1. 1923: The first game at Yankee Stadium is played in New York
PHOTO: NYdailynews
On this day in 1923 the very first game was played in the brand new Yankee Stadium that was built in just 284 working days. The previous seasons that Yankees played at the Polo Grounds which was the home stadium of the New York Giants. So both teams had to share the Polo grounds, although it technically belonged to the Giants not the Yankees. During the 1920 season there was a major falling out between the two teams, mainly because the Yankees had a much larger fan base and was destroying the Giants when it came to filling up the seats. So at the end of the 1921 season Giants representatives informed the Yankees that they were no longer welcome at the Polo Grounds and they needed to leave as soon as possible. The Yankees purchased an 11 acre spot of land from William Walfdorf Astor for $675,000 and proceeded to build the biggest baseball venue in the country. It was actually the first to be called a “stadium” with 70,000 capacity.
2. 1775: Paul Revere makes his famous midnight ride
PHOTO: Bostonteapartyship
Statue of Paul Revere in North Boston
PHOTO: WIKI
Tonight was the infamous night that Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride letting all the colonist know that the ” British Are Coming”! Great Britain sent out orders to General Thomas Gage, who was the British Governor of Massachusetts, stating that he must confiscate all of the weapons and gunpowder that the American would have access too. SO he ordered his troops to start marching towards Lexington and Concorde were it was thought that Samuel Adams and John Hancock were hiding out.
3. 1906: Massive Earthquake destroys San Francisco
PHOTO: HuffingtonPost
PHOTO: WIKI
On this day in 1906 there was a 275 mile long segment of the San Andreas fault line shifted causing a massive earthquake that devastates the city of San Francisco> It was said the quake reached as high as 8.0 on the Richter Scale which brought the city to its knees. Most of the buildings were built with bricks or wood at the time and with a quake as ferocious as an 8.0 it caused most of the building to crumble into a huge piles of rubble. Then things took a drastic turn for the worse as these piles of rubble started to catch fire, and due to the massive quake many different water mains had been broken so firefighters couldn’t get access to water so they could fight the blaze. Things quickly got out of control as fire storms now were ravaging through the City. Because they weren’t able to get water to fight the fires the firefighters, and now with some help from the military, started to get creative in how to stop the devastation of the fire. The only thing they could come up with was to use explosives to level full city blocks so as to create a firewall which hopefully would contain the blaze. The U.S. army was called in and was under a strict shoot to kill order if anyone was caught looting during this disaster. It wasn’t until five days later that most of the fires went out, it was said that as many as 3,000 people lost their lives but many believe that number to be extremely low.