George Herman Ruth
New York, New York, New York
Marker Inscription
Babe Ruth (George Herman Ruth) 1895-1948 “The Sultan of Swat” led the New York Yankees to seven pennants between 1920 and 1934. Ruth hit 714 career home runs, a record until 1974. He lived here for several years, beginning in 1929, and then moved to 173 Riverside Drive.
Erected by Historic Landmarks Preservation Center
The Story
For several years beginning in 1929, this was home to Babe Ruth at the height of his fame. "The Sultan of Swat" powered the New York Yankees to seven pennants between 1920 and 1934 and hit 714 career home runs, a record that stood until 1974. Larger than life on and off the field, Ruth became the defining star of baseball's golden age before moving on to Riverside Drive.
Why it matters
Ruth transformed baseball into America's premier spectator sport in the boom years of the 1920s, becoming one of the nation's first modern celebrity athletes.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1920s and into the 1930s, New York City was the capital of American ambition — a place of skyscrapers, subways, nightclubs, and newspapers hungry for heroes. It was also the capital of American baseball, and no team loomed larger than the New York Yankees, whose rise reshaped the whole sport.
This was the era when baseball became the national pastime in the fullest sense: a game followed by millions through box scores, radio, and the roar of enormous new stadiums. The home run, once a rarity, became the sport's defining thrill, and the crowds grew with it.
A city apartment building like this one placed a superstar in the thick of that world. To live in Manhattan at the height of the Yankees' glory was to live where the noise was loudest, a short trip from the ballpark and squarely inside the celebrity culture the decade invented.
People & events
For several years beginning in 1929, this was home to George Herman Ruth — the man the world knew as Babe Ruth, and the sportswriters dubbed "The Sultan of Swat." By the time he lived here, he was already the most famous athlete in the country.
The numbers behind the legend are staggering. Ruth led the Yankees to seven pennants between 1920 and 1934, and he finished his career with 714 home runs — a record that would stand until 1974. Each of those figures represents a decade of dominance that changed what fans expected a great player to be.
Ruth lived here at the peak of that fame before moving on to Riverside Drive. Picture the daily comings and goings: a man who could not walk a city block unrecognized, heading out to a ballpark full of people who had come, more than anything, to see whether he would hit one out.
Its place in the American story
Babe Ruth did more than break records; he changed the business and the feel of baseball. His towering home runs helped turn the game into America's premier spectator sport during the boom years of the 1920s, drawing crowds that filled ever-larger stadiums.
He was also one of the nation's first modern celebrity athletes — a figure whose fame spilled far beyond the box score into advertising, newsreels, and popular imagination. The template of the sports superstar as a household name owes an enormous debt to him.
That a preservation marker sits on an ordinary apartment building says something too. It reminds us that the golden age of baseball was lived not only in the stadium but in the city around it, and that the giants of that era were, at the end of the day, people who came home to a New York address.
If you visit
This is a home, not a ballpark, so come for the quiet thrill of standing where a legend actually lived rather than for a grand monument. The pleasure here is imaginative: knowing that the most famous man in American sport once walked through this door.
Look up at the building and let the contrast sink in — the everyday facade of a Manhattan residence against the outsized fame of the person the marker commemorates. That gap between the ordinary and the legendary is exactly what makes a stop like this fun.
It fits beautifully into a walking tour of the city's history, an easy pause between other sights. Pair it in your mind with the world of 1920s and '30s New York — the stadiums, the newspapers, the roar of the crowd — and this modest doorway becomes a doorway into an era.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Plan your visit
NearbyMake a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.
Museums & culture
- 81 Leonard Gallery5.3 mi away
- Gerben Fine Art5.3 mi away
- Bureau5.4 mi away · 112 Duane Street
- Hall des Lumières5.5 mi away · 49 Chambers Street, New York, NY
- Cloud Gallery5.5 mi away
- 9/11 Memorial & Museum5.8 mi away · 180 Greenwich Street, New York, NY
Attractions
- The River Project Wetlab4.7 mi away
- FDNY Ladder 85.1 mi away · 14 North Moore Street, New York
- Dream house5.2 mi away
- Cortlandt Alley5.2 mi away
- Sherman Zwicker5.3 mi away
- Textile building5.3 mi away
Food & drink
- Sweetgreen6.0 mi away
- Maman6.0 mi away
- Greene Hook Bar & Kitchen6.0 mi away
- Semicolon Cafe6.0 mi away
- Rumi Turkish Grill6.1 mi away
- Bluestone Lane6.1 mi away
Places to stay
- DoubleTree5.6 mi away · 455 Washington Boulevard, Jersey City, NJ
- Conrad5.6 mi away · 102 North End Avenue, New York
- Sonesta Simply Suites Jersey City5.6 mi away · 21 2nd Street, Jersey City, NJ
- M Social Hotel New York Downtown5.8 mi away · 55 Church Street, New York, NY
- Hyatt Regency Jersey City on the Hudson5.8 mi away · 2 Exchange Place, Jersey City, NJ
- Residence Inn New York Downtown Manhattan/World Trade Center Area5.9 mi away · 170 Broadway, New York, NY
Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Babe Ruth
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Carrere Memorial
New York, NY
John Merven Carrère was one of the most influential American architects of the Gilded Age, a founding partner of the celebrated firm Carrère & Hastings, which shaped the Beaux-Arts style that defined turn-of-the-century civic America. With his partner Thomas Hastings he designed landmarks such as the New York Public Library's main branch, bringing a grand European classicism to the nation's growing cities. Carrère died in 1911 from injuries in an automobile accident, and in 1919 Hastings honored his late partner with this memorial, a personal tribute from one half of a legendary architectural partnership to the other.
Firemen's Memorial
New York, NY
On Riverside Drive at 100th Street stands one of New York's most moving public monuments, dedicated in 1912 to the firefighters of the City of New York who gave their lives in the line of duty. Its inscription casts them as "soldiers in a war that never ends" — a war against the fires that repeatedly swept a fast-growing, densely built metropolis in the era before modern building codes and fireproof construction. The memorial, with its bronze relief of a horse-drawn engine racing to a blaze, rose during the Progressive Era, when a professionalized, uniformed fire service had become a point of civic pride and the department mourned losses at catastrophic tenement and factory fires.
New York Central Railroad 69th Street Transfer Bridge
New York, NY
Along Manhattan's Hudson shoreline, the New York Central Railroad's 69th Street Transfer Bridge solved a problem that defined the age of rail: how to move loaded freight cars across water when no rail bridge spanned the Hudson. Cars were rolled onto floats and barges here and ferried to connecting lines, knitting the island's industry into the national network. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, its surviving ironwork is a rare relic of a vanished waterfront economy.
Victor Herbert
New York, NY
From this address, Victor Herbert helped define the sound of American popular music at the turn of the century. Living here from 1904 until his death in 1924, the composer and conductor organized his own orchestra and wrote beloved operettas including Naughty Marietta and Sweethearts. He also championed the Copyright Law of 1909 and helped found ASCAP, the organization that still protects composers' rights today.