R A I D E R L E G E N D
February 19, 2008, 3:18 pm
A Stairway to Sports History From the Polo Grounds
Steps that lead nowhere today once offered a clear, yet distant, view of games at the Polo Grounds. (Photo: Geoffrey Croft/New York City Park Advocates)
With the winter baseball news dominated by tales of steroids and human growth hormone drugs, hearings and investigations, and apologies and denials, a look back at a more innocent time in baseball may be in order this week, when position players are joining pitchers and catchers at training camp in Florida and Arizona.
The Polo Grounds, the northern Manhattan home of the New York Giants baseball team, has long been the site of a rather imposing public housing complex called the Polo Grounds Towers — four 30-story skyscrapers with 1,616 units.
Few clues remain about the glorious things that happened when the Polo Grounds was a sports stadium in Washington Heights — Willie Mays, the birth of the Mets, the New York Cubans, the New York football Giants, and Floyd Patterson vs. Ingemar Johansson, among them.
But one relic remains, not as the result of historic preservation, but by accident.
That relic is a staircase built down Coogan’s Bluff, the hill that overlooked the stadium, which is roughly where Edgecombe Avenue runs today. The staircase once led to a ticket booth, and was built by the owner of the Giants at the time.
Coogan’s Bluff had long been a sort of Tightwad Hill for local fans, a place where those unwilling or unable to pay the stadium’s entrance fee had a clear, if distant, view of the proceedings at no charge.
If nothing else, the Giants may have hoped a new stairway would prompt a few fans to buy tickets.
Today, the stairway leads nowhere, except for an overgrown stretch of Highbridge Park. Many, if not most, of its steps are missing; its guard rails rusting and falling apart; and some sections have disappeared into the underbrush, making an attempt to walk down them highly inadvisable.
But at a landing partway down is an inscription; like the staircase, it has been slowly disintegrating over the decades. Its letters are still clear despite rain, snow and heat, and it reads: “The John T. Brush Stairway Presented by the New York Giants.”
A New York Times article from July 9, 1913, retrieved by the Parks Department, says that on that day the baseball club would be formally presenting the “John T. Brush Stairway” to the city. The Giants’ team president, H. N. Hempstead, was to present the gift to the city parks commissioner, Charles B. Stover, to honor Mr. Brush, the Giants owner who had died in 1912.
But city officials say the long-forgotten inscription and staircase, which might be the last vestiges of the old ballpark, could be in for a reprieve.
Tonight thee Golden State Warriors traded guard Monta Ellis, Yes, the spark plug that's been making the car go, to the Milwaukee Bucks.
Look who's at one and two; throwbacks and a powder blue disney color? Come'on Man! It's football. It's supposed to reflect the strength of a warrior-like culture, not the ambiance of a baby daycare play room.
If the past rulings that have gone against the Raiders were conspiratorial, then this injustice is nothing short of a league in complete denial of it's brute history. Putting football players in powder blue is as contradictory as putting lipstick on a pitbull. Just who does NFL.com think they are, Sarah Palin? At least Palin gave a few eye winks to show she shouldn't be taken too seriously. I vote for a recall!
