Yankee Stadium and the Politics of New York

The Diamond in the Bronx: Yankee Stadium and The Politics of New York NEIL J. SULLIVAN OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS THE DIAMOND IN THE BRONX This page intentionally left blank THE DIAMOND IN THE BRONX yankee stadium and the politics of new york N EIL J. SULLIVAN 1 3 Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paolo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2001 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN 0-19-512360-3 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For Carol Murray and In loving memory of Tom Murray This page intentionally left blank Contents acknowledgments ix introduction xi 1 opening day 1 2 tammany baseball 11 3 the crowd 35 4 the ruppert era 57 5 selling the stadium 77 6 the race factor 97 7 cbs and the stadium deal 117 8 the city and its stadium 145 9 the stadium game in new york 163 10 stadium welfare, politics, 179 and the public interest notes 199 index 213 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This idea for this book was the product of countless conversations about baseball and politics with many friends over many years. Much of the material was made available by the staffs at the Bronx Municipal Build- ing, the New York City Municipal Archives, and the New York Public Library. Their patient and professional efforts belie the easy and erro- neous remarks sometimes made about public employees. Mario Charles and Jerry Bornstein were especially helpful at the Newman Library at Baruch College. Susan Freedman provided extremely useful research as- sistance as well as many thoughtful suggestions. The Bronx Historical Society has an invaluable collection for any work on that borough. Peter Ginna, Rudy Faust, and Aimee Chevrette at Oxford University Press have been encouraging throughout the project, and invaluable in keeping me on track. Jane Dystel has continued to be a valued friend as well as agent. Bill Agee and Jerry Mitchell are friends and fellow academics who have not yet mastered the art of passing off baseball as scholarship. Dan Fenn’s extensive knowledge of business and government has been particularly thought provoking.Peter Woll was my mentor at Brandeis University,and ix acknowledgments he continues to be a cherished friend and teacher. Joseph Cianciulli and my colleagues on the Yonkers Zoning Board of Appeals offer inspired instruction on balancing economic development with other aspects of the public interest. Tom Vilante generously offered his own insights on Yankee Stadium as well as considerable help in securing interviews. I am grateful to Roger Hannon and Father Walt Modrys, S.J.—Yan- kee fans who have been gracious these past few years to a suffering Dodger fan. Patricia Flynn has been a dear friend and steadfast help to my family. From his tonsorial parlor, Emile Vaessen dispenses unparal- leled wisdom and makes the Sullivan boys look as good as the gene pool allows. Bob Fitzpatrick was very encouraging about this book, and it re- news a terrible loss that he is not here to read the finished product. Greg Shuker is another absent friend who would have offered an early and honest review. Authors often thank their families for being patient during the research and writing. Neither Kate nor Tim ever displayed such patience, but I love them anyway. To their great fortune and mine, their mother Joyce has enough patience and love for all of us, and it is to her parents that this book is gratefully dedicated. x Introduction ankee Stadium is an incomparable theater in American sports. The World Series visits other ballparks, but its home is Yankee Y Stadium, where the championship flag has been raised twenty- six times. Since 1923, a few dreary seasons aside, any fan visiting the Stadium would see at least one future Hall of Famer in pinstripes. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio are just some of the Yankees who have been legendary in American culture for more than the records they made playing baseball. Other sports have borrowed the Stadium for great moments of their own. Joe Louis destroyed Max Schmeling in the first round of a heavy- weight championship fight in 1938, and kept his title with an even more gallant win against Billy Conn in 1946. Notre Dame and Army played memorable games there, including a scoreless tie in 1946 when both teams had undefeated seasons. The National Football League began its hold on the public imagination when the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants in a 1958 overtime championship game. When popes say Mass in New York, Yankee Stadium can become a church. At a mass on October 2, 1979, John Paul II urged the faithful to xi introduction meet their obligations to the poor and all those in need—a poignant appeal at a time when the Yankees thrived and the Bronx suffered. In a rare mistake, the Beatles played Shea, but Pink Floyd rocked the Stadium. Billy Graham and Nelson Mandela have packed the place. As riveting, popular, or significant as these other moments have been, they are grace notes to baseball. Yankee Stadium, more than anything else, is a baseball stadium and the home of the most successful team in professional sports. The National Football League and the National Basketball Association have taken runs at becoming the dominant sport in America, but they both have risen on television, with neither sport having a facility that compares in importance to Yankee Stadium. Baseball has its old lov- ables—Fenway Park and Wrigley Field—and the ghost of Ebbets Field can be seen again in new ballparks from Baltimore to the San Francisco Bay, but Yankee Stadium remains unique as a home of championships. For all this remarkable history, Yankee Stadium has a very uncertain future because, by the standards of the sports industry, the Stadium is a relic. Within a few years, it could be replaced entirely or renovated in a way that puts the price of a seat beyond the financial reach of many fans. The fate of the Stadium will be determined by George Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ principal owner, and various public officials in New York. Their decision will reflect Steinbrenner’s interests balanced against competing claims from other New Yorkers. In other words, it will be inevitably political, and it will almost certainly include a substantial public subsidy from the city treasury to the Yankees. Politics and Yankee Stadium have been linked from the time Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston bought a sawmill on the Harlem River from the Astor family and built the house for which Babe Ruth gets credit. Ruppert and Huston had purchased the Yankees in 1915 when the team played in the Polo Grounds as tenants of the New York Giants. At that time, the sawmill’s location was unpromising on its face, but, in a few years, subway lines provided access and the Bronx Terminal Market became a commercial anchor for the area. Jake Ruppert had been a four-term congressman connected politically through Tammany Hall, the machine that dominated New York City politics in the late nine- xii introduction teenth and early twentieth centuries; these projects and Ruppert’s op- portunity to know about them exemplified the kind of “honest graft” for which Tammany was notorious. Most remarkable about the Stadium’s construction, from our own perspective, was the financing. The effort was entirely the responsibility of the Yankee owners even though Ruppert’s fortune rested on the family brewery and the Stadium was built while the country was in the mid- dle of Prohibition. In an age when political connections made as many fortunes as new industrial technologies, no one suggested that city tax- payers should assume the cost of the Yankees’ new facility. Fifty years later, the Yankees were owned by the Columbia Broad- casting System (CBS), one of the most prosperous companies in Amer- ica. The aging Stadium had been sold in the 1950s to a private party who had bequeathed the property to Rice University with the land be- neath going to the Knights of Columbus. Despite financial forces that were driving the city to bankruptcy in the early 1970s, Mayor John Lindsay successfully pressed to have New York assume ownership of the Stadium along with the costs of renovation. Other cities across America were building stadiums to attract or to keep their sports teams and Lindsay seemed to take those ventures as challenges to his own administration. All the resources of modern urban government—the professional structures that had swept aside the ma- chines like Tammany—were brought to bear on the problem of how to provide an adequate baseball stadium for the Yankees. If no one thought to offer Ruppert public money to build the Stadium, the use of the public purse to pay over $100 million for the renovation was a foregone conclusion to Lindsay and the Yankee owners. The deal cut between the city and the ball club secured the Yankees’ future in New York for thirty years.

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