Yankees Had Eyed 42nd Street Stadium

The Yankees once considered making their home on 42nd Street in bustling midtown Manhattan, according to a remarkable 1915 letter penned by team co-owner Colonel Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston.

A New York auction house just got its mitts on the historical gem -- in which Huston, hat in hand, begs American League brass to help keep the then-financially struggling franchise afloat.

Huston, on behalf of his business partner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, asked AL president Ban Johnson for a meeting to hash over their plans to build a new stadium on 42nd Street.

"We have canvassed the feasibility of the 42nd Street site for a ballpark," Huston wrote in the July 16, 1915, letter. "Col. Ruppert and myself will be with the Club when it reaches Chicago, and we will be glad to discuss the subject with you then."

The typewritten, yellowing letter with tattered edges is being hawked for $4,500 by Gotta Have Rock and Roll auctioneers.

The letter is a file copy that Huston would have had retyped and placed with other club papers, according to auction-house co-founder and co-owner Pete Siegel.

"When I first saw it, my mouth just dropped," Siegel said. "It's incredible to think what could have happened -- how one paragraph in one letter could have changed the entire landscape of the city."

The Yankees of today might be the most powerful team in sports, but those pre-Babe Ruth Yanks barely got by. In 1915, they were lowly renters, playing second fiddle to the Giants at the Polo Grounds in Harlem. Huston and Ruppert feared that if they did not get help to build a Midtown stadium, the Yankees would not survive.

"We think our team has been very lucky to keep in the first division and we are painfully aware of the fact it must be radically strengthened, and are greatly exercised over the small headway we have been able to make," Huston wrote. Read more:NYPost