Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Photo by Bobby Das via Flickr
It’s day one of the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, held at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. For urban explorers, the park has long held a special lore, with its layered history and abandoned structures. As you’ll see in this collection of secrets, its past and proposed future continue to reflect the push and pull of New York City development and most spectacularly its hidden spots may reveal themselves in centuries to come, or never again.
10. Flushing Meadows-Corona Park Has A Buried Time Capsule To Be Opened in the Year 6939
Burial schematic from the record of Westinghouse Time Capsule I
On September 23, 1939, an 800-pound tube made of an alloy of copper and chromium called Cupaloy was lowered 50 feet into the ground at the site of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company exhibit of the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. The tube’s contents comprised 35 items one might find in any run-of-the-mill American family household, including copies of Life magazine, a Sears Roebuck catalog, cigarettes and seeds of wheat, corn, alfalfa and soy, each examined and preserved in inert argon and nitrogen gas to remain intact for the next five thousand years–until the year 6939 to be exact.
The device was an engineering feat, a “time capsule” as notable New York public relations counselor George Edward Pendray called it for the very first time in 1939. We’ll just have to wait another 4900+ years to see it again.