Under the stadium: the real Yankee Stadium beneath Blood Under the Lights

Book One begins with an electrician on the night shift under Yankee Stadium. Readers from outside New York sometimes picture the famous one, the house that Ruth built. Readers from the Bronx know there are two, and that the first one is gone.

Two stadiums, one street

The original Yankee Stadium opened in 1923 on the east side of 161st Street. The one standing now opened in 2009 directly across the street, and the old one came down over the following year. Where it stood there is a park now, Heritage Field, with ballfields laid roughly where the old diamond was. You can stand at home plate, more or less, and look across at the new stadium’s wall. The 4 train still rattles past above it the way it did in 1923.

That is the first thing I wanted in the book: a place that remembers something that is no longer there. A hundred years is a long time for a city. It is nothing to a vampire.

What Marisol does

Marisol Vega is a night-shift electrician, and a stadium of that size at night is mostly empty, mostly dark, and full of current. Floodlights draw the kind of power that has to be fed from somewhere underneath. I spent a long time with the idea of a woman whose whole trade is listening to wires, who knows what a live line feels like before she touches it, and who finds one under the stadium that is not on any plan and should not be live at all. The green line is mine. The listening is real. Ask any electrician.

What Noa does

Noa Vale has held the door under the stadium for a hundred years. The old stadium opened in 1923. I will leave the arithmetic to you, except to say that a guardian who took up a post the year the lights first came on, and watched the whole building come down and go back up across the street without once leaving, has a particular kind of patience, and a particular kind of loneliness, and the book is about what happens when someone finally touches the line he has spent a century keeping sealed.

If you go

Take the 4, the B or the D to 161st Street. Walk the block of Heritage Field before a night game, when the lights are coming up across the street. That is the hour the book is set in. Then, if you want to go under, Book One is here, in print, on Kindle, and in audio.