THE NAKED CITY BETRAYS ITS HERITAGE: THE END OF YANKEE STADIUM

The old and gritty ”Naked City” television series invariably closed with, “There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

That naked city, of course, was and still is New York City, the city that never sleeps, the crown jewel of the Empire State, but it’s a very different and very tarnished jewel today. The following is another story about the Naked City.

It’s now a Manhattan city predominantly populated by the rich and the poor where the former can browse Fifth Avenue shops and sleep in Madison Avenue duplexes and the latter can sweep that avenue and clean those duplexes. There are four other boroughs but they have always been considered city step children.

We’ve heard a great deal about change this election year and change can be a good thing. Change for the mere sake of change is rarely a good thing. Nor is change which incorporates alterations that negate the good that existed before and such is the case with New York.

New York City is a place one either loves or hates. There’s little middle ground. There’s much to be admired and much to be despised. Never really a melting pot despite what we’ve been led to believe, it has now become a new city of Babel where new immigrants not only do not blend into the whole but revel in their differences and act in ways that set them apart, from flaunting traditions they refuse to change to an English language they refuse to speak.

The city is a prime example of diversity run amuck, where a cacophony of tongues can make a casual visitor believe he could be in Calcutta or Mexico City or Chungking or Nairobi–all at the same time.

Personally, I could do without unnecessary change and I especially could do without the recent changes in New York. One major change I regret is one that is happening this weekend in the northern borough of the Bronx where the city fathers and the Steinbrenner family have conspired to destroy one of the most iconic buildings in New York City, Yankee Stadium.

One of the crown jewels of the crown jewel that is New York, Yankee Stadium is a place both built out of necessity and built for spite, yet the result was magnificently breathtaking in its time.

The New York baseball team, the Giants and their Polo Grounds had welcomed the struggling enterprise that was the Yankees, knowing they could not overshadow the Giants. That all changed after the Boston Red Sox sold a hearty fellow, an outstanding pitcher and hitter named George Herman “Babe” Ruth to Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert and, as they say, the rest was history.

After Ruth began hitting baseballs which had the consistency of a rolled up sock into the bleachers, the Giant welcome mat was removed. The House that Babe Ruth almost literally built was erected in barely a year directly and visibly across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, a provocative in-your-face move by Ruppert. It opened in 1923, eighty five years ago, and will shut its gates permanently after tonight’s game.

This is not intended as a history of Yankee Stadium but rather more as a dirge for the foolishness of New York City in planning to destroy what is undeniably a national baseball monument...

(Read the rest of this article @ http://genelalor.com/.)