Pictures, HighLites and Video Walkthrough of NEW Yankee Stadium

NEW YANKEE STADIUM

New York, New York

Tenant: New York Yankees (AL)

Groundbreaking: August 16, 2006

Construction began: August 17, 2006

Opening: April 2009

Capacity: 51,800

Style: Open air

Surface: Grass

Architect: HOK Sport (Kansas City)

Developer: Tishman Speyer (New York)

Construction: Turner Corp. (Dallas); Skanska USA Civil (Queens) will build structural steel frame and pilings

Owner: New York Yankees

Cost: Approximately $1.3 billion

Public financing: $220 million from New York City for parking facilities ($75 million), parkland along the waterfront ($135 million) and other work related to the stadium

Private financing: Approximately $1.1 billion from the Yankees

Location: Just north of the existing stadium, between 161st and 164th Streets, and between Jerome and River Avenues.

Dimensions: Same as Yankee Stadium

Fences: Same as Yankee Stadium

The Yankess began construction on a new stadium across the street from the current Yankee Stadium in the summer of 2006. Completion is scheduled for the 2009 season. The project is part of a larger redevelopment plan that includes a hotel, conference center and high school for sports-related careers.
The stadium will feature an exterior facade which will replicate that of the original Yankee Stadium. The interior of the stadium will be a separate structure, rising above the top of the exterior. From the outside the structures will look similar to the original stadium. A "great hall" between the exterior wall and the interior structure will feature five to six times more retail square footage than the current stadium. The signature frieze, the lattice work that once rimmed the original stadium's roof, will adorn the new stadium's roof in the original copper.
Just before leaving office in December 2001, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani reached a tentative agreement with both the Yankees and Mets to build them each an $800 million, retractable-roof stadium. Upon becoming mayor, Michael Bloomberg made it clear that he had other priorities and the ballpark plans were put on hold indefinitely.
The proposed Yankees ballpark would seat 47,000 people and feature a retractable roof. The interior would include the facade, as well as the original field dimensions, from Yankee Stadium. Soil from the outfield would be moved to the new stadium.
The city would finance the stadiums by issuing $1.6 billion in bonds, and the teams would have to reimburse the city. Giuliani emphasized that the stadiums would pay for themselves and made good business sense.
In the summer of 2004, New York newspapers reported that the Yankees were on the verge of announcing plans for a new ballpark next to Yankee Stadium. It was rumored that the Yankees would forgo the retractable roof and increase seating capacity to approximately 56,000. As of January 2005, the Yankees have said nothing on the subject.
In January 2005, it was reported that New York City planned on spending $1.1 billion on three sports complexes: $600 million for a Jets stadium on Manhattan's West Side, $300 million toward a new Yankees ballpark and $200 million toward a Nets arena in Brooklyn. The Mets have said they expect to receive the same $300 million subsidy as the Yankees.
In April 1996, the city and state of New York and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner completed a study of four possible sites as a future home for the Yankees. One of those is now the site of the proposed Jets stadium. The other sites studied were Van Cortlandt Park, Pelham Bay Park and the site of Yankee Stadium, all of which are in the Bronx. The study also found that renovation of the Yankees' present stadium in the Bronx would cost at least $770 million (1996 dollars).
Several years ago, New Jersey gave the New York Yankees a plan for a new baseball-only stadium that would hold about 50,000 people and cost about 50 percent less than a multipurpose sports stadium in Manhattan.

Big Pappy, David Ortiz Jersey burried at new Yankee Stadium

I had to post this story. www.cbssportsline.com
Red Sox jersey removed from new Yankee Stadium, will go to charity
April 13, 2008
CBSSports.com wire reports
A construction worker's bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.
After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.
The team said it learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday.
Yankees president Randy Levine said team officials at first considered leaving the shirt where it was.
"The first thought was, you know, it's never a good thing to be buried in cement when you're in New York," Levine said. "But then we decided, why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?"
On Saturday, construction workers who remembered the employee, Gino Castignoli, phoned in tips about the shirt's location.
"We had anonymous people come tell us where it was, and we were able to find it," said Frank Gramarossa, a project executive with Turner Construction, the general contractor on the site.
The Yankees say they will send the tattered David Ortiz to a Boston charity to be auctioned off.
It took about five hours of drilling Saturday to locate the shirt under 2 feet of concrete, he said.
On Sunday, Levine and Yankees CEO Lonn Trost watched as Gramarossa and foreman Rich Corrado finished the job and pulled the shirt from the rubble.
In shreds from the jackhammers, the shirt still bore the letters "Red Sox" on the front. It was a David Ortiz jersey, No. 34.
Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney's office.
"We will take appropriate action since fortunately we do know the name of the individual," he said.
A woman who answered the phone at Castignoli's home in the Bronx on Sunday said he was not there.
A spokesman for Bronx district attorney Robert Johnson said Sunday he did not know whether any criminal charges might apply.
Levine said the shirt would be cleaned up and sent to the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Along with that, New York will send a Yankees Universe T-shirt, which is sold to benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
"Hopefully the Jimmy Fund will auction it off and we'll take the act that was a very, very bad act and turn it into something beautiful," he said.