MLB | The House That Ruth Built, and What Replaced It (Original Yankee Stadium site)

It was cold in the Bronx on Wednesday 18 April 1923. Governor Al Smith threw out the first ball, John Philip Sousa's band played, and in the bottom of the third Babe Ruth hit a three-run home run off Boston's Howard Ehmke into the right-field seats. Bob Shawkey finished a three-hit complete game and the Yankees beat the Red Sox 4-1.

The attendance is worth pausing on. The announced figure was over 74,000 and Baseball-Reference still lists 74,200, but research published by SABR points out that the park held about 60,000, so the number was almost certainly inflated in the retelling. Either way it was the largest crowd that had ever watched a baseball game in the United States, and thousands more were turned away outside.

A landlord dispute is why the stadium exists at all. The Yankees had been tenants of the Giants at the Polo Grounds, and once Ruth arrived in 1920 they began outdrawing the club that owned the building. Their landlords told them to find somewhere else. Jacob Ruppert bought roughly ten acres in the South Bronx, across the Harlem River from the park he was being pushed out of, and paid for the whole thing himself. Ground was broken on 5 May 1922 and the job took 284 days. It was the first ballpark with three full tiers, and one of the first anyone thought to call a stadium rather than a park.

Fred Lieb coined "the House That Ruth Built" in his column the following day. It was accurate twice over: Ruth hit the first home run in it, and Ruth's gate receipts had paid for it.

Eighty-five seasons later, on 21 September 2008, the Yankees played their last game there and moved across 161st Street. Demolition ran through 2009 and 2010.

The eight-acre site is now public parkland. Heritage Field, part of Macombs Dam Park, holds three grass ball fields, and New York City Parks states that the southern baseball field is aligned with the original stadium's footprint. A turf inlay traces where the old diamond sat, and granite pavers set into the walkways run a timeline of what happened here. In 2020 the ball field area was renamed for Elston Howard, who on 14 April 1955 became the first Black player in Yankees history, eight years after Robinson's debut in Brooklyn almost to the day.

It is free, open, and used by Bronx school and youth teams. The 4, B and D trains still stop at 161st Street, as they have since 1923. Coordinates from OpenStreetMap.

Cover: Yankee Stadium during the 1923 World Series, 10 October 1923. Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-36450. No known restrictions on publication. Second image: Heritage Field in 2019, photographed by Tdorante10, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.