“Once a central gathering place for school sports and community events, the city has determined the long-shuttered stadium building at Van Cortlandt Park is beyond repair, with demolition now considered inevitable — even as funding to carry it out remains uncertain,” reports The Riverdale Press.
“The conclusion follows a comprehensive planning study by the New York City Parks Department, which found the structure to be unsound after a yearlong engineering review,” according to journalist Michelle Mullen. “While the building has been closed to the public for years, officials say its deterioration has reached a point where continued maintenance is only a temporary measure.”
Some Park History
The 1,146-acre Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx is owned by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and managed with assistance from the Van Cortlandt Park Alliance.
Named for the colonial era Van Cortlandt family, the park is the city’s third-largest. It includes numerous recreation facilities for nearly every imaginable sport, including 10 of the borough’s 19 Cricket fields, five major hiking trails; horse stables; Van Cortlandt Lake, the largest freshwater lake in the Bronx; old-growth forests; and the Van Cortlandt House, the oldest known surviving house in the Bronx, and the Van Cortlandt Golf Course, the oldest public golf course in the country.
In the 1930s, the Robert Moses directed the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway and Mosholu Parkway, which fragmented Van Cortlandt Park into its six discontinuous pieces.
What’s believed to have been the last remaining freshwater marsh in New York State, Tibbetts Brook, was dredged and landscaped to accommodate construction, causing large-scale ecological disruption.
The 1975 New York City fiscal crisis caused much of the park to fall into disrepair, though gradual improvements began taking place in the late 1980s, eventually including the addition of new pathways, signage, and security.
In 2014, the “Van Cortlandt Park Master Plan 2034” was published.
Van Cortlandt Stadium
Van Cortlandt Stadium was built near Broadway in the park’s southwest corner by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia from 1937 to 1939, during the Great Depression, and was funded by the New Deal‘s Works Progress Administration.
The stadium opened on September 22, 1939, to a day of track events and a football game between Manhattan University and Fordham University.
It had 18 tennis courts, five basketball courts, six handball courts, three baseball fields, three football fields (including one in the stadium itself), three horseshoe pitching fields, a running track, and a bowling green, as well as water fountains and lockers.
In 1994, Mayor Rudy iuliani funded a $415,000 project for concrete repairs to the stadium, and in 1998, the 0.25-mile running track was rebuilt for nearly a million dollars.
The park has been the home of the Manhattan University Jaspers college baseball team.
“According to the parks department,” Mullen reports, “its Capital Architecture division has no records of any significant work having been done on the building since its initial construction.”
Photo: Van Courtland Stadium Grandstand.
Source link
