• Back To Notebook Front
• Back To NY Front

07.14.01
Saturday

As soon as you step to ground level of the 161st Street subway station in the Bronx, you’re flat up against the white stone facing of Yankee Stadium. I never pictured it quite as crowded in the area as it was, nudging parks, small parking lots, and a covered train track.

Yankee Stadium has inspired some of the corniest free verse by baseball writers and fans for its legend-studded history, but I had no such inspiration upon my first view of the park. This is partly because on the plane back in June I’d read Bob Costas’ Fair Ball, a scathing indictment of the baseball’s screwy economic system that rewards the rich teams like the Yankees. As Rick Reilly put it, rooting for the Yankees “is like rooting for Brad Pitt to get the girl or for Bill Gates to hit Scratch 'n' Win.”

But more directly, this was because the stadium doesn’t feel old; it doesn’t really breathe the spirits of the Roaring 20’s or the wartime era when the Yankees won so many of their serial championships (it’s now 26 and counting, the most of any sports franchise in history). Instead, the place doesn’t seem to go that far past the 70’s, and for good reason: The original structure, built to accommodate Babe Ruth’s swelling Polo Grounds public, was mostly razed and rebuilt in 1973. For a few years the Yankees played in Shea, the Mets’ home, until the new stadium opened in 1976. So while the alignment of the field is the same, and the classy white fencing which circled the original stadium is lamely alluded to with a stretch of imitation fencing across the outfield, Yankee Stadium feels exactly like what it is – a 1970’s reconstruction of something that was once grand. 

Except for the fencing, the stadium is quite nondescript – just a mass of blue seats swallowing a tiny field area. Whereas Shea was bigger than I imagined, I hadn’t expected how small Yankee Stadium would be - the outfield dimensions and foul territory are among the smallest in the major leagues.

The tour included a stop in the Yankee clubhouse, where the players locker areas are chained off as tour groups constantly trample in and out over the grayish-blue carpeting. The player areas aren’t actually lockers per se; they’re more like shelves with hangers and a padded chair underneath, topped off by more imitation white fencing. The shelves are packed with dietary supplements (I saw no creatine, but it might have been mis-labeled) and Sam’s Club-sized boxes of sunflower seeds. In one stall is a Bible. Next to Derek Jeter’s is an empty stall, left open for its last occupant, catcher Thurman Munson, who was killed in 1979. Slugger Bernie Williams owns the largest space – the corner location – which he inherited from longtime resident Don Mattingly. 

The players go from there to the dugout, passing a sign in the tunnel with the Yankees logo that reads, “‘There is no substitute for winning.’ Gen. Douglas MacArthur.” The troops march to war through the dugout, where a bench with blue padding provides a lousy view of the action, since the field slopes to enable drainage, dumping excess into drains in the dugout floor. There is just barely enough room for the large men between the bench and the ceiling, and so the ceiling is also padded, to accommodate players jumping off the bench in celebration, something there’s been a lot of here the past few seasons.

I gave a chapel talk on sports and religion this past year, so I was on the lookout for related items on this tour. I found plenty. Throughout the tunnel outside the clubhouse is posted, in white letters on a blue sign, a Joe DiMaggio quote: “I thank the Good Lord I’m a Yankee.” In center field, the otherwise-bland Yankee Stadium is trademarked by “Monument Park,” where plaques perch on rocks like tombstones, and tourists lower their voices out of reverence. Alongside the commemorations for “George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth” and the others, two plaques are centrally placed. Both read: “In commemoration for solemn mass led by His Holiness, Paul VI,” each with their dates, October 4, 1965 and October 2, 1979. Exactly where the holiness stops and the sports begin here is a matter many Yankee fans have left to more ambitious others. 

On the way out I lost the rest of the group in the exit tunnel and ducked back inside the stadium seating area. In the complete stillness of the empty seats and silent field I ate my sack lunch, enjoying the day’s perfect, temperate weather. Even if I wasn’t in the mood for communing with the spirits of the Yankee ghosts, or whatever it is tourists and fans flock here for, this was my favorite way to enjoy the sports landmark: looking around the quiet emptiness, not another person in the place. 

Back down the subway tunnel, I appreciated that the A/C express barrels, in one stretch, through 66 blocks before relenting at Columbus Circle. So it was a swift trip down to Penn Station and Madison Square Garden overhead. I detoured to mail some postcards at the world’s largest post office across the street on 8th (which, it was announced recently, will be partially renovated to be a grand train terminal, an attempt to fill the still-aching absence of the august Penn terminal that stood where the Garden is now).

I expected less of the Garden tour, since in the past couple years I’ve done arena tours in Toronto, Chicago, and Cleveland, and was getting used to them. But Madison Square Garden, the “world’s busiest arena,” is unlike any of them. For one thing, it’s arguably as famous for its non-sports events (concerts and circuses) as its athletic offerings. For another, it’s just not a standard arena, architecturally. After a 1991 renovation, it is now connected to a building next door, and from below, amid the T-shirt vendors, it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Meanwhile, an enclosed luxury deck area was tacked on to the side of the original structure at the 9th floor, hanging on by bridge cables. Most distinctively, the floor of the arena, where basketball, hockey, music, and everything else takes place, is actually on the fifth story, above the theater and restaurants which occupy stories two through four. I should have realized this when I went to the NBA Draft at the Garden Theater, but I didn’t put it all together at the time.  Such a massive chamber sitting five stories above the streets of New York City is shocking, particularly when you think about hauling the elephants up the elevators at circus time. 

Outside, the Empire State Building stood stiffly against the clear blue of the sky. I haven’t yet written what I consider the most important difference between the Empire –   – and its little brother, the splendid Chrysler – and the most famous resident of my favorite city, Chicago: the Sears Tower  – and its kin the Hancock Tower.  Each of these duos is uniquely impressive, but where the jet-black Sears is as sporty as a leather jacket, the grand Empire is as formal as a tuxedo. (The World Trade Center, meanwhile, is plain but coldly huge, which makes it a fitting representative for New York.) Thus these two city’s icons match their style. The Empire and Chrysler dazzle with their bright crowns atop endless stone facing, just as New York is at once ornate and oldly plain, maintaining more of a rigid pretension. The Sears and Hancock strut against the sky with the swagger of modernity, just as the city itself is newer, cleaner, and less self-critical, on a mission to modernize ever since the Great Fire of 1871 made it start from scratch. For me, feeling like a visitor to New York expatriated from Chicago, I feel about the buildings as I feel about the cities – New York is brilliant to look at but less approachable; Chicago has a fresher energy. 

07.12.01
Thursday

I’d seen it and ridden by it on the shore of Lower Manhattan, but I’d never walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. I decided to do it the best way possible – on a Big Onion twilight walking tour (apparently “Big Onion” preceded “Big Apple” among New Yorkers). So we made our way across the classic structure on a clear, cool night as the sun crawled under the horizon, our tour guide shouting about the bridge’s history over the traffic below. The bridge features a central walkway that rises a level above the traffic (and did when the bridge was built, in the late nineteenth century, when the noisy traffic was carriages and trolley cars), and what shocked me is that bikers fly through the fast lane from both directions, in the same lane! I saw a few razor-thin misses.

The history is, to credit the tour guide, worth shouting about – this is one of the most startling architectural narratives since the building of the pyramids. One of the first and boldest suspension bridges ever, ahead of its time when it opened in 1883, the bridge is the brainchild of eclectic genius John Roebling and his son, the quite possibly obsessive-compulsive Washington Roebling. From the beginning, the story is so strange: John, watching from a dock during the bridge’s, has his foot crushed by an oncoming boat. But he shakes off conventional treatment in favor of “hydraulic” therapy, a bizarre system of bathing and depriving the body of water, which only makes things far worse and leads to his quick demise.  Taking the reins after John’s death is Washington, the less creative but more mathematical man who never left a piece of paper unblanketed in calculations. He gets “the bends,” a brand of physical and mental illness caused by nitrogen bubbling in the blood after coming in and out of pressurized underwater digging chambers (the bends afflicted dozens of workers long after the underwater work was over, the worst of the low-wage work in deplorable conditions).

So Washington watches the final years of the bridge’s construction from a Brooklyn Heights townhouse, dictating instructions to his wife and new chief engineer, Emily. A plaque on the Manhattan tower anachronistically and patronizingly reads, “Dedicated to Emily Roebling – Back of Every Great Work We Can Find The Self Sacrificing Devotion Of  A Woman.”

So the bridge is a marvel partly for its construction. No one had ever tried such a building project over so much water, and no one had pulled it off so relatively safely (except for the bends, only three workers were killed during construction). But its continued allure decades past its days as the tallest structure in New York City, its gothic European style – unusual now that subsequent bridge designers have put very little art into their work – and its New York ruggedness (ever since a 1954 renovation, inspectors estimate it has anther two to three hundred years left in it) make it a landmark almost more awe-inspiring than the skyscrapers, the transit system, and the museums – for the Brooklyn Bridge is all three at once.

07.11.01
Wednesday

This summer is our introduction to the headaches of full-time flying – if we had any illusions that hassles only happen to frequent flyers, my six-hour layover in Chicago (including an impromptu bus trip from Midway to O’Hare) and Andrea’s experience last night are a splash of water in the face (which, come to think of it, we could have used literally after the wearying evening). Her plane was so late coming in from Detroit that she couldn’t get back to make the last Grand Rapids connection, so it was another night in New York, and an even longer drawn-out goodbye. When we finally did part in the terminal this morning, it felt to me like an amputation – a part of me had been removed. My job and dorm felt coldly quiet again the rest of the day.  If this isn’t motivation enough to get married (other than the rapturous mystery of love and all that), than I deserve another summer of unaccompanied evenings. 
 

07.09.01
Monday

Going back on an insistence the previous night that we rouse ourselves early for the Today Show, we stumbled off at the last minute, arriving in Rockefeller Plaza just in time to see Katie blankly bending over a summer patio spread while a garrulous guest spouted the virtues of different tumblers. Al made his appearance in the plaza to cheers after a long vacation in which he inexplicably gained a beard and crutches. At lunch we went back to the plaza to wedge ourselves in on the stone edge of a fountain among a white collar noontime crowd, and then stopped at the intriguing gift shop for the Met, plunked in the plaza blocks away from its massive home in Central Park. At night it was time for Phantom again, since Andrea hadn’t seen it since a trip Chicago years ago. While she still likes Les Miz better, I maintain that there’s no show so technically stunning yet subtly challenging.

07.08.01
Sunday

Tim Keller is what I used to call myself in my school newspaper column: a radical moderate. The conversational intellectual who draws crowds at Redeemer Presbyterian on the Upper East Side pokes holes at the arrogance of both liberals and conservatives from the middle, and is also, in a way, more extreme than either.

Jesus was extreme, after all, in identifying the greatest commandment as “Love the Lord your God” and then “Love your neighbor.” He was extreme because he put moral questions in entirely new contexts. His questioner was saying that the law was too onerous and a shortcut was needed. Jesus could concede this and lose credibility, or refuse and join the ranks of the Pharisees. Instead he simultaneously upped the ante and removed the burden, saying that there is no shortcut, yet shining light on what’s behind the law. 

The problem with legalism, Keller pointed out, is that it leads to sound morality for the wrong reasons – we try to live good lives for fear of judgment out of the pride of self-righteousness. But this leaves us empty, too. Only in the humility of gratitude do the law and love exist in symbiosis. 

In the afternoon we ended up at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum on 42nd just off Times Square. Andrea had seen the original in London and could highly recommend it. The place is frightening, and not just for its morbid re-creation of the French Revolution, commemorating Madame Tussaud’s work casting wax molds of guillotined heads.

Beyond that, the way the place toys with reality can be downright scary: capturing and casting humanity in wax, daring you to shelve your imagination and look and stare into famous faces. It opens in a grand ballroom where celebrities are casually poised around the room, standing and sitting in groups as visitors trickle around and through them, as though fellow guests at a posh party.

A fellow tourist in front of you steps aside to reveal a spitting image of Whoopi Goldberg, or Nicholas Cage, or Woody Allen. Meanwhile, while I stood idle gazing at aliases of Dan Rather and Jodie Foster, a tourist just behind me peered around to look at my face and jumped back when I turned to return the look. “Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were a celebrity,” she said. That was a humbling correction to make. 

But the likenesses do prompt their share of double-takes. Or, as Larry King, captured in wax at the far wall, was quoted as saying in awe: “It’s not a likeness. It’s an exactness.”

Still, it was instructive to note how some, maybe one third of the figures, just don’t arrest you quite that way. There’s just something that’s a little off – an eyebrow level that comes too low, a smile that’s too high, or just something in the eyes that tips you off and ruins the whole thing. To me that says something about the human face - how deep it is and beyond capture. Even with all the pain-staking, calculating, scientific sweat that goes into perfecting these pillars of persons, only God can pull it off with his original copy.

• Back To Notebook Front
• Back To NY Front
• NBierma.com