FROM the air, you can see how far along the process is already, the inside of the old Yankee Stadium already looking like a ghost town, the grass already gone, sectioned away and framed and sold for parts. The seats are all gone. It looks very much like a French town in a World War II movie, after the Allies have gone 15 rounds with the German army.
YANKEES DRAFT COLLEGE QUARTERBACK
SUBWAY SERIES: Home Sweet Homer
Outside, scaffolding has already begun to creep up the corner of the old place, where 161st Street crosses River Avenue. The very least you can say about his iconic piece of old New York is that they aren’t treating it like a cheesy old Vegas gambling hall, imploding it for sport and photo ops. It will come down slowly and methodically.
But it is coming down. We’ve been allowed to live in denial these past few months, snaking into the new Stadium while sneaking peeks at the old, stealing a few last glimpses, hoping secretly that maybe someone simply forgot to get rid of it, decided to let it stand for a while.
“When I was a kid, I thought this was the worst place in the world,” a man named Arthur Biscotti was saying yesterday. “But, then, I was a Dodgers fan, so I thought Ebbets Field was a church and this place [was] where the devil lived. You know when I started feeling different? Oct. 4, 1955. I was here that day, 18 years old, about to go into the army. We won the Series here. How could it really be that evil a place?”
Biscotti is long retired, moved to Vero Beach, Fla., so the Dodgers — who switched spring training sites this year from his Florida hometown to Arizona — have abandoned him twice. He’s back home visiting grandchildren and has tickets for tomorrow’s Subway Series game between the Mets and the Yankees, and he wanted one last good look at the place that housed so many wonderful inter-borough skirmishes over its 85-year life.
“Would you mind?” he asks, handing me a digital camera, and he poses with his grandson, Anthony, who’s wearing a Yankees cap. We’re in front of the new Stadium, which is about as close as you can get to the old one now that it’s becoming a demolition site. Yet it still looks imposing as background. Imposing and perfect.
We’ve already had the Red Sox play a couple of games inside the new Stadium, and that visit brought the attendant life-goes-on observations from both sides of that great fray. Still, as intertwined as the Yankees and the Sox may be as franchises, they produced only a handful of iconic images at the Stadium.
But the Subway Series . . . those were something else. Those were all about New York City, all about the city’s generational love for baseball. Every game contested between the locals — Giants-Dodgers, Giants-Yankees, Dodgers-Yankees, Mets-Yankees — had a distinct history, played exclusively within the borders of our city.
And, until tonight, within the walls of stadiums that are all now gone, forever. Ebbets Field was the first to go, reducing to dust the images of Mickey Owens’ passed ball and Bill Bevens’ near no-no. Then it was the Polo Grounds, which only hosted the most famous home run in the history of baseball 58 years ago. Shea Stadium had the smallest warehouse of memories, chief among them Game 5 of the 2000 Series and any number of cuticle-chewing regular-season games with the Yankees over the past 11 years.
But it was here, at the old Yankee Stadium, where so many old Subway Series memories are entombed. It was here that Casey Stengel went inside-the-park against the Yankees in the 1923 Series, here where Al Gionfriddo robbed Joe DiMaggio, here where Don Larsen went 27-up and 27-down, here where Jackie Robinson stole home (though Yogi Berra would beg to differ), here where Paul O’Neill outlasted Armando Benitez.
And here where Sandy Amoros caught the ball, where Johnny Podres finally delivered Next Year, a forever afternoon still frozen in the memory of Arthur Biscotti.
“Time marches on, I guess,” he says. “Whether we want it to or not.”