Flushing Meadows Corona Park

This guide to Flushing Meadows Corona Park traces the ground beneath its giant steel globe back to the Corona Ash Dumps, decades when furnace ash from across New York piled into mountains here under a Tammany Hall contractor nicknamed Fishhooks McCarthy. You'll hear how F. Scott Fitzgerald folded this landscape into The Great Gatsby, and how Robert Moses set out in the 1930s to turn the ash heaps into the site of a World's Fair. It follows the years of leveling, digging and pile-driving that reshaped a tidal meadow into fairgrounds.