Whatever happened to the Polo Grounds?

Paul Fitzpatrick

What time is it as you read this? If it's 8.07pm on Thursday evening, pause for a moment. At that exact minute, 70 years ago, ref Martin O'Neill hoisted the ball in the air and the All-Ireland final of 1947 in the Polo Grounds, New York, began.
The Polo Grounds – a ramshackle old stadium in Harlem which was home to the New York Giants baseball team – gained iconic status in this country after '47. 
I visited it two years ago along with Damien Donohoe, Mickey Brennan and Connie O'Reilly. It's a mean enough scene.
Ironically, the old ballpark's connection with the GAA grew stronger after the men of Cavan and Kerry boarded the boat for home. Vast emigration saw the games grow more popular than ever in the Big Apple.
In July of 1950, New York were down to play the winners of the National Football League. By coincidence, Cavan, not league specialists, had come through the home final.
As it happened,the Gunner Brady's sister, Rose, was living in the city at the time and doing a line with a strapping Mayo full-back called Tom Gallagher. She knew Phil’s form and, keen that big brother wouldn’t scupper the romance, took out her pen.
“Whatever you do,” she wrote to her mother in Mullahoran, “don’t let Phil start fighting with Tom.”
The rest of the story writes itself. Twenty-five minutes in and Tony Tighe is upended. There is sorting out to be done and Phil does it; ref points to the line.
New York won the match,too, producing one of the GAA shocks of the century to win by 2-8 to 0-12, with Roscommon’s Bill Carlos – who played against Cavan in the 1947 final - lining out at centre half-back against a Cavan team which featured 10 – Deignan, Smith, O'Reilly, Cassidy, Brady, Tighe, Higgins, Carolan, Donohoe and Stafford – of the men who had travelled overseas three years earlier.
Later that year, Tipp beat New York by two points in the hurling final and the following year, Meath and Galway travelled over to play New York, both winning before 26,000 fans, the
hosts featuring none other than Gega O’Connor in the forward line.
But famed official John ‘Kerry’ O’Donnell’s crankiness didn’t endear him to the authorities at home the following year and after some acrimony, the link to the National Leagues was dissolved, with the home winners now playing New York in the St Brendan’s Cup.
The final exhibitions were in ’58, New York beating both Louth and Kilkenny, but by then changes were afoot in New York that not even John Kerry could halt.
The Dodgers franchise vacated Brooklyn, heading for Los Angeles, and the Giants, whose attendances had fallen off a cliff  followed, dropping their bombshell on August 19,1957.
The Polo Grounds was crumbling and the team’s status had plummeted. The neighbourhood around the stadium had never been the safest but was becoming downright dangerous, and the fans were staying away. It had to happen.
The Giants’ final game was the following month,when they were trounced by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Even their last-ever match could only draw just over a fifth of the capacity, fans shouting insults and tearing up the fixtures as souvenirs.
Soon, they were gone. By the following year, a midget car track had been installed, making the pitch unplayable for Gaelic games.

The Polo Grounds had witnessed the last thwock of a sliotar, the final thud of an O’Neill’s size five. For a time, the Yankees were the only baseball show in town before the Mets franchise arrived on the scene in 1962 and while they re-located to the Polo Grounds for a few months, paying out of their own pocket for extra police on match-days, it was never going to be a long-term deal.
By 1963, the area around the stadium had become almost a no-go zone, with muggings and car break-ins rife,the problem quickly escalating after the construction of nearby housing projects. The city itself was struggling, ghettos were springing up and the Polo Grounds was just another victim.
In April, 1964, the Mets moved into their new home. The same month, the wrecking balls arrived at the Polo Grounds. When it was tossed, four 30-storey high-rise towers – projects, with all of the delinquency and social problems that term suggests – were constructed and named Polo Grounds Towers, consisting of 1,612 apartments. That was the complex I visited with the lads. It hasn't improved much in the interim.
In 2010, it was reported that pizza delivery chains insist that residents of the towers meet the courier a block away, at 155th St Subway Station, for fear of attacks. Two years later, at a public meeting, a tenant asked: “If the cops are afraid to come in here with guns, how am I supposed to feel?”

Today, they are among the worst projects in the five boroughs, immortalised in hip-hop tracks,with crime rates among the highest in the city.
A park in the shadow of the towers houses six compact basketball courts, named after the legendary Willie Mays, and a small plaque is all that remains to show the history of the place.
Asked for a 2013 documentary, one resident summed it up.
“I thought it was just a forest and they turned it into a housing development. I didn’t know it was a baseball field, back in the day,” he said.
Fans of the Giants never got over their sense of mourning.
“There’s nothing there, it’s a housing project. So we don’t have anywhere really,” said Bill Kent, who runs the New York Baseball Giants Nostalgia Society.
The novelist and journalist Pete Hamill said it best when he spoke
of the grief that still hangs over the stadium, the team and the city all these years later.
“I don’t think the nostalgia is sentimentality,” Hamill has said. “It was based on a memory of something that did exist, that was not a Norman Rockwell painting.”
Kent’s words could be about the ’47 final, the fresh-faced men of Kerry and Cavan, all gone, like the ground they played in.
“When we live it,” he said, looking back, “it didn’t die.”