I am committed to the process of learning to love Citi Field. The Mets are important to me and they are unlikely to build another stadium in my lifetime. Either I learn to love this place or I’m up a creek. The following comments need to be understood as part of this process. It is not going to be easy and it is going to take me a while. I will have to struggle to be fair, since I had so much affection for Shea. But I am committed to being fair. And to be fair, I have to sort out what I love, what I like, what I don’t like and what I hate. I also have to sort out what it is reasonable to ask to be changed.
When you love a place, as I loved Shea, you get used to its imperfections and you cherish what you cherish. It’s like loving anything. If Shea were still standing, and I were to enter it for the very first time tomorrow, I would have a lot to criticize. But Shea is gone and Citi Field is here. I do not yet love Citi Field and I am therefore incapable of overlooking the things I don’t like about it. I see much to admire in this stadium. But nothing has happened in it yet and, at this point, it contains nothing of my life. It is not yet protected, as Shea was, by the willfull blindness of my love.
Let me start with the one thing I love about it so far:
I love having a brick. I love the way in which the name of my family is in the ground in front of the entrance. I love having permanent neighbors in eternal Mets love. I love the pathos of all of the references to all of the fans still cheering the team from beyond the margins of life. I think that Citiwalk is a stroke of genius. The principle of the democracy of the ballpark and of baseball fandom is all right here. The square bricks are a bit bigger but there are no luxury boulders. Here is the crowd, in brick and in words. Here we are speaking to Mets fans of a generation, of ever so many generations hence. I love seeing the people looking for their bricks. I love their cries of delight when they find them. I love the way in which they want to point it out and talk about it to everyone in earshot. I love everyone helping everyone else to figure out which section is which.
This is all I love so far. But there are quite a few things I like.
I like the rotunda as everyone enters and looks up and around. I like the honoring of Jackie Robinson even if I am still not sure that this memorial should occupy so prominent a place in this particular ballpark. I would have been happy to have the stadium named after Robinson (a corporation could have sponsored the naming and it would certainly have gotten my business as a result). The rotunda could have honored both the person for whom the stadium was named and the passion of tens of millions of people who have loved the New York Mets for almost half a century.
I like the wide, comfortable concourses, where people walk back and forth and see each other walking back and forth. The best sense you get of the crowd in Citi Field is what you get as you walk all around the stadium looking at everyone else looking for and eating their food. I like the broader range of food options. I’ve tried Shake Shack and Catch of the Day and both were excellent. I particularly like the areas where you seem to leave the stadium to enter what feel like urban village squares open to the sky. I like the way these places, in the lovely waning sunlight of early evening, remind me of beach or amusement park concession areas at the end of the kind of long summer days that kids remember with love so long after they stop being kids.
I like being able to get so close to the old Home Run Apple and I like the way that people, unsupervised by anyone, kindly wait on a long line for the people in front of them to take pictures of this fine, but lonely representative of what the New York Mets have always been.
I like the comfort of the new stadium. I like having a little bit more legroom and I like how in the mens’ rooms now, there are just about as many sinks as urinals. Ladies, you can now know that in Shea, each bathroom would have about sixteen urinals, a bunch of stalls (don’t know how many, I never used them) and two sinks, at least one of which was all crapped up and the other was probably occupied. The men with whom you may have gone to ballgames had not washed their hands after going to the bathroom. I’m sorry. This is the truth. This is the way it was.
I like the view of the sky and the bay from the Promenade level. I like the view of the arches and the columns of the façade from the parking lot. I like the enclosed embrace of the stadium as you feel it in your seat and on the concourses. There’s a kind of cosiness to the stadium as you walk to get your food along the field level concourse. And there is an echo of Shea’s sublimity in the view of the entire stadium from the Promenade Level. I like and appreciate the fact that there is still a Home Run Apple. Though its immaculate immensity strikes me as a little sterile and steroidal, I like the fact that there still is a Home Run Apple. I’m sure that I will learn to love it, as I learned to love Diamond Vision. Some innovations seem too modern to begin with, but then they grow on you.
This is what I like right now and I expect to like more things as time goes by.
[Next posts: What I Don't Like and What I Hate, What Can Be Done and What Can't Be Done]
