The original Yankee stadium, the stadium Babe Ruth played in lives in my basement.
My father finally took me there and we walked down one of these aisles here and as soon as I saw the
field and the grandstands a scoreboard I just fell in love with this place. Without bragging I would
say this is by far and away the most accurate model of this Yankee Stadium that's ever been
built. Every significant detail is reproduced I spent about four years on this project probably
between three and four thousand hours. I figured if I'm going to spend my time doing this it
better be right, because there's always going to be somebody out there that's going to tell you what's not right.
A little bit neurotic probably but yeah you have to be I guess to do something like this.
I'm John Meeks and we're in Hillsborough New Jersey. Businessman by day and when the business
day is over yes I like the paint and like to build projects. Got pretty good at drawing
and self-portrait in a bathroom mirror upstairs .
Took up oil painting mostly New Jersey scenes. I grew up in North Plainfield New Jersey which was
about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan. I originally fell in love with this place because I had been
watching Yankee games on a 19-inch black and white television and my father finally bought
tickets. It was the most cool thing I'd ever seen in my life it was nothing like what I expected
it was a thousand times more than what I had expected and then I started looking at things
and thinking Babe Ruth looked at that same thing Lou Gehrig stood there Joe DiMaggio stood there
it was like it just at that point I'd been a Yankee Zen and Mets fan at that point Yankees
in 2009 they're going to be tearing down Yankee Stadium it's not going to exist in
any form anymore the house that Ruth built was going to be demolished building a new
stadium across the street which was very nice but it wasn't the ballpark where this history
had happened and I felt Yankee Stadium needed to be rebuilt in all its glory and that's why
I set out to make such a faithful reproduction so it could give people an idea of what it was
like to actually be in that Stadium believe me that place had a lot of atmosphere a queen
a hit a homer it was just a wonderful place to see again the Acoustics the smells everything
so the vast majority of this model is built out of styrene plastic I found this company
called Evergreen that made strip stock they made sheets and you can cut it into anything
you want and if you're creative and you have a decent eye there's really no limit to what
you can do with this it's a great material for modeling you can make it look like concrete you
know you can make it look like metal it's great I don't want to even say how many dollars worth
of this stuff yeah let's say I needed to to place a couple of steps somewhere you take the solvent
and starts to dissolve the plastic and then just let that set up and in a couple of minutes you
won't get those two pieces apart and it was just a matter of doing that over and over again many
thousands of times and these are very large pieces compared to what most of what I was
working on the scale of the model is 1 120th a tenth of an inch equals a foot and I made sure
that every significant detail is reproduced properly and not try to cut Corners oh here
it is I don't know why I didn't see it this is my architect scale this is actually broken
in half in pieces a couple times I've had the repair it's been used so much you can
see how discolored it is there's no 3D printing there's no replication it's all piece by piece
now I don't know how many pieces it is but I'm guessing north of half a million
I actually picked the date June 24th 1973 to depict the stadium because my best friend and
I had gone in to see a doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers and the Yankees won the first
game a really close game and in the second game it was one to one in the bottom of the ninth inning
and Greg Nettles the third baseman hit a home run into the lower stand back there and won the game
and everybody went crazy it was the high point of the season so I figured I'll pick June 24th
I set out to make it exact and I sweat every single detail on this ballpark everything is oh
100 precise to scale and I represented everything reasonable that I could represent every single
light Tower it's all configured exactly the way it was with exactly the right number of Lights
all of these are completely accurate and there's actually a difference between this
one and these and you would never see it but I I caught that difference I put in
these are football broadcast booths here because the New York Giants played here
I managed to get all the ads exactly the way they were because Die Hard fans that had all
kinds of photos I needed everything to be as it was that day all these signs are hand-painted
drawn and hand-painted in oil paint all the flags which I have obviously in motion with
swirling winds I draw a flag on one side of the piece of paper I'd draw a flag on the
other side of the piece of paper I'd saturate it with glue crinkle it up and then have it dry
in place these electrical supply lines for the the light towers all exactly the way they were
of course the ticket booths which a few of the ticket booths actually still survive I think
one's in the Hall of Fame and another one turned up not too long ago and of course this this looks
a little scary they had to put that up to hold the scoreboard up never did fall down but again
the scoreboard all hand painted the entire scoreboard the official long jeans clock out
here on the main gate I have it at 8 52 in the morning there's nobody here yet you know I would
love to make sixty thousand people and put them in here but that's not going to happen anytime soon
the most common number I saw for seating was 65 000. well I don't know how many exactly
how many grandstand seats there were but it's 40 something thousand grandstand seats and 20
something thousand bleacher seating so you hand painted all 60 000 seats one at a time yeah I
hand painted all all these seats one at a time because there was no other way to do it and I
might add they've been hand painted blue a number of times because I wasn't happy with the color
I was able to come up with the proper color because these are pieces of the
original Stadium unfortunately there's no rule book there's no class you can take it's
trial and error which means it's a lot of error I have a drawer full of outtakes here
all of this decorative freeze that took me weeks to build the first time
after I'd been hanging for a few months I decided I didn't like it anymore it all
had to be redesigned ripped out and done all over again so that set me back about 10 weeks at least
all right here's one of them and of course it would be the glasses off because I'm nearsighted
start out with a raw piece of plastic and I'd build the rail first the top rail one at a time
lining it back up again absolutely perfectly within the thousandths of an inch
you're punching out the bottom radius with a larger punch I would start the glue these
pieces down and then from there I would set this up like this and cut the radius in but
there are multiple layers and ultimately there's about 230 pieces took about six
hours for each one of these sections I spent about four years on this project week nights
after work was three to four hours of course it weekends I remember some Saturdays spending up
to 14 hours kind of painful to really try and hit it up properly because you think
oh my God but I'm estimating probably between three and four thousand hours
oh I had a motto when I was building this thing it says I'm going to find a way there's always a way
and I got there
my wife and kids weren't crazy about all the time I spent on it but they think it's
really cool and I'm sure they're as glad that I built it as I am
my Yankee Stadium model is the coolest thing I've ever made foreign