"You're seeing people moving into the Bronx now," he says. "The neighborhood just to the south of the stadium is growing; young people are moving in; artists are moving in, taking on some of the industrialized, underutilized buildings. That has happened in every borough of the city but the Bronx; now it's the Bronx's time. I wouldn't say it's happening because of the stadium, but it's [connected to] it."
The existing stadium occupies a unique place in American lore. This is where Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run, where Lou Gehrig told a packed crowd that he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth, where Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, and where Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson hit prodigious World Series home runs and brought the Yankees more world championships. It is also a place where Joe Louis fought, where popes have celebrated mass, where Billy Graham preached to the multitudes, and where Nelson Mandela spoke to a tumultuous crowd shortly after his release from a South African prison.

The history is encapsulated in Monument Park, just past the outfield wall - and the question for architects, city planners, and Yankees officials is whether a new building with a similar look built across the street can inspire the same feelings of awe and majesty that the current stadium does. The monuments will be moved to the new stadium, but no one knows for certain whether the magic will come along as well.

Yankees manager Joe Torre questions whether the new park can capture the glory of the old. But he says the Yankees had no choice because of the worsening condition of the existing stadium, which was extensively (and unsympathetically) renovated in the 1970s and is today badly out of date.