A World Series That Wasn't

John T. Brush

(a "mug" for the ages)

The following is a story I came across while researching a man pictured on the 1911 World Series program, Mr. John T. Brush.

Early in the major league baseball season of 1904, due to business rivalries and personal animosities, Mr. Brush is said to have stated publicly that his NL New York Giants would not face the AL Boston Americans (now Red Sox) if both teams won their respective league championships. The statement was in total defiance of a preseason agreement between the two leagues.

As fate would have it, they both won and the world series was never played. It would solidify a sports rivalry between the two cities that exists till this day.

Today in Manhattan there's an old broken down stairway that once led to the old Giants Polo Fields stadium. It's the only piece of the park that still exists years after the team bolted for San Francisco in 1958. It leads to nowhere and the city of New York has come to it's rescue with a rehabilitation project to restore it and the surrounding area for not only their former teams' sake, but for the man responsible for the team, John T. Brush.

Here's a part of the nostalgic story of the John T. Brush High Bridge Stairway; it's beginnings, it's demise and it's projected renovation. It's a story that I felt deserves hearing about if your a Giants fan or simply a baseball fan.

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February 19, 2008, 3:18 pm

A Stairway to Sports History From the Polo Grounds

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

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.

Restoration Project