THE ELEVATED TRACKS of the 4 train rumble every few minutes above the strip of shops, restaurants and bars that run up and down River Avenue. You get used to the sound, eventually. The area smells like roasted nuts and McDonalds. The tan paint on the underside of the rails is peeling; there’s rust and residue, though just across the street, everything is new. This is the first thing many of the nearly 3.2 million people who attended New York Yankees home games this year saw upon exiting the 161st Street-River Avenue stop and entering one of the most important hubs of commerce in the South Bronx.
It’s also one of the things that has been driving Cary Goodman, 64, crazy. For Goodman, the Executive Director of the 161st Street Business Improvement District, the cracked paint isn’t just cracked paint. It’s a symbol. “There’s four million people and the first thing you see when you get to the Bronx reinforces all of the negative prejudices and stereotypes about it being a dirty, perhaps even dangerous place. Can’t we just get that painted?” he asked.
On an overcast October day, there was exasperation in his voice, the kind you acquire when there’s an obvious, seemingly easy fix to a problem that no one really wants to tackle—a tiredness that must come from years of trying to do the work no one else wants to do. With disbelief, he added that he’d been working on getting the train tracks painted for more than three years.
The 161st Street Business Improvement District (BID) was born out of a need for someone to oversee the details—big and small—that often fall by the wayside when the interests of the powerful prevail over the needs of a community. A hybrid organization, composed of representatives from government—the community board, City Council and the Mayor—as well as local leaders, Goodman and the BID act as a liaison between community businesses, political factions and what is one the best known professional sports franchises in the world: the New York Yankees. If the BID sounds like a boring bit of bureaucracy, the team that everyone loves to love or loves to hate certainly keeps it busy. “They have more than money. They have a lot of access and a lot of power. Their president is a former deputy mayor,” Goodman said, referring to Randy Levine, who served as Giuliani’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Planning and Administration from 1997 to 2000. “Our president is me.” Then he laughed, a huge guffaw that reverberated throughout the tiny office.
Freddy Sanchez, 20, works the tables at Stan’s Sports World the night of the American League wild card game. (Katie Ferguson/The Ink)
IT’S BEEN A tough year for the Yankees on the field, but the guys that Goodman represents across the street from the stadium have had it much worse. One early September afternoon—a month out from the playoffs, with the Yankees at an away game in Boston—S&A Sports, a souvenir shop on River Avenue, was silent, empty except for owner Mohammed Ali, 42. A 4 train passed above, and everything shook a little. Glasses clinked, fabric swished, key chains clattered back and forth—dozens of Yankees logos jingling at the same time together. Then back to quiet again.
It is difficult for merchants like Ali to know how many customers they will have on any given day. “We never count,” he said. “A lot of people. But not everyone will buy something.” The number is low if it’s not a game day and almost certainly zero if it’s the offseason. Ali keeps his storefront open throughout the winter, for the slight upswing the business sees during the holiday season and for the occasional tourist that wanders in from a passing bus tour. At S&A Sports and Pinstripes Yankee Shop just a few doors down, employees estimated that they lost 80 percent of their customers during the winter. “Sometimes we make nothing a day. I charge my phone three, four times. I play Sudoku,” Ali said.
On the business side, this was a bad year for the Yankees too. Attendance was down by an average of 2,566 people per game for the 2015 season. Viewership on the Yankees’ YES network declined by 21 percent. New York has another team to rally behind now—the Mets are back in the playoffs for the first time since 2006, while the Yankees just barely eked out home field advantage for the American League wild card game.
“To be quite honest with you, this is one of the worst years we’ve had,” Nick Madio, 48, owner of Yankee Bar and Grill, said. The night of the wild card game, the bar’s floors were wet, a mop and industrial yellow bucket left out in the middle of the room, and the place was empty except for Madio, his wife, a friend and the bartender. A 2009 study from the New York Economic Development Corporation found that each postseason game that year was worth $6.7 million to city businesses, with huge sums of money spent on food and dining, merchandise, transportation and travel costs. Had the Yankees continued in the postseason, they could have played up to twenty additional games. When asked how many playoff games the Yankees would have had to play to turn this into a good year for business, Madio shook his head. “It’s impossible,” he said.
This is especially true for the businesses that are only open during Yankees home games. Stan’s Sports World has been a centerpiece of River Avenue since it opened in 1979. Derek Jeter filmed an Emmy nominated farewell commercial for Gatorade at Stan’s Sports Bar a few doors down. Freddy Sanchez, 20, is in his fifth season manning Stan’s table on the street, selling hats and t-shirts to visiting fans as well as locals. He reiterated that 2015 was the worst year in a while, and noted that the schedule, determined by Major League Baseball, can have a huge impact on sales. “This year, we got hit with all the holidays,” Sanchez said.
If this seems like an insignificant detail, it isn’t. The Yankees played home games on Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day this year. Though a long weekend might be a good time to take in a ballgame, Sanchez is right—attendance drops significantly. Yankee Stadium was at only 63 percent capacity on Labor Day—almost 9,000 less people than the average home game. And from that smaller audience, there’s still no way of knowing who will buy. “There could be a crowd of three hundred, four hundred people and only one hundred stop,” Jeremy Levine, 32, working the table for Bald Vinny’s House of Tees, said. “And they still might not buy anything.”
As with so much for the businesses of River Avenue, it’s out of their hands. Major League Baseball doesn’t take guys selling shirts into account when they make the schedule. During the season, trades and injuries are as regular as home runs, and the looming prospect of retirement by the remaining star players that led the Yankees to so many championships is a concern, particularly for the souvenir shops. “My generation grew up with Derek Jeter and that core group of players,” law student and lifelong Yankees fan Luke Pontier, 24, said. Without popular players to fill in the void left by stars like Jeter, sales have moved away from more expensive items this year to cheaper, small gift fare, like key chains and hats. Abdul Slhia, 33, an employee at Pinstripes Yankee Shop, said that as recently as two or three years ago, the top purchases were jerseys and t-shirts, particularly numbers 2 and 13. Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez have two of the most popular jerseys—not just among Yankees players, but for all of the MLB. Jeter’s number is reportedly the best selling shirt of all time. “This is the worst year because no stars on the team. Before, it’s a lot of stars,” Ali said. “This year? We have Rodriguez, but not like those people before. Slow moving.”
Cary Goodman, 64, is the Executive Director of the 161st Street Business Improvement District. (Katie Ferguson/The Ink)
CHANGE ON 161ST Street is also slow moving, but it does happen. The construction of the new stadium in 2009 came with a series of promises to the neighborhood. The establishment of the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund—$800,000 in grants for civic, socioeconomic and educational projects in the South Bronx—was among them. However, this did little to assuage the years of bad feelings bubbling to a boiling point. “The community board—as well as the majority of the community—had a really hostile, negative feeling about elected officials, about the Yankees, about the democratic process. It was a sort of scorched earth approach,” Goodman said.
That approach extended to the neighborhood businesses. When the BID formed, police were setting up barricades outside the subway stations that shuttled patrons directly to the stadium and acted as both a physical and metaphorical blockage between the ballpark and the community. Goodman remembered, “My job immediately was to say, hey, we’ve got to first of all try to get rid of these barriers. People coming here to see the game should be encouraged to come have a slice, grab a beer, buy a cap in our businesses. That was the first point where we tried to rebuild a sense of confidence and trust. The neighborhood saw that we weren’t working on behalf of the Yankees.”
Going up to bat against the Yankees is not new for Goodman, who grew up in the Bronx on Morris Avenue until the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway drove his family away. But he returned to work in the Bronx in 1974, and a couple of years later, joined with a group of community and civic leaders to prevent the team from turning what was then Macombs Dam Park into a parking lot. They won the battle, or at least they thought they had. “Ultimately, thirty some odd years later, [the Yankees] took it over and moved the stadium into that,” he said, smiling and shaking his head.
Goodman wears a Yankees cap to work, and he has one perched on his head in all of the framed photographs in his office. He owns four hats total, one lucky, though he said he occasionally switches to a Jets cap. This is how he accessorizes his usual uniform of a sports coat, a tie and white athletic socks. He is quick to wave when he recognizes someone passing by the window of his small office. The room, which faces 161st Street, is packed with posters advertising BID sponsored street fairs and block parties. There are a number featuring Pope Francis, though the pontiff’s recent New York itinerary did not include a trip to the Bronx. “We’ve been trying to create events for the purpose of finding common experiences, not for the Yankees themselves but for the Yankee fans—who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy and many from the suburbs—and the people who live here, who were resentful and not white and not wealthy,” Goodman said. “The people who want to embrace the Yankees and live here—they have an unfettered way of being a baseball fan. It seems like it should be everybody’s right.”
Competition on the River Avenue strip can be fierce. “There’s not a lot of friendship business to business,” Nick Madio of the Yankee Bar and Grill said. The customer pool is small, and in recent years it’s getting smaller game by game, season by season. But the more formal coordination achieved by an organization like the BID matters. “In any business, when businesses stick together, you get more done,” Madio said.
Goodman has been successful in negotiating the political crosscurrents between the different factions of elected officials in the South Bronx, as well as in organizing opportunities for community members to have their voices heard. In 2013, a plan to build a soccer stadium for the New York City FC—a new Major League Soccer franchise, partly owned by the Yankees—stalled after the BID hosted a town hall meeting, where residents could voice their opinions. “We had almost five hundred people. It was an overflow crowd,” Goodman said. “Why? Because it was the first time in ten years or more that people were asked ‘what do you think’ without imminent threat.”
But the BID’s task will always be daunting. “They are just a mammoth, powerful organization,” Goodman said. “So many people—maybe myself included—aren’t used to having a conversation or interacting with an IBM or AT&T. For better or worse, that’s who the Yankees are here.”
Fans outside of Yankee Bar and Grill the night of the American League wild card game. (Katie Ferguson/The Ink)