Yankee Stadium's Demise and A City's Hypocrisy
By Bill Lalor
Posted On July 09, 2005

It was in 1963 that New York Times famously bade farewell to the magnificent old Penn Station rail terminal, poignantly reminding the city, as wrecking balls made their backswing, that "Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves…We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed." Gotham’s politicos, not keen on such a benchmark, opted for a landmarks conservation law that, it was said, would prevent another Penn Station.

Though it’s hard to debate the Times’ sentiment, it’s unwise to overlook what’s become of conservationism, particularly when it meshes, as it often does, with layered environmental regulations, zoning and the recent re-write of the 5th Amendment into unadorned hostility for private property rights. In the city, the results can be extraordinary. Over the last few months alone, the anti-development thicket felled a proposed stadium for the New York Jets (and puff went NYC’s slim hopes at the 2012 Olympics), while immortalizing the “Highline,” a decrepit overhead railway that’s an unsightly vestige of an industrial heritage the city otherwise seems pleased to forget, one that blights much of the city’s prime “river view” property. Meantime, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has doted over picayunes such as the dreary Socony-Mobil Building and leapt to defend the Summit Hotel, a library branch, the vapid “Williamsburg Houses” and Erasmus High School, to name just a few, each in the name of preserving “historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage.”

Whatever the merits of the meddling, though, one might conclude that with such an exquisite interest in cultural architecture that City Hall would leap at conservation when it owns important property. Right?

Not quite. A few weeks ago Mayor Bloomberg giddily announced plans for a “new” Yankee Stadium, expecting us all, it seemed, to be smitten with the glitz and faux antiquity and that ballyhoo that the ball club would foot a share of the tab. Within a few years, we’re told, the Pet Cemetery version of Yankee Stadium (just across the street from that old one) will be ready, in plenty of time for the London Olympiad.

And what of the old Stadium? Wrecking balls, mostly. Though P.R. hacks carefully downplay this unhappy aspect of the grand plan, one certainly senses whispers of a Penn Station redux. It was in the dead of last winter that the Times noted, and without a hint of protest, that under the proposal most of baseball’s shrine would be “converted, possibly, to a multilevel parking garage with a soccer field on top, while retaining the ball field and the most recognizable elements of the structure." Ho, hum.

The official announcement a few weeks ago affirmed many fans’ worst suspicions: the Stadium’s grandstands, the most “recognizable” piece of the Stadium if we’re concerned at all with the Ruth/Gehrig/Mantle/DiMaggio version – and a great deal more – will be torn to the ground. Details may be forthcoming, no doubt in benign-sounding dribs and drabs but ultimately the old Stadium most assuredly will be a “stadium” no longer. It will be a shriveled and barely recognizable insult to its former self.

New York Yankees fans long ago came to understand that principal owner George Steinbrenner doesn’t care all that much about the three-point-something million little people who pinch and scrape to buy tickets each year. Big Stein’s Holy Grail has always been comprised of more luxury boxes for the pink cardigan crowd, a profitable retail concourse and better cash flows from concessions, not to mention the last earthly word in his nauseating ego match with Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner et al.

The Boss’ stadium lust is comprehensible, if not defensible. But the City’s disregard for the Stadium’s sanctity is neither of those. Lest anyone forget, New York City owns Yankee Stadium – the attorney armada routinely sicked on private citizens could stay home. Indeed this would seem to be an ideal opportunity for the City to show some genuine interest in conservation, yet Hizzoner slouches toward summer 1963, foolishly clearing a way for the wrecking crews, to give lebensraum to another tin-can replica of Camden Yards.

Yankee Stadium’s “historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage” is immeasurable and hardly needs my advocacy, though one City Hall could probably use some perspective from the General Admission crowd. In the end, though, if the current plan goes forward, we’ll waste a time capsule and a magnificent piece of our heritage, one that, by the way, extends well beyond this city, the Yankees and baseball. Tragically, it won’t be because we and our government are helpless; it’ll be because our tinhorn culture doesn’t give a damn. And we’ll wonder how we could let this happen, again, and lament our 1963-vintage myopia until the day we die. For shame, New York.

Bill Lalor is the founder of Citizen Journal.

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