11/14/2023 0 Comments Petrified wood forest![]() “He was sitting backstage reading the Post. Should we stop the show? Turn on the house lights?’” Luba remembers. “I said, ‘Hey Chief, I’m not super comfortable with how things are going. It was so packed that Luba, fearing a crowd crush, approached the chief of police, who he says was a music fanatic and had the word “Prince” tattooed on his knuckles. ![]() But during the Mumford & Sons grand reopening show, in August 2013, fans flooded the pit. Without seats or aisles, the venue could cram 13,000 people in the bowl and 4,000 on the floor. The goal was to recreate a “Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii” vibe. So Luba and Forest Hills got to work, stripping the stadium of its original petrified wood and bringing in a pop-up stage. “‘This is nothing like Wimbledon - this is a shithole! We can actually play a proper rock concert here.’” “’You pitched this to us completely wrong’,” Luba recalls him saying. 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. Several months later, he took Mumford pianist Ben Lovett on a walk-through. “The night before, the members finally said to the developers, ‘Over our dead body are you going to knock down this space.’” “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. And given that half of the members of Mumford & Sons grew up in Wimbledon, he thought the tennis stadium was a perfect match. Luba grew up on Long Island and remembered hearing stories about Forest Hills from his parents, whose second date was a Simon & Garfunkel concert at the venue. 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. 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. ![]() The legendary Queens, New York, tennis-stadium-turned-amphitheater - longtime home of the U.S. Forest Hills Stadium could have been a condominium.
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