📍Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York, NY 10033, USA
1910 – 1925“I was the only one of my parents' four children to survive infancy, and my mother poured all her love and hopes into me. Heinrich and Christina Gehrig were German immigrants, and I was born in Yorkville, the German neighbourhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side, in 1903. When I was five we moved uptown to Washington Heights. My father, a sheet-metal worker, was often out of work, so my mother became the family's breadwinner, cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, including at a fraternity house at Columbia University, where I helped her carry the loads. My mother wanted me to be an engineer, and she pushed me to study. I went to PS 132 in Washington Heights and then to the High School of Commerce, where I starred at football and baseball. I was shy, big and a little clumsy, and I felt embarrassed by our poverty, but sports gave me confidence. In 1920, when our school team went to Chicago to play Lane Tech for the inter-city championship, I hit a grand slam right out of the Cubs' ballpark, today's Wrigley Field, and the newspapers called me the Babe Ruth of the high schools. I won a football scholarship to Columbia, and my mother hoped I would graduate, but in 1923 the Yankees offered me a contract, and the money meant we could live more comfortably. For seventeen seasons I played every day, earning the nickname the Iron Horse, and I was proud to buy my parents a house. I never forgot that Washington Heights boy. In 1939 I told a packed Yankee Stadium that I considered myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth, and I meant every word.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today