BALLPARKING IT

When America's pastime was New York's.

- ADAM GOPNIK

Of all the arenas gone from New York, there are two that a sports-obsessed New Yorker may regret most never having seen. One is the old Madison Square Garden, with its SaintGaudens statue of Diana dancing on the skyline, and its memorable murder, when, in 1906, Evelyn Nesbit's deranged husband shot and killed the architect Stanford White. The other is the Polo Grounds on 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, with its one-of-a-kind horseshoe shape, its oddly rural placement within Coogan's Bluff, and a dramatic death of its own, when, fourteen years after the White murder, Carl Mays struck and killed Ray Chapman with an inside pitch, still the only on field death of a player in the history of major-league baseball. There are other places it would have been nice to see: notably, Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn, the home of the Dodgers until they were snatched by Los Angeles. But Ebbets at least has had its façade and some of its dimensions replicated in today's Citi Field, which Fred Wilpon built, the way moguls can, as a monument to his Brooklyn-baseball boyhood.

But the Polo Grounds uptown still touches hearts while having truly disappeared. Jimmy Breslin, in a fine new collection just published by Library of America, conjures the childhood memory of seeing the green park in the gray city: "I start squeezing and pushing through these men because the moment I get near the top of the subway stairs I can look around and see the ballpark, the Polo Grounds... and for me that was the best part of the whole day at a baseball game, coming up the subway stairs and seeing the park for the first time.