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The new Yankee Stadium is a stadium currently under construction. It will serve as the home baseball park for the New York Yankees. It will replace and assume the name of the previous Yankee Stadium, built in 1923. The new ballpark is being constructed across the street, west and north of the 1923 Yankee Stadium, on the present site of Macombs Dam Park in the New York City borough of the Bronx. The new Yankee Stadium will open on April 3, 2009 when the Yankees host an exhibition game against the Chicago Cubs. The first regular-season game will be on April 16, 2009 when the Yankees host the Cleveland Indians.

Groundbreaking ceremonies for the stadium took place on August 16, 2006, the 58th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death, with George Steinbrenner (the Yankees’ owner), Michael Bloomberg (the Mayor of New York City) and George Pataki (then the Governor of New York State) among the notables donning Yankees hard hats and wielding ceremonial shovels to mark the occasion. The projected total cost of 1.6 billion U.S. dollars makes it the second most expensive stadium ever built after the new Wembley Stadium in London.

	Capacity		53,000
	Opened		April 2009 (scheduled)
	Owner		New York Yankees
	Architect		HOK Sport

The Yankees’ desire to move to a new stadium dates back to the 1980s, when Yankee owner George Steinbrenner publicly considered a move of the franchise to a safer area of the New York City metropolitan area, even the possibility of moving the team across the Hudson River over to New Jersey. The South Bronx was considered a bad neighborhood. However, in the 1990s, with the team becoming successful on the field, attendance increased dramatically. With the large number of people coming to the Bronx, and the increased security in the area on game days, the public safety situation became less of a problem, and thoughts turned to a new or renovated stadium in the Bronx.

Days before leaving office in December 2001, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced “tentative agreements” for both the New York Yankees and New York Mets to build a $5 billion stadium. Of $1.6 billion sought for the stadiums, city and state taxpayers would pick up half the tab for construction, $800 million, along with $390 million on extra transportation. The plan also called for forgiving $80,000 that the Mets owed the city in cable revenues and giving both teams an additional $25 million in planning money. The plan also said that the teams would be allowed to keep all parking revenues, which state officials had already said they wanted to keep to compensate the state for building new garages for the teams. The teams would keep 96% of ticket revenues and 100% of all other revenues, not pay sales tax or property tax on the stadiums, and would get low-cost electricity from New York state. Business officials criticized the plan as giving too much money to successful teams with little reason to move to a different city.

During his eight years as mayor, Giuliani was a constant advocate of publicly funded stadiums. The dual $1 billion plans had also been put forth unsuccessfully by Giuliani in 1996. Giuliani faced questions about how to finance these stadiums, while the city struggled to balance the budget. Recently built stadiums in Baltimore and Cleveland had cost one-third to one-fourth the $1.3 billion set aside for the proposed New York stadiums; the $1 billion stadiums were to be the most expensive in American history. His 1998 plan to relocate the Yankees to the west side of Manhattan had been met with strong opposition; at that time, $3 million in city money was given to the Yankees for site planning. Six city officials were sent on a city trip to explore stadiums in Baltimore, Denver and other cities.

Michael Bloomberg, who succeeded Giuliani as mayor, exercised the escape clause in the agreements to back out of both deals, saying that the city could not afford to build new stadiums for the Yankees and Mets. Bloomberg said that unbeknownst to him, Giuliani had inserted a clause in this deal which loosened the teams’ leases with the city and would allow the Yankees and Mets to leave the city on 60 days’ notice to find a new home elsewhere if the city backed out of the agreement. At the time, Bloomberg said that publicly funded stadiums were a poor investment. Under Bloomberg, the New York City government would only offer public financing for infrastructure improvements; the teams would have to pay for the stadiums themselves. Bloomberg called the former mayor’s agreements “corporate welfare.” Giuliani had already been instrumental in the construction of taxpayer-funded minor league baseball facilities KeySpan Park for the Mets’ minor league Brooklyn Cyclones and Richmond County Bank Ballpark for the Staten Island Yankees.

On June 18, 2008, the Yankees announced two new restaurants will open in the new stadium, and will be open year round to both ticket holders and non ticket holders. A Hard Rock Cafe and a new restaurant named NYY Steak will both be located beyond right field; neither eatery will have a view of the field.

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