It’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park’s turn now |

For three weeks, US Open tennis shines a glittering light on a celebrity-filled corner of a park often considered the city’s most neglected. Now it’s time for Flushing Meadows Corona Park to get the respect it deserves, a former long-serving NYC parks commissioner says.

A legacy of city government penny-pinching has left the biggest park in Queens plagued by crumbling structures and persistent flooding, said Adrian Benepe, parks commissioner for 11 years during the Bloomberg administration. Only the city’s legendary master builder Robert Moses held the job longer, 26 years.

“The problem is Flushing Meadows Corona Park remains the remnants of two World’s Fairs that no actual landscape architect has ever transformed into a well-functioning, well-designed public park,” Benepe said in a recent interview. The park was home to the New York World’s Fairs in 1939-40 and 1964-65.

Benepe said change at Gracie Mansion marks a unique opportunity for the makeover. The election of Zohran Mamdani, a former state Assembly member from Queens, as mayor should mean greater political heft for the borough, he said.

“I think this mayor would recognize it as an opportunity to address years of inequitable investment in Queens and turn Flushing Meadows into a world-class park,” Benepe said.

The cost of Benepe’s vision for the park — one that would survive climate-driven flooding — is eye-popping; he estimates at least $1 billion. But hold on, that cost is well in line with government spending to rebuild existing parks and to create new parks in recent decades, he said.

“It’s never had the major park investment that has happened in Brooklyn, in Manhattan, in the Bronx and Staten Island,” Benepe said.

• Hudson River Park, which totals 550 acres and runs from the Battery to 59th Street, has so far cost $1 billion.

• Highline Park cost approximately $300 million, about half government funded and the rest from private sources. Built on an abandoned elevated railroad line, the 1.5-mile park covers seven acres.

• The 85-acre Brooklyn Bridge Park cost $600 million, according to its managing nonprofit.

Flushing Meadows dwarfs those parks. Covering nearly 900 acres, it is the city’s fourth-largest park; it’s also the city’s fourth most-visited park.

Many have called for Flushing Meadows makeovers through the decades, including a 2025 report which found it to be the city’s “most underappreciated important park.” The study by the Center for an Urban Future cited deteriorating electrical systems, gas lines and water mains.

The worst was park drainage. “Even minor rainfall” leaves large stretches of the park unusable for days. Flooding of a path around Meadow Lake amounts to several months of closure annually, the center found.

The Mayor’s Office did not respond to several emails requesting comment on Benepe’s statements.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards Jr. recently wrote that the park could no longer be ignored in an op-ed piece for AMNewYork.

“The deferred maintenance has piled up year after year and today it stands as a crisis hiding in plain sight,” wrote Richards and co-author Anthony Sama, executive director of the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The nonprofit group’s aim is to help maintain and improve the park. Richards’ office did not respond to emails seeking a response to Benepe’s recommendations.

Unlike the Central Park Conservancy and the Prospect Park Alliance, the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park does not benefit from affluent constituencies that have helped fund renovations in those parks.

What’s more, only a few city parks benefit financially from concessions and other operations within them; most do not get funding from such activities. That money goes into the overall city budget. Directing those funds instead into the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation would provide approximately $60 million more, or a 10 percent budget increase, Benepe said.

The former commissioner recommended that a portion of revenue generated at Flushing Meadows Corona Park be shared to improve the park. That could include surcharges on events such as the Governors Ball, the three-day music festival that takes place there annually, Benepe said. The cheapest admission listed this year on the event’s website was a basic one-day ticket for $159; the most expensive was a three-day pass with multiple perks at $1,499.

Instead of a required payment, Governors Ball promoters voluntarily provide about $90,000 annually to the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

Jackson Heights resident Len Maniace was a daily journalist in New York for more than three decades and more recently co-manages a book and author publicity business founded by his wife, Barbara Monteiro.