C4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, AUGUST 6, 2020
SANDERSONWell, we’re starting at Yankee
Stadium. Imagine we’re standing in center
field.
KIMMELMANThe closest I’ll get to being
Aaron Judge.
SANDERSONHundreds of years ago center
field was the mouth of what was called Men-
tipathe or Cromwell’s Creek. Mentipathe is
the Lenape name. The creek started in the
headwaters of Jerome Avenue, at around
180th Street, then flowed down a valley to
where the stadium is now, which used to be
a salt marsh that opened into the Harlem
River.
KIMMELMAN For fellow pedants: center
field in the current Yankee Stadium or the
original one?
SANDERSONThe original Yankee Stadium
was on the edge of the marsh; the new one,
a little farther upstream. Mickey Mantle
used to complain about the old center field
getting mysteriously wet. It was wet be-
cause of all the groundwater from the an-
cient stream. The bedrock underlying the
field runs downhill, and you can try to cover
up bedrock all you want with concrete or
whatever, but water will follow gravity.
KIMMELMAN In the 1920s the Yankees
moved from the Polo Grounds in Manhat-
tan, just across the Harlem River.
SANDERSONWhich they shared with the
New York Giants. Then the Giants kicked
the Yankees out and the Giants manager,
John McGraw, famously taunted them
about relocating to what he called Goatville.
The Bronx was the hinterlands back then.
KIMMELMANThe site of the Polo Grounds
was Coogan’s Bluff. It’s now a public hous-
ing development.
SANDERSON During pre-Colonial days, it
was a rocky forest on an escarpment with
spectacular views down the river valley.
Once upon a time, the Hudson River may
have flowed down this valley, not along the
west side of Manhattan, where it is now. The
river has changed course several times. It
used to cut across New Jersey at the
Sparkill Gap, then through the Newark ba-
sin. According to a paper I recently read, at
an earlier point it followed the path of
what’s now the Harlem River — past the fu-
ture Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium —
through Flushing Meadows, carving out the
ancient valley that underlies Jamaica Bay.
KIMMELMANWhen are we talking about?
SANDERSONThe paper suggested the Pleis-
tocene era before the Wisconsin glaciation,
so perhaps 1.5 million years ago. It’s hard to
know for sure about early glaciations be-
cause later glaciers rearranged everything,
but traces remain. If you dig down in Long
Island, for example, layers of sands and
silts connect to geologic formations discov-
ered in New Jersey, which suggest that,
maybe 3.5 million years ago, a still earlier
proto-Hudson River flowed west and then
south into the Delaware basin. It carved out
the Kill Van Kull strait that now separates
Staten Island from Bayonne, N.J.
KIMMELMANYour point is that, like millions
of New Yorkers, the city’s rivers have
moved around, changed neighborhoods, as-
sumed new identities?
SANDERSONAnd that the site where the
Yankees settled in the Bronx, at the edge of
what used to be Mentipathe or Cromwell’s
Creek, went through its own transforma-
tions. So if this were 1609, and we were
where the stadium is today, we would be
near a wide tidal creek, possibly sitting in a
dugout canoe, surrounded by swirling, yel-
low-green Spartina grass and wild geese.
KIMMELMANOliver Cromwell, the English
ruler after they chopped off Charles I’s
head?
SANDERSONNo, John Cromwell, a nephew
of Oliver’s. John came to America in the
1680s. One of his descendants built a water
mill on the creek during the 1700s, hence the
name. The creek fed an ice pond where peo-
ple used to go skating during the 19th cen-
tury. By the 1920s, what became Yankee
Stadium had turned into a lumber mill.
There’s a description of the lumber yard
surrounded by boulders — glacial erratics,
they’re called. They are all over New York
City. There’s a monster example at Heck-
scher Playground in Central Park and a
number of erratics in the Bronx like
Glover’s Rock in Pelham Bay Park. Boul-
ders were part of the “till” a glacier would
leave behind.
KIMMELMANGlacial sediment.
SANDERSONExactly, which the ice moved
sometimes hundreds of miles from where
the boulders and other rocks started.
KIMMELMANEric, you and I haven’t moved
an inch.
SANDERSONLet’s push on. I thought from
Yankee Stadium we’d duck under the
No. 4’s elevated subway tracks and trudge
east, uphill, on 161st Street toward the
Bronx County Courthouse.
KIMMELMANA hulking Deco-era landmark
on a big granite podium with a columned
portico and pink-marble Art Moderne
sculptures. Joseph H. Freedlander and Max
L. Hausle were the architects. Charles
Keck, who among many other things
worked on the Brooklyn War Memorial, did
some of the sculptures.
SANDERSONThe county building sits on top
of another ridge, I don’t know the Lenape
name for it. The South Bronx is made up of
several rocky ridges, spread like fingers,separated by valleys. It’s clear in an aerial
view. The ridges run more or less north-
south — meaning 161st Street, which runs
east-west, kind of roller-coasters up and
down the ridges. The underlying geology is
a mix of Fordham gneiss, Manhattan schist
and Inwood marble, which is softer than the
schist and the gneiss, more erodible. The
ridges are gneiss and schist; the valleys,
marble, worn down through various glacia-
tion events. Lenape trails tended to follow
the ridges and valleys, which then became
some of the Bronx’s big north-south ave-
nues.
KIMMELMANI assume in 1609 nearly all of itwas dense forest.
SANDERSON Hickories and oaks, some
chestnuts. Pines. The trees of the Bronx
have inspired lots of writers. When I get
called for jury duty at the county court-
house, if the weather is nice, during breaks I
sit across the street in Joyce Kilmer Park,
which is named after the poet who wrote: “I
think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as
a tree.”
If we keep walking east on 161st Street we
drop into another valley. That’s now the
Concourse Plaza and the Bronx County Hall
of Justice.
During the 19th century this valley wasBefore Yankees Strode the Bronx
MICHAEL KIMMELMAN CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKThis page,
counterclockwise from
top: Fordham gneiss
found in the New York
Botanical Garden; the
Bronx County
Courthouse as seen
from Joyce Kilmer Park;
a rendering of the
pre-Colonial Bronx; and
a sculptural detail from
the courthouse.From left to center: Woodycrest Avenue, in the Bronx, rising up from Jerome Avenue, was once a ridge the Lenape knew as Keskeskich; a train stop at the Polo Grounds
near the Harlem River in the 1880s; and the Harlem River today, as seen from the Macombs Dam Bridge, which links Yankee Stadium with the site of the old Polo Grounds.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
ZACK DeZON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES GETTY IMAGESERIC MEHL/THINK HYPOTHETICAL, INC.; ERIC SANDERSON/WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETYZACK DeZON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESZACK DeZON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESZACK DeZON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES