BASEBALL isn’t the only thing that has filled the place with people, and with magic, and with memories, through the years.
Two Popes have preached here. So has Billy Graham. The Giants and Colts played the most important game in the history of professional football here on Dec. 28, 1958. Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling here, on June 22, 1938, the most famous of 30 championship fights – from Benny Leonard/Lew Tendler in 1923 through Muhammad Ali/Ken Norton 53 years later – to be contested here.
But the name on the front of the building still says “Yankee Stadium,” and has read that way from the moment they opened the doors to its first 74,217 customers on April 18, 1923, and across 80 years, it’s been the Yankees who have fortified the legacy, and the legend, of this grand, old baseball place on the corner of River Avenue and 161st Street, hard by the Harlem River.
“The first time I trotted out to right field at Yankee Stadium, wearing a Yankees uniform, I was already a veteran ballplayer,” Paul O’Neill says. “I’d seen a lot. I’d already won a World Series ring in Cincinnati. I was no kid. And about halfway out there, it occurred to me that this is exactly the spot where Babe Ruth used to play. He used to hit home runs into those bleachers right behind me. That’s when I really looked around, and noticed how enormous it all is.”
Fenway Park has its charms, it has The Green Monster and the Pesky Pole and the undying affections of all the lost souls of Red Sox Nation. Wrigley Field has the ivy, and the wind occasionally blowing out toward Lake Michigan, and all those devoted Cubs fans who take their shirts off and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and suffer year after year, decade after decade. But they are what they say they are: a park. A field.
This is a stadium.
Sure, it has also been called a cathedral, a baseball basilica, a shrine, all kinds of breathless things by the wide-eyed poets who’ve visited here over the years. But beyond all else, this is a stadium. It was the first stadium to have three decks, the first to ring its grandstand with the 16-foot copper facade that became its trademark, the first to house as many as 60,000 seats, the first to have monuments and a flag pole in the field of play (tributes to Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Miller Huggins that young Yankee fans often assumed were their tombstones), the first to be tailor-made to its best player (it is, after all, still called “The House that Ruth Built” 68 years after the Babe’s retirement, 55 years after his death).
In a city where so many children were raised on asphalt gardens and cement front yards, it has also long provided one of the greenest, greatest getaways in all of New York, the Bronx’ answer to Central Park. Only with baseball thrown into the mix. Unforgettable baseball, mostly.
“I want the greatest ballpark in the world,” was Col. Jacob Ruppert’s simple request when he retained Osborn Engineering Co. of Cleveland to design his new park and White Construction Co. of New York to build it at a cost of $2 million. The Yankees’ owner had scouted out possible plots of land in Long Island City, in upper Manhattan (on the site of the old Hebrew Orphan Asylum) and in lower Manhattan (on top of the old Pennsylvania Rail Road tracks).
When he settled upon a rocky lumberyard in the Bronx countryside owned by the estate of William Waldorf Astor, and subsequently paid $600,000 to own it, John McGraw, manager of the rival Giants, was delighted. “If they move to The Bronx,” McGraw huffed, “they may never be heard from again.”
They were heard from again. It took exactly 284 days for workers to turn 1 million feet of Pacific Coast fir, 230 tons of structural steel, 1 million brass screws, and 16,000 square feet of sod into what would eventually become the New World’s equivalent to the Roman Coliseum. The baseball memories began immediately, with Ruth hitting a three-run homer in the forth inning of the very first game, a 4-1 Yankee win over the Red Sox.
And in many ways, they have never stopped. Ruth hit his 60th homer here in 1927, Roger Maris his 61st 34 years later. Don Larsen was perfect here, and so were David Wells and David Cone. Joe DiMaggio was robbed of a home run by Al Gionfriddo here, famously kicking the dirt in front of second base. Mickey Mantle twice hit the facade in right field here, the closest a ball ever came to escaping the stadium’s vast boundaries. Gehrig called himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth in here, one solemn Fourth of July. The Yankees returned to glory, winning the 1996 World Series here. And seven weeks after the city’s greatest tragedy, Tino Martinez and Scott Brosius delivered Hail Mary blasts that turned Games 4 and 5 of the 2001 World Series into instant classics.
Col. Ruppert, safe to say, got precisely what he paid for.
1923 2003
281 feet LF 318 feet
460 feet LCF 399 feet
490 feet CF 408 feet
429 feet RCF 385 feet
295 feet RF 314 feet