I loved last night’s closing ceremonies, but there were a few notable absences. Donnie Baseball wasn’t there; Joe Torre garnered nary a mention; and while the team honored the players, the Stadium itself served more as a backdrop than as the main event at times. It wasn’t until after the game that the Stadium took centerstage. Joel Sherman, a writer to whom we rarely link, runs down some of the more disappointing aspects to last night’s ceremonies. While Sherman, not quite a Yankee fan, is engaging in some Monday Morning Quarterbacking, he raises a few valid points, and for a piece offering up a dissenting view on last night, it’s not half bad.

With the announced attendance of 54,610 last night, the Yanks drew 4,298,543 fans last night. This lofty total is a new record for the Yanks, and as Tyler Kepner notes, it is one the team cannot break in the new stadium. Capacity for the new Yankee Stadium will be 52,325 according to the Yankees, and a sold-out slate of 81 games would find 4,238,325 fans at the stadium. While the Yanks will probably reach that goal next year, they won’t reach the 2008 record unless they expand the seating at the new stadium. It certainly makes me wonder why the team has built a smaller stadium.

There sure is a lot of coverage about Yankee Stadium today. Much of The Times Sports Section is devoted to the stadium. The Daily News is running a whole slew of articles. Buster Olney spoke with a good number of current players to collect their memories. Barry M. Bloom of MLB.com has an FAQ about the stadiums. And, of course, Tom Verducci penned a farewell to the Stadium. That ought to keep every Yankee fan busy until ESPN’s wall-to-wall coverage starts in an hour.

New York City Transit, the arm of the MTA that operates the subways, is running a special nostalgia train up to Yankee Stadium this evening. To find the details about catching the train, read my post on Second Ave. Sagas about the special ride.

The Yankees and the South Bronx have always co-existed rather uneasily with each other.

When the Yanks first arrived in the Bronx, the demographics of the area were far different from what they become in the 1960s and 1970s and what they are today. In fact, as the borough changes, so too did Yankee Stadium. While the renovations in the 1970s were ostensibly about modernizing the stadium, the Yankees sealed off the inside of the park from the outside. Gone were the views of the tenement houses across the street. Instead those residents saw a drab gray wall backing up along River Ave.

This stark contrast between the rich and powerful Yankees and a very poor and struggling neighborhood came to head in 1977 when the South Bronx erupted in riots. As the Yankees played at night, smoke from the fires in the area wafted over that high outfield wall. While the Yanks try to make fans forget they’re in the Bronx, the Bronx would not allow the fans to forget where they were.

Today, the stories of class conflict in the city have fallen by the wayside. The areas around Yankee Stadium are still among the poorest and least safe neighborhoods in the city, but as the team grew wildly popular and successful throughout the 1990s, friend of the Yankees Rudy Giuliani made sure that no place in the city had more cops than Yankee Stadium at game time. Now, no one thinks twice about trekking up to the South Bronx to see a Yankee game.

But what about the people on the other side of this story? What about the hundreds of thousands of people who live around Yankee Stadium? For them, the impending destruction of the old stadium and the arrival of the new stadium tells a different story.

David Gonzalez, writing in The Times this weekend, delves into that story of a neighborhood defined, often reluctantly, by a stadium in which most residents could never afford to set foot:

It’s just that too often, no one much respected the neighborhood outside its walls, including Yankee executives. That’s what makes for my melancholy heart.

Over the years there was griping about how the area was unsafe — this despite scores of police officers assigned to games and the presence of two pretty well-fortified courthouses and a transit police station a couple of blocks away. And there were arguments about whether the Yankees could develop a fan base in the Bronx — a borough that is home to legions of baseball-mad Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.

On one level, you could dismiss it as just posturing, a bargaining ploy over the years meant to wrest something new from the city — tax breaks or a stadium. But for a track man at Cardinal Hayes High School who ran past the stadium every day, it could feel like an entire community’s recent history had been reduced to a negotiating tactic.

The Yankees exist in Yankeeland, as much a part of the Boogie Down Bronx as the tony Riverdale neighborhood is. The rest of the South Bronx neighborhood along the Grand Concourse, near 161st St., exists in a separate world. It is one in which neighborhood — and, in particular, the now-gone Macombs Dam Park — matters to those who live there. It is a neighborhood defined by adversity and a neighborhood much better off than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

When the Yanks move across the street and open a new ballpark in seven months, the views we’ll change. The center field backdrop will now be 1020 Grand Concourse instead of the familiar court house. The stadium will be more insular than ever before with restaurants and martini bars and a mini Yankee City within the walls. But the neighborhood will be the same, defined not by an 85-year-old Baseball Cathedral but by a stadium that stole a park. We celebrate — or bemoan — the Yanks every day, but as an era draws to a close today, we can’t forget the countless people who have grown up and have lived in the shadows of the Yankees, for better or for worse.

A few hours ago, Mike posted a link to the Yanks’ plans for Sunday evening. As farewell ceremonies go, it sounds like a pretty swell plan, but something about it bugs me.

For ticket-holders to Sunday’s game, the Yanks plan to open the stadium at 1 p.m., seven hours before the first pitch. From 1 p.m. until 4 p.m., these fans can wander around the field — on the warning track only — and tour Monument Park. Then, the normal pre-game batting practice routine starts. At 7 p.m., the Yankees will begin the pre-game ceremonies featuring former Yankees and artifacts from the stadium’s past. The game is set to start at 8:15 p.m.

The catch is that anyone who enters the ballpark for the hours of pre-game explorations and ceremonies doesn’t enjoy the privilege of re-entry. If you show up at Yankee Stadium at 1 p.m. and want to see the game, you’re stuck in the Bronx at the stadium for the next seven hours. I’d guess that only the most die-hard of obsessed fans will go. I have tickets, and I probably won’t stop by the stadium until at least Yankee batting practice at 4:40 p.m, if not later.

While re-entry isn’t the norm at any sports venue across the country, the Yankees should make an effort on Sunday to accommodate fans making their final journeys to the House that Ruth Built. A re-entry system wouldn’t require much thought, but it would require a little bit of work. As the number of fans who would take advantage of it are capped by the capacity of the stadium, it can be done. Yet again, though, the Yanks are neglecting the common fan. But that’s why, as Cliff Corcoran so aptly wrote yesterday, they’re building this new ballpark in the first place.

Update 4:28: Now that I’ve reflected for a few minutes on this, I realize I come across as bitter over this plan. I want to clear something up: I love this ceremony. I love the idea that fans will be able to spend time on the field and watch Yankee batting practice. I love that the team is planning to honor the stadium with former greats and an extensive pre-game ceremony. I just wish the team could find a way to be a little more flexible with re-entry on a day during which some fans could be in the stadium for ten or eleven hours.

That’s one hell of a Jumbotron, ain’t it?. WCBS has a gallery of photos of the ongoing construction at the New Yankee Stadium, and it looks like it’s really starting to come together. The massive cranes have been replaced by the tiny work vans of small-time subcontractors, and piles of dirt have been replaced by the makings of a future field. While I am sad to see the old place go, I am pretty excited to see the new digs. Assuming I can afford to get in, of course.

(h/t/ LoHud)

Update (1:55pm): Fans will be allowed to walk on the field during a three hour “open house” prior to the Sunday’s game. Great stuff.

Via New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog comes the lovely news about the bleachers at new Yankee Stadium: A whole bunch of unlucky fans won’t be able to see because the restaurant will be in the way. As you can see from the above screenshot, that pesky restaurant is going to obscure the sight lines.

Now, we’ve heard about this problem in the past, but the existence of that oh-so-fun Stadium seat selector confirms the bad news. Folks sitting in the some bleacher sections won’t be able to see the entire outfield. Fans in left won’t have a view of right, and fans in right won’t have a view in left.

While the impacts only a few of the bleacher denizens — the people sitting in the sections adjacent to these bad sections can still see — a significant number of bleacher seats in a new stadium will have obstructed views. But, hey, at least the people in the center field restaurant will be able to see. Right?

After the jump, the view from right field.

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The Associated Press tracked down a Yankee fan who was there for the first game at the stadium and will be there for the final game this Sunday. Joe Mignogna, now 90 and a resident of Delaware, went to Yankee Stadium on April 18, 1923 when the Yanks and Red Sox opened the Stadium. He was five at the time and says that his family got their tickets from then-owner Jacob Rupert. Mignogna’s grandfather was one of the construction foremen who built the original stadium. As we hear the memories and tales of Yankee Stadium, this one’s a great story.

While the Yankee employees will all venture north to the new stadium next year, these folks who hawk scorecards, hot dogs and beer have their fair share of Yankee Stadium memories. M.A. Mehta hunted down a few of those workers, and Mehta’s resultant story offers up a nice look at people we as fans often take for granted. With the last weekend of Yankee Stadium upon us, I’ll have more on the stadium over the next few days, including a damning report from Richard Brodsky about the stadium funding deals. Stay tuned.