Yankee Stadium - Former NY Ballparks - Ed Alstrom - Classic Yankee Stadium Photos - Future Ballpark News
Bronx, New York
Groundbreaking: Spring, 2006*
1st American League Game: April, 2009*
Surface: Natural Grass
Architect: HOK Sport
Cost: $1.02 billion**
Seating capacity: 50,800*
Owner: New York Yankees
Public financing: $220 million from New York City for parking facilities ($75 million), parkland along the waterfront ($135 million) and other work related to the stadium.
Private financing: $800 million from the Yankees
Playing Field Dimensions*:
LF foul line: 318 ft
Left Field Alley: 399 ft
Center Field: 408 ft
Right Field Alley: 385 ft
RF foul line: 314 ft
Outfield Fences: 7 ft.*
*Tentative-subject to change
**Estimate
By RICHARD SANDOMIR - The New York Times - June 16, 2005
Construction of the ballpark will mean the end of major league baseball at Yankee Stadium, where Mickey Mantle roamed center field, Don Larsen pitched the only World Series perfect game, popes visited and Joe Louis beat Billy Conn.
"We are standing at the cathedral of baseball," Randy Levine, the Yankees' president, said at a crowded news conference with team executives and elected officials sitting beneath the stained glass of the Stadium Club. "We love this place. We honor its memories." But, he added: "This building is becoming nonfunctional. It can't go on for another 40 years."
George Steinbrenner, the Yankees' principal owner, beamed as speakers called him King George I and praised him for having the team finance construction of the $800 million stadium.
"This is a great heritage," he said. "We love the Bronx."
He also indicated that Steve Swindal, his son-in-law and general partner of the team, would succeed him.
Steinbrenner, who bought the team in 1973, can look forward to the stadium's opening in 2009, shortly before his 79th birthday. It will rise just north of the old stadium; it will seat from 50,800 to 54,000, with 50 to 60 luxury boxes and an unspecified number of high-priced club seats. About 30,000 seats will be in the lower bowl, 20,000 in the upper, the reverse of the current configuration.
The classic rooftop frieze that endured from 1923 until it was destroyed by the 1974-75 renovation will return but will be made of a translucent material, not copper, and a restaurant will be built above a recreated Monument Park behind the batter's eye in the outfield. The field dimensions will remain as they are now, concourses will be wide, and the field will be visible from any snack bar or concession stand.
The team's decision to pay for the stadium is a position that has changed drastically over two decades. Steinbrenner had for years looked for ways out of the Bronx to move to New Jersey or Manhattan, fulminated about crime, parking and vermin in the neighborhood, and argued with public officials like Fernando Ferrer, then the borough president, about low attendance.
Steinbrenner stopped criticizing the neighborhood about the time the Yankees starting winning World Series again and their attendance rocketed from 2.25 million in 1996 to a team record 3.77 million last season.
In the many stadium plans suggested to or by Steinbrenner, in the Bronx or elsewhere, to build a stadium or to renovate the old one, he sought public financing.
By agreeing that the team will pay the cost of construction, he recognized a growing trend toward teams' paying their way if they want new ballparks.
"We decided to stay," Steinbrenner said. "That's the cost today."
Levine added: "It became evident over the past several years - not just in New York - that a public subsidy was not going to happen. We can afford it, and we can make the commitment."
The two stadiums are scheduled to open in 2009 and in both cases will get infrastructure help from the city and the state. "The state is helping," Gov. George E. Pataki said, "but George is footing the bill. It doesn't get any better than that."
In the Yankees' case, the city will contribute $135 million to, among other things, replace the land that the new stadium will occupy at well-used and well-worn Macombs Dam and John Mullaly Parks. The state will spend $70 million to build three new garages with 4,000 to 5,000 spots and get all the parking revenues.
No mention was made of a new Metro-North rail station at the stadium, which would come out of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's capital budget.
The new parkland will include Little League fields and an esplanade along the Harlem River; a 400-meter track, and softball and soccer fields outside the old stadium; and tennis and handball courts atop two of the three new garages. The new ballpark and the old one - which may be cut down to its lower tier for use as an amateur baseball field (photo below) - will be separated by an enlarged Babe Ruth Plaza.
The new ballparks will use tax-exempt bonds issued by the city that will save both teams millions of dollars in annual debt payments. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg bristled when asked if doing so constituted subsidizing the projects.
"The government is here to facilitate development in the city," he said. "We don't do subsidies." He added, "The city is getting paid back at a profit."
Another element of the financing for the Yankees will be their ability, granted by the collective bargaining agreement with the players, to offset their revenue-sharing payments to the rest of the league by deducting their debt payments.
Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, described this financial practice as a type of subsidy from the other major league teams. The Yankees paid $60 million into the revenue-sharing pool in 2004.
"It's a subsidy, whether you're getting a check directly from Bud Selig, or indirectly, whereby you send a smaller check to the other teams," Zimbalist said, referring to the baseball commissioner.
Levine stopped short of calling it a subsidy, but said, "Clearly, the revenue-sharing rules were a factor in making the stadium affordable." He added that the other teams "may be the ones who are most unhappy about this."
But he said the substantial new revenues that the ballpark would generate may mean that the team will share more money in the future, simply not as much as it would if not for its ability to deduct debt payments.
Levine said that he believed the Yankees had so far convinced the Bronx community and its leaders of the need to build the ballpark, and that he did not expect significant opposition. The team will submit the project in the fall for the city's approval through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure.
Daniel L. Doctoroff, the deputy mayor, said he did not anticipate a fight over the stadium or a campaign like the ubiquitous one mounted by Cablevision against the proposed $2.2 billion Jets stadium on the Far West Side of Manhattan that could have been the centerpiece of the 2012 Olympics. The refusal by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver last week doomed that project, forcing the city to look to Flushing in Queens.
"There's a small group that doesn't want everything to happen, wherever it is," Doctoroff said.
That small group appears to be Friends of Yankee Stadium, whose membership of 20 has been "waiting for something to organize against," said David Gratt, one of its members, who lives two blocks from the stadium.
The group has a Web site, yankeesstayhome.com.
"For 20 years, the Yankees have stated their desire for a new stadium, but never successfully stated a case for need," he said. "The mayor and the Yankees say it's approaching nonfunctionality, but it processed nearly four million people last year. I'm sure there are minor structural things to be addressed, but it's not nonfunctional."
Gratt said he would like to see the old stadium survive the way Fenway Park has.
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Opinion
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF - The New York Times - June 16, 2005
Designed by HOK Sport + Venue + Event, the stadium is more thoughtful, at least in urban planning terms, than the preposterously ill-conceived Jets stadium. But as architecture, it could not be duller. A predictable mix of old and new, its conventional interiors and faux historical skin are a quaint version of the existing Yankee Stadium, whose hulking shell has been a Bronx landmark since 1923. It represents the kind of watered-down view of history that remains a dispiriting trend in New York architecture.
The stadium will rise on a site just north of the existing stadium, which will be downsized. There are those, no doubt, who will complain about the loss of the site of some of the most memorable moments in the history of sports. I am not one of them. The current stadium, which was severely altered in the mid-1970's, has little architectural merit. Its most famous feature, a kitschy bronze frieze that decorated its exterior facade, was replaced with a poor concrete replica.
The project is part of a broader urban development package that will add a number of public sports facilities and parks to an area badly in need of public space.
But in architectural terms, the new stadium - however it pulls at the heart strings of the nostalgic - will be the worst of two worlds. It is neither a compelling design that speaks to its age, nor does it do justice to the memory of the past.
And as in all new stadiums today, a band of corporate boxes will ring the stadium between the two main tiers.
That formula is wrapped in (no surprise) a formulaic facade that is supposed to be truer to the original stadium than the existing one. The architects say that the frieze will be recreated once again - this time in the original bronze. The original limestone facades, with their brooding entry arches, will be reproduced, although they will have little relation to the new interiors.
The idea, of course, is to treat the past and the present with equal sensitivity, but the result is more suited to Las Vegas than to the Bronx. There are creaky old stadiums that have been renovated without losing their character. Think of Boston's Fenway Park, built in 1912, where additional seats were added on top of the famous Green Monster, or Dodger Stadium, which has been cleaned up but retains its aura of a 1960's-era ballpark.
In the last several years, plenty of new stadiums around the world have boasted a structural bravura and architectural flair that ranks them among the most elegant ever built. In Braga, Portugal, for example, Souto de Moura's soccer stadium is gently yet strikingly embedded in the side of a quarry. Herzog & de Meuron's soccer stadium in Munich is wrapped in an intriguing web of structural steel, like an unraveling ball of yarn.
The Yankees have managed to propose a stadium design that has neither the charm of the rickety old stadiums nor the energy and power of the most innovative. It is a hollow replica of the past that may beguile fans of the current team, but it fails to tap into the spirit of what New Yorkers like to think of as the most legendary sports team in America.
"I understand that owners want luxury boxes and Yankee Stadium has (I believe) only 12. And building 150 or so luxury boxes will steal cheap seats (the kind I sit in.) But worse, today's architects seem to think that lower deck seats are somehow preferable to upper deck seats. In the present Yankee Stadium there are ~ 20,000 lower deck seats and ~30,000 in the upper deck (plus ~7,000 in the mezzanine.) The plan for the new park reverses that. Any real fan would prefer to see the whole game from upstairs.
"Sit downstairs in the first few rows and look at the upper deck in the Stadium. It seems to be right on top of the lower deck and going straight up. National League teams coming into the Stadium actually marvel at how close the screaming-banshee Yankee fans are to the action.
'But the cabled cantilever design is expensive -- much too expensive to waste on the "cheap seats". So they build luxury boxes instead and move you and me to a seat in a different zip code. For all its architecural excellence, even a place like Camden Yards gives the back of its hand to the peons upstairs.
"As far as the "history" ... well ... except for the relationship of the stands to the field, which is pretty much the same in the 1976 Stadium as it was in 1923, most of the character of the old ballpark was obliterated when it was remodeled 30 years ago. A fake plastic "facade" tacked on in the outfield just isn't the same as the green copper adornment to the old park's roof.
"Even if you want to make the case that Gary Sheffield plays on the same patch of ground as the Babe (I think I wanna be sick) you have to allow for the 10 feet deeper the '76 park's field is into the earth than the original.
"The new park will recreate the 1923 exterior (although it will actually be a "false-front") and take a stab at recreating the so-called "facade" around the roof. (When Mantle hit the facade off Fisher in, what was it, '64?, he referred to it as the "FACARD".) And, maybe best of all, the plans call for preserving the playing field and part of the lower deck of the present Stadium for amateur games.
"So, all in all, as desecrations go it could be a lot worse."
Source: Andrew Clem
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