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THOUGH constructed on landfill and girdled by four major highways, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park is nonetheless the most visited park in Queens by far.
After years of neglect, the sprawling grounds that were home to two World's Fairs are beginning to show the fruits of a $61 million capital outlay from the city this year.
In addition to six new playgrounds, work has begun on an $11 million overhaul of the Flushing Bay promenade from the public boat launch near the mouth of Flushing Creek to LaGuardia Airport, a distance of two miles. Also on the board is a $7 million project to install artificial turf on the park's heavily used soccer fields, which turn into dust bowls during games.
Local activists contend, however, that funding for maintenance is lacking and that the park is being treated like the dumping ground it once was. Around the turn of the century, the meadowlands around Flushing Creek served as the final resting place for Brooklyn's incinerated garbage. In his novel "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald described the place as a "fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens."
"Then, in 1939, along came Robert Moses," the powerful parks commissioner who shaped modern New York City, said Kew Gardens Hills resident Ben Haber, who helped organize the ad hoc Committee to Preserve Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. "He had this great idea to build a World's Fair site and after that he would give the people a wonderful park. [The park] never happened. Then another World's Fair came along in 1964. Moses promised an even better park, but that never happened, either."
When the second World's Fair pulled up its stakes in 1965, the city inherited 1,255 flat acres that spread from Flushing Bay to the subway yards near the junction of the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway. Moses' clout had waned by then and the park became what Haber termed the "stepchild of the New York City park system."
Though several structures from the fairs remained (every major structure in the park dates from the two fetes), the political will to maintain them evaporated.
"The politicians used the park to grant political favors and lopped off pieces for non-park...