U.N. ON ICE.(possible temporary relocation of United Nations headquarters to Brooklyn, New York)

Last week, a United Nations report revealed that the U.N. was considering a temporary move to Brooklyn, in 2007, to make way for a very expensive five-year renovation of its headquarters, in Turtle Bay. Brooklyn: the borough's boosters preened, while others wondered, as Reuters put it, about "the psychological impact to the organization and staff of moving from chic Manhattan to one of New York's less fashionable outer boroughs."

In terms of institutional relocation, there are various precedents--moma, the Oakland Raiders, Taipei, Babylon--but the most apt involves the U.N. itself. When a number of American cities competed to be the U.N.'s home, at the end of the Second World War, Robert Moses advanced New York's cause by proposing a giant complex--a World Capitol--in Flushing Meadow, on the site of the 1939 World's Fair. Queens: the delegates were ambivalent. Eventually, the Rockefeller family bought and donated the tract in Manhattan, and the Flushing scheme was forgotten. Still, while the Turtle Bay site was under construction, the U.N. needed a temporary home, and, after a brief stopover at Hunter College, it wound up in Flushing after all--in the New York City Building, one of a few structures left from the World's Fair. Shortly before the war, the building had been divided in half; one side became an ice rink, the other a roller rink. There were ice shows and big-band performances. In 1946, the skating surfaces were covered up, and the spaces were converted into the seat of world government. The U.N. stayed for five years (though the offices of the Secretariat were in a gyroscope factory in Lake Success). Its Flushing sessions were productive and star-studded: Eleanor Roosevelt, Andrey Gromyko, Adlai Stevenson. The creation of unicef, the birth of Israel, the debate on Korea. It happened in a rink in Queens.

One of this interlude's more fervent aficionados ("I'm so big on this") is David Oats, a fifty-five-year-old Flushing native who has edited both the Queens Courier and the Queens Tribune and is now leading an effort to have the Olympic stadium built near Shea. When, last week, Oats heard the news about Brooklyn, his feelings were mixed. "They're not going to Paris or Geneva or New Jersey," he said. "They're staying in New York, and that's a marvellous ...