Excerpt: The football diaries

Whatever it was that all those representatives of those old, moneyed families thought they were meeting about, it certainly was not about an opportunity to invest in a large amusement park located in the Bronx, with a United States of America theme. And the idea was, at first blush, laughable. The location that Van Diepen had chosen was, of course, the dingiest, slummiest part of the Bronx, rife with drugs, prostitution, and guns. If you were white -- which all of these potential investors were -- you wouldn't last more than an hour in those 285 Acres that Van Diepen had set his ambitious eyes upon.