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.
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BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.