By Zach Patberg
Within an hour, the 7,000 Crusade volunteers had most of the 40,000 chairs in the main area disconnected, folded and stacked in piles of ten and had moved on to the 30,000 more in the grassy outskirts. Trash was bagged and waiting to be set on the curb for the Parks Department to pick up. By 7 p.m., the clean-up effort's well-oiled gears had shifted to the stage to start taking down the podium, props, speakers and the lighting from high-rise trusses. Semis would come by later to cart it all away.”We call it 'hard out time' or 'clearing the deck,'” said the Billy Graham Association's arrangement manager, Jeff Anderson, who was in charge of setting up for the Crusade and then tearing it down. The stage alone would take a day to dismantle, he said.Then there were the 150 portable toilets, the elaborate off-stage sound system and the couple of enormous matts that protected the grass.Since Anderson had to take the usual six to nine months needed to prepare for an event of this magnitude and scrunch it into a month and a half, he called it “the 90-day miracle.” With the sun setting on the aftermath of a three-day crusade involving more than 200,000 sweat-soaked people, Anderson probably could have used another piece of divine intervention to get Flushing Meadows-Corona Park back to normal by the Tuesday-at-midnight deadline. “It takes a lot of components to make this work,” he said. “We put it through a grid and take it step by step.” The Crusader's budget allotted $2.4 million for preparation and cleanup, organizers said. Once the volunteers left, a crew of about 100 contracted laborers stepped in to work in shifts non-stop through the next two nights. The first priority, Anderson said, was restoring the nearby soccer fields since teams had to practice the next morning. The last priority was touching up the area around the park's Unisphere.Among a sea of neatly stacked chairs, volunteer Demetria Jackson, a Spanish counselor, and her mother, daughter and granddaughter sat down in their assigned section to rest.”It all went by fast,” said Jackson, of Brooklyn's Flatbush Christ church. “It's pretty much all done now.”With more certainty, her mother, Cora, added: “My knees tell me I'm done.”Reach reporter Zach Patberg by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 155.
