Yankee Stadium Gets a Makeover

On April 3, 2009, an exhibition game between the New York Yankees and the Chicago Cubs served as the inaugural game at the brand spanking new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. The new ballbark is located where the Macombs Dam Park used to exist, right across the street from the old Yankee Stadium, which was built in 1923.

A lot of the new stadium incorporates many of the same design elements used in the original Yankee Stadium in order to pay homage to the history of the Yankees. The project for building the new stadium isn’t a recent idea; the construction has been debated and discussed for years and encountered many obstacles and objections along the way. Financing the construction of the stadium has been one of the most hotly contested issues, because most of the citizens of New York City objected to the use of city funding to build a sports venue when there have been other, more pressing issues that needed funding. New Yorkers may have had a point in their objections, because the total cost of the new stadium has so far been nearly $1.5 billion - it is second in costliness only to Great Britain’s Wembley Stadium.

George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, started campaigning for a new stadium in the 1980s, even going so far as to talk publicly about unsafe conditions in the area around Yankee Stadium. But instead of drumming up support for replacing the stadium, he stirred up the fears of the public, thereby discouraging people from attending Yankees games. In 2001 Rudy Giuliani announced that the city had reached a tentative agreement to build new stadiums for both the Yankees and the Mets, with the city and the state each contributing half of the money required. But when Michael Bloomberg took over as the mayor of New York City, he backed out of the deals, saying the city couldn’t afford to foot the bill for two new stadiums. So the teams would have to pay for their own stadiums, with the city paying for only infrastructure improvements.

The new stadium’s exterior looks very much like the original Yankee Stadium, but the interior is a modern design with more space and more amenities. The playing field is very much like the ballpark in the old stadium. The seating areas are similar, with grandstands, bleachers, a lower bowl, and suites on an upper level and grandstand level. About 2/3 of the seats are located in the lower bowl, which is the opposite of the way seating was grouped in the original stadium. The stadium has seating for about 51,000 people. Although the standing room capacity increases that number by about 1,000, the total number of seats has been reduced by about 4,000 because many of the seats in the lower levels are larger than the previous seats.

The construction of the stadium was criticized by health officials, public transportation groups, community advocates, urban planners, parks and recreation officials, and thousands of residents of New York City. Still, the new stadium was finally built and now there is brewing controversy over the demolition of the original stadium, which is the fourth oldest stadium in the United States, and most people feel, the most historic of all baseball parks. In fact, the original Yankee Stadium was the first ballpark to be referred to as a "stadium." So sentiment about the original facility still runs high, even though there will never be another Yankees game on that playing field.

The mayor and other city officials are convinced that the Bronx will benefit from the attractiveness and revenue of the new Yankee Stadium. Randy Levine, the president of the Yankees team, says that the new stadium will bring thousands of new jobs to the community, and according to city economic developers, the tax base of the city will grow as well. The general consensus is that the cost of renovations to the old Yankee Stadium would have been about the same, or maybe even more, than the cost of building a new stadium.

Despite the public controversy over replacing the old with the new, sentiment for the old took a backseat to a realistic view of the future. Thanks to the new venue and the promise it holds, having a new Yankee Stadium ensures that the team will be able to stay in New York City at least for the next few decades.