Traffic slows for suites at new Yankee Stadium

Seven luxury boxes down the foul lines priced at $600,000 remain available for the 2009 season, the first at the new Yankee Stadium. The team still had seven available in August, too.

"There's no getting away from the fact that the world is different than it was, so traffic slows," chief operating officer Lonn Trost said Tuesday. "So you don't have 10 people banging on the door. You may only have two people."

Trost said in August that 44 of 51 suites priced at $600,000 to $850,000 had been committed, and that the $650,000 and $850,000 suites had sold out.

"We're entertaining proposals from different folks," he said. "I'm not going to put them into the sold column until somebody sends me an e-mail and says, 'Done.' It's so hard to say close when you get attorneys involved and you start fighting over terms, and we don't want to change terms."

He said in August that 3,500 of the 4,300 premium seats had been sold, including the $500-$2,500 per-game tickets near home plate in the first nine rows of 25 sections ringing home plate.

Speaking after a news conference to announce a technology agreement with Cisco Systems Inc., Trost didn't have an updated figure on premium seats and said it was too early to determine how well season-ticket sales were going for the $1.3 billion ballpark.

"We can see that the economy is affecting the traffic that is coming around," he said. "Listen, nobody can avoid it. We recognize it. You wake up in the morning and you see it. So we're trying to work with our fan base and understand what their needs are."

He also said the pace of business deals had been impacted by the economic downturn. New York has been working on completing an agreement with Bank of America.

"Things are slow to come to fruition, but they're getting there," Trost said.