It's Gone! Goodbye!

"Those walls," Nick Trotta says, "are going to scream."

TROTTA IS part of the great masses who came to me to see their first ball game, and with it they got their first understanding of the concepts of scale and grandeur. Trotta's father arrived from Italy in 1954 and understood neither English nor baseball, but he grasped what the Yankees and I represented. We are America. So the Italian immigrant, living in New Rochelle, N.Y., told his son that he must go to the Bronx, and little Nick, about nine years old, did so one sunny afternoon in 1969, to see the Yankees play the Kansas City Royals.

His story is one repeated by millions of others. Having seen me only on black-and-white television, the images flickering on the WPIX Channel 11 broadcast, people like little Nick were awestruck by the color and majesty. The wide, wide expanse of lush green grass. The white frieze with the famous curved design hanging from the rooftop, so high up that it seemed to hang from the clouds, the unofficial third emblem for the Yankees (joining the interlocking ny and the script YANKEES over a baseball). Nick recognized it from his baseball cards. The Topps Company that produced the cards was based in New York City, and its photographers shot American League players when they swung through the Bronx. Nick enjoyed knowing that every major star in the league—Harmon Killebrew, Al Kaline, Carl Yastrzemski—had a little bit of Yankee in them on their baseball card because of that iconic frieze in the background. Before color television, to see me for the first time was breathtaking, not unlike seeing the Grand Canyon.

A little more than 30 years later, Trotta found himself on that great expanse of grass, standing between the first base line and a 2001 World Series logo. He was an assistant special agent in charge of the presidential protective division of the U.S. Secret Service. President George W. Bush was throwing the ceremonial first pitch of Game 3 from the pitcher's mound 49 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Nick had a very serious job at a very serious time. But what he remembers about that moment were the goose bumps raised on his arms by the roar of the crowd. To this day, if he thinks about that moment, the goose bumps come back.

Now, to think about that wrecking ball swinging at Edison's concrete, swinging at Trotta's childhood memories and his adult responsibilities, swinging at the millions who hold dear the personal history and the American history inside my walls ... well, it's a little too much.

"I don't think I could watch it," Trotta says. "Once this stadium is taken down, it's gone forever. You can't say Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle played here anymore. Those walls have living blood in them. When that ball hits, it would be the same as me or you getting hit with a 95-mile-an-hour fastball. Those walls are alive. They are going to scream."

Sam Rice played within my walls. Sam was an outfielder with the Washington Senators who kept a secret up until his death. In the 1925 World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Rice jumped over a short rightfield wall in Washington's Griffith Stadium and into the bleachers to catch a long fly ball. He and the ball fell out of sight for a moment behind the wall and amid the fans. After a moment or two, Sam emerged with the ball in his glove. The umpires ruled the batter out. The Pirates argued for a home run, the chain of custody, so to speak, being left to doubt. Rice refused to tell anyone, including his own family, whether he had actually caught the ball or not. He said he would explain himself only by way of a letter he wrote that was to be unsealed upon his passing. When the letter was opened 49 years later, Sam Rice, from the grave, confirmed that he had caught the ball.

I thought about Sam and his secret, given my own impending death. What I decided is that I should tell you my secrets now, before the wrecking ball hits and I am gone for good. In about 13 months, after the scavengers and four or five demolition companies are done with me, a park will stand in my place. I want you to know what is being lost forever. As one of my final acts, I will show you the unseen places. I will separate fact from myth, though I have inspired so much embellishment and storytelling that even for me that is not always possible.

IN A DYING state, you don't worry about offending people. So let me just come out with the truth, even if this one might hurt: The original Yankee Stadium has been gone for 35 years. Derek Jeter doesn't stand in the same batter's box as Joe DiMaggio did, because home plate was moved forward some 10 to 20 feet in the renovation. Leftfield doesn't "get late early out there" anymore, as Yogi Berra famously observed, because the layout of the field changed; Death Valley, the infamous leftfield gap where titanic blasts went to die, became only a near-death experience, its deepest point chopped from 457 feet to 430 in 1976, to 411 in '85 and finally to 399 in '88. The frieze, made of copper, was sold for $75,000 to a guy in Albany, N.Y., who promptly melted it to sell for piping and other pedestrian uses. The foul poles were sold to a baseball team in Osaka, Japan, for $30,000. One-hundred-eighteen steel pillars, which were either a distinct structural element or a nuisance, depending on whether you ever sat behind one, were removed.

Indeed, short of Thomas Alva's concrete, there is almost nothing you can see from your seat today that somebody in that same spot could see in 1973. And even the concrete looks different. That's another story. In the mid-'60s the sand-colored concrete facade and the green patina frieze were painted white. When George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, he made sure I was covered in fresh coats of paint. That's because in '73 graffiti artists tagged everything that didn't move, like me, and even some things that did, like subway cars. "It was disgusting," says Marty Appel, the Yankees' assistant public relations director at the time, "but that was New York City in the early '70s. You would walk around the Stadium, and it was gross."