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becoming largely populated by Dominican immigrants. In 1903, it was made up largely of Irish immigrants.
    TODAY WE THINK the field was commonly called Hilltop Park, and the team commonly called the Highlanders. But in the first decade, while actually in use, the park was better known as the American League Grounds, sometimes just as “up on the hilltop” or “up the rockpile.” Sometimes newspapers called it “the American Park.”
    The team was also better known as the New York Americans or the Greater New Yorks. On opening day, the
Telegram
called them the Deveryites. Sam Crane in the
Evening Journal
was determined that they be the Invaders. In those days, team nicknames were far less formal. It was, for example, more common to say the Bostons or the Boston Americans than to call them the Red Sox or the Pilgrims.
    There was a well-known British military regiment called Gordon’s Highlanders, and some fans thought team president Joe Gordon had suggested it as the team’s nickname. “Hilltoppers” was also used on occasion, and as early as April 7, 1904, the
Evening Journal
used YANKEES BEAT BOSTON in a headline. (“Highlanders” didn’t even appear in the
New York Times
until March 1906.) “Yankees” spoke to patriotism, certainly of northern patriotism (post–Civil War) going back to the Yankee Doodle days of the American Revolution, and baseball executives loved to consider the sport a uniquely American one. This was a particularly nationalistic time in the country’s history, with victory in the Spanish-American War having come in 1898.
    Writing for
Baseball
magazine in 1922, Fred Lieb reported,
    [Highlanders] was awkward to put in newspaper headlines. Finally the sporting editor at one of the New York evening papers exclaimed “The hell with this Highlanders; I am going to call this team ‘the Yanks,’ that will fit into heads better.”
    Sam Crane, who wrote baseball on the same sheet, began speaking of the team as the Yankees and Yanks. When other sporting editors saw how much easier “Yanks” fit into top lines of a head, they too [decided against] Highlanders, a name which never was popular with the fans.
    Mark Roth of the
Globe
was an early proponent of “Yankees,” while Jim Price used it in the
Press
.
    An irony to all of this is that if the major league baseball cities had been outside of America’s Northeast at the start of the century, and if the team had ever envisioned selling its brand nationally, “Yankees” might have been rejected. Less than forty years removed from the Civil War, with Confederate veterans still in abundance, feelings still ran strong in the South against the term. It might have been considered insensitive.
    The year 1903 was itself remarkable in America, with eighty-eight automobile manufacturers opening their doors, including Ford and Buick. Among companies founded that year were Harley-Davidson, Kraft Foods, Steuben Glass, Sanka coffee, and Lionel Trains. On April 22, a magnificent new building opened on Broad and Wall streets to house the New York Stock Exchange. People were running to movie houses to see a twelve-minute silent film called
The Great Train Robbery
. In December, the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.
    Among the people born in 1903 were Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Benjamin Spock, Walter O’Malley, and two who would have strong connections to the Yankees: a future restaurateur named Toots Shor, and a baby named Henry Louis Gehrig, born June 19 at 1994 Second Avenue near 103rd Street, about equidistant from Hilltop Park and the future Yankee Stadium.
    FORMER POLICE COMMISSIONER Thomas F. McAvoy headed the construction of the American League grounds, a rush project that needed extensive dynamite work to clear five thousand cubic yards of rock from where the grandstand would sit, the filling in of a swamp that ran near the Broadway side of the park, the uprooting of trees, and the leveling, as best as possible, of the