Bronx, N.Y., January 18, 2008 — I’ve been pretty deep in thought since my annual pilgrimage to Yankee Stadium over the New Year holiday this year, but the news (and pictures) about the name “Yankee Stadium” being added to the new edifice across 161st Street has prodded me to share some thoughts and photos. It’s always with a somewhat sentimental turn of mind that I take these midwinter trips to the Bronx. I feel reassured paying off my season plan invoice in person, it’s true, but there is also something contemplative about seeing a great baseball venue in the throes of winter.
The trip was made more poignant than ever this year, with the final season in the great old ballpark scheduled to commence in a short 10 weeks. I’ve been of two minds for years over the coming move of the greatest team in spectator sports history to new digs. It’s understandable that a Yankee fan should feel this way. The team won 26 Championships in the old place, and goes for number 27 this year.
But this isn’t yet another installment in the debate among Yankee fans about new stadium vs. old. When the Yanks take on the Rays in Tampa on a Monday two weeks into the coming season, it will be the 10th anniversary of the day a beam fell onto some seats in the loge level, thankfully hours before a game was to be played. If the old park may not be viable going forward, there really is no debate.
Fittingly, it was freezing in the Bronx the day of my trek. My hands gripped the camera stiffly while I snapped a few photos of each Stadium to start, but the construction on the new park continued apace, weather or not. I walked around to the legendary bat that adorns the front entrance to Yankee Stadium, but the tarp that was stretched across the street fronting it had virtually no effect on the whipping wind. After taking care of business at the ticket window, I stopped at the Yankee store and bought a “Joba Rules” shirt. The place has loads of history, yes, but one feels there is history aplenty to come too. I then proceeded around the exterior of the Stadium to the first base side. The Yankee offices are located here, adjacent to the players’ parking lot and the basketball court on the edge of Macombs Dam Park.
The parking space remains, but the court and park are gone now, amid a secondary construction site that promises to erect a two-level parking facility with a park on top that will be accessible to the local neighborhood. One finds a good vantage to the new Stadium here, as the main entrance to this ballpark sits where Jerome Ave. crosses 161st, clearly visible to the north. Change is good, they say, but I was heartened to see that some similar wall designs from the venerable Baseball Cathedral will grace the new ballpark as well. I paused to stare at a picture of the recently departed Scooter, Phil Rizzuto, that hangs outside The Stadium Club, then finished the Stadium circuit outside Gate 2, in the left field corner, immediately across from the new construction.
And that was when I snapped the most intriguing picture of all, at least to me. No it wasn’t one I took from the elevated subway on River Ave. where the actual outside wall can be seen inside the clapboard construction fence that has been up for more than a year. Rather, it was a view of the old facade, immediately above the gate. It is an architectural detail that I have been staring at in particular from time to time for the last few years. I can’t swear that it has been a part of the old structure since when the Cathedral went up back in 1923, but it certainly has the air of decades gone by and of authenticity.
The flourish I am talking about occurs in three places across the top of the gate. It is a representation of three structures thrusting out from the facade, with a Yankee cap gracing the center structure. It is recognizable as a Yankee cap, of course, because it has the interlocking N and Y, just like we’ve all been seeing during the course of our Yankee lives, however many years that entails for each of us.
Well, yes and no. There is a cap, the cap adorned with the most recognizable logo in sports. And there is an N and a Y on each, all right, but there is a significant difference. I’ve seen the interlocking NY represented two ways in my life, be it in cloth, in plastic, in metal, in stone, etc. On most it is obvious that the vertical stroke of the Y sits atop the diagonal of the N. In some, the two butt with neither sitting atop the other.
But there it hangs on the multi-decades-old Yankee Stadium facade: a Yankee logo for the ages, one that has hung proudly there lo, these many years, configured with the N clearly atop the Y. If this is what people saw when Ed Barrow, Miller Huggins, and Babe Ruth made their way across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds to play ball in the Bronx in 1923, it is an adornment that needs to make the trek across the street to the new ballpark.
YANKEE BASEBALL!!!