Growing up, Shea Stadium was almost a religious shrine for me. Little did I know, that the really important – and still quite timey—shrine was less than two miles away.
My feelings about Shea were so strong that I would get excited when we went past it as we drove from our home in New Jersey to my cousins’ house on Long Island. That passion dates back to about 1965 or 1966, when I started following baseball and rooting for the Mets (who were awful). Starting in about 1966 and continuing until the early 1970s, my father would take me on a birthday pilgrimage to see the Mets play at Shea. In 1969, I even got to attend the third and final game of the first National League championship series. When the Mets won, I was among the fans who rushed the field and took home a piece of the sacred turf which we planted in our otherwise scraggly front yard. It thrived for years, which, given our utter lack of lawn care, might be more proof that Shea was a sacred place.
I’m not alone in seeing Shea as a religiously important venue. In 1965, many had a transcendent experience when the Beatles played there before a sold-out crowd of about 55,000 “deliriously screaming teenagers” who, according to the next day’s New York Daily News, were “literally…climbing up the walls.”
In 1969, when Mets upset the Orioles to win the World Series, Joseph Durso, the New York Times’ baseball writer, went fully Biblical writing: “The Mets entered the promised land yesterday after seven years of wandering through the wilderness of baseball.”
And, Shea became a religious venue in October 1979, when Pope John Paul II celebrated mass at the stadium. Moreover, since “a torrential downpour” that had “soaked the more than 60,000” attendees “cleared up as soon as the Pope reached the stadium,” some people believed “they had witnessed a minor miracle,” according to the New York Post.
Notwithstanding these miracles and experiences, the really important religious site in Flushing is the Browne House, located at 37-01 Bowne Street, about 1.6 miles from where Shea Stadium stood. This house, which dates back to 1661 and is the oldest house in Queens, was part of America’s first critical battle over religious rights, a fight that is still resonant today.
Here’s the back story. Flushing, which was settled in 1645 by British men and women, was part of the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, which was founded in the early 1620s. The colony was governed in accordance with Holland’s 1579 constitution, which stated that “no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.”
Consequently, the new colony soon became home to people practicing a variety of religions, including some of the new world’s first Jews. However, as historian Kenneth Jackson wrote in a 2007 essay in the New York Times “religious tolerance had its limits in New Amsterdam, especially when it came to Quakers, who then had a reputation as obnoxious rabble-rousers.”
Moreover, Peter Stuyvesant, New Netherland’s director general (or governor) who was “a Type A personality if ever there was one, was not going to tolerate a Quaker presence in his domain.” Stuyvesant “ordered the public torturing of…a 23-year-old Quaker convert who had become an influential preacher. And then he issued a harsh ordinance, punishable by fine and imprisonment, against anyone found guilty of harboring Quakers.”
Non-Quaker residents of Flushing, where many Quakers lived, did not agree with the decree. On December 27, 1657, their leaders presented Stuyvesant with the “Flushing Remonstrance,” a letter announcing they not follow his decree. The 400th anniversary of that letter, is honored by todays #stampoftheday, a 3-cent “Religious Freedom in America” stamp, issued on December 27, 1957.
Even though they had been ordered not to “receive or entertain any of those people called Quakers because they are supposed to be, by some, seducers of the people,” the signers wrote, “if any of these said persons come in love unto us we cannot in conscience lay violent hands upon them.” Instead, they promised to “give them free egresse and regresse unto our Town, and houses…for we are bounde by the law of God and man to doe good unto all men and evil to noe man.”
This statement of defiance, Jackson contended, is the moment when “religious freedom was born on this continent.”
But the document also shows how hard it can be to win that freedom.
As expected, Stuyvesant rebuffed them and arrested several people involved with its drafting and forced other signers to recant. Nevertheless, the Quakers continued to meet in Flushing.
In 1662, Stuyvesant arrested John Bowne (who built the house that’s still standing in Flushing) for holding illegal meetings in his house. Bowne, who was banished from the colony went to Amsterdam where he appealed to officials with Dutch West Indies Company, which oversaw the colony. In 1663, they ruled that although Quakerism was an “abominable religion,” Stuyvesant had to “allow everyone to have his own belief.” (The ruling’s effect was limited because the British gained control of New Netherlands in 1664.)
To be clear, that decision was not based on moral principles. Rather, as historian Russell Shorto noted in a New York Times op-ed written in 2018 after the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s travel ban on people from several mainly Muslim countries, “that decision was practical,” because the company’s leaders “feared that Stuyvesant’s bigotry would dissuade others from settling” in New Netherlands (which fell to the British in 1664).
Regardless of the rationale, religious freedom, particularly the welcoming of immigrants who practice other religions, has been an important (but not always consistent) theme in American history (and in American economic growth). Indeed, Flushing is one of America’s most diverse neighborhoods and the Bowne House (and, therefore, the site of Shea Stadium) is close to several churches, a synagogue, a Hindu temple and a mosque.
The 1657 document “reminds us that freedom of religion is in a constant struggle with fear of the other, that basic rights are never secure, but are only upheld by constant vigilance,” wrote Shorto, who added that the letter’s call for “‘the law of peace, love and liberty,’ applies just as well in the 21st century as it did in the 17th.”
And, that, is something worth rooting for with at least as much emotion as I felt when we drove past Shea Stadium on our way to Plainview, Long Island.
Be well, stay safe, “doe good unto all men and evil to noe man,” fight for justice, and work for peace.