Build It and They Will Forget?

Heritage Field, the Bronx

I had my first look recently at the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009 when I was living in California. At first glance it is quite similar to the old venue. But the designers clearly had in mind how visitors' expectations have changed since the last refurbishment, in the mid-70's. There's a giant HD scoreboard, leather upholstered seats for our expanded fannies, and a wider choice of cuisine for the appetites that feed the fannies. Stadium 2.0 is richer and bigger in everything except tradition. It's no longer the House Ruth Built, but the House Ruth Would Have Built if he'd lived on a diet of cheddar melts and Tuscan paninis—instead of just cigars and booze.

       What made the biggest impression on me, though, was how the footprint of the old stadium has been preserved. Heritage Field, as it is now called, is located across E 161^st Street, a few hundred yards from the new stadium. By all appearances it is an ordinary city park, surrounded by cyclone fencing and a fragment of the old 1970's stadium facade. There is history in its ordinariness, however, as regular folks can now step up to the dish and run the base pads on exactly the same ground where Yankee legends did over the decades. You can stand where Lou Gehrig gave his "luckiest man on the face of the earth" speech in 1939; you can hoist your lumber where Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in one game in the '77 World Series, or stand where Don Larsen greeted an exultant Yogi Berra after his perfect game in '56.  It's as if the Circus Maximus in Rome had been turned into a park where you could rent a chariot to do a few laps over the hallowed old track.

       This brings me to a curious point. While the old stadium is gone, some of the surrounding structure, such as the footbridge from the old parking lots, and the "big bat" near the old entrance, are still there. In fact, Heritage Park and the other landmarks are the only reasons I could precisely locate the site of the old stadium.  If they had also been demolished, I might have supposed that the new Stadium was built exactly on the same site as the old. This is despite the fact that I'd visited the original Yankee Stadium at least a dozen times in my life. I should know exactly where it was located.

       How fallible, then, is our memory for places we take for granted. Indeed, if we imagine a time in the distant future when most of the buildings in this corner of the Bronx were wiped away, and all that was left of the 2009 Stadium was a quadrilateral of ruins, how tempting it would be for future archaeologists to mistake it for the original stadium site. I imagine that even if they managed to revive some poor stiff from 2013, some stiff like me, and asked me to show them the layout of Yankee Stadium, it would be very hard for Rip Van Winkle to help them. With the lack of recognizable landmarks, even an eyewitness could be as confused as anyone. 

       So I come back to the Roman parallel. If we were lucky enough to reanimate  someone from the early Empire, and asked him for guidance on a few topographic points on ancient Rome, he would probably be equally useless. There would be too much added to the world he knew, and at the same time, too much missing. The precise layout of the Forum of Augustus, or Nero's Golden House, would simply have been given facts in his time, about as worth committing to memory as we have for the exact address of the Jefferson Memorial (which is, of course, 900 Ohio Dr SW, Washington, DC 20242).   

      The details of the past are hard enough to recover. Perhaps more disturbing, the details of the present hardly exist in our minds either. 

© 2013 Nicholas Nicastro