Yankees bid a fond farewell to the House that Ruth Built

New Yorkers were readying themselves last night for a frenzy of mourning and nostalgia as fans old and young poured into Yankee Stadium in the Bronx to witness their team play not just the last game of this baseball season, against the Baltimore Orioles, but the last ever in a hallowed edifice they like to call the "House that Ruth Built".

By this morning, it will be over. After 85 years of drawing baseball fans to worship, Yankee Stadium will be no more. The city and indeed the country will have bade a final farewell to a venue that has hosted 100 World Series games, three Papal masses, numerous rock concerts, football games – Celtic once played on its turf – and the occasional championship boxing bout too.

Awaiting just across the road, however, is a new Yankee Stadium that, once inaugurated next spring, may make followers of the game grateful for the passing of the old structure, with its vertiginous stands, chilly ramps and corridors and crumbling concrete.

The team's new home has been built for $1.6bn (£870m) – the most expensive sports venue ever in America – and will feature 60 luxury boxes, a Martini bar, several lounges and restaurants as well as vastly improved parking.

But what it won't have, of course, are the memories. The old stadium always belonged first to the biggest baseball superstar of them all, Babe Ruth (George Herman Ruth). It was on the foundations of his play – the repeated home runs – that the original stadium was built in 1923 by the then Yankee's owner Jacob Ruppert.

And it was on the stadium's hallowed ground in 1948 that Ruth was laid in state after his death from cancer to allow more than 100,000 fans to pay their last respects. If his family is not celebrating the end of Yankee Stadium, no one could be surprised. "It's going to be sad, Babe would not like to see his House come down," said his granddaughter Linda Ruth Tosetti.

But many other moments echoed around the stands last night. Like when Lou Gehrig addressed fans in mid-play just days after being diagnosed with a degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, that would eventually bear his name. "For the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got," he said. "Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."

It was at Yankee Stadium in 1946 that Joe Louis retained his world heavyweight boxing title against Billy Conn and where eight years before, Louis knocked out Max Schmeling of Germany in just 124 seconds.

But mostly last night was about the national pastime. No matter which team they supported, every baseball fan in the country saluted a venue that, for more than eight decades, had been more venerated than any other. Never mind that it was also pretty uncomfortable.

Soon, work will begin to raze it, but not before just about everything that can be removed – seats, signs, changing room lockers – has been sold off, one by one, as memorabilia to fans.