There’s no preservation society clamoring to save Fort Lauderdale Stadium and Lockhart Stadium. Ghosts of Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and soccer great Gordon Banks won’t be locking metaphysical arms to block bulldozers from their imminent task.
Preparations to demolish the two structures to make way for a modern soccer stadium and training complex are underway at the city-owned 64-acre property. In April, Fort Lauderdale’s city commission approved a bid by an ownership group headed by soccer legend David Beckham to redevelop the site as a training hub for its new Major League Soccer team, Inter Miami.
The demolition will mark the end of an historic run that spans back to 1959 for Lockhart Stadium and 1962 for Fort Lauderdale Stadium.
Fort Lauderdale Stadium hasn’t been spring training home to a major league baseball team since the Baltimore Orioles wrapped up their 14-year run in 2009. Local baseball fans remember it more vividly as “Fort Lauderdale Yankee Stadium,” focal point of the New York Yankees’ annual five- to six-week stay that boosted tourism and receipts at players’ favorite watering holes.
Lockhart Stadium last hosted soccer and high school football games in 2016. A revived version of the professional Fort Lauderdale Strikers soccer team played there between 2011 and 2016, hoping to benefit from fans’ nostalgia for the original North American Soccer League team that packed the stadium from 1977 to 1983.
That was the era that saw international stars such as Pele, Gordon Best, Gerd Mueller, Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and many others displaying their skills, according to longtime South Florida sports executive Tim Robbie.
The annual prep football showdown known as the Soul Bowl was also last played at Lockhart in 2016 before the two participating high schools, Blanche Ely and Dillard, swapped hosting duties the past two years.
Lockhart was the first of the two stadiums to open on city-owned property adjacent to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport between Cypress Creek Road and Commercial Boulevard. Getting to what was then the far-flung site proved daunting in 1959, the first season games were played by Fort Lauderdale High and St. Thomas Aquinas, then called Central Catholic.
A columnist writing for the Fort Lauderdale News that year complained about the six-mile drive from downtown Fort Lauderdale seeming like “almost a half-day trip because of one-lane traffic from a point two miles away.”
Fort Lauderdale Stadium was built for $800,000 after the New York Yankees agreed to leave their spring training home in St. Petersburg, where they had spent 31 years, in part because the team’s headquarters hotel there would not house its African American players.
When it opened in 1962, the new stadium had 7,800 seats, priced at three levels: $3 for box seats, $2 for reserved, and $1 each for bleacher seats offered only on game days.
Four other teams trained in southeast Florida during those days: the Orioles (Miami), Los Angeles Dodgers (Vero Beach), Washington Senators (Pompano Beach), and Kansas City A’s (West Palm Beach).
The Yankee Clipper Hotel (now called B Ocean Resort Fort Lauderdale) served as the team’s headquarters. Prior to the Yankees’ arrival, the New York Daily News reported, “There is to be no segregation.” Fort Lauderdale officials, the paper reported, “checked with various movie houses in town and have been assured that Negroes will be admitted.”
As the city unfurled a promotional blitz marking the team’s arrival, “there were locals who worried lest tourists lose their way trying to find the ballyard,” the Miami News reported. “So 400 directional signs — baseball-shaped and with Yankee insignia — were erected, and the Yanks put a map on the back of their 100,000 schedule cards.”
Columbia Pictures filmed a forgettable movie, “Safe At Home,” at the new stadium and at the the Yankee Clipper Hotel. The movie starred Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris as themselves, with appearances by Whitey Ford and Ralph Houk, then the team’s manager. William Frawley of “I Love Lucy” fame was the marquee actor. The film revolved around a Little Leaguer named Hutch sneaking into the ballpark and the hotel to prove to his friends that he wasn’t lying when he said he knew Mantle and Maris. The trailer can easily be found on YouTube.
The Yankees’ arrival created something special in the Fort Lauderdale area, reporter Jeff Pearlman wrote in a 2011 Wall Street Journal story headlined, “Baseball Left, Never Looked Back.”
Marty Appel, the Yankees’ former media relations director, told Pearlman: “At the time Fort Lauderdale was this up-and-coming place to be. It’s where spring break was taking place, where the weather was beautiful and a lot of great restaurants and hotels were popping up.”
The team’s Fort Lauderdale tenure spawned much Yankees lore:
Film star Marilyn Monroe stayed a week at the Yankee Clipper Hotel in 1962 while visiting ex-husband Joe DiMaggio, who was then serving as a volunteer coach.
Reliever Marshall Bridges was shot by a stripper in 1963 and suffered a minor flesh wound.
In 1965, Maris and Clete Boyer were charged with assault after a reported brawl outside a Fort Lauderdale cocktail lounge.
Reggie Jackson angered teammates during the 1977 camp when he told Sport magazine, at a bar called The Banana Boat, that he was “the straw that stirs the drink.”
Chapters of the off-again, on-again feud between manager Billy Martin and owner George Steinbrenner were penned here. As the Yankees were losing to the Mets in 1978, Steinbrenner showed up in the dugout and barked out orders at Martin, who told the boss to either get out or manage the team himself. The boss left and the Yankees ended up winning the game.
While the Yankees’ 1995 departure is still mourned by the teams fans, Fort Lauderdale Stadium seduced a new generation of Orioles fans.
David B. Stinson, a former litigator for the U.S. Department of Justice, baseball enthusiast and curator of the website deadballbaseball.com, which tracks the fate of no-longer-used baseball parks, said in an interview that Fort Lauderdale Stadium impressed him by remaining simple through an era when most teams demanded more and more revenue-enhancing amenities.
He first visited the stadium in the late 1990s and noticed “the city didn’t spend a lot to refurbish or update it, but kept everything fixed up.
“There were no sky boxes, no luxury suites, no berms in the outfield, and the stadium retained the intricate metal backing that looked like it was inspired by Yankee Stadium.”
Entering the stadium, Stinson said, felt like walking back in time. “You were experiencing what it must have felt like to watch a baseball game in the 1960s.”