‘Old Yankee Stadium’s Rise and Fall: The Complete Story of “The House That Ruth Built”’
Dayn Perry at CBS Sports, in a magnificently comprehensive look back at the original Yankee Stadium, which opened 100 years ago:
On April 18, 1923, it was a brisk 49 degrees in New York City, a
spring in name only. The wind whipped up dust from the dirt roads
and vacant lots abutting the ballpark that now rose from the
planed-out soil of city plot 2106, lot 100. Those same winds
whirled the eight-foot copper baseball bat that served as a
weathervane from atop the in-play flagpole in center field. There
had been a farm there, granted to John Lion Gardiner just prior to
the Revolutionary War, and then a sawmill, and the surrounding
sweeps of land seemed more suited to just that — an old farm or
sawmill — rather than what now scraped the sky.
And what loomed above, three decks high, was a concrete-and-steel
colossus unexampled in sports and certainly baseball. The forging
of the stadium at 161st and River displaced 45,000 cubic yards of
Bronx soil. Then it devoured 20,000 yards of concrete; four
million feet of lumber; 800 tons of re-bar; 2,200 tons of steel
beams and channels and angles and plates; 13,000 yards of topsoil
and 116,000 square feet of Merion Bluegrass sod; one million
screws of brass.
It was not the first stadium to be raised up in the medium of
modern construction materials, but it was the most hulking, the
most impossible-seeming. Unlike Wrigley, Fenway, Shibe, Crosley or
others of the prior generation, Yankee Stadium defied words like
“cozy” or “intimate” at every grand angle. In that way, it augured
a coming era in which ballparks would no longer tuck into their
existing neighborhoods but rather barge in with shoulders wide and
arms akimbo. The original design of Yankee Stadium of course
reflected some geographic limitations, but its final presence
looked and felt like an unyielding one. Yankee Stadium was big and
bad like its warrior-poet Babe Ruth — like its titular hometown
nine soon would be — and it authored a reimagining: that the
“ballpark” could be elevated and sprawled into the realm of
“stadium.” And so it was the first ballpark to be called a
stadium.
The second-finest ballpark ever built.
★
Dayn Perry at CBS Sports, in a magnificently comprehensive look back at the original Yankee Stadium, which opened 100 years ago:
On April 18, 1923, it was a brisk 49 degrees in New York City, a
spring in name only. The wind whipped up dust from the dirt roads
and vacant lots abutting the ballpark that now rose from the
planed-out soil of city plot 2106, lot 100. Those same winds
whirled the eight-foot copper baseball bat that served as a
weathervane from atop the in-play flagpole in center field. There
had been a farm there, granted to John Lion Gardiner just prior to
the Revolutionary War, and then a sawmill, and the surrounding
sweeps of land seemed more suited to just that — an old farm or
sawmill — rather than what now scraped the sky.
And what loomed above, three decks high, was a concrete-and-steel
colossus unexampled in sports and certainly baseball. The forging
of the stadium at 161st and River displaced 45,000 cubic yards of
Bronx soil. Then it devoured 20,000 yards of concrete; four
million feet of lumber; 800 tons of re-bar; 2,200 tons of steel
beams and channels and angles and plates; 13,000 yards of topsoil
and 116,000 square feet of Merion Bluegrass sod; one million
screws of brass.
It was not the first stadium to be raised up in the medium of
modern construction materials, but it was the most hulking, the
most impossible-seeming. Unlike Wrigley, Fenway, Shibe, Crosley or
others of the prior generation, Yankee Stadium defied words like
“cozy” or “intimate” at every grand angle. In that way, it augured
a coming era in which ballparks would no longer tuck into their
existing neighborhoods but rather barge in with shoulders wide and
arms akimbo. The original design of Yankee Stadium of course
reflected some geographic limitations, but its final presence
looked and felt like an unyielding one. Yankee Stadium was big and
bad like its warrior-poet Babe Ruth — like its titular hometown
nine soon would be — and it authored a reimagining: that the
“ballpark” could be elevated and sprawled into the realm of
“stadium.” And so it was the first ballpark to be called a
stadium.
The second-finest ballpark ever built.