Shea Stadium

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Shea Stadium opened on the 17th of April 1964, and the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Mets 4-3 in front of 50,312 fans. The telephone wiring was not finished in time. The stadium was barely done. And yet within a year, the Beatles would stand on that same field before a crowd of 55,600 screaming fans who could not hear a single note. Over the next four decades, Shea would host miracle championships, record-breaking performances, a papal visit, a city blackout, and a closing ceremony that ended with Tom Seaver throwing a final pitch to Mike Piazza while the Beatles played on the loudspeakers. How did a stadium in Flushing, Queens, come to hold all of that? The answer begins not with the Mets, but with two teams that left.

• 2. The Absence That Built It

  ›

  In 1957, both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants left New York for California, and the city found itself without a National League baseball team. The Dodgers' owner, Walter O'Malley, had been offered the Flushing Meadows site by city official Robert Moses, but negotiations broke down entirely. O'Malley wanted to own the stadium outright, control the parking and concession revenue, and build in Brooklyn. Moses insisted on Flushing Meadows and insisted the city retain those revenue rights. Los Angeles gave O'Malley what New York would not. Horace Stoneham moved the Giants from the Polo Grounds to San Francisco, though he had briefly considered Minneapolis. New York was left with a wound.

  The lawyer who set out to heal it was William A. Shea. He led the effort to bring National League baseball back to the city, and the stadium eventually bore his name. Getting there required threading a legal needle: New York state law at the time did not allow a city to borrow money to build a stadium unless the stadium could demonstrate it would pay for itself. Moses and Shea solved this by having the new team commit to paying substantial rent, structured to retire 30-year bonds. The Mets signed their lease on the 6th of October 1961. Rent was set at $450,000 for the first year, dropping by $20,000 annually until it reached $300,000. The Mets never fully met that monetary commitment, and the terms caused them financial difficulty for years.

  Construction hit problems from the start. The severe winter of 1962-1963, the bankruptcy of two subcontractors, and labor disputes delayed the project. Both the Mets and the Jets, as the football team had been renamed, played a second year in the old Polo Grounds. After 29 months and $28.5 million, the stadium finally opened. A jurisdictional dispute between two electrical unions meant the telephone and telegraph wiring was unfinished for opening day. The stadium opened five days before the 1964-65 World's Fair across Roosevelt Avenue, and its exterior panels matched the fair's blue and orange.

• 3. A Stadium Shared

  ›

  Shea was conceived as a multi-purpose facility, and its design reflected that ambition. Field-level seats rotated on underground tracks, swiveling between baseball and football configurations. The stadium held 60,372 for football and around 55,300 for baseball in its early years. The design allowed for potential expansion to 90,000 seats by fully enclosing the grandstand. A formal plan to add a glass dome and 15,000 seats was announced in March 1965, but engineering studies found the foundation could not support the dome's weight, and the idea was dropped.

  The Jets of the American Football League played at Shea from 1964 through 1983, and their tenancy came with constant friction. Until 1978, the Jets could not play their first home game until the Mets' season was finished. In 1969, when the Jets were the defending Super Bowl champions, they did not play a home game until October 20 because the Mets had advanced to the World Series. They opened with five consecutive road games that year. The lease terms were onerous by any measure.

  The year 1975 stands entirely apart. The Mets, Yankees, Jets, and Giants all called Shea home that season, the only time in professional sports history that two baseball teams and two football teams shared a single facility in the same calendar year. Yankee Stadium was under renovation; Giants Stadium was not yet finished. The four teams drew a combined 3,738,546 people that year: 1,730,566 for the Mets, 1,288,048 for the Yankees, 361,102 for the Jets, and 358,830 for the Giants. On four consecutive Sundays in the fall, Shea hosted a different team each week. Joe DiMaggio played his final Old Timers Day game at the stadium in 1975, during the Yankees' two-year stay.

• 4. Miracles and Milestones

  ›

  Shea hosted its only All-Star Game in its first season, 1964, when Johnny Callison of the Philadelphia Phillies hit a walk-off home run in the ninth inning. A month before that, on Father's Day, Callison's teammate Jim Bunning, later a Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator, pitched a perfect game against the Mets at Shea.

  Nothing at the stadium matched the shock of 1969. The Mets had finished last or next-to-last for seven straight seasons, and were given 100-1 odds of winning the championship. Led by former Brooklyn Dodger Gil Hodges, they won the World Series in Game 5. Fans stormed the field in celebration. Similar scenes had played out weeks earlier when the Mets clinched the National League East title, and then defeated the Atlanta Braves in the first National League Championship Series.

  On the 16th of December 1973, O. J. Simpson stood at Shea and became the first running back to gain 2,000 yards in a single season, doing it in 14 games or fewer, a mark no one has since matched. Shea also witnessed Robin Ventura's famous "Grand Slam Single" in a postseason game. After hitting what should have been a walk-off grand slam, Ventura was mobbed by teammates before he could round the bases. Because he failed to touch each base, the hit was officially scored as a single, though it ended the game. The technicality made both the hit and the hitter more famous than a routine grand slam would have.

  Tommie Agee hit what may have been the longest home run in the stadium's history on the 10th of April 1969. The ball landed in the upper deck in left field, a feat no other player ever matched. Agee's teammate Cleon Jones said the ball was still rising when it struck the seats. Agee hit a second home run in the same game, over the center field wall, and both shots came off Montreal Expos starter Larry Jaster. The Mets won that day, 4-2.

• 5. The Concert That Changed Everything

  ›

  On Sunday, the 15th of August 1965, the Beatles opened their North American tour at Shea to a record audience of 55,600 people. Film footage from the evening shows security guards covering their ears as the band entered the field. The crowd noise was so overwhelming that none of the Beatles could hear what they were playing. Despite this, the concert was the first ever held at a major stadium, and it set records for attendance and revenue. It proved that outdoor concerts at scale could be commercially viable, and the band returned to Shea on the 23rd of August 1966.

  Grand Funk Railroad played Shea in 1971 and broke the Beatles' record for fastest ticket sales. Humble Pie opened the show. The Rolling Stones performed a six-night run at Shea in October 1989. On the 18th of August 1983, The Police played in front of 70,000 fans. Sting described it as "like playing the top of Everest" and said near the end: "We'd like to thank the Beatles for lending us their stadium."

  Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band closed The Rising Tour with three concerts at Shea in early October 2003. Bob Dylan appeared as a special guest at the final show to perform "Highway 61 Revisited" with Springsteen. The last concert at Shea was a two-night stand by Billy Joel on July 16 and 18, 2008. Former Beatle Paul McCartney closed the second night with "Let It Be". Pete Flynn, a Shea groundskeeper, drove the Beatles from the stage to a centerfield gate in 1965 and then drove McCartney from the stadium's rear entrance to the stage for that same farewell concert 43 years later.

• 6. Closing and After

  ›

  The last game at Shea was a 4-2 loss to the Florida Marlins on the 28th of September 2008. The Mets had been in playoff contention until that final day; a win would have forced a tiebreaker game for the Wild Card. Instead, the stadium closed with a ceremony called "Shea Goodbye," in which players from the team's history entered the field and touched home plate one final time. Tom Seaver threw a last pitch to Mike Piazza. As the two former stars walked through the center field gate and closed it behind them, the Beatles' "In My Life" played over the speakers, followed by fireworks set to Fanfare for the Common Man.

  Demolition began on the 14th of October 2008. The scoreboard in right field came down on October 18, followed by the bleachers and bullpens. By November 10, the field level and dugouts were gone. On the 31st of January 2009, fans came for a final farewell tour of the site. The last section of seats was demolished on February 18. The last standing structure, a single section of ramps, came down at 11:22 am that morning.

  In the parking lot of Citi Field, which was built on the adjacent land, plaques now mark the locations of Shea's home plate, pitcher's mound, and bases. The engravings feature the neon signs depicting baseball players that decorated Shea's exterior from 1988 onward. The original Home Run Apple, first installed at Shea in May 1980, was relocated in 2010 to stand outside Citi Field in front of the Jackie Robinson Rotunda. As of the time of writing, Mets owner Steve Cohen has proposed building a park, casino, and entertainment complex on the former site, to be called Metropolitan Park.