Shea Stadium, which was already booked solid with its regular tenants, the New York Mets and the New York Jets, was also the home of the New York Yankees during the prior and coming season, while Yankee Stadium underwent a complete renovation. Mayor Abraham Beame announced in January that Shea would also be the home for the New York Giants in the fall because that team would also be displaced during its Bronx ballpark’s massive renovations....

Prospects for the establishment of a Queens medical school seemed to improve with a proposal by the city Board of Higher Education and Long Island Jewish-Hillside Medical Center for a jointly operated facility....

Community residents opposed to the opening of more OTB parlors in Bayside, Bellerose, Fresh Meadows, Glendale, Glen Oaks, Howard Beach, Laurelton, Queens Village and Richmond Hill picketed a Democratic dinner attended by the mayor and OTB Chairman Paul Screvane at Antun’s in Queens Village. Opposition to additional storefronts was intensifying throughout the borough....

The Tribune reported in January that the city had agreed to give the go-ahead to begin construction in March on the Flushing bus terminal....

A crisis developed between the staff and the board of directors of the fledgling Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Fearing that a dispute between museum Director Kenneth Kahn and the board – which Kahn claimed was interfering in the work of the director, who they claimed was failing to establish professional guidelines – could shut down the museum, a group called Friends of the Museum urged Donald Manes to step in and mediate the dispute....

The Tribune marked its fifth anniversary in February with another of its souvenir bicentennial editions. John Warner, head of the National Bicentennial Administration (who later became a U.S. senator from Virginia), unveiled the special issue in a ceremony at Federal Hall in Manhattan, the site of George Washington’s first inauguration as president. The National Newspaper Association gave the Tribune a special award for third place in the entire nation for bicentennial coverage. President Gerald Ford presented the award in Washington, D.C. in March.....

Mario Cuomo was appointed secretary of state by Governor Hugh Carey....

Robert Moses, New York’s master builder, wrote a full-page exclusive column for the Tribune on his concerns about the upcoming celebrations of the nation’s bicentennial in 1976....

The board of trustees of the Queens Museum fired its executive director for going to the press over his concerns about the museum’s direction. The director of the Queens Council on the Arts, Wallace West, resigned from the museum board in protest. He was the second director of the museum to be fired in the museum’s short lifetime....

“Cousin” Bruce Morrow of rock ‘n’ roll radio fame began a regular music column for the Tribune and visited the Tribune’s offices to kick it off....

A local weather column was started by a Queens teacher, Irving Gikovsky, who later went on to fame as television weatherman “Mr. G.”...

The five-year-old dispute between residents of Bayside Hills and the religious followers of Veronica Leuken of Bayside erupted in March into a street confrontation between the two groups and the police, after the arrest of a prominent area community leader, William Caulfield....  

Former Queens District Attorney Thomas J. Mackell was cleared of all charges for which he had been found guilty the year before. The State Appellate Division, in reversing the convictions of Mackell and his two aides, said that the indictments against the three were “wholly unsupported by the evidence.”...

Five hundred angry civic leaders jammed into the Queens Playhouse at Flushing Meadows in a protest rally opposing the possible use of JFK Airport for take-offs and landings of the supersonic Concorde jetliner – also known as the SST...The Tribune published a four-page special report on the controversy surrounding the so-called “Veronica Vigils” in Bayside Hills. Violence broke out during a huge vigil when local residents staged a block party along the same malls that the worshippers were using. The Diocese of Brooklyn denounced the vigils as “the product of a fertile imagination” and the Queens DA was asked to investigate the situation....

With the three sides in the Veronica Vigils controversy still at loggerheads, the Tribune was enlisted as a go-between for the residents of Bayside Hills, the followers of Veronica Leuken and the police to resolve the situation. A compromise was proposed, whereby the vigils would be moved to a quiet location in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, where followers would be permitted to worship. By the end of May, Leuken said she had received “instructions” to move the vigils to the former site of the Vatican Pavilion in the park. For the first time in months, a peaceful vigil was held and the streets of Bayside Hills were quiet again....

Vice President Nelson Rockefeller came to Queens to speak before the county’s Republican Committee at a dinner at Antun’s restaurant. Tribune photographer Joe Ullman photographed the event, marking his 1,000th assignment for the paper. Ullman, a veteran New York photojournalist, took his first Tribune assignment as a volunteer in 1970, when the paper started. His first assignment – the dedication of Flushing’s new 109th Precinct by then-Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myersohn – would lead him to take on numerous jobs, each requiring a number of photographs. Publisher Gary Ackerman presented Ullman with a plaque to mark his unique achievement for the paper....

The 108th Street Forest Hills project, which had caused so much news and furor during the past two years, quietly opened its doors in late June. The first occupants moved into the project adjacent to the Long Island Expressway without pomp or ceremony....

Rockaway Boulevard was turned into a grisly scene of charred bodies, twisted wreckage and makeshift morgues after an Eastern Airlines Boeing 727 jetliner carrying 115 passengers and a crew of eight crashed and burned in an attempted landing at JFK during an electrical storm. Fourteen survived what was the worst single plane disaster in the New York area, and was only one short of the toll of the worst single-plane crash in U.S. aviation history....

The battle of Willow Lake brewed up again in September when it was learned that the Lefrak hi-rise project over the IND rail yards in Kew Gardens might not be a dead issue, as community leaders had been led to believe. The MTA was quietly working to sell the air rights to Lefrak. City Councilman Morton Povman vowed to stop the plan...Thousands rallied in the streets of Fresh Meadows to urge the police department to keep the 107th Precinct from being eliminated....

At the end of October, the Flushing bus terminal was again killed by the city....The huge stained glass roof which covered the New York State Pavilion at Flushing Meadows was demolished by the city because it posed a safety hazard. Local park groups said the destruction of the roof damaged the terrazzo map of New York State on the pavilion’s floor and that the structure faced further destruction.