Polo Grounds trivia

Here's a photo of the stairways from a 2008 article in the Times about it:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/a-stairway-to-sports-history-from-the-polo-grounds/



The Polo Grounds, the northern Manhattan home of the New York Giants baseball team, has long been the site of a rather imposing public housing complex called the Polo Grounds Towers — four 30-story skyscrapers with 1,616 units.

Few clues remain about the glorious things that happened when the Polo Grounds was a sports stadium in Washington Heights — Willie Mays, the birth of the Mets, the New York Cubans, the New York football Giants, and Floyd Patterson vs. Ingemar Johansson, among them.

But one relic remains, not as the result of historic preservation, but by accident.

That relic is a staircase built down Coogan’s Bluff, the hill that overlooked the stadium, which is roughly where Edgecombe Avenue runs today. The staircase once led to a ticket booth, and was built by the owner of the Giants at the time.

 

The average New Yorker and especially a tourist with a love of hoops would have plenty of reason to visit the area if they want to see another place with great history: Rucker Park. It's right by where the Polo Grounds stood.

 

Unless their on a real pilgrimage, they could go to the West 4th Street Courts instead. It's Medina to Rucker Park's Mecca.

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/82835/

http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M125C/

Then they can bop around the Village afterward.

Seriously, the Polo Grounds are pretty far from the beaten path these days.

 

What if Horace Stoneham would have had some brains and balls (and not been a Walter O'Malley stooge), worked with Robert Moses to build a new Giants stadium in Flushing, or even a new Polo Grounds, and decided to stay in NYC instead of moving?

He could have easily played a season in Yankee Stadium, or even in Jersey City or Newark, while they built the new stadium. He would have owned the NL half of NYC because there is no way O'Malley was staying in Brooklyn.

FB, I also immediately thought "Stairway to Heaven" when I read that story too. I've been to old, old (pre-1976) Yankee Stadium. Wish I could have visited the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field as well.

 

Yeah I agree, for the most part it is. But as someone who lives pretty close to that beaten path, I also know that it's fairly easy to get to on the train. Will the average tourist from Nebraska go there? No. Although if they want to see where Durant put on a show...

Plus, if you really want to see some ancient baseball history, there's another place fairly near the old Polo Grounds spot, that has long ago been forgotten.

The Yankees - or as they were then called, the Highlanders - played at Hilltop Park, which was between 165th and 168th in northern Manhattan, just a ways up from the Polo Grounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilltop_Park

A lot of people do actually visit the site these days - because Columbia-Presbyterian hospital is now there. A small plaque marks the spot where the stadium stood.

 

Reminds me of League Park in Cleveland, where in the middle of a run-down neighborhood, there's only a plaque showing where Babe Ruth hit his 500th home run and a ticket counter left. It's surreal.

 

I read this book:



http://www.amazon.com/Baseballs-Greatest-Games-1960-World/dp/B004AP3PO4

The author talks about some of the remains of Forbes Field, like this one:



This site has more on Forbes Field.

http://stadiumpage.blogspot.com/2010/02/stadium-remains-part-one-forbes-field.html

I'd love to visit some sites like this.

Hell when I went to St. Louis, I went to the "Hill" just to see the house where Yogi Berra grew up.

Even after explaining to my girlfriend why we were there, I still don't think she understood.

 

Stoneham wanted to move the Giants anyways because he didn't think the city would be able to support three teams. He had planned to move them to Minneapolis, where they had their Triple-A team, until O'Malley decided to move to the West Coast and convinced Stoneham it would be a better place.

 

NYC offered to build the Dodgers essentially the same stadium that became Shea Stadium.

O'Malley wanted to get Stoneham out to the Coast because getting a travel partner was a key in getting the other NL owners to go along with the deal. They didn't want to have to fly out to California to play just one team.

Had O'Malley flown to LA all by himself, Stoneham would likely have used the threat of Minneapolis to try to get the city to build some kind of new Polo Grounds, but the Giants were slumping on field and at the gate and didn't have the mojo to get it done.

Plus the Yankees who were then the colossus who ran all of baseball probably would have deep-sixed any idea of the city paying (or even allowing) a new park to be built a half-mile across the river from Yankee Stadium.

 

. . . which wasn't hard, considering Stoneham's typical state . . .

 

Bill Veeck had a pretty funny chapter on Horace Stoneham in one of his books (I believe "The Hustler's Handbook") which maintained that Stoneham's widespread image as a bumbling drunken boob was a put-on -- that Stoneham mainly allowed people to "bamboozle" him into doing stuff he had planned to do all along.

Such as O'Malley "talking him into" heading for SF as opposed to Minneapolis or staying in the rotting Polo Grounds. O'Malley looks like the bad guy while poor gullible Stoneham is suckered into moving into one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.

 

O'Malley was leaving regardless, if not in 1958 then no later than 1959. O'Malley wanted to own his own ballpark, and Moses was not going to permit a new ballpark in Brooklyn, because he wanted it at Flushing Meadows.

RM was the most powerful man in New York State in the late 50s, early 60s, even more powerful than Governor Rockefeller and certainly more powerful than Walter O'Malley..

Stoneham could have easily let O'Malley leave, and brokered a new ballpark in NYC. So what if it was in Queens.

Instead O'Malley beat Stoneham to the West Coast, and got the far better market and the far, far better stadium. O'Malley got everything he wanted out of the city of Los Angeles, sand then crewed the LA Angels while they shared Dodger Stadium, while Horace got hookwinked on Candlestick Park so bad it's embarrassing. He'd have been better off in MSP than San Francisco.