April 18, 1923: Yankee Stadium Opens

 

April 18, 1923, 100 years ago: The original Yankee Stadium opens, at the intersection of East 161st Street and River Avenue in the South Bronx. What was then reported as 74,218 fans, a record crowd for a Major League Baseball game, but was later admitted to be "only" 62,000 or so (still a record at the time), filed into the massive structure.

The New York Yankees had needed a new home field for the 1923 season, because their lease had run out at the Polo Grounds, and their landlords, the New York Giants, had told them they would not get a new lease. This was out of spite, because, with their 1920 acquisition of Babe Ruth, and the home runs he was hitting, the Yankees were drawing more fans than the Giants.

The Giants, as landlords, made money off this, too. And when the Yankees won their 1st 2 American League Pennants in 1921 and 1922, the Giants won the National League Pennant both times, and beat the Yankees in the World Series both times. Still, the Yankees surpassing them in attendance was embarrassing from a public relations standpoint.

So the Yankees' owner, Jacob Ruppert, found a plot of land with an elevated branch of the New York Subway system going past it, and some room for parking lots for the recently increased use of cars. The fact that it was right across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, at 155th Street and 8th Avenue, where the Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem and Morningside Heights meet, and could be seen from seats at the Polo Grounds itself, was a nice bonus, a counter-spite.

Jacob Ruppert

This is what the world was like at the time:

What we now call Major League Baseball had 16 teams: 3 in New York; 2, 1 in each League, in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis; and 1 each in Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Detroit. No teams south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, and, aside from the 2 St. Louis teams, and they just barely, no teams west of the Mississippi River. Such regions had minor-league teams only.

There were no black or Asian players. The few Hispanic players who had played had been light-skinned enough to be accepted as "white." There were no stadiums with lights, no electric scoreboards, no artificial turf fields, and no stadiums with domes, retractable or otherwise. Of the ballparks in use then, only Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago are still in use today.

The NFL had been founded just 3 years earlier, and, at this point, could hardly have been called a "major league." The NHL had been founded 6 years earlier, and would not have a U.S.-based team until the Boston Bruins were founded a year later. The NCAA Basketball Tournament wouldn't be founded until 1939; the NBA, in 1946. As I said, the Giants were the defending World Champions in baseball; in the NFL, the Canton Bulldogs; and in the NHL, the Toronto St. Patricks, who were renamed the Maple Leafs in 1927. The Heavyweight Champion of the World was Jack Dempsey.

George Wright and Cal McVey, of the 1st openly professional baseball team, the 1869-70 Cincinnati Red Stockings were still alive. Along with Ruth, the biggest stars in the AL were, as they had been for years, Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, George Sisler and Walter Johnson. In the NL, they were Frankie Frisch of manager John McGraw's fiesty Giants, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Rogers Hornsby. Casey Stengel was still playing, for the Giants, and the idea that he would one day be a big-league manager must have seemed ridiculous.

Lou Gehrig would make his major league debut later in the year, for the Yankees. So would Bill Terry, for the Giants. Both 1st baseman would reach the Baseball Hall of Fame, which would not be established until 1936. Joe DiMaggio was 8 years old; while Ted Williams, Bob Feller and Jackie Robinson were 4. Stan Musial was 2. Roy Campanella was 1. Bobby Thomson would be born later in the year. Yogi Berra, Duke Snider, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Sandy Koufax weren't born yet.

Soccer hadn't yet held a worldwide tournament such as the World Cup. The closest it had come was in the quadrennial Olympic Games. While the Games had held 6 Summer editions, they would not hold their 1st in the Winter until the following year. The games have since been held 7 times in America; 4 times each in France and Japan; 3 times in Canada, Germany and Italy; twice each in Britain, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Austria, Russia, Korea and China; and once in the Netherlands, Finland, Mexico, Bosnia, Spain, Greece and Brazil.

There were 48 States in the Union, and 19 Amendments to the Constitution of the United States. One of those, the 18th Amendment, was for Prohibition, and it became the most-broken, and the most-brazenly-broken, law in American history, until the 21st Amendment, in 1933, made it the only Amendment ever to be repealed.

There had been no Civil Rights Act since 1875. There was no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Interstate Highway System, Medicare, Medicaid, Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, or Title IX. The idea that abortion and same-sex marriage would one day be allowed was ridiculous. Then again, so was the idea that corporations were "people," and entitled to the rights thereof.

The President of the United States was Warren G. Harding. But he would die later in the year, and his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, would become President. Former Presidents Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft were still alive. Wilson was ill, and died within a year. Taft had been appointed by Harding to be the Chief Justice of the United States. To this day, he is the only man to serve both as President and on the Supreme Court.

Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce. Franklin Roosevelt was out of active politics, recovering from polio. Harry Truman was in private business. Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Captain in the U.S. Army. Lyndon Johnson was 14 years old, Ronald Reagan was 12, Richard Nixon was 10, Gerald Ford was 9, John F. Kennedy was 5; and Jimmy Carter, both George Bushes, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden hadn't been born yet.

The Governor of the State of New York was Alfred E. Smith. The Governor of New Jersey was George Silzer. The Mayor of the City of New York was John Hylan.

There were still living veterans of the Mexican-American War, the European Revolutions of 1848, and the Crimean War, including at least 1 known survivor of that war's Charge of the Light Brigade and its "noble six hundred." There was still a surviving participant of the Seneca Falls Convention, and a former Senator who had voted to convict the impeached President Andrew Johnson and remove him from office.

The Prime Minister of Great Britain was Andrew Bonar Law, and of Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie King. The head of State of both nations was King George V. Liverpool F.C. had just won England's Football League. Manchester-area team Bolton Wanderers were about to win the FA Cup, at the newly-opened Wembley Stadium in London. Indeed, it could be argued that the 3 greatest sports stadiums the world has ever known are the original Yankee Stadium, the original Wembley Stadium, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and all 3 opened within a span of 14 days in the Spring of 1923.

The holder of the Nobel Peace Prize was Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian scientist honored for work with post-World War I refugees and the repatriation of prisoners of war. The Pope was Pius XI. The Soviet Union had been newly established. China was a young republic. There was no State of Israel. There have since been 18 Presidents of the United States, 5 British Monarchs, and 8 Popes.

Khalil Gibran published The Prophet. Ernest Hemingway published Three Stories and Ten Poems, although he hadn't yet published a novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald had published the novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, and was now working on The Great Gatsby.

C.S. Lewis had published 1 volume of poetry. J.R.R. Tolkien, 6 years older, had published 20 of them. But neither had published any fantasy work. When they met 3 years later, as professors at Oxford University, they still hadn't published any.

Films in 1923 were still silent, and still black & white. Among the films of the year were the Lon Chaney Sr. version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Cecil B. DeMille's original version of The Ten Commandments, and Safety Last! with its iconic image of Harold Lloyd clinging for dear life to the hands of a clock, several floors above a city street.

James Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was 14 years old. Superman's creators, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, were 7. Batman's creator, Bob Kane, was 6. So was Doctor Who's creator, Sydney Newman. Comic book writing icon Jack Kirby was 5, Gene Roddenberry was a toddler, and Stan Lee was an infant. George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and George R.R. Martin wouldn't be born for over 20 years.

George M. Cohan was still the biggest musical star on Broadway, but Al Jolson was right behind him as a singer and actor. As far as composing for the musical stage was concerned, Irving Berlin and the brothers George & Ira Gershwin were already giving Cohan a run for his money.

Notable songs of 1923 included "Charleston," "It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo," "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," "That Old Gang of Mine," "Who's Sorry Now?" and "Yes, We Have No Bananas."

Louis Armstrong had made his 1st recording just a few days before. Bing Crosby had just joined a band -- as a drummer. The band didn't last long. Frank Sinatra was 7 years old. Neither Elvis Presley nor any of the Beatles had been born yet.

Inflation was such that what $1.00 bought then, $17.65 would buy now. A U.S. postage stamp cost 2 cents, and a New York Subway ride 5 cents. The average price of a gallon of gas was 14 cents, a cup of coffee 5 cents, a hamburger 5 cents, a movie ticket 22 cents, a new car $570, and a new house $4,000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed that day at 102.24.

The tallest building in the world was the Woolworth Building, in Lower Manhattan. Telephone numbers were still based on "exchanges," based on the letters on a rotary dial. So a number that, today, would be (718) 293-6000 (this is the number for the Yankees' ticket office, so I’m not hurting anyone's privacy), would have been CYpress 3-6000. There were no ZIP Codes, either. They ended up being based on the old system: The old New York Daily News Building, at 220 East 42nd Street, was "New York 17, NY"; it became "New York, NY 10017."

Radio broadcasting was still new, and few homes had a radio set. Television was still in the experimental stage, and had not been "invented" yet. Photocopying wasn't even an idea. Computers, and everything they can do? Forget it.

There were no credit cards or automatic teller machines. Artificial organs were not yet possible. Transplantation of organs was not possible. The distribution of antibiotics was not possible: If you got any kind of infection, you could easily die. There was no polio vaccine. In spite of the fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, no one had yet launched a rocket toward space.

In the Spring of 1923, Prince Albert, Duke of York, married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, which came in very handy 13 years later, when he had to become King George VI. The Irish Civil War ended. The 1st 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race was held in France. There were military coups in China and Bulgaria. Egypt approved a constitution calling for a parliamentary democracy. In America, Michigan received a rare (even for them) drop to single-digit temperatures.

Sarah Bernhardt, and George Herbert, and Alexander Calder died. Marcel Marceau, and Bettie Page, and Aaron Spelling were born.

That's what the world was like on April 18, 1923, when the 1st Yankee Stadium opened.

*

It was a sunny, warm Wednesday afternoon. John Philip Sousa conducted the U.S. Marine Band in playing "The Star-Spangled Banner," which would not be declared the National Anthem until an act of Congress in 1931. Governor Smith threw out the ceremonial first ball.

Babe Ruth was not happy that the Yankees were leaving the Polo Grounds. Its short foul pole distances made for easy pickings for his booming bat. But when he walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium for the first time, he looked around at the biggest stadium ever built for baseball to that point, and said, "Some ball yard." He saw that the right field fence was only 3 feet high, and the pole was just 296 feet from home plate. The money he'd brought into the Yankees got the ballpark nicknamed "The House That Ruth Built," but it also seemed to be a house built for Ruth. And he said, "I'd give a year of my life to hit the first home run in this ballpark."

The game got underway at 3:30 PM, with Yankee starting pitcher Bob Shawkey getting the Red Sox' shortstop, Wilson "Chick" Fewster, to ground out to his opposite number, who had also been his predecessor in Boston, Everett Scott. At the time, Scott held the major league for most consecutive games played, considered to be continuous in spite of his trade from Boston to New York. Scott's streak would end 2 years later. Within a few days, the streak of the man who would break his record, Lou Gehrig, began.

Bob Shawkey

What the Babe wanted, he usually got. In the bottom of the 1st inning, against Sox pitcher Howard Ehmke, he hit a fly ball down the right field line, but it was caught. He batted again in the 3rd, following an RBI single by Joe Dugan that made the score 1-0 in the Yankees' favor. With Whitey Witt on 3rd base and Dugan on 1st, Ruth crushed Ehmke's delivery deep into the right field stands, making it 4-0 Yankees.

He had hit the 1st home run in Yankee Stadium. Did he give a year of his life for it? Hard to say: The Babe was a heavy smoker, and it was throat cancer that took his life in 1948. He was only 53 years old.

The Yankees won that 1st game 4-1. The winning pitcher was Shawkey. As far as the Yankees were concerned, the Roaring Twenties were well underway.

In 1973, the Yankees celebrated Golden Anniversary Day, and invited Shawkey to throw out the ceremonial first ball. In 1976, following a 2-year renovation that required that they share Shea Stadium in Queens with the New York Mets, they reopened Yankee Stadium, and Shawkey threw out the first ball again.

The opening of the original Yankee Stadium began a 2-week stretch in which 3 of the greatest sports venues ever built opened. The original Wembley Stadium opened in London on April 28, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened on May 1.

In addition, Ohio State University opened Ohio Stadium in Columbus on October 7, 1922; the Rose Bowl stadium opened in the Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, California on October 28, 1922; the University of Oklahoma's facility in Norman, now known as Gaylord Family Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, and the University of Nebraska's Memorial Stadium in Lincoln both opened on October 20, 1923; the University of Illinois' Memorial Stadium opened in Champaign on November 3, 1923; the original Soldier Field opened in Chicago on October 9, 1924; and the University of Texas' Memorial Stadium in Austin opened on November 8, 1924. So that's a lot of legendary stadiums built in a span of a little more than 2 years.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1923, beating the Giants, and confirming their status as the best team not just in the world, but in New York City. Before the original Stadium closed in 2008, they won 37 Pennants and 26 World Series while playing there. It hosted the All-Star Game in 1939, 1960, 1977 and 2008.

The original Yankee Stadium also hosted some legendary college football games, including Notre Dame's win over Army in 1928 that included coach Knute Rockne's invocation of late Notre Dame Star George Gipp, "Win one for the Gipper"; and another Army-Notre Dame game, in 1946, with both teams undefeated. It was billed as "The Game of the Century," but it didn't live up to the billing, ending 0-0. From 1971 to 1973, and again from 1976 to 1987, the Whitney M. Young Jr. Urban League Classic featured black college football teams.

The New York Giants football team played there from 1956 to 1973. They won the NFL Championship Game there in 1956, beating the Chicago Bears. But they also lost it there in 1958, against the Baltimore Colts in an overtime classic that has been called "The Greatest Game Ever Played." They lost another NFL Championship Game there in 1962, to the Green Bay Packers.

Legendary soccer teams have played there, including Brazilian club team Santos, the Brazil national team, and, in the 1976 North American Soccer League season, the New York Cosmos, all with the greatest player in the sport's history, Pelé. AC Milan and Internazionale played a Milan Derby there, and Glasgow giants Celtic and Rangers both played there, although not against each other. A 1952 match featured the last 2 Champions of England's Football League, with Tottenham Hotspur of North London demolishing Manchester United 7-1.

And the old Stadium hosted lots of prizefights, including Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in 1938, Rocky Marciano knocking out Archie Moore in 1955, and Muhammad Ali beating Ken Norton in 1976.

A major renovation was necessary by the 1970s, and the Stadium closed after the last game of the 1973 regular season. It reopened on April 15, 1976, with an 11-4 Yankee win over the Minnesota Twins. That season began a run of 6 seasons with 5 Division titles, 4 Pennants, and 2 World Series wins.

The last game at the old Yankee Stadium was played on September 21, 2008. With regular catcher Jorge Posada injured, the last home run was hit by his backup, José Molina. The new Yankee Stadium opened across 161st Street on April 16, 2009, and Posada hit the 1st home run, but the Cleveland Indians spoiled the party, 10-2. The old Stadium was demolished in 2010.

The two Yankee Stadiums, side-by-side, 2008

In every measurable way, the new Yankee Stadium is superior to the old one. But some things simply cannot be measured. Yes, the new one has been home to Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Aaron Judge. But it will never be home to Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson, Frank Gifford, Sam Huff, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano or Pelé.