A Diamond In The Ashes

By the end of 1975 the city had quietly dropped a program to clean up the area around the Stadium, specifically to buy and raze several dilapidated buildings. The reason cited was the "fiscal crisis." The program would have cost about $2 million. Instead, some of that money was allocated to improve the subway station adjoining the Stadium. About $300,000 more of it was used to buy the Yankees such things as a tarpaulin, a carpet for their general offices and private toilets for the VIP boxes.

Macombs Dam Park seems never to have been seriously included in any official master plan, although Abrams claims to have fought for it in vain. Yankee Architect Green, who says he helped Jackson draw up a program for the park's rehabilitation, calls Jackson a "troublemaker," while describing Macombs Dam Park as a "strolling space for Stadium patrons" in his own press release.

"This park could make this neighborhood safe and give a sense of community spirit," said Jackson recently as he stood in the mud of it. "It could offer recreation to 700,000 people a year and do it without costing the city a penny. It could be a model for the whole country, the kind of thing that could turn the Bronx, maybe New York, around, but all the big boys think about are those rich suburbanites. Who do they think the rest of us are, Apaches with Magic Markers?"

At numerous public hearings, in letters to politicians, Yankee executives and the media and by a 10-mile jog to City Hall, Jackson and his committee have tried to sell a $2.5 million plan to turn Macombs Dam Park into the city's only 24-hour, competition-class track-and-field facility.

The $2.5 million, perhaps raised from federal or private sources, would buy an eight-lane all-weather track, artificial turf for football, floodlights and a double-decked, 5,000-capacity grandstand with locker rooms, offices and meeting halls. Competitive events, even a Park'n'Jog for commuters, would make it a money-earning facility as well as a kind of plaza for the neighborhood, and one easily accessible to the rest of the city.

"The Stadium isn't going to do anything for me," says a store owner on 161st Street, Yankeeland's northern boundary. "That's an insulated place over there, people just drive in and out. But the park, that could bring life back to the area. People could walk around at night again. There'd be something for youngsters to do, a place for old folks to kibitz."

That is the crux of the problem exemplified by rebuilt Yankee Stadium, with its "historical aura" and its huge cost overruns paid for out of public funds. While municipal officials and businessmen argue that keeping their city "major league" is essential to its well-being, perhaps even to its survival, the nonfans among the youngsters, old folks and those in between who live in the city have inadequate facilities. The savings from less elaborate paving, not to mention a multipurpose park housing all of New York's big-league teams, might have built a monument to sports far greater than Yankee Stadium will ever be.