After last Sunday's Tigers-Twins game, the last game before the last All-Star Game to be played at Yankee Stadium, my son and I took a detour on our ride home. We wanted to hit The Corner and see the great ballpark once again. The great ballpark we had heard might be coming down at this very minute.
We took Fort Street west to Trumbull--the road this city has long known as the exit for Briggs Stadium, long before it was renamed for the team itself. Riding north from the Detroit River provides a wonderful build-up to the moment when baseball's grand cathederal comes into full view. Three blocks from Michigan Avenue its distant image appears as powerfully as if it were directly before us [see my photo]. And the old building, from that far away, still holds the majesty it commanded during its maiden World Series in 1935, through the second World War and amid the explosive race riots of the 1960s. When we reached Michigan and Trumbull, once Detroit's most famous corner, we now could see the evidence of decay from a decade of inertia. The outlines of missing letters are all that convey its mighty title. Rust swallows every corner of exposed metal, while weeds and tall grass envelop each crack in its concrete.
Yet amid the minute traces of negligence, we saw nothing of the demolition that had been mentioned in the papers. Then we walked along its perimeter. Down Trumbull we went, tracing the three-story white wall that borders the narrow sidewalk. All the while I felt the same way about this stadium that I always had. This was the ball park I knew growing up, the structure that housed the greenest sod my seven-year-old eyes had ever seen the moment my dad and I walked out the corridor of Gate 5 and stood inn the open air along the first-base lower deck box seats. My first game was in 1970, when Detroit was blanked by the Washington Senators (two years before they moved to Texas), 1-0, on a solo home run by this enormous dude named Frank Howard. Big ol' baggy pants and all, the guy crushed a ball like I'd never seen, sending it into the first rows of the overhanging upper deck.
I was still basking in the earthy aroma of cigar smoke from the old men around me, the guys who kept score of every at-bat in their programs, when my son and I rounded the centerfield corner. We saw the portable night lights and the rows of cranes, sitting idly by, waiting for everyone to go to bed before continuing the job no one would ever want: tearing down the pride of Corktown and a bastion of civic pride.
As if cut with a carpet knife, the bleacher stands and the concrete and metal stands below them stood severed yet proud above our heads, adorned with occasional twisted chards of metal. The upper-deck outfield seats were now in full view [see photo], the bleacher stands still in place and the monsterous scoreboard ready to cheer on the next Tiger batter. We could even see the flag pole, with the stars and stripes at full mast, the only such pole of any major league park in fair territory. Eerily spectacular under a rich blue sky, the marvel of bearing witness to this little slice of heaven one last time would have been considered a privilege were it not made possible by the slice literally carved into it. The slice which eliminated the entire left-centerfield stands.
In full view were the tall rectangular light towers of right field [see photo], the one closest to the right-field foul pole made famous by one Reginald Jackson, who struck its transformer box in the second inning of the 1971 All-Star Game.
You stand overwhelmed by it all and you aren't sure how to handle it. Do you want these memories to come flooding back, or is it better to spend your time moving forward? To some, both seemed to be the answer. As we walked back to our car people lined up along Michigan Avenue, pressing up against the stadium's iron fence and prying bricks from its food concourse. Some kept them as souvenirs, others sold them on the spot to onlookers without tools.
Soon it will be long gone. And in its place, apparently, a parking lot. The great irony being, back in the days when the Tigers hosted World Series games at The Corner, there was no parking to be found, the common practice being to pack oneself into the surrounding lots and wait for the cars behind you to leave. Now there will be spaces to spare, yet no attraction for which to park.
To say it broke my heart to witness this slow death is an understatement.
