Crumbling Van Cortlandt Park Stadium to be demolished after largely being left to rot since 1939

A Bronx athletic stadium that has ties to a silver-screen cult classic and has been left to deteriorate for years will soon be razed to the ground.The Parks Department signed the death certificate for Van Cortlandt Park Stadium last month after a year-long study determined that the integrity of the asbestos-filled venue was “beyond repair” — and had actually been doomed from the start.“It is too far gone,” Marlisa Wise, the Park Department’s director of architecture, told The Post Friday.“The structure of the building is compromised beyond repair.We are seeing the failure of the concrete material itself, and this is due to the materials that were originally used when it was built in the 1930s.”The Van Cortlandt Park Stadium Master Plan was contracted last summer in a last-ditch effort by Parks to restore the venue, which served as the backdrop for a high-stakes football game in the 1979 film, “The Wanderers,” though it wasn’t actually filmed there.

But engineers found that the 3,000-seat venue was built with outdated methods and that its foundation is entirely too shallow to withstand the swampy wetland it sits on.The “high water-to-cement ratio” does not allow for thermal expansion in the concrete — meaning the water was infiltrating the entire structure and causing deterioration of the concrete and steel from the inside, Wise explained.Cracks throughout the building sprout so frequently that repairs would be needed every four to five years if the building were permitted to stand, the survey noted.“We would need to literally replace all the walls, beams, columns and the foundation, at which point you are looking at a new building,” Wise said, noting that the structure doesn’t pose an immediate danger, but is not made to last.The venue has a litany of other issues, including the presence of asbestos, lead-based paint, toxic materials and mold throughout the building.The study also found that the mechanical, electrical and plumbing...