Robert Moses and ‘The Great Gatsby’
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Now more than ever is the time to go to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens. The Queens Museum of Art, housed in the old New York City Building from the 1939 World’s Fair, hosts, beginning this Sunday, “The Road to Recreation,” a major, dazzling part of the three-venue blockbuster “Robert Moses and the Modern City.”
In 1992, in an early number of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Roger Starr wrote an essay called “The Valley of Ashes: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Moses.” At first, it seemed like an odd pairing of names. It was anything but.
“The Valley of Ashes” will resonate with readers of “The Great Gatsby.” Fitzgerald, in his 1925 novel, described
a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
To get from Manhattan to East Egg and West Egg, the train passed through this valley. Many readers may presume that Fitzgerald’s biblical image of the ashen valley was as fictitious as his resort towns on the Long Island Sound. In fact, the Valley of Ashes was quite real. It was on the site of Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
In the days when our furnaces burned coal in vast quantities, ash dumps were an unavoidable feature of the city. The city contracted with private ash-removal firms. One of them, the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company, operated what was known as the Corona dump. In the 1930s, the city purchased the Corona dump. At the time, Moses was building the Triborough Bridge, and to connect to it he built the Grand Central Parkway. The rest of the area he envisioned as parkland, but in the 1930s funds were scarce. Moses staged the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs on the site. Both contributed to the intensively used 1,255-acre park of today.
The Queens Museum of Art is a 10-minute walk from the no. 7 train’s Willets Point stop. The building once housed the United Nations General Assembly from 1946 to 1950. The museum opened in 1972. Its most notable permanent attraction is the Panorama of New York City, the extraordinary 9,335-square-foot model of the five boroughs, showing some 895,000 structures.
The 140-foot-high Unisphere, a globe showing the Earth’s continents, encircled by the orbits of the first astronaut, the first cosmonaut, and the first communications satellite, is 450 tons of stainless steel. U.S. Steel built it for the 1964 fair that failed to make enough money for Moses to make Flushing Meadows-Corona Park the crowning achievement of his career he so dearly wished it to be.
But read “The Great Gatsby,” then visit “The Road to Recreation,” and you will find the park — which also includes the New York Hall of Science, the National Tennis Center, and much more — to be achievement enough.
