A Farewell to the Best Seat Not in the House (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: July 14, 2008

Across seven decades, the big plays of wealthy Yankees stars half a block away have filled dimly lighted hallways and cramped rent-stabilized apartments on Gerard Avenue in the Bronx with the roar of 50,000. Tenants and their friends have congregated on the rooftops, running extension cords through open windows to watch the games on television, on account of the mostly obstructed views.

And for people everywhere else, the tan-brick facades of the three buildings with the best views — 825, 831 and 845 Gerard Avenue — have achieved a kind of split-second fame, regularly appearing on television as tenement backdrops when cameras follow the arc of home-run balls into the outfield bleacher seats in right-center.

But as Major League Baseball prepares to play a farewell All-Star Game at the stadium on Tuesday, a way of life on Gerard Avenue is quietly ending.

Next April, the Yankees will move into a new $1.3 billion stadium directly across the street from the old one at East 161st Street and River Avenue. But the new stadium is too high, too far and facing the wrong way for the people on Gerard Avenue to get a look inside. And so the rooftop and fire-escape tradition, a quirky little footnote of Yankees history that dates to the early 1930s, when two of the three buildings were built, is in its final days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/nyregion/14bronx.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin