Pinstripe Empire (22 page)

It was not the top deck that was the wonder, but the ability to tuck in a mezzanine. And for years, fans accepted “obstructed views” as a necessary evil, for it was unimaginable that the stands could hold up without them.

The
Times
explained, “The mezzanine deck is made possible by carrying it out only to the front columns and not so far as the upper grandstand and by tilting the supporting mezzanine trusses. This has been done to gain headway over the lower grandstand without increasing the height at this point. It is believed that the seats in the mezzanine will find great favor with the fans, as most of those who have inspected the grandstand consider that the seats there are the best in the entire stadium. On the mezzanine deck are 19 rows of seats accommodating approximately 10,000 persons.”

No one paid attention to this architectural talk. Not then, and not in the future. It was, to all eyes, a triple-decker. Ramps, not stairways, led people from one level to the next, offering teasing glimpses of the expanse of green grass that was soon to be before them.

The seats were painted a grass green. The first four rows of seats on all three levels were not bolted in but would be movable, wooden Windsor chairs with five bevels supporting the high backs. A box for four could accommodate a guest from a neighboring box, who could bring his chair with him. The architectural drawings called those rows “box chairs.”

It would be called the Yankee Stadium, with the first word staying in general use on into the late 1950s. People would say “I’m going to the Yankee Stadium” more often than “Yankee Stadium.” Of course, Ruppert could have put his own name on it and let it serve as an advertisement for his brewery, too, but he didn’t. (Ruppert Stadium in Newark would house his powerful minor league team later on.)

It was not the first use of “stadium,” although it was perhaps the first arena worthy of the word. Beginning with Harvard Stadium, college football fields had begun using the name in 1903. But they were all single-deckers. Wembley Stadium, then called Empire Stadium, the best-known soccer field in England, would open on April 28, 1923, just days after Yankee Stadium.

John Brush had tried to rename the Polo Grounds as Brush Stadium, and in Washington, Clark Griffith renamed National Park as Griffith Stadium in 1920 after assuming ownership of the team. But it was hardly fit for such a grand name; a two-deck structure that held thirty-two thousand.

Lost to history is the name of the person at Osborn who designed the copper frieze that would gracefully hang from the roof of Yankee Stadium, giving it a majesty unlike any other. But it could have been the chief architect, Bernard Green.

The
American Architect
magazine called the frieze “rather idiotic,” but conceded that it provided for a “festive air.”

Thomas Edison’s concrete company was hired to construct the shell of the stadium and the platforms onto which seats would be installed. There were red shutters at the window openings, and dual, circular patriotic symbols looking vaguely like the presidential seal over the main entry gate. The outer concrete would be painted light brown. The twenty-four-foot-wide cinder track around the field was intended to be used for track events, perhaps one day even for an Olympics. A football gridiron could fit and would accommodate major college games, an eventual fixture there. The park was made ready for boxing with the installation of electronics in a fifteen-foot-deep vault below second base to allow easy placement of a ring. A fight was already scheduled for July of 1923, with Benny Leonard defending his lightweight championship.

The structure was 108 feet high, supported by 118 columns. The frieze hung sixteen feet down, and in the eyes of Sandy Koufax, pitching there decades later, “It made you feel as though you were playing in the Grand Canyon.”

Baseball
magazine said, “It looms up like the great Pyramid of Cheops from the sands of Egypt.”

The original Osborn plans called for the park to be triple-decked on all of its sides, although it would come in stages. For the opening of 1923, the decks would end at the foul poles, and the long wooden planks of bleacher benches would extend pole to pole with almost unknown capacity as people
shoved in. It was assumed that some eighty thousand could fill the place if put to the test, even without extra decks over the bleachers, as first planned.

(The Yankees liked to fill the twenty-one thousand or so bleacher seats end to end rather than erect a black screen in the “batter’s eye.” Today, as a matter of safety, it would be against the rules to have the hitters looking into white shirts in the bleachers.)

IT WAS DURING the winter of 1927–28 that the second and third decks were added in left-center field; the right-field portion was completed in 1937. Ruth, therefore, would never be hitting fair balls into the upper decks of right field. He only belted them into the bleachers, a section known as Ruthville. (McGraw derisively called the site of the stadium Goatville.)

So imposing were the dimensions that not even Ruth ever managed to hit a fair ball out of the park and onto River Avenue, or onto the elevated train tracks of the IRT Lexington Avenue line. (If the doors opened at just the right moment, the home run could have gone all the way to New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn.) According to Bill Jenkinson’s log, Ruth reached the last row of the bleachers on at least three occasions.

The original dimensions—257 down both lines and nearly five hundred to dead center—lasted only a year. In 1924, home plate would be moved up ten feet and the field tilted a bit more toward right, making it “harder to bounce home runs into the grand stand seats” and creating more foul territory for infielders to catch pop flies, according to the
Times.
The rules of the day allowed for “bounced home runs,” but none of those were hit by Ruth. These became ground-rule doubles in 1931.

Beginning in 1924 it was 281 down left, 294 down right, but the walls quickly spread until dead center field was 490 feet away, making it just fine to place a flagpole in fair territory without worrying about it interfering with play. Left-center field, which would come to be known as Death Valley to right-handed hitters, was 402, and then 457 in center.

Yankee Stadium would define the Yankees. Visiting players would say, “Now I feel like I’m in the major leagues!” when they first played there. National League players might take the subway there early in the day just to take a look at it. Yankee players, already cocky after winning two pennants, could add the pride of playing in this fabulous home park to their self-image. It became a tourist attraction for New York and gave the Bronx an
anchor just off the Grand Concourse, a street billed as New York’s answer to the Champs-Elysées.

The Concourse Plaza hotel would open on the Grand Concourse and 161st Street in October 1923, and with its efficiencies and apartments, it would serve as “home” to generations of Yankee players up until Horace Clarke checked out in 1973. (By then, sadly, it had fallen into disrepair and was largely housing welfare citizens, but Clarke loved the convenience.) The hotel, considered the gateway to the Concourse, was a presence in photos and camera shots over left field of the stadium for the next eighty-six years of the ballpark’s life.

The Bronx County Court House, which became a landmark structure over the right-field vantage, was built in 1933.

The neighborhood was home to tens of thousands of largely European immigrants or their offspring, all of whom seemed to embrace baseball and talk endlessly of growing up “in the shadows of Yankee Stadium.” Becoming a baseball fan was a way for immigrants—and especially their children—to assimilate into the U.S., and the blocks surrounding Yankee Stadium were a microcosm of Europeans becoming Americans through baseball. They all shared the Yankees.

Some apartments along River Avenue offered free views over the bleacher walls. Free glances were there for the taking from the elevated train platform. The stadium was truly part of the neighborhood, yet those entering and traversing its ramps en route to a seat would marvel at the 3.5 acres of manicured grass and brown dirt. The entire footprint was 11.6 acres. There were thirty-six ticket booths and forty turnstiles. The total cost was $2.5 million.

When I first went to work there and had the ability to wander onto the field itself, I was somewhat surprised to discover that the outfield was not perfectly level, as it appeared on television, but rather given to waves of small gullies, just inches in variation, but certainly not as flat as I had thought.

The Yankees occupied the third-base dugout and their clubhouse was on street level—that is, two flights up from the field. This was a late change to the original design, which had it on the first-base side. Upon arrival, players could enter from street level on the third-base side, but they went to the field and returned to the clubhouse by climbing two flights of steps on the opposite side of the entry door.

Phil Schenck finished placing the last of 136,000 square feet of sod on the field on November 27, before snow fell. It gave the field plenty of time to
“take.” He supervised installation of a drainage system and sifted every piece of topsoil through a sieve, removing, as best as humanly possible, all pebbles.

Schenck couldn’t have been happier. It had been twenty years since he laid out the field at Hilltop Park. During the Polo Grounds years, he’d essentially been “off duty,” as the Giants’ ground crew handled the field. The Yankees had kept him on the payroll assisting the clubhouse men with baggage and equipment. (“His occupation long was a jest,” wrote Fred Lieb.) Now older, more roly-poly than before, but still a man who loved to work the soil, he was back in his game. And a hard game it could be, especially with power-driven lawn mowers a decade away and a vast stadium outfield to care for.

THE VALUABLES SAFE, still stenciled with the names of Griffith and Chesbro and Keeler and their teammates, was carted from the Polo Grounds across the Macombs Dam Bridge, along with PA announcer Jack Lenz’s mega-phone; Pop Logan’s trunks of uniforms, bats, balls, resin bags, and spittoons; Doc Woods’s training equipment, rubbing liniment, ban dages, and scale; Dr. Stewart’s medical supplies; Mark Roth’s notebook with travel plans for the new season and his blank cards to fill in daily attendance data; Huggins’s desk and blank lineup cards; and anything else that didn’t belong to the Giants.

Charlie McManus, who would serve as the stadium superintendent from 1924 until his death in 1953, took charge of the logistics of the move. If you were a ticket seller, an usher, a carpenter, a plumber, or a groundskeeper, you reported to Charlie. Pop Logan or Michael “Pete” Sheehy, who was hired as a seventeen-year-old assistant to Logan in 1927, might hire you as a batboy, but you did your paperwork at McManus’s office to get on the payroll.

The new manually operated scoreboard above the bleachers, at sixty by thirty feet the biggest in baseball, had a clock at the top center, the four American League games on the left—showing inning-by-inning scores and runs-hits-errors summaries—and the National League on the right side, covering their four games of the day. Below would be the familiar balls, strikes, and outs, and one line at the bottom to indicate the next game. It even provided a little rain and sun protection underneath for lucky bleacher patrons. It required up to three operators, depending on how many other games were in progress (usually seven), to keep it timely.

Lineups would be superfluous until uniform numbers were adopted in the seventh year of the ballpark.

As was the case with all ballparks of the time, a path ran between the catcher and the pitcher, largely to avoid the grass being worn down anyway during trips to the mound. The path remained until 1949.

The bullpens were just inside the center-field fence between the bleachers and the left-field end of the grandstand. Under the lower deck were the umpires’ locker room, the visiting locker room, and storage space for Harry M. Stevens.

OPENING DAY, APRIL 18, 1923, drew 74,200 announced fans (though Barrow told friends it was more like sixty thousand), the previous major league record having been 42,620 for a game in the 1916 World Series in Boston. Many thousands more were said to be turned away. Some made it to the Bronx by automobile, and many experimented with their first trip to the Bronx via subway. (It was a subway, despite the station being elevated; the train emerged from underground only a few hundred feet from the platform on northbound trains.)

The Yankees felt a little shortchanged by the location of the station, out by the left-field bleachers. People departing the trains would thus encounter the cheapest seats, among them $1.10 for the grandstand. Like all ballparks, the stadium had to be laid out so that the sun didn’t set in the batter’s eye and so that the pitcher’s left arm (his “southpaw”) faced south. Moving the subway exits would have been good business but an impossible feat.

At one point during a private VIP reception before the first game, Huston asked for a moment’s silence and saluted the team’s late business manager. “Harry Sparrow should have lived to have seen this day,” he said. “Then he could have died happy.”

Babe Ruth was the center of attention and posed for many photos with his mascot, Little Ray. Tom Connolly, who had umpired the first Hilltop Park game in 1903, was the home-plate umpire for this one as well. The players, in their long gray button-down sweaters with the interlocking NY on the heart, marched to the flagpole for the raising of the American flag and the 1922 American League pennant, with Huggins, in his long-sleeved jersey, and the new Red Sox manager, none other than Frank Chance, doing the honors with Commissioner Landis, who had come uptown by subway. Ban Johnson, who had dreamed of this day for years, was said to have the flu, and
Mayor Hyland was under the weather as well. The great John Philip Sousa guest-conducted the Seventh Regiment Band (Ruppert’s unit) and played the requisite patriotic songs of the time, many by Sousa himself. Red-white-and-blue bunting was displayed over the railings along field level, a practice that would remain in style for future opening days and World Series games.