Sunday School: Forgotten Faces of Flushing #76 — Or Perhaps This Week, Forgotten Facades of Flushing
- Mark Rosenman
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Last week in Sunday School, we talked about Tim Tebow.
The football superstar who spent five years chasing a baseball dream that never quite felt real—but somehow never felt impossible either.
Because baseball has always had room for the unusual.
Strange players.
Strange moments.
Strange experiments.
And sometimes…
Strange architecture .
Because every once in a while, the things we remember most about being Mets fans aren’t the players at all.
Sometimes it’s Bob Murphy’s voice.
Sometimes it’s a jet from LaGuardia cutting through a conversation in the upper deck.
Sometimes it’s the smell of cigar smoke mixing with hot dogs and spilled beer.
And sometimes…
It’s just giant orange and blue squares.
Which admittedly sounds less like baseball history and more like something hanging in the Museum of Modern Art.
This week, we’re taking a slight detour.
Because this isn’t really a Forgotten Faces of Flushing article.
It’s more of a Forgotten Facades of Flushing article.
Because long before Citi Field’s brick walls…
Long before the Jackie Robinson Rotunda…
Long before the Home Run Apple became a tourist attraction…
And even before the neon baseball players became synonymous with Shea Stadium…
There were the squares.
Big.
Bright.
Orange and blue.
And for nearly two decades, they were simply part of the background noise of being a Mets fan.
Nobody talked about them.
Nobody made a bobblehead to honor them.
They just existed.
If you only knew Shea as a baseball park, the squares were just scenery.
But if you ever went to a Jets game there in December or January…
They became something else entirely.
Because winter at Shea wasn’t just cold.
It was Shea-cold.
The kind of wind that didn’t just blow through you—it rearranged your internal organs.
Walking up those ramps toward the upper deck felt less like entering a stadium and more like entering a weather system.
And that’s when you saw them in a completely different way .
Suspended between the concrete ramps, the panels weren’t decorations anymore.
They moved.
They creaked.
They swayed on their cables just enough to make you glance twice.
And in a strong enough wind, they seemed to lean and shift, as if they were thinking about detaching themselves entirely.
There were moments—especially during those early December Jets games—when you’d look up and think:
If the wind picks up just a little more… those things are coming off.
It had the same uneasy feeling as watching something barely holding on in a storm.
Like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz lifting into the sky.
Except as Dorothy would say "Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore."
It was Shea Stadium.
And instead of a tornado warning…
It was a third-and-seven. Al Woodall under center, Lee White in the backfield, and a wind that felt like it had a personal grudge against everyone in the stadium. Not sure which is worse.
And then, as life tends to do, everything came full circle.
Because years later, those same orange-and-blue facades showed up on film anyway.
In The Wiz, the 1978 film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, Shea Stadium appears not as a ballpark, but as part of a surreal, dreamlike New York landscape.
And there they are.
You can catch a quick glimpse of those familiar colors.
Frozen in time.
A version of Shea that no longer exists except on film and in memory.
By the late 1980s, the squares quietly vanished.
Replaced by something entirely different.
Towering neon baseball players.
A batter.
A pitcher.
A catcher.
Simple outlines.
Nothing fancy.
Yet somehow perfect.
At night, they glowed against the Queens sky like baseball constellations.
You could see them from the Grand Central.
From the Long Island Rail Road.
From traffic crawling toward Flushing.
And somehow, they always felt reassuring.
Like running into an old friend who never missed a game.
They were saying:
“Yep… you’re in the right place.”
Which, come to think of it, was more emotional support than Wally Whitehurst or some other middle relievers ever provided.
And maybe that’s the real point.
Shea itself always felt a little like that—part real, part imagined, part weather system, part dream.
A place where even the architecture had a personality.
And perhaps that’s why both the squares and the neon players still linger in memory.
Not because they were spectacular.
But because they were constant.
Because memories are funny that way.
The things we think we’ll remember forever sometimes fade without warning.
And the things we never thought twice about…
Stay with us forever.
Long after the ramps are gone.
Long after the wind stops howling through them.
Long after the stadium itself has been replaced.
They’re still there.
In the part of us that never really left Flushing.
Comments