Icahn Stadium, opened April 23, 2005, offers a 400-meter Mondo Super X Performance running track, flanked by covered spectator seating for 5,000 and features modern locker rooms, showers as well as fitness, exercise and meeting rooms. In addition, a premier FIFA certified soccer field to the north of the Stadium has been built with an artificial surface, fencing, lighting and bleachers. Icahn Stadium opened on April 23, 2005 and is named after American businessman Carl Icahn.
Downing Stadium, which it replaced, was constructed soon after the Triborough was opened; over the years, it hosted the 1936 Olympic trials (Jesse Owens won the 100-yard dash); thousands of other track and field events; was home to the New York Cosmos, who featured superstars Pele, Georgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer; and hosted major concerts from George Gershwin to Duke Ellington to Jimi Hendrix to Pearl Jam to Dave Matthews.
Quite a turnaround from the original uses of Wards and Randalls Islands, which in the pre-Mosesian era were used to stash “undesirables” from the insane to the virulently ill to the criminal element.
Read more Randalls Island from a 2015 walk and a 2011 tour.
Check out the ForgottenBook, take a look at the gift shop, and as always, “comment…as you see fit.”
1/14/21
4 comments
When Downing Stadium hosted the Cosmos, the world was amazed that international superstar players were playing in such a dump It had deteriorated so much by that time. For one televised game, they painted areas of dirt green, to look like grass.
He didn’t mean to leave NYC, it left him (& too many others):
https://nypost.com/2021/01/16/i-used-to-love-nyc-but-feckless-leaders-have-forced-me-to-leave/
What does this non-sequitur have to do with anything? Who in the story “left New York City?” Your brain?
In “The French Connection”, mention was made of the “garbageman school” on Ward’s Island