A Diamond In The Ashes

"It was an arrogant administration," said Garelik. "And just as in the case of many stadiums throughout the country, the public was misled." He spoke very carefully, in the monotone that had helped mark him as a boring public official.

"Look, I'm out of politics," said Garelik, now Chief of the Transit Authority Police. "I just don't want to get into anything now. If you write about me, just say I stand on everything I said then, and I was dead right at the time."

Myles Jackson, a lineman on Michigan 's 1951 Rose Bowl team, was not born in the Bronx , as Abrams and Garelik and I were, but he lives there now, a block from Yankee Stadium . Four years ago, rebuilding himself after a business failure, he found an inexpensive apartment in the neighborhood, which is basically commercial and industrial. The Bronx Terminal Market is nearby, and the Bronx County Courthouse stands on the highest hill.

Sometimes Jackson spent a dollar to sit in the bleachers. I have done that, too, and it can be a soothing place, as public or private as one might need it to be, a sun deck, a gambling casino, a patio from which to see green, a tree house of old August fantasies.

And sometimes Jackson went to jog in Macombs Dam Park, which includes a football field ringed with a cinder track that lies literally in the shadow of the Stadium. The track was poorly maintained by the city; it was often unusable. When the Stadium was closed for renovation after the 1973 baseball season and the little park deteriorated even more, Jackson became angry enough to found a local organization called the Committee to Save Macombs Dam Park.

"Yankee Stadium is a symbol of the value system by which this city, this country, bases its decisions," he says. "They can spend all that money for a stadium, but when it comes to a little more for a recreational facility that will really enhance the quality of life through sports, there's just nothing left."

But symbols and chemistry are the name of the game, whether your city is New York or someplace else, whether your game is baseball or some other sport. The "new" Yankee Stadium is not the all-weather, all-purpose facility New York needs. But as an example of the state of the art of cosmetic architecture, it is a handsome improvement. When I take my son to his first major league game, it will be in a brighter, airier, more comfortable ball park. The pillars that obscured the view of too many of the old 65,000 seats are gone, replaced by a steel cable-counterweight system of the type used to support suspension bridges. Gone will be that chilling dankness of Giant football Sunday afternoons, when the pillars cast late-fall shadows on the seats behind them. Of course, gone, too, are the Giants (to New Jersey ), and gone are 11,000 seats, a million baseball seats per season.

Most of the 54,000 that remain are wider. When the park was built in 1923 for a reported $2.5 million by Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston, the seats were 18 and 19 inches wide. The new molded-plastic seats, complete with indentations to simulate the "historical aura" of the old slatted wood ones, are mostly 20 and 21 inches. Many of the seats in the field boxes are 22, and some of the cheaper ones in the grandstand are 18. Class is served.

The director of the Stadium project, an architect named Perry Green, is particularly proud of the historical aura. "I'm an architect; I like pretty things," he says. "Look, there are millions of paving stones around the outside of the Stadium. They could have been all one color. It would have been cheaper. But we used three colors, and it's so much more esthetically pleasing."

I said, "Why didn't you just blacktop it, like Dallas ? You'd have saved millions."