{"id":1414,"date":"2013-04-09T13:15:45","date_gmt":"2013-04-09T17:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1414"},"modified":"2013-04-09T13:15:45","modified_gmt":"2013-04-09T17:15:45","slug":"memories-of-polo-grounds-on-anniversary-of-final-opener","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/?p=1414","title":{"rendered":"MEMORIES OF POLO GROUNDS ON ANNIVERSARY OF FINAL OPENER"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY KEN BELSON OF THE NY TIMES 4\/9\/13
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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.
\nAfter all, it was on April 9, 1963, that the Polo Grounds hosted the last opening day in its long history.
\nThe Mets \u2014 not the Giants, who left for San Francisco after the 1957 season \u2014 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.
\nBy 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 There was limited parking, the locker rooms were cramped and the concession stands outdated.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.
\n
\n\u201cThey made it so we could play in it,\u201d said Ed Kranepool, the starting right fielder that day for the Mets, who lost, 7-0, to the Cardinals. \u201cIt was painted, but it was dark. The clubhouse was terrible, and the conditions there were strange. It wasn\u2019t easy to get to. We were looking forward to moving into Shea.\u201d
\nThe 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 \u201cit probably was more archaic than falling apart.\u201d
\nBut 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\u2019 colors. Above the clubhouse were the words \u201cPolo Grounds\u201d and to the right, in larger letters, were the words \u201cThe Mets N.Y. National League Baseball Club.\u201d
\nBehind 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\u2019s 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.
\nThe 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.
\n\u201cHe got the lighting correct, the contrast right and the exposure, too,\u201d Putman said. \u201cIt\u2019s perfectly composed.\u201d
\nPutman scanned the slide and then enlarged and cleaned it on Photoshop. He gave a few prints to die-hard Mets fans. \u201cThey thought it was Shangri La,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you\u2019re into old stadiums, it\u2019s something you have to have. It\u2019s like finding a picture of Babe Ruth standing at home plate.\u201d
\nThe Polo Grounds has been gone nearly 50 years, but one of its last remnants is being restored. The Brush Stairway, which ran down Coogan\u2019s Bluff to the stadium, which is roughly where Edgecombe Avenue runs today, is being repaired in part with donations from the stadium\u2019s former tenants.
\nThe 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.
\nWhen the Giants played at the Polo Grounds, fans would stand on Coogan\u2019s 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.
\nThe broken stairway leads nowhere today except to an overgrown stretch of Highbridge Park. On a landing part of the way down is an inscription: \u201cThe John T. Brush Stairway Presented by the New York Giants.\u201d The stairway was meant to honor Brush, the Giants owner who died the year before, in 1912.
\nIn honor of the stairway\u2019s centenary, the Parks Department is fixing it up as part of an overhaul of Highbridge Park. The reconstruction will maintain \u201cthe location and characteristics of the prior stair\u201d and incorporate \u201csimilar material elements of steel and concrete,\u201d according to Phil Abramson, a spokesman for the Parks Department.
\nThe 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\u2019s office paid the rest.
\nIn 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 (\u201cThe Boys of Summer\u201d) and it is Ebbets Field that inspired the design of Citi Field.
\nThe 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\u2019 turn to bask for a moment in memory\u2019s spotlight. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1416,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions\/1416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newyorkgiantspreservationsociety.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}