« New Ad by Brooklyn-Bulldozing Company Barclays Shows City as Personalized Amusement Park | Main | In Time Out New York, some curious agnosticism about arena impact, but no love from Prospect Height interviewees »
September 25, 2010
Sport Culture Capper: Yankees, Professional Sports and Criminals Wearing Yankee Hats
Noticing New York
This blog entry uses a New York Times story as a jumping-off spot. The story is about how many criminals are wearing Yankees garb.
I don’t usually pay much attention to the world of sports fan culture when I analyze the urban planning concerns of locating huge stadia in the middle of the urban fabric or complain about the unfairness of how these private profit-making enterprises are being financed on the backs of all of the rest of us, but I have an irresistible temptation to write about the subject now and before I’m through maybe I will have made clear why I personally am not much of a professional sports fan. . . .
. . . . Did everyone catch the story on the front page of the New York Times last week about how New York Yankee caps and baseball jackets seem to have become the apparel of preference for the city’s criminal element?:
A curious phenomenon has emerged at the intersection of fashion, sports and crime: dozens of men and women who have robbed, beaten, stabbed and shot at their fellow New Yorkers have done so while wearing Yankees caps or clothing.
...
Somehow it did not seem so surprising to our Noticing New York sensibility that predatory criminals, the bank robbers and thieves written about in the article, should identify with the Yankees who along with their owners have turned professionalized theft from the community into a business. While the recent new stadia including Yankee Stadium have fewer seats (to boost prices) the Yankee Stadium is actually bigger than the old in order to suck up “inside the cloister of its privately-owned walls the economic activity that once upon a time existed in the surrounding Bronx community.” (See: Saturday, November 14, 2009, The Yankee’s Hoggish New Stadium Monopoly Taxes The Rest of Us.) As reported by WNYC, and what we wrote in that story, the new Yankee Stadium includes: “a `mega-mall’ that is in decimating competition with local merchants taking away the business that used to be theirs.”
Read the rest of the post to why it makes a kind of sense for criminals to emulate owners of sports franchises. There is also a critique of sports fan culture and why fans might channel their energies more constructively and keep from becoming antisocial.
Posted by steve at September 25, 2010 7:50 AM