Old Yankee Stadium Deserves To Be Preserved

You can go home again, if home survives. The Los Angeles Dodgers proved that last Saturday when a record crowd of 115,300 attended an exhibition contest against the Red Sox at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the 1923 football and Olympic venue that was home to the newly relocated Dodgers between 1958 and 1961. The Los Angeles multitude got to have an experience impossible anywhere else in the country, the closest possible thing to time travel.There is no way to stage a return to Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds, for those fabled ballparks have long since been reduced to rubble and carted away. Even the most unique relics of these parks disappeared — the Polo Grounds’ Eddie Grant Memorial, a plaque dedicated to the memory of a ballplayer killed in action in the Argonne Forest in 1918, vanished into a Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J., attic for more than 40 years. Anything not nailed down was fair game, and no one seemed to care that even a monument to a dead war hero had proved to be just another object to be coveted by a socalled “collector” — “collector” in this case being another word for one who wants to keep to himself what everyone should have.Yankee Stadium will soon join them in the ever-narrowing corridor of memory. A combination of profiteering and attempted looting has already begun — two fans were arrested at Tuesday’s home opener for attempting to take bits of the ballpark home with them. By year’s end, a good many more will join them, more innocently joined by Yankees ownership, executives, and players, who will undoubtedly get to walk off with a number of souvenirs. Whatever is left will be turned into cash — there is every reason to believe that before too long the urinals will be turning up on eBay.New York City is far too valuable and vital a place to preserve an outsized edifice like a baseball stadium for very long, and money (a term sometimes used interchangeably with “progress”) trumps sentimentality; if a gem like the original Penn Station can be torn down, nothing is sacred. Yet the triumphant exhibition in California suggests an alternative to the destruction and dispersal that will soon befall the old ballpark.Los Angeles is not the dense place that New York is, so the pressures on their old buildings are not as severe. Still, they have found ways to keep the Coliseum vital — note that it opened the same year as the decrepit Yankee Stadium — it continues to host University of Southern California football games and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. It was also almost certainly constructed with more care than Yankee Stadium. The Coliseum took about 18 months to build, while Yankee Stadium was thrown together in less than a year. It was the House that Ruth Built (with Some Amazing Shortcuts). It was large, but not an architectural model, more dowdy and functional than palatial.In building the new Yankee Stadium, the Yankees have opted to recreate the look of the original. Rather than trust the new edifice to create a history of its own, the new building will appropriate that of the old. The possibility of verisimilitude would be greatly increased by the retention of as many relics as possible. Yes, Monument Park will cross the street, but there are small touches as yet unthought-of that would help the transform the new building from an exploitation to a homage.This is important, for if the legacy of the destruction of the great old ballparks proves anything, it’s that future generations want a second chance to see what it was really like “back then.” In the same way that one can visit Mt. Vernon or Monticello and walk through the rooms where Washington or Jefferson worked and thought, there is a great desire to see the grass where Christy Mathewson threw his fadeaway, Willie Mays made his catch, or, especially, where Jackie Robinson broke the color line — but they can’t. The grass has given way to concrete, for the city couldn’t even bother to put parks in those places. They not only razed the buildings, but salted the earth.The great allure of Yankee Stadium is the palpability of its ghosts. Despite its extensive mid-1970s renovation, a great deal of the original is intact. It is not unreasonable to look out to right field and imagine Ruth (or left field, since he split his time between the two corners), to look up to the façade and try to imagine where Mickey Mantle’s longest clouts hit, or to squint at the jacketed manager in the dugout and pretend it’s Casey Stengel. It is understood that the Yankees need a new home, but the focus these last days has been on what will be lost. If the Yankees — and for that matter, their more avaricious fans — want to preserve those ghosts, they’d better think less about what they can take and a bit more about what can be kept.Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.

Old Yankee Stadium Deserves To Be Preserved

Old Yankee Stadium Deserves To Be Preserved

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