In sports, everyone is a winner—some people just win better than others. Like the folks who get a perverse thrill from watching that pompous old Bronx ornament get gutted and torn apart, piece by self-important piece.
OK, I enjoy history as much as the next guy, and I'm firmly of the belief that the Yankees left a perfectly viable ballpark — sorry, stadium — for the sole purpose of taking up residence in a spacious cash register (screwing its neighborhood in the process), and that furthermore the team spent its last decade there draping the place with all manner of grandiose historical froufrou in part to distract you from the fact that the joint was just 30 years old. But, I'm sorry, that photo up there? Fucking awesome.
Lord, just look at it. Yankee Stadium in a cloud of dust. Doesn't it make you just a little bit happy?
Of course, the old men are weeping and blowing their shofars and writing their sad, sad poetry —
They idled in left field, side by side, their buckets down, prepared to pull down a section of the upper deck.
The grass field is gone, replaced by shards and chunks of concrete and steel.
The field and loge decks were munched up and torn apart by hydraulic hammers and shears.
The bleachers are as dead as Neidermeyer. Scoreboards, too.
So much has been destroyed that it's hard to feel even a tingle of fuzzy nostalgia for the house that Ruth built and the city is razing. You have your memories, but nothing that matters is left in these remains.
Maybe a Jimmie Foxx jersey will be found buried beneath all the rubble.
Sure, there used to be a ballpark right here. But there is no trace of DiMaggio here. Just debris by the ton.
Old Yankee Stadium: opened in 1923, reopened in 1976.
New Yankee Stadium can be seen through what's been torn out of the old.
On Wednesday, the electronic sign atop its roof read: "Twenty Five Days Until Opening Day." Hope.
— and I know I'm supposed to feel really, really bad about this, if not for the sake of history then at least for the residents nearby who will spend the foreseeable future inhaling the stadium's antique dust and awaiting their long-promised park land. But I see those backhoes and excavators idling heavily in right field, ready to lay waste to the upper decks, and I feel, just for a moment, that our fondest hopes and our most fervent wishes can become vivid reality. That dreams can come true. Yankee Stadium is getting blown the fuck up. Hope.
Memories, and Debris, at Old Yankee Stadium [The New York Times]