Two Popes

Paul

Joseph Tiraco

I take my kids there on weekends, and we're often the only non-Asian/ non-Hispanic people in sight. The park is nowhere near as well-kept as the more 'socially acceptable' parks in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and maybe that's why most Queens residents don't come by. But they should, and I think if they started coming they wouldn't stop.

-Levi Asher, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Web Page, www.levity.com

Joggers of Forest Hills have the best of two worlds, Forest Park and Flushing Meadows Park. The former contains a shiny spot on the Big Apple, Victory Field, a quarter mile oval running track paved with a rubberized surface - a gift from Ed Koch at his zenith.

One of four in the city, the ultramodern exercise facility replaced a cinder track that often left a runner looking like a coal miner. The emerald studded commons, selvedged by towering red headed harbingers of the fall season, and juxtaposed by a reviewing terrace large enough to hold several hundred people, has a robust social atmosphere thoroughly homogenized; school kids run alongside octogenarians. (I once witnessed an 85 year old acquaintance, a few yards ahead, stumble dead into the arms of a lovely woman jogger. He had once mused on the desirability of a quick death while running. On a mild winter's day, his wish was granted; the warm embrace, a gift from the graces.)

The casual jogger might not readily experience this park's deep social undertow. Unlike Central Park's swinging singles scene, friendships here often take several seasons to blossom.

Victory Field is a 24 hour facility. At night, spotlight towers illuminate the track. (Though, the Giuliani administration barely gives enough light to cast a pale shadow, as if to eclipse the largesse of a former mayor. Giuliani's gift, a 24 hour Home Depot being built a stone's throw from the park, will be garishly lit all night.)

The elegantly landscaped Flushing Meadows Park, the 1939 & 1964 Worlds Fair site, is far more tamed by the hand of man then the deciduous old growth stands of Forest Park. Flushing Meadows' jogging attraction is sprawling Meadow Lake, a bucolic lea ringed by weeping willow trees dipping their fingers into the lake. A turn around the outer roadway (there are also two inner pedestrian & bicycle paths) measures 2 ½ miles - twice around once a day keeps the doctor away.

Once upon a time, innovative exercise stations - chinning bars, inclined situp boards, flying rings, parallel bars, etc. - were positioned equidistant around Meadow Lake's perimeter, each station had a placard describing the exercise and suggesting the equipment's correct usage. But the Parks Department let the equipment fall into disrepair, until it was removed and never replaced. The salubrity of the citizenry apparently carries little weight with politicians - squandering billions on boondoggles while saving pennies to deny some small measure of public felicity.

In fact, Flushing Meadows Park is a misnomer, because politicians have declassified this park as a park - it is officially meadowlands, set aside for miscellaneous public use, New York's answer to New Jersey's meadowlands. This designation has led to political mischief. The escapade to turn the roadway circling Meadow Lake into an auto racetrack is perhaps the most well known. Another proposal was to drain Meadow Lake and install a waste disposal plant. Currently, thirty acres have been fenced, one can only hope another slice of this park is not about to be loped off.

Officially, Flushing Meadows is land in reserve for some yet to be named development. The continuous wait for the other shoe to drop has discouraged proper funding for the park's development.

After hundreds of jogging visits to Flushing Meadows Park over the past quarter century, I have formed an inescapable conclusion: Flushing Meadows Park is a first class public asset receiving second class care. The sudden spate of custodial services applied in the last few weeks after an instigation of public awareness took place, is in no way permanent or sufficient. The permanent new bathroom at the boathouse being lauded by the Queens Parks Department - a tin trailer set on cinder blocks - would be laughed out of Manhattan's Central Park (unless it belonged to the tunnel workers.) The ubiquitous portable bathrooms used extensively throughout this park (which suddenly vanished this week) were left to fester, and would not be allowed in the gorilla cage at Bronx Park.

A man could die of thirst circling Meadow Lake on a hot summer day, unless of course, he brings the price of bottled water, about a buck a gulp at the concession stand.

Full of righteous indignation, I set out to prove the point, loaded a camera with fresh film, and took it along on a Sunday jog. In gladiatorial temper, I snapped away at clumps of high weeds left discretely untrimmed at strategic points around the park to serve in lieu of bathroom space, broken fountains, bottled water stacked high at the concession stand, the disgusting conditions of the portable heads (I caught a teen urinating on the outside wall of a portable bathroom - a potent point, I thought.) But, to bear the cruelest cut of all, I needed a picture of what was not there.

As I circled towards the 1965 site of the Vatican Pavilion, somewhat elated by the telling photos being captured, and wondering if Pulitzer Prizes were awarded for photojournalism, an image stopped me dead in my tracks. What dumb luck! a scene corporealizing the abstract message I wanted to convey was staring me in the face; all I had to do was snap it up.

Countless dignitaries and notables have walked the trails of Flushing Meadows, from the Queen of England to Albert Einstein. Pope Paul VI once visited this spot, and brought with him Michelangelo's Pieta. The Vatican Pavilion was a New York sensation. Crowds of thousands waited hours to enter. In preparation of the pope's visit, the school children of New York City had donated their pennies to provide the pontiff with a secluded retreat behind the Vatican Pavilion called, The Pope's Contemplation Garden. When Pope Paul knelt to pray in his garden that New York October morn, it was undoubtably the most heavenly place on Earth.

Years after the fair had closed, and the pavilions erased, the garden, open to the public, was still a delight to walk through. Landscaping had risen to a high art in Queens, of which Flushing Meadow Park was a vivid manifestation, and the Pope's Contemplation Garden, a floral paradise within its bosom, beauty within beauty, petals enfolding a delicate stigma in efflorescence. But the garden, like the park, was neglected by caretakers, and fell into ruin, the unkempt tangle hacked down and turned into lawn space.

How expensive is seed and gardening tools? Money could not have been the determining factor in this treasure's demise. The churches of Queens would have certainly provided volunteers to maintain the garden if they were asked. Within the same proximity, the Queens Museum is subsidized by taxpayers to preserve and exhibit art for the people of Queens, yet barely 200 yards away, a rare Queens art treasure, readily accessible to the public, was ignored and went to pot. This callousness towards Flushing Meadow Park has become habitual in official circles.

A perfectly matched young Hispanic couple, dressed in athletic clothes, tall and lean, were kneeling before Pope Paul's marble throne, left as a memento, but now a shrine. Three concentric steps rise to hold the throne. The couple, serene and motionless, knelt side by side on the first step, backs perfectly erect, heads bowed to their chest and hands pointed in prayer. I moved quickly before the spell could be broken; their unawareness of me was essential. Three sneaky snaps and I had it; they were oblivious to distractions while communing with Paul.

Words to fit the pictures were swimming in my head as I breezed into the photo shop on Metropolitan to pick up my flicks. But the film was blank. Not one photo came out. Bright light was the prognosis.

Ridiculous, I loaded the film carefully in a dark corner. How could a bright light get inside the camera?

. . . Whoops . . . my peccadillos?

Righteous indignation?

All too sure cockiness?

Obnoxious intrusion?

Violating the sanctity of devotion?

Sorry Paul!

October 23, 1998