The Yankee Standium

Oceane Mercadal

Activity 8.2

To complete the second part of activity 8, group 7 sent my group to visit the new Yankee stadium. I was really not excited to go all the way up in the Bronx because I thought the ride was going to be long and I just hate taking the subway. The ride ended up not being that bad, a good 45minutes but I had reading to do so the time went by pretty fast. Once I got there lucky for me, it was easy to find the stadium considering the size of it. Would be pretty hard to miss it.

I had never seen a baseball game before just because I don’t understand this sport and it doesn’t interest me particularly. I have seen movies where people go to a baseball game and was surprised to see that the stereotypes are true. The majority of people at the stadium where white, which unlike my other group members didn’t surprise me. It is true that it is not the usual habitants of the neighborhood but I have always thought that each sport has its own type of spectators and players. Like my group members said in their posts baseball like all sports need to attract money. I looked up at the price of tickets for a Yankee game and was shocked when I saw that they ranged from $5 to over $2000. Unless you are a really big fan of the Yankee’s I don’t understand why any one would pay that amount of money to watch people hit a ball one after the other.

Like Jane Jacobs cites in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Generalized parks can and do add great attraction to neighborhoods that people find attractive for a great variety of other uses.” (p.111) I personally would not have gone to the Bronx if it weren’t for the stadium. I grew up hearing that the Bronx was not a very safe area to be in. However now that I have gone to the stadium and seen how the neighborhood looks like it has made me overcome my fear of the stereotype of the Bronx being a bad place to live in or walk around. In a way Jane Jacobs is right by saying that large parks can attract a large amount of people. The new stadium has 51000 seating places so on game days a lot of people can be found in the Bronx even though it may only be for the game period, it still creates good traffic for the neighborhood.