A World's Fair atop the ashes

I lived in the borough of Queens for a number of years, often visited the site of the '39 and '64 World's Fairs (once even finding a stray there), and have read The Great Gatsby a couple of times (and wondered about the allusions to the ashes), but I never knew this.

In debating what the Olympics might deliver to New York, it might be worth recalling the forgotten legacy of Fishhooks McCarthy.

The line connecting Mr. McCarthy with the Summer Games is crooked or, at best, circuitous. But it offers a timely reminder that well before the current debate over whether New York needs the Olympic Games or a new stadium to accommodate them, two ambitious World's Fairs were also touted as cost-effective vehicles to expand the city's parks and public works. The analogy is not precise, but the question it raises is instructive: Did those fairs deliver on their promise of civic improvement?

Both fairs were held in Flushing Meadows, Queens, a site immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald as the fiery "valley of ashes" through which Jay Gatsby commuted in the 1920's between Manhattan and Long Island's gold coast. The valley was manmade, flanked by mounds of ashes up to 90 feet high that John A. McCarthy's company, under a sweetheart deal with his fellow Democrats in Tammany Hall, removed from Brooklyn's coal-burning furnaces and dumped at the rate of 100 or so railroad carloads a day.

Legend has it that Mr. McCarthy's moniker was inspired by his habit of thrusting his fists immutably into his pockets at the first sighting of any due bill. But when the city finally bowed to reformers and canceled its contract with Mr. McCarthy's company, Brooklyn Ash Removal, in 1934, a door was opened to transform the befouled meadows into New York's second-largest park and Robert Moses bullied his way through.