By this point in a normal summer, the New York Yankees would have drawn more than 1.8 million fans to their palatial stadium in the South Bronx. On game days, the bars and souvenir shops around the ballpark would be overflowing with customers.
But there is little joy in the Bronx these days because the coronavirus has struck baseball out.
Merchants and residents of the blocks that surround the stadium have been staggered by the toll the pandemic has taken on their community, which sits in the country’s poorest congressional district.
After bringing a wave of sickness and death, the virus has now cut off one of the main sources of commerce in the area: fans of the Yankees and their opponents.
The highly paid players will soon be back in pinstripes, scheduled to play an irregular season of just 60 games beginning July 23. But the games will be visible only on screens because Major League Baseball, like other pro sports leagues, is barring spectators out of concern about the virus.
So when the Philadelphia Phillies show up for the first game this year, there will be no surge of people streaming off the subway and into the taverns and souvenir shops that line 161st Street and River Avenue.
Ticket holders will not be searching nearby blocks for cheap parking spots in driveways or haggling with street vendors.
“We’ve kind of locked in this year as a loss,” said Mike Rendino, who manages Stan’s Sports Bar, a block from the stadium. “There’s nothing we can do to salvage it.”
The same goes for his commercial neighbors, most of whom have not been able to pay rent for months because they have done little or no business since the city shut down in March.
The usual hiring of workers to sell hot dogs, beer and jerseys did not happen this year: The unemployment rate in the Bronx in May was 21.6 percent, more than four times as high as the year before.
“There’s a feeling of dejection and a very high level of anxiety,” said Cary Goodman, who represents a group of neighborhood merchants. “Every day I’ve had a conversation with at least one of them who says, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay in business.’ ”
Nancy De La Rosa’s father operated Molino Rojo, a restaurant a block east of the stadium, for 30 years. He was from the Dominican Republic but served mostly Puerto Rican food, like mofongo, because so many neighborhood residents came from that island.
These days, the Latino majority — the community district surrounding the stadium is 65 percent Hispanic and 29 percent Black — includes many more Dominicans. The median household income is $33,400 in the district, where about one-third of the residents live in poverty.
When Ms. De La Rosa and her husband, Diony Nunez, took over Molino Rojo four years ago, they added more Dominican dishes, like chicharrón de cerdo. Last fall, they installed a bar and a small stage and spent about $4,000 obtaining a liquor license, hoping to attract crowds before and after night games.
“Now we can’t have a baseball season to recoup that money,” she said. “We definitely will not be able to survive too long without the games.”
The absence of fans will hurt other ballpark neighborhoods around the country, but the impact is likely to vary, said Paul Goldberger, author of “Ballpark: Baseball in the American City.”
"Covid was causing trouble in a lot of these neighborhoods anyway,” Mr. Goldberger said. But he added, “Those ballparks that are in active, vibrant downtown neighborhoods have more things going on and more of a chance of having some activity.”
Among the better-positioned, Mr. Goldberger said, are Wrigley Field in Chicago, where bars popular with Cubs fans have been drawing crowds this summer, and Petco Park in San Diego. By contrast, a stadium that is an “isolated island surrounded by a sea of parking,” like the New York Mets’ home base, CitiField, “doesn’t have a prayer until the spring of 2021,” he said.
In the Bronx, the merchants’ woes have been exacerbated by the virtual shutdown of the hulking Bronx County Courthouse up the hill from the stadium. Along with other city courts, it was closed in mid-March, eliminating the need for jurors and sharply reducing traffic around the complex.
On a recent weekday, Molino Rojo was empty at lunchtime.
Still, Ms. De La Rosa had been hopeful about rehiring some of her seven employees for the scheduled resumption of indoor dining early this month. Then officials postponed that indefinitely.
“I actually called some of the employees to let them know we were going to be hiring them back,” she said. “I had to call them back and let them know we wouldn’t be.”
The Bronx borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., called neighborhoods near the stadium “the ground zero of ground zeros,” saying, “We’ve had sickness, joblessness, food insecurity, poverty.”
The average merchant in the area was at least $60,000 behind on rent by the end of June, Mr. Diaz said.
“Everyone’s on back rents,” said Joseph Michialis, who operates Yankee Twin Eatery Bar with his twin brother, John.
Mr. Michialis, whose family has operated a sports bar for 40 years, said the baseball season provided 60 to 70 percent of the annual revenue for his small restaurant. “No matter what you do with your business here,’’ he said, “if you don’t make your money in baseball, it doesn’t matter.”
Around the corner, Mike Hong was scrambling to change the mix of merchandise in his narrow shop, D & J Variety Store, hiding items with Yankees logos behind face masks.
Nobody was buying his custom lapel pins, which marry flags of various nations with Yankees banners.
“Who’s going to come?” Mr. Hong said, waving an invoice that showed his share of the building’s annual property tax was nearly $22,000. “If you’re really a Yankee fan, you’re going to watch the game in the house.”
The unequal fortunes of the Yankees and neighborhood merchants prompted Mr. Goodman, as executive director of the local business improvement district, to urge Mayor Bill de Blasio, in a letter last month, to revisit the Yankees’ deal with the city, which owns the land under the stadium.
The Yankees, worth an estimated $5 billion, pay no property taxes, Mr. Goodman wrote, but if they did, some of the proceeds could go to help their neighbors.
“I don’t know how this shortened season will benefit anybody other than the Yankees,” Mr. Diaz said.
Mitch Schwartz, a spokesman for the mayor, said the city was legally bound by a lease negotiated before Mr. de Blasio took office. But he said the administration had overseen an emergency grant program for small businesses that distributed $550,000 to 59 businesses, almost all in the Bronx.
Jason Zillo, a spokesman for the Yankees, said that the team had contributed $50,000 to the emergency grant program and that New York City FC, an affiliated pro soccer team that normally plays at the stadium, had chipped in $25,000.
Brian Smith, the Yankees senior vice president for community relations, provided a list of other organizations that had received contributions from the team this year, including the Food Bank for New York City and the Hispanic Federation.
The bulk of the money the city has dispensed to small businesses in the Bronx — $500,000 — was donated by SOMOS Community Care, a network of health care providers led by Dr. Ramon Tallaj.
For an organization as wealthy as the Yankees to contribute just $75,000 “would be a shame,” Dr. Tallaj said. He said SOMOS, which has been organizing coronavirus testing sites and food banks around the city, had invited the Yankees and other private enterprises to aid poor Bronx residents.
“Most of them lost their jobs,” Dr. Tallaj said. “When you lose your job, you lose your health care.”
Julia Nin, 58, lives in the Bronx and has not worked at her $26-an-hour job preparing salads in Yankee Stadium since March, spending the past four months alone in her apartment, collecting unemployment and waiting for a call back to work.
“I miss it,” Ms. Nin said. “There’s no energy like before. When people are moving around, people are excited and happy. You don’t see that any more.”
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