Tennis fans have a new view as they walk back to the 7 train after the Open: a stadium is growing on the other side of Roosevelt Avenue.
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.
