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playing surface. The total area of the grounds was 9.6 acres. McAvoy was awarded contracts for both the excavation work and the construction work. Conveniently, he was the Tammany Hall leader of the Washington Heights district.
    Much of the construction force was made up of some five hundred Polish, Italian, and Irish laborers, paid $1.50 a day, who were not otherwise part of the twelve-thousand-strong team digging up the subway tunnel. They would work night and day, in rain and chilly weather, with the home opener now moved to April 30.
    Farrell and Devery spent $200,000 to level the site and $75,000 inconstruction costs for what would be a park with a capacity of sixteen thousand, largest in the league. (The league may have assumed some of the cost.) It was the last “five-figure” ballpark built for a major league baseball team. The two-story clubhouse wouldn’t be ready by opening day, so the players would change in their hotel, two blocks east on Amsterdam Avenue, and would walk to the field amidst admiring crowds. Not only was the grandstand not going to be finished by opening day, there would be no roof over it; only the support posts to eventually support a roof. Plans for a second deck never did materialize, as attendance didn’t seem to warrant it.
    Additionally, Farrell set up an office in the new Flatiron Building at Twenty-third and Broadway, where Ban Johnson also would maintain an office (and where, coincidentally, the publisher of this book would be housed more than a century later). He later moved the team office to the Reed and Barton Building at 320 Fifth Avenue.
    The park was made almost entirely of yellow pine and spruce wood, which remarkably never burned. Most wooden ballparks eventually met this fate: Parks in Philly, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago all burned in one season in 1894. The first row was sixteen inches higher than the playing field, the twentieth and last row thirty-four feet above field level. Six aisles in the grandstand separated the sections and provided access to the field. After games, fans could exit through these aisles and across the field, a practice the Yankees maintained until 1966 wherever they called home.
    When the clubhouse was ready, Gordon hired a young man to manage it named Fred Logan, twenty-three, who had been working for the Giants since he was ten but now switched over. He would remain with the Yankees until his death in 1947, the last original team employee.
    Another part of the original cast was Harry Mosley Stevens, who had been selling scorecards and snacks at Giants games and now added the Hilltop to his growing concession business. Considered by some to have introduced hot dogs to ballparks, Harry M. Stevens Inc. would be the concessionaire for the Yankees on into the early sixties, with the team continuing to assign the rights until 2008, when it formed a partnership with the Dallas Cowboys football team to operate its own concessions.
    Stevens produced the official scorecard for the team (five cents), calling the team the American League Base Ball Club and its field American League Park. There was no reference to Highlanders or Hilltop. The twelve-page program, with rosters and room to score in the centerfold, includedadvertising for such products as Philip Morris cigarettes, Dewar’s scotch, Coca-Cola, Horton’s ice cream cones, automobile oils and greases from Atlas, Pommery champagne, and Henry Rahe’s Café just opposite the 168th Street subway station, where you could order Jac. Ruppert’s Extra Pale, Knickerbocker, and Ruppiner.
    There was also an ad that said, “Any baseball player who will hit the ‘Bull’ Durham cut-out sign on the field with a fairly batted ball during a regular scheduled league game will receive $50.00 in cash.”
    On the front of the scorecard was a notice from the telephone company stating that “Public Telephone Booths on Grand Stand, rear aisle, northerly end. Patrons expecting inward calls should leave their seat