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Yankee Stadium
Ruthian size, price tag and sponsorships (continued)
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When you spend over a billion dollars building a stadium, the architects are quite busy creating all of the aspects of the design.
Without a doubt, Populous put some of the best and brightest sports-facility architects to work designing this massive facility. In fact, so protective were the Yankees of the design specifics of this park that they required Populous to separate this design team from the one working on the Mets' Citi Field by putting them on different floors on opposite sides of their building!
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I have no doubt that the main message from the Yankees to the architects was, "Make this a living museum for the Yankees' great accomplishments." I don't think anyone who attends a game at the new ballpark would dispute that the designers did this extremely well. From top to bottom and from outside to inside, this is a building that only the Yankees could occupy, because it was constructed to be a monument to them.
In fact, I'm not the only observer who has noted that, if anything, the place feels as much like a museum as a ballpark. It has the grandeur of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, to the point where it almost feels more like a monument than a place where a child's game is played.
When I visited the Yankees Museum inside the ballpark as part of the guided tour I attended with my family, I was a little surprised that it wasn't bigger. After all, the team museums for the Reds and the Royals are both tremendously larger, and you certainly couldn't make the case that those franchises have more "history" to tout than the Bronx Bombers. But then you remember that the whole stadium acts as a museum for the Yankees, and it all makes more sense.
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So let's examine the stadium's design, feature for feature, starting with the seating bowl. Keep in mind that the original Yankee Stadium (the one that opened in 1923) provided the template for the design of the new park. That structure was the first sports facility to (a) carry the permanent name of "stadium" (everything was a "field" or "park" up until then) and (b) it was the first to have three seating decks.
The new edition of the stadium also has three seating levels -- or five, depending on how you count them. However, there's a little more to it than that. The lowest section is referred to as the Legends/Field level, and the seating sections here either have two digits or are in the one-hundreds. The separation of these two sections is quite pronounced, as the ultra-expensive seats have two digits, and are quite a thing to behold (below left). Yes, these are the padded seats you've read so much about. A close up of one of these rows is on the right side below. Note the enormous, 40-inch legroom and the real-wood arm rests. One assumes that the cup holders are in the arm rests because no one would be able to reach their drink if the holders were attached to the backs of the row in front of them.
By the way, the front row of the Legends section is much closer to the action than in the old park. Through 2008, the backstop was about 72 feet from home plate. Now it is only 52 feet.
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The Main Level is made up of seats numbered in the two-hundreds. More or less, this level circles the entire stadium, and includes the bleachers. Most of the bleachers provide a good view, not unlike the bleachers at old Yankee Stadium. However, as you get closer to center field, you see a big problem that the old place didn't have: severely obstructed-view seats (below left). This is the result of the Bleachers Cafe being located over the batter's eye in dead center.
The party suites and luxury boxes (there are a whopping 56 of them, compared to only 19 in the old stadium) comprise their own level, which the team calls the Luxury/Party/Club level. The party suites are clustered near the right-field foul pole, while the huge Audi Yankees Club is down the third-base line.
The topmost level contains Terrace boxes, which have section numbers in the three hundreds, and Grandstand seats, which have numbers in the four hundreds. There is a single concourse for both of these areas, and most of the way around, that concourse is "open" to the field. That's because the Terrace seats are all below this concourse, while the Grandstand seats are physically separate, hovering above the concourse -- much the same way that the upper decks are arranged at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia and Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
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Oddly, though, this upper concourse isn't completely open to the field. That's because a number of the Terrace sections have extra rows, which block the view of the field from the concourse (above right).
And I have to point out one aspect of the Grandstand level that is troubling to me. I know the famous frieze is an iconic element of Yankee Stadium, going back decades. The original facility had the frieze (which was made of copper) around the roof in the infield. When the stadium was rebuilt in the 1970s, the frieze for some reason was in the outfield. I'm thankful that the new park has this feature back in the infield ... however, it is so large (it weighs about 300 tons!) it is distracting when you're sitting in the upper rows (below left).
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Helping you navigate to and from your seats are, of course, the concourses. This might be the single biggest improvement over the old park, because the concourses beneath the stands at old Yankee Stadium were clearly too narrow. The one on the upper deck, in fact, was criminally cramped. At the new park, the average width of the concourses is 32 feet, almost double the size of the average concourse at the old place. The one shown on the right side above is on the Main seating level.
The two most noteworthy aspects of the architecture that don't have anything to do with seating are Monument Park and The Great Hall.
Monument Park at the old ballpark was perhaps its most-loved feature. Fans would line up for hours to file past the plaques and memorials there, and the waits were clearly worth it. The waits are still quite long to see the new stadium's Monument Park (below), and all of the old favorite features are there -- the 9/11 memorial, the centerpiece monuments to Ruth, Huggins and Gehrig, all of the retired numbers -- but it has a different feel now. While it's still covered in netting, it's now in dead center field instead of left field -- and the arrangement of the space just seems a little too perfect to me. It's too symmetrical and the landscaping is too finely manicured. There was a special appeal about the old Monument Park where you felt like areas were added as the number of plaques and retired numbers grew over the years. At the new park, everything is just too meticulously arranged. It's a little too clinical and not nearly organic enough for me.
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The massive Great Hall, for which there is no comparable area in any other ballpark, is overwhelming. This 31,000-square-foot concourse is the first part of the facility that you step into when you enter through Gate 2. At the west (home plate) end is an area where you can purchase artifacts from old Yankee Stadium and an escalator that takes you to Tommy Bahama's Bar. At the east end (below) is one of the four walk-in souvenir stores and the elevators to the team museum and the NYY Steak restaurant. There's also a high-res video screen that is 24 feet by 36 feet -- bigger than the main screens in the outfields at many other big-league parks. Running along the inside wall is a five-foot-tall ribbon board that is an incredible 383 feet long. Yes, there's no shortage of ways for the Yanks to show you Great Ads while you're in the Great Hall.
While it's true that this "Hall" is covered, it's interesting that its wide-open windows mean that it isn't enclosed. Consequently, there's no heating and no AC there -- and when it's raining, the wind blows the precipitation into the area. I found this out first hand when waiting out a five-hour rain delay there.
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The fact that this area is unheated and uncooled brings us to a much-touted aspect of new Yankee Stadium -- the "green" aspects of the park. Indeed, the Yanks list the fact that The Great Hall isn't air conditioned as one of the "green initiatives" that were undertaken in the design of this park. In fact, they trumpet the fact that the power saved by there being no AC is equivalent to (quoting the team's website) "10,000 New York City apartments shutting off their air conditioning for a summer day."
The more-efficient plumbing fixtures in the restrooms are projected to save over 3 million gallons of water per year, which represents about 22 percent of the total water consumed at the ballpark. Also, all beverage cups are made of biodegradable materials instead of plastic, and each lighting fixture atop the ballpark consumes about 300 fewer watts than the previous lights. Further, sophisticated computer systems operate the lighting and heating/cooling in the park, thereby reducing power consumption considerably.
These green initiatives aren't quite the extreme lengths taken at Washington, DC's new park (which was the first sports stadium to be awarded LEED certification), but they are admirable.
Finally, it seems to me that there are a couple of areas within the confines of the ballpark that aren't really needed -- or, at best, aren't yet utilized to their fullest potential. They remind me of constructing a house with far more bedrooms than you need for your family, guests, a den ... and all of your pets! One such area is just inside Gate 2 on the northern side of the facility (below left). Here there is a wide, high-ceilinged lobby-like area that isn't really needed -- although it is very attractive. Since there was already a Great Hall in the park, maybe this was meant to be the Not Quite As Great Hall.
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Another under-utilized area is just inside Gate 8 (above right), which is the one closest to the bleachers. Unlike the aforementioned "Halls," this large, square area isn't covered. Perhaps in the future there will be points of sale added here, or bands playing as fans arrive.
I guess it doesn't hurt to have room to grow.
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