A to Z Challenge: My theme this year is NYC before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

FLUSHING MEADOWS CORONA PARK, FREEDOM OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT & FOREST HILLS STADIUM: Please excuse the long title, but it’s necessary. Last June, we ventured to Queens to take in a concert at Forest Hills Stadium and made a day of it by visiting the nearby Flushing Meadows Corona Park where we found the Unisphere and the Freedom of the Human Spirit sculpture. (You’ll also find the Fantasy Forest Amusement Park here for some family fun.)

Flushing Meadows Corona Park is a beautiful, 1,255-acre park in Queens that played host to two World’s Fairs (1939 and 1964). It wasn’t always so beautiful, having once been the dumping ground for coal ash in the early twentieth century. In The Great Gadsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald described it as a “valley of ashes.”

” . . . a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms 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.”

It wasn’t pretty. Then, in the mid-1930s, Robert Moses swept in and converted it into a park. The Unisphere, a remnant of the 1964-65 World’s Fair (and a CGI prop in Men in Black), is really magnificent. Built to represent the fair’s theme of “Peace Through Understanding,” and celebrated the dawn of space exploration, it’s now a Queens landmark.

Also created for the ’64 World’s Fair, the Freedom of the Human Spirit bronze sculpture by Marshall Fredericks, depicts a male and a female nude with wild swans soaring skyward.

“I realized that great multitudes of people, of all ages, and from all walks of life would see this sculpture…I tried to design the work so that it was as free of the earth, as free in space as possible…the thought that we can free ourselves from earth, from the material forces which try to restrain and hamper us, is a happy, encouraging and inspiring one, and I sincerely hope that my work will convey this message.”

Marshall Fredericks

A short walk from the park is Forest Hills Stadium, built in 1923, and boasts a name-dropping history of performers: the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, Diana Ross, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Talking Heads, and The Who — just to name a few. It also hosted the U.S. Open for decades, but after the tennis tournament moved in ’78, the stadium fell into disrepair and sat empty and ugly until 2012 when it was revitalized. Since 2013, it’s once again a thriving concert venue. For now, it’s quiet again.

FACETIME: There’s so many f-words I could have gone with; one in particular whose root has spawned an impressive growth of f-blooms, but I think it just goes without saying. FaceTime with friends and family, however, has become a regular thing for us. I decided to liven up the visuals:

Yes, I’m that big of a dork. But this dork has cheered some folks up, so I’ll risk dorking up my reputation. I think we should make #FaceTimeFacePaint a thing, don’t you?