept. 9 release. The game comes packed with 45 Beatles songs to play (or to approximate playing) in your living room—like 21st-century sheet music!

But at Citi Field and the Ed Sullivan Theater this week, it’s the music that will be the center of attention. And that is good for Mr. McCartney, because nowadays, and for the first time in a long time, he is exhibiting some part of the ambition that made the Beatles, and an earlier Mr. McCartney, not just world-famous, rich, the center of the recording-industry universe, but actually great.

Of course, it’s ridiculous to speak of a man like Paul McCartney as having been unambitious. But given his early legendary status, it was easy to think that the fans’ connection to Mr. McCartney made success too easy for him.

How do you continue a career that seemingly can’t go wrong, and infuse it with the energy that accompanied that first American tour?

In many ways, this recent shift is the result of years spent in the dead center of the music industry, watching its decline. It’s also proof that Mr. McCartney the studio tinkerer, responsible for backward guitar lines and orchestral cacophonies in the Beatles days, hasn’t lost his curiosity.

It’s possible that no one was as entrenched or even as responsible for what happened to the music industry since 1970 as Paul McCartney (and by extension, the Beatles). He was signed to EMI for decades and made the label very rich (and he didn’t do so bad for himself). Yet by 2007, McCartney was convinced the industry had reached the end of its usefulness. He called EMI “boring.” He walked.

Mr. McCartney’s relationship to Big Music has often been contentious, but never has it propelled him so far outside its own conventional commercial wisdom as it has now.

Soon after the game’s release, downloadable versions of Beatles albums, starting with Abbey Road, will finally be made available. (The Beatles haven’t exactly been on the edge of new technologies; it took years before their catalog was first available on CD, too.) In a nice touch, a download of “All You Need Is Love” will be available exclusively to Xbox 360 users and proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders.

One return that isn’t in the cards for Sir Paul is those Beatles songs Michael Jackson owned before his death. In the past weeks, rumors swirled that he had willed the songs back to Mr. McCartney (and Ringo, one presumes), but this turned out to be untrue. On his Web site, Mr. McCartney explained that it was fine, because the alleged will was “something I didn’t believe for a second.” He also insisted that the famed rift between the two onetime collaborators (“The Girl Is Mine,” “Say Say Say”) was overplayed by the media: “In fact, though Michael and I drifted apart over the years, we never really fell out, and I have fond memories of our time together.” He did however call Michael a “boy man,” which may be accurate, as well as accurately creepy.

One former associate whose passing likely did not elicit fond memories for Mr. McCartney was Allen Klein, who died July 4. The noted cutthroat manager who once quipped “Don’t talk to me about ethics” tried to wrest the Beatles catalog just as the band was splitting up (he’d conned his way into many valuable Rolling Stones rights years before), but thanks in part to Mr. McCartney’s vocal dissent, he never got a chance.

Mr. McCartney learned from these un-square dealers. He’s been working to extricate himself from middlemen for the past two years. He’s in a video game. He’s circumventing the major-label system that once revolved around him. He was quoted in the press saying he’d like to work with MGMT (they’re opening a few dates on this tour). Who is this old hipster?

He became the first artist on the Starbucks–Concord Music Group’s Hear Music Record Co. Memory Almost Full was well received, among critics but especially by the public, and sold more than a million copies in the U.S.—his highest-selling stateside release in 25 years. The 2007 album was solid though comfortable, not much of a musical surprise. Mr. McCartney also made a deal to sell the album through iTunes, and even allowed a song to be used in a commercial for the online music giant.

Hear Music seemed like a sure thing. But by 2008, Starbucks’ model wasn’t looking so rosy anymore. Returns diminished through Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and James Taylor and onto, uh, Cat Power (apparently just being in a Starbucks isn’t enough to make people buy music by someone other than someone who was in the Beatles). As Starbucks started slashing prices and closing hundreds of branches, Hear Music got shunted over entirely to Concord Music, and Starbucks focused on its partnership with iTunes rather than cultivating a label.

But set adrift, Mr. McCartney did not return to the majors. In fact the decline of Hear Music may have been even more liberating for him. His next album was self-released in late 2008 by MPL, an imprint of his own London-based publishing company, and distributed through indie labels (ATO, One Little Indian) as well as on his own Web site. It was also released under the name Fireman, not as Paul McCartney—the return to that moniker for the first time in a decade. (He’s used it twice before in non-vocal electronic collaborations with producer (and ex–Killing Joke bassist) Martin “Youth” Glover, in 1993 and 1998).

All the Fireman albums have been expressly about pushing Paul McCartney to places where he sounds very un-McCartney. In the past, that’s meant rather drippy electronica. This time it meant a rather joyous (and noisy!) psychedelic pop album titled Electric Arguments, in which there’s no piano balladeering and even less anthemized “Hey Jude”–like formula-ism. The album ranges from the heavy kerrang of the opener (“Nothing Too Much Just Out of Sight”) to the plaintive and lo-fi follow-up (“Two Magpies”), reminiscent of the hushed urgency of his early solo albums, and on through string sections and rousing marching-band fervor and even a bit of hymn singing (“Is This Love?”).

The collaborative duo worked swiftly, crafting 13 tracks in as many days, yet the results feel vital rather than slapdash. There are thunderous, Zeppelin-like rockers and Paul duetting with his own falsetto and Paul’s voice at a shout, nearly subsumed in more than a few reverb storms of epic proportions. He’s done nothing like this in many years. It’s proof that McCartney’s legendary experimental streak is still around and can be folded into his more prosaic pop songwriting.

A statement released about the album bragged that it was “made with no record company restraints or a set release date to work to” and “with complete artistic and creative freedom.”

It shows, and it will be interesting to see how much Macca makes of his newfound freedom.

editorial@observer.com

“You stopped me right before I could walk in and get too liquored up!” prolific restaurateur Danny Meyer told the Daily Transom as he arrived at the Central Park Conservancy's "Taste of Summer" benefit on Wednesday night, June 3.

An estimated crowd of about 1,000 had turned out to the Central Park Naumberg Bandshell--not only for the open bar--but also to sample fare from some 40 top-notch New York restaurants. (A guest at the end of the night walked out holding onto her stomach and said, “I’m not pregnant, I promise! I’m just full!”)

Mr. Meyer hosted a special VIP cafe exclusively for guests who rented a table for the night, featuring tastings from across his Union Square Hospitality Group's repertoire, including the perenially popular Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Cafe.

Though not a fan of the term "empire," Mr. Meyer only continues to expand his culinary footprint. In addition to rolling out new concessions at Citi Field in Willet's Point, he is also opening a new catering operation in Central Park called Public Fare, which he said "hopefully, will not only make it more fun to go see 'Shakespeare in the Park' but will also be open during non-theater nights, too."

He further plans to open a fancy new restaurant at Ian Schrager's posh Gramercy Park Hotel in the fall.

"This is a recession baby, this restaurant," Mr. Meyer told the Daily Transom. "The only recession baby I’ve ever had was Blue Smoke, which was born just a couple months after 9/11. And I think it’s fair to say, I want to create a restaurant--presuming that these times are going to go on for a number of years, even though we’d all like it to be over--but I’d rather make that presumption and have the kind of restaurant that somebody would wanna go to even with that, and then that means you wouldn’t want to go there just because you had a few more dollars to spend."

Mr. Meyer said he hasn't yet decided on a name for the new eatery. (How bout just calling it Recession Baby?) “But we have a chef which we just announced today! Nick Anderer," he noted.

"He’s not only an amazing chef; he’s an incredible guy, too," Mr. Meyer said. "We haven’t opened a fine dining restaurant since The Modern opened 5 years ago. Which is fine, it’s not like I have to do something every year. But you end up getting a back log of talent, whether at Gramery Tavern or Eleven Madison Park, or Tabla, or Union Square Café, or The Modern, who say ‘What about me? I want to grow.' So, we’re pretty much committed to doing everything we can to promote our own talent."

Mr. Meyer described the Gramercy Park deal as a lot more manageable than the lucrative city contract to operate Tavern on the Green, for which Union Square Hospitality ultimately declined to submit a bid. "I think we really wanted to do something that we could manage," Mr. Meyer said. "Life always presents you situations where your heart says 'yes' and your mind says 'no,' and I think Tavern on the Green was one of those. It would have been a lot of fun but it would have been a tough business to operate. We’ve got enough."

Behind the ruins, I still saw the Van Wyck Expressway in the background, the chop shops that line 126th Street in Queens, the planes flying from LaGuardia overhead. Flushing.

And then the No. 7 slowly led me to the front door of Citi Field, the new $850 million home of the Mets, designed by HOK Sport, which is based in Kansas City.

I didn’t see any Shea blue. In fact, there isn’t much color on the stadium at all. There’s a brownish brick and beige-ish brick on its facade, and exposed trusses and fixtures within arches that surround the whole stadium that are a dark, steel blue—a foreign color. There was, however, some out-of-context Mets orange. And a red Citigroup logo. 

There was a blurb on A1 of The Times last week: “Good News, Baseball Fans: There is a lot to like about Citi Field. The Mets’ new stadium corrects many of the worst faults of Shea Stadium, the team’s old park, which is in ruins a few hundred yards away.”

The story that followed--"Mets' New Home Is the Anti-Shea," by Ken Belson and Richard Sandomir—was effusive.

It made many of the same arguments that Mets owners Jeff and Fred Wilpon had made for a new stadium—nicer food; nicer bathrooms; a nicer, dark-green-hued seating arrangement—all of which is perfectly … nice.

Some questions remained unasked, though. Does old-timey equal classy? Does quirky equal original? Are amenities and character mutually exclusive? Is this a stadium for the New York Mets?

The Mets, after all, are not the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Mets are not the New York baseball Giants. The Mets were born as a charmingly hideous hybrid of New York’s excised National League teams—a blue and orange mess.

Shea Stadium, a giant bowl with Technicolor-outlines of baseball players on the outside of the stadium, was the perfect symbol for it. It was modern (at the time) and brutally loud—the embodiment of a franchise that had racing stripes on its uniforms throughout the ’80s.

People can say what they want about the Mets, and about the losing, and the choking. But no one has ever accused them of being without an identity. The same was true, until now, of their stadium.

Shea had its problems. It was probably time for it to go. The question is whether Citi Field is a worthy successor.

The facade has been designed to recall Fred Wilpon’s beloved Ebbets Field, a stadium that was once an integral (if cramped and smelly) part of a densely built downtown neighborhood that was, and is, completely unlike Flushing by the water.

The seats in the Mets’ new stadium are not garish like the seats in Shea. Or festive.

“Dark green is the color of a classic ballpark,” said Mets executive Dave Howard to The Times when describing the color of the seats at Citi Field. The “candy-colored” seating arrangement of Shea had been disposed of, The Times noted.  

“Classic” is something that Mets executives are obsessed with. In 2003, even before we knew there would be a Citi Field, Jeff Wilpon complained to The Times that Shea had to be knocked down because “it’s no longer state of the art, and it’s certainly not a classic ballpark.”

Classic isn’t really something you can manufacture, though, is it?

SHEA, IN ITS WAY, was a classic ballpark. It had Banner Days. It had life. The foundation literally shook inside that place during the playoffs, as a nervous-sounding Joe Buck acknowledged as the Mets won the pennant in 2000, or when Endy Chavez leapt over the left field wall in 2006. It shook because it had a devoted fan base that didn’t give a fuck that Shea was a dump. It was ours. That’s classic.

Inside the walls of Citi Field there is yet more green. Green seats, green walls, a green scoreboard above the left field upper deck. There are quirky dimensions! The walls are taller, supposedly inspired by any number of the ball fields of yore—the old Crosley Field, Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, you name it. The overhang in right field is a nod to Tiger Stadium.

But this sparkling new stadium, if we’re being honest, doesn’t conjure the old Tiger Stadium or Crosley Field. It’s inauthentic—it’s a copy of a copy. And it’s a decade too late.

Camden Yards was a really neat idea, and it works. And now there are faux-antique baseball stadiums in St. Louis, Cleveland, Houston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Arlington, Denver, Milwaukee, San Diego, Washington and Philadelphia, too. Between 1992 and last season, 18 teams moved into new ballparks, the vast majority of which are replicas.

Citi Field, in other words, could be anywhere. The Times’ writers noted, approvingly, that unlike Shea, the stadium is enclosed, shielding fans from views of the unsightly surrounding neighborhood. (Close your eyes and you’re in Philadelphia!)

“Sitting in their seats, few fans will see the chop shops in Willets Point, the cars roaring past on the Van Wyck Expressway, the subway yards to the south or the U-Haul sign,” they wrote. “They will still get a crystal-clear view of the planes on their final approach to La Guardia Airport. Some things never change.”

Ah, yes. Very thoughtful of those architects from Kansas City to still allow us the planes.

But, see, the stadium is in Queens. In Willets Point.

It’s the Valley of Ashes. It’s chop shops with signs that say CHEPE AUTO REPAIR and SAMBUCCI BROS. INC AUTO SALVAGE. It’s Flushing Meadows park, a grab-bag of World’s Fair relics and more recently installed amenities that now includes an unjustly underhyped New York panorama, a pitch-and-putt that serves beer, a highly enlightened zoo, a science museum where lots of Orthodox Jewish families go, an indoor swimming center where lots of Korean families go, and, still, somehow, the Unisphere.

The old adage goes that the Yankees are a corporate titan. They are winners, and their stadium—the Fucking House That Ruth Built, we get it—is a cathedral. 

Shea, by contrast, was merely the most democratic stadium in baseball. It was monstrously big, and, with rare exceptions, you could always find a seat. It was a bowl where you went to go watch baseball games.

Now, the Mets have given their fans Citi Field, a place where we’re invited to do lots of things that don’t really involve watching baseball. There’s a Budweiser beer pit. There’s a party spot called “Knothole Alley” (more old-timey-ness!) beyond the right field wall. There’s an auditorium for corporate events. There’s a spot to host birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. And there’s a restaurant named Caesar Club where you can get gourmet food and watch the game. On TV.

It’s not surprising the Wilpons went down this road: Indications of their new-franchise class envy have been unmissable for a while now. In 2004, for example, the Mets renamed Thomas J. White Stadium, their longtime spring training home in Port St. Lucie, “Tradition Field.” It was an unsubtle attempt to ape the Yankees’ facility, which is called “Legends Field.” It was sad.

AFTER MY TRIP to Citi Field this weekend, I boarded the No. 7 with the intention of getting off somewhere to get myself burgers and beer. I noticed that there were some other Mets fans who had gone to look at the new stadium. I joined them.

At the Cuckoo’s Nest, a Guinness bar in Woodside, we talked about the stadium, and I realized I might be the one who has to get a grip. These guys, like all the other Mets fans I’ve spoken to about the dawning of the Citi Mets era, were divided between those who loved Shea but are willing to give Citi Field a chance, and those who really do like Citi Field much better. (The ones, presumably, the Times writers were addressing in their cheery lede: “For those fans who hated Shea Stadium, fear not: Citi Field is nothing like its predecessor, the last bits of which lie in ruins a few hundreds yards away.”)

“You know, we took the 7, and we got to 110th street; I couldn’t believe Shea was gone,” said my new friend Tom McLaughlin, a 50-year-old travel agent. “But you know what? I thought the new place was really great. I feel like it has a lot of personality.”

“Shea had to go,” said Rob Pedoty, a 44-year-old born-and-bred Queens resident. “You know those forest-green seats they got in the new place? That was the same color of the seats they used at the Polo Grounds!”

Well, fine. But who cares.

jkoblin@observer.com

Citi Field, which will open next spring, will be the home of the New York Mets baseball team, and is being built next to Shea Stadium, which it's replacing. Shea, built in 1964, is like Queens itself: an aesthetic jumble, charmingly uncomfortable and unexpectedly lovable.

The design of Citi Field, though, is strange for a stadium located in one of the most diverse places on Earth. Citi is being built to look like Ebbets Field, the storied home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and it reflects a taste in new baseball stadium design for a retro look evoking some vague vision of Fifties, apple pie America. It looks like a set from A League of Their Own. Tourists from the Midwest might like it, but then they've already got parks like this.

On top of ticket prices, which will rise, and corporate boxes, which will grow in size and number, Citi Field will replace the vitality and variety of its home borough with the baseball equivalent of a T.G.I. Friday's.

Feh.

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