"Displaced by the Yankees, Some Bronx Athletic Teams Go Homeless" NY Times 4/18/9

Displaced by the Yankees, Some Bronx Athletic Teams Go Homeless

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: April 18, 2009

The roar of the fans could be heard for blocks on Saturday as the New York Yankees played their third regular season game in their new $1.5 billion stadium. Hours earlier, the junior varsity baseball squad from All Hallows High School sprinted onto the field for their fourth game of the season.

It was technically a home game for All Hallows, a Catholic school in the Bronx that is down the street from the new Yankee Stadium. But home no longer means home for the student athletes. Their game was played on Staten Island.

For years the home baseball field for the All Hallows Gaels was at Macombs Dam Park. But the field and the park were demolished to make way for the new stadium. Without a home field, coaches have held baseball practices in the cafeteria and the gym, and the school had to spend $75,000 to buy two buses and is planning to buy a third for $25,000 because of the increased travel to and from games.

Early in the game on Saturday, played on the home diamond of the opposing team, St. Joseph by-the-Sea High School, Luggi Batista, a sophomore at All Hallows, made a solid hit to give the team a 2-0 lead, but not a single All Hallows parent was in attendance to watch it happen. The team met at All Hallows at 9:15 a.m. and squeezed into a 15-seat bus for the one-hour trip to Staten Island, where they looked sharp in the familiar pinstripes of their major-league neighbors.

“That’s the ironic thing,” said the All Hallows principal, Sean Sullivan. “We’re wearing Yankee pinstripes, and they’re the ones that threw us off the field. And I’m a die-hard Yankee fan. And, boy, am I dying hard here.”

The official opening of the new Yankee Stadium last week was greeted by rave reviews from many fans. But some parks advocates, community leaders and neighborhood residents have been less enthusiastic, frustrated by the loss of ball fields as well as the construction delays and rising costs of replacement parks.

The new stadium was built across the street from the old one on Macombs Dam Park and a portion of John Mullaly Park. State and federal law dictates that parkland removed from public use must be replaced by parkland of equal or greater value. The city’s Parks and Recreation Department originally said seven of the eight replacement parks planned for the area would be completed in time for opening day at the new stadium. But the agency later pushed back the schedule for some of the parks, and a report in January by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that the cost to replace the two parks had climbed to nearly $195 million, up from a 2005 estimate of $116 million.

Shortly before the Yankees game against the Cleveland Indians on Saturday, several dozen men, women and children packed a small interim park at East 161st Street and Jerome Avenue in the shadow of the two stadiums. People jogged along a track as groups hit baseballs and threw footballs on a green synthetic turf.

About a dozen young men from a local youth sports organization, the Bronx Colts, practiced football pass patterns. A coach, Joey Allen, 28, and the group’s founder, Leroy Freeman Jr., 54, said the interim park was too small for a regulation game and too crowded for a smooth practice. A few weeks ago, a 7-year-old boy on a Bronx Colts team was hit in the face with a wayward baseball, Mr. Freeman and Mr. Allen said.

“It’s congested,” Mr. Freeman said. “It’s really unbearable. The replacement parks should have been built first.”

The new seven-acre Macombs Dam Park, with four handball courts and a soccer and football field, among other amenities, is under construction and scheduled for completion in the spring of 2010, although a portion of it will open later this month, said Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner. A nine-acre park called Heritage Field will be built on the site of the old stadium and is set to open in 2011. And a 10-acre park on the Harlem River waterfront will open in the winter of 2009-10, he said.

Mr. Benepe said he was sympathetic to All Hallows High School and others in the neighborhood who used the old Macombs Dam Park, but he described the situation as a natural consequence of rebuilding the parks. “By the time all of the construction is done, this neighborhood will have one of the finest collection of parks and sports facilities anywhere in the city,” he said, adding, “In a crowded city like New York, when you do public works, there’s always going to be inconvenience.”

The total acreage that will be replaced remains a point of dispute. The nonprofit group NYC Park Advocates issued a report last year saying that the neighborhood would lose nearly four acres of parkland when the eight replacement parks were completed, but Mr. Benepe said their calculations were wrong. The civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel said he was considering filing a lawsuit over the four-acre loss.

“There needs to be an apology to this community for the promises unkept,” Mr. Siegel said.

Last year, All Hallows applied for a $40,000 grant to purchase a bus from a community benefits fund financed by the Yankees as part of the new stadium deal. Paul Krebbs, the president of All Hallows, said the school was turned down. The Yankees gave All Hallows a pitching machine, but it is too big for the school’s facilities, and sits in storage in the gym, said Mr. Sullivan, the principal.

A Yankees spokeswoman said the team controlled neither the timing of replacement parks nor the distribution of grants, but added that it gave the city $10 million for parks. Brian Smith, senior vice president of corporate and community relations for the Yankees, said the team had been a good neighbor, with its nonprofit foundation giving nearly $1 million a year to Bronx community groups. He said the team pays for bus service for the baseball and other athletic teams at Cardinal Hayes High School, and it was interested in working with All Hallows but had not received a request for transportation assistance.

“We would love to help our neighbor,” Mr. Smith said. “The only thing we need is a request from the organization.”

On Staten Island, in the dugout at the All Hallows home game, Roger Ramos, 16, a third baseman and sophomore, said he did not like to make excuses, but he thought the team would be better if it had a home field. All Hallows lost, 8-4. The Yankees did too, 22-4.