BY COLE SINANIAN
FLUSHING — With wildfire smoke still choking the air and the July sun scorching the otherwise deserted soccer pitch at Flushing Meadows Corona Park last Friday morning, it was a questionable time to be engaging in any outdoor activities. But TK-year-old labor activist and lifelong soccer aficionado Victor Mooney paid the heat no mind as he lathered white paint onto the goal posts with his wife, Su Ping, who seemed even less bothered than him in shades and a yellow baseball cap.
Through his efforts, part of a partnership between his organization — Goal 2 Goal — the NYC Parks Department, and several sponsors (like?), Mooney hopes to help revitalize the park’s soccer infrastructure as a means to inspire a new generation of Queens soccer players and encourage community stewardship of the beloved public space. Though it sees more than 9 million visitors each year, Flushing Meadows Corona Park has suffered chronic underinvestment, with the Central Park Conservancy receiving 277 times more private funding per acre despite being 50 acres smaller, per a 2025 report by the Center for an Urban Future.
Over the course of the summer, Mooney, the Parks Department, and his team of volunteers will work to repaint goals, replace netting, deep clean the bleachers, and help to restore the nearby Column of Jerash — a nearly 2,000-year-old Roman column that’s the second oldest man-made object in New York City.
“Let the big projects come, but in the interim, the community can get involved and do small things,” Mooney said. “And this is what we’re here to do: goalposts, the bleachers, the grass. “We’re just preparing the next generation of park stewards to give back to the community.”
But the cleanup project also serves another purpose: to honor the life and work of former American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) President, John Sweeney, who Mooney met in 1999 Sweeney, born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents, was a prominent leader in the American labor movement, and an inspiration to Mooney, whose father also hails from Ireland.
“Brother Sweeney was the president emirates of the AFL-CIO, right from the Bronx,” Mooney said. “He was a son of immigrants, and he rose to be the president. So the future football players that we have here now, in a few years, they can be doctors, lawyers, judges.”
When asked where he’d be watching Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina, Mooney insisted he’d be watching it “right here” in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. It’s his love for his Queens community and desire to keep it “the World’s Borough” that brought him out into the heat Friday, and will likely bring him out again next week, and the next, and the next…
“They need infrastructure and sprinkler systems that work,” Mooney said. “But love is important for this community, for the next generation to take ownership of this beautiful metropolis that we call home.”
