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NEW YORK — The crack of a bat is the sweetest sound in the world to some baseball fans living in the Bronx neighborhood that hugs Yankee Stadium.
On game nights, powerful lights over the field where the immortals have hit home runs for 85 years spill onto homes blocks away. The familiar smells waft through the grungy streets — of stale beer, peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs. Some people sneak out to fire escapes to cheer the Yankees from afar while chugging beers with the TV on.
"Everybody talks about the Yankees in this neighborhood — all the time," says Saeed Jeffe, a local resident who manages a sports souvenir shop and learned to love baseball after he emigrated from Yemen.
This is the Yankee Stadium neighborhood — for one last summer before the gates close on the temple of sports. Its rich history will be celebrated this week as Yankee Stadium hosts the All-Star game.
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The old ballpark saw Babe Ruth's 60th home run, Roger Maris' 61st and Reggie Jackson's three in Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, powering the Yankees to victory over the Dodgers.
That's the kind of sports glory that draws fans who on sweltering summer days drive the streets for hours in their cars, competing for parking spots with annoyed residents.
One sunny morning before Tuesday's All-Star game, River Avenue was almost empty of moving cars. But it was full of nostalgia as time ticked down for the House that Ruth Built.
An American flag fluttered in the breeze atop a crane erecting the new stadium.
"I've known the old stadium for a long, long, long, long time," said Carlos Deleon, who brings his young children to games now. "The new one will be better, but they should leave the old one up."
It's where Luis Colon, now a baseball coach, played as part of his Roman Catholic high school all-star game years ago. "I played short there before Jeter," he joked.
Behind River Avenue stretches a neighborhood into which few Yankees fans ever step — hilly Highbridge with its low-income, Art Deco buildings and vacant lots, amid urban renewal that has brought subsidized new townhouses and apartments.
The area, ravaged in the 1960s and '70s by crime and drugs, still suffers from years of bad press, following sportscaster Howard Cosell's unforgettable pronouncement on live television during the 1977 World Series, against a backdrop of urban blazes: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning."
The Bronx isn't burning these days, and beyond the beer-soaked bars across from the stadium are pavements rich with baseball lore — and just plain life.
During games, groups of men play dominoes on makeshift tables set up in the street — while following the play on radio, or sometimes even on small TVs. The laughter and cursing heard out here is often Spanish.
All the while, a new Yankee Stadium is rising that will open next year.
"It's looking beautiful — like the White House. Really!" said Angel Figueroa, a Dodger fan and handyman who lives in one of the buildings with the fire escapes facing the old stadium.
Still, the people who live around Yankee Stadium have plenty of worries, struggling to keep their jobs and homes in a bad economy that has hit this mostly minority part of the Bronx especially hard.
But on the tough urban turf, Yankees games are still a perfect escape. Locals like to sit on fire escapes during the play — hoping not to get caught by the authorities. (It's illegal to be on a fire escape just for fun).
Others hang out open windows, bathed in the stadium's incandescent light.
So hallowed are the grounds around the old stadium to some fans that Jimmy Haller scattered his brother's ashes in Monument Park, a section of the stadium with plaques bestowed on the best — Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Ruth, Mantle.
Haller said he took along his young daughter as a decoy, asking her to run and pick something in a public flower bed to divert police.
Meanwhile, "I opened the ashes and I scattered them under the trees in Monument Park," he says. "That's the truth — may God strike me dead."
