BY KEN BELSON OF THE NY TIMES 4/9/13

Ebbets Field is in the spotlight this year because the long-departed home of the Brooklyn Dodgers is in the centennial of its birth. But this is also a significant month for the Polo Grounds, the other New York home for National League baseball that succumbed to the wrecking ball decades ago.
After all, it was on April 9, 1963, that the Polo Grounds hosted the last opening day in its long history.
The Mets — not the Giants, who left for San Francisco after the 1957 season — were the home team that day, 50 years ago. And the Mets were reluctant tenants. They had hoped to move into Shea Stadium at the start of that season, their second in the major leagues, but delays in the construction of Shea forced the team to play an extra year in Upper Manhattan.
By then, the final incarnation of the Polo Grounds, which opened in 1911, was on its last legs. There was limited parking, the locker rooms were cramped and the concession stands outdated. Maintenance and restoration work had all but ceased.

“They made it so we could play in it,” said Ed Kranepool, the starting right fielder that day for the Mets, who lost, 7-0, to the Cardinals. “It was painted, but it was dark. The clubhouse was terrible, and the conditions there were strange. It wasn’t easy to get to. We were looking forward to moving into Shea.”
The Jets, who were then the Titans, were also using the Polo Grounds at that point, but they, too, knew the place was on borrowed time. (Demolition began a week before Shea Stadium opened.) George Vecsey of The New York Times, who covered the Mets in those years, called the Polo Grounds rusted-out and pigeon-befouled and said “it probably was more archaic than falling apart.”
But the team did splash some paint around to make it appear like the home of the Mets. A photograph unearthed by Pete Putman, a photographer and sports blogger from Bucks County, Pa., shows the back end of the stadium painted in a cream white with flourishes of blue and orange, the Mets’ colors. Above the clubhouse were the words “Polo Grounds” and to the right, in larger letters, were the words “The Mets N.Y. National League Baseball Club.”
Behind the stadium, apartment houses can be seen set against a blue sky and puffs of white clouds. A handful of cars are parked in front, presumably those of workers inside. Many pictures of the Polo Grounds were taken from Coogan’s Bluff, above the other end of the stadium. But this photo provides a rare view of the stadium, a tranquil portrait of a relic that was soon to vanish.
The person who took this photograph remains a mystery. In the 1970s, Putman bought trays of Kodachrome slides at a garage sale in upstate New York. A decade later, he looked at them and saw that they were taken on a trip to New York City in 1963, presumably by someone on a Circle Line cruise because there were pictures of the waterfronts in Weehawken, Hoboken and Lower Manhattan. The ship must have also made its way up the Harlem River, where the photographer took this shot of the Polo Grounds.
“He got the lighting correct, the contrast right and the exposure, too,” Putman said. “It’s perfectly composed.”
Putman scanned the slide and then enlarged and cleaned it on Photoshop. He gave a few prints to die-hard Mets fans. “They thought it was Shangri La,” he said. “If you’re into old stadiums, it’s something you have to have. It’s like finding a picture of Babe Ruth standing at home plate.”
The Polo Grounds has been gone nearly 50 years, but one of its last remnants is being restored. The Brush Stairway, which ran down Coogan’s Bluff to the stadium, which is roughly where Edgecombe Avenue runs today, is being repaired in part with donations from the stadium’s former tenants.
The staircase once led to a ticket booth and was built by the Giants in 1913. Now it leads to a public housing complex called the Polo Grounds Towers that includes four 30-story skyscrapers with 1,616 units.
When the Giants played at the Polo Grounds, fans would stand on Coogan’s Bluff to watch games for free. In building the staircase, the Giants might have been trying to coax a few more fans into buying tickets.
The broken stairway leads nowhere today except to an overgrown stretch of Highbridge Park. On a landing part of the way down is an inscription: “The John T. Brush Stairway Presented by the New York Giants.” The stairway was meant to honor Brush, the Giants owner who died the year before, in 1912.
In honor of the stairway’s centenary, the Parks Department is fixing it up as part of an overhaul of Highbridge Park. The reconstruction will maintain “the location and characteristics of the prior stair” and incorporate “similar material elements of steel and concrete,” according to Phil Abramson, a spokesman for the Parks Department.
The renovated stairway, which will be finished this spring, will cost $950,000. Of that, the New York Giants football team donated $200,000, the Mets and Yankees (who played there from 1913 to 1922) donated $100,000 each, and the Jets, the San Francisco Giants and Major League Baseball each donated $50,000. The Manhattan Borough president’s office paid the rest.
In the decades since the Dodgers and the Giants left New York for California, it is that Dodgers team that lives on in the popular imagination more than the Giants do. It is the old Dodgers, after all, who became the subject of a best-selling book (“The Boys of Summer”) and it is Ebbets Field that inspired the design of Citi Field.
The old Giants, meanwhile, were often ignored, although they have twice gotten a generous nod in recent years from their descendants in San Francisco, who came to New York after their World Series victories in 2010 and 2012 to show off the championship trophy and to reconnect with the past. And now, on Tuesday, it is the Polo Grounds’ turn to bask for a moment in memory’s spotlight.