Forest Hills Stadium at 100 Years Old: From Dylan and Dolly to David Byrne and Don Draper, a Look Back at the Venue’s Most Memorable Moments
04.10.2023 - 16:05
/ variety.com
Ethan Shanfeld Forest Hills Stadium could have been a condominium. The legendary Queens, New York, tennis-stadium-turned-amphitheater — longtime home of the U.S. Open, which would later host outdoor concerts by the likes of the Beatles, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones — had gone decades without live music and was casually courting offers from developers to knock down the stadium and build housing units.
Meanwhile, in 2012, music entrepreneur Mike Luba had just finished a tour with Mumford & Sons and was looking for a “wacko” venue for the folk rockers to play in New York. Luba grew up on Long Island and remembered hearing stories about Forest Hills from his parents, whosesecond date was a Simon & Garfunkel concert at the venue.And given that half of the members of Mumford & Sons grew up in Wimbledon, he thought the tennis stadium was a perfect match. So Luba cold-called Forest Hills.
“They said, ‘I don’t know who you are or what the hell you’re talking about, but your timing is pretty good,’” he recalls. “The night before, the members finally said to the developers, ‘Over our dead body are you going to knock down this space.’” Several months later, he took Mumford pianist Ben Lovett on a walk-through. The musician told Luba that, far from the rarified air of the British tennis mecca, the amphitheater was actually the sort of down-and-dirty venue the band prefers.
“’You pitched this to us completely wrong’,” Luba recalls him saying. “‘This is nothing like Wimbledon — this is a shithole! We can actually play a proper rock concert here.’” So Luba and Forest Hills got to work, stripping the stadium of its original petrified wood and bringing in a pop-up stage. The goal was to
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