Fading Grandeur & a Lotta Words

This is not a Leica shot--I took it with a Voigtlander Vito B. This

is a side exit in a building Babe Ruth inhabited in the 1920s. It

fronts on New York's Riverside Drive, just over the water and up a

hill from Yankee Stadium. Ruth lived on the seventh floor and had a

fine view of the Hudson River. The hallway in his apartment was

sixty feet and six inches long. (Does that number sound familiar?)

I once lived in half of his old apartment. The people next door had

the other half. Indeed, they had moved in just after Ruth moved out

and the apartment was partitioned; they were very old. They had the

Babe's original door with the locks he had put on it; the locks were

so many and so elaborate that, even after many years, the old folks

occasionally were locked out. I had the Babe's old dining room.

There was a button on the floor that he stepped on to summon the

cook to bring on more food. I took this shot in 1976, shortly

before moving out of the building. The film was Kodachrome.<div></div>

Thanks, Peter. You are very close to the answer to the 60'6" puzzle.

It must be the distance from someplace to someplace on the baseball field. Home plate to 1st base? Pitcher to catcher? Pitcher to home plate?

Jeez, it's the distance from the mound to the plate. Plate to home is 90 ft. But who cares about the bleepin' Yankees anyway?

 

Well, I guess if you lived in half his apartment... ;)

Ha. Plate to home is 0 feet. Plate to first is 90.

It's not the distance from the mound to the plate. It's the distance from the rubber to the plate.

Which side of the rubber to which side of the plate, Mark? (lol)

Rubber to the plate is correct, of course. I imagine Ruth, when he decided to take the apartment, saying, "There's just something about that hallway..."

60 feet 6 inches "from pitcher's plate to farthest point on home base (over which batter hits)" -- The Macmillan Dictionary of Measurement (1994), page 31.