by Neil deMause
Moreover, for stadiums as for other corporate subsidies, the burden is on the local government once the deal is in place. If local government fails to live up to its end of the bargain, the corporation can simply take its business elsewhere; but a corporation that fails to come through with the jobs or economic development it promised a locality can simply shrug its shoulders and blame the vagaries of the economy—assuming anyone ever even thinks to ask.
Over the past few years, cities and states have begun exploring methods of holding corporations to their end of the bargain, specifically through “clawback” legislation that would force companies to repay their subsidies if job or economic goals are not met within a specified time. But as these depend on enforcement by the same public officials who approve the deals in the first place, corporations are seldom if ever held accountable for their actions.4
Arthur Rolnick, a vice-president at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve who has campaigned for years against “the economic war among the states,” can’t see local politicians ever putting an end to corporate welfare. “In some sense, they come out of it a hero,” he says. “The businesses that are involved with this thing, they love this deal, they’re getting big benefits, and you can bet that they’re going to support this guy’s campaign. For the public, they’re against it, maybe, but it’s one of many issues, and when it comes time to vote, there’s a million other issues, and this thing’s probably already been done, and so they move on. So it looks like, the way the political aspects of it work, there isn’t much downside for these guys.”
The downside for the public, though, is another story—often several stories, in fact, as different interests fight to prevent the brunt of the corporate welfare burden from falling on them. Nowhere were these competing interests more evident than in the case of baseball’s oldest stadium, which became one of its earliest stadium battlegrounds: Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
Notes
1. One tactic, little noticed at the time, that aided the Heat in their arena vote was to make a last-minute switch in their financing plan: Instead of the county putting up the money for construction costs and collecting rent from the team, the team would pay the up-front costs and receive a $6.4 million a year “operating subsidy” from the county. At the end of the day, the team would have the same annual expenses but could claim that the arena was now a “privately financed” project. As for taxpayers, the Palm Beach Post reported in 2004 that they were losing more than $15 million a year on the city’s three local arenas.
2. Sportswriter John Stebbins noted that reporters don’t always have to be told which side their bread is buttered on: “I don’t think it was any secret in the Tampa Tribune newsroom that if we lose the Bucs, there’s going to be a good chunk of advertising revenue out the window.” Though as his former editor John Sugg observed, the Trib didn’t leave anything to chance: The managing editor of the paper in the mid-’90s, when the Buccaneers were seeking a new stadium, directed his staff that “[the paper’s] coverage of the stadium [would] be limited to finding solutions for it to be built.”
3. Matters didn’t improve even after Detroit’s new stadium was completed in 2000. When baseball’s All-Star Game was held at Comerica Park in 2005, the Associated Press ran a story asserting that “even [Tiger Stadium’s] supporters acknowledge it had to be replaced because of its crumbling infrastructure, obstructed views and lack of many luxury suites.” Kim Stroud of the Tiger Stadium Fan Club spotted a prepublication copy of the story on the wire and immediately phoned AP writer Larry Lage to point out that Tiger Stadium supporters had acknowledged no such thing. Lage, according to Stroud, agreed to ask his editor to change the line to “even some supporters,” but it ended up published as originally written.
4. On tour for his 2005 book The Great American Jobs Scam, corporate subsidy expert Greg LeRoy was fond of showing off the “business assistance form” that had been filed with the state of Minnesota by a Dairy Queen seeking $275,515 in state subsidies. Under “job creation goals” the company had listed “1 new job” with an hourly wage of “$4.50/hr.”
7
Local Heroes
If you have to survive, you don’t have time to get discouraged. —Wentworth Gardens community activist Hallie Amey
John Aranza has always been somewhat leery of radicals who make a lot of sound and fury for their various causes. His own community activism was centered on electoral politics, his church, and the Boys and Girls Clubs—until the Chicago White Sox demanded a replacement for eighty-year-old Comiskey Park, then threatened to leave town, and his life was changed forever.
The White Sox threatening to leave might not have changed Hallie Amey’s life all that much if the team hadn’t ended up putting her neighbors’ homes in the bulldozer’s path. When it became clear that the community she had called home for decades was in jeopardy, the spirited senior citizen decided to do something about it. But then again, Amey has been a community activist for just about her whole life. More than forty years a resident in Wentworth Gardens, a small Chicago housing project on the city’s south side, Amey long ago learned that if you wanted to get something done, you have to do it yourself.
It was early spring 1986, and one of baseball’s most storied franchises was about to set in motion an unlikely chain of events that would see a historic landmark gutted, dozens of homes and businesses torn to the ground, a new trend in stadium architecture and a newly dominant architectural firm emerge, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, a remarkable convergence occur in the lives of John Aranza, Hallie Amey, and so many more.
Warning Bells
By the mid-1980s, the relatively new owners of the White Sox had escalated their rumblings of dissatisfaction with seventy-five-year-old Comiskey Park and its urban neighborhood. When Jerry Reinsdorf and Edward M. Einhorn purchased the team from Bill Veeck in 1981, it didn’t take long for them to decide they wanted more—more television revenues, more attendance at games, more profit from the franchise. Their complaints about the state of the old stadium, the safety of its neighborhood, and their ability to turn a profit grew louder, and their flirtation with St. Petersburg, Florida, to move their team to that region grew more intense.
Local fans began to get alarmed. “We were afraid to speak up then,” says Aranza. “I’m no activist, but I’ll tell you what I did. It’s the first time I ever did this in my life.”
Aranza grew up on the South Side of Chicago, home to the city’s famous meatpacking industry, century-old Irish neighborhoods, monstrous housing projects, and many of its most infamous politicians. He and his wife make their home in Bridgeport—a white ethnic Chicago neighborhood (one of the city’s oldest) known for producing, among other things, future mayors of the city. On Memorial Day 1986, the Aranzas had relatives over for a barbecue on their back patio. From their small bungalow, John could see the light towers of Comiskey Park, and the team’s uncertain future was very much on his mind. Aranza remembers the day when, standing there at the family barbecue, he realized he’d had enough. The White Sox were going to move, he told his wife. “You know what?” he remembers saying. “I got a feeling they’re gonna move the ballclub. They’re going to tear down the ballpark. It’s terrible, I don’t know what to do.”
Aranza asked his wife to get him something he could make a sign with. She returned with an old pillowcase, on which he composed a homemade sign, “Save Our Sox.”
With two pieces of bamboo holding up the pillowcase, Aranza made his way the few blocks to Comiskey Park, where he stood on the curb with his homemade sign. When passersby questioned him, Aranza could only reply, “I’ve got a feeling the ballpark’s going to be torn down.” Some folks ignored him; others asked what they could do. “‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Write your congressman. Write the owners. Write state legislators,’ I says, ‘I don’t know who. Write local TV people. Just something.’” After some time the bamboo broke, and Aranza just held his sign in his hands. “I must have looked like somebody on a desert island, wai
ting for a passing ship to see it, to rescue me, to rescue the ballpark,” he says. “I never did this in my life. Never in my life.”
His one-man demonstration might have been the end of it but for similar concerns that were plaguing Mary O’Connell, a lifelong White Sox fan despite living on the city’s North Side. (Chicago has many historically deep divides between its North and South sides—the North being home largely to the city’s elegant tree-lined streets and upper-class white residents, and the South the traditional manufacturing base and the town’s black and ethnic white working-class populations. The city’s baseball fans are as deeply split, with the National League Cubs making their home and taking their fan base from the North Side, and the White Sox firmly a South Side team.)
“I saw an article in one of the Chicago papers talking about how the White Sox needed a new stadium,” O’Connell says. She was surprised at the paper’s easy acceptance that Comiskey Park had supposedly outlived its useful life.
Alarmed, O’Connell wrote to the team management and received a cursory response, referring to an enclosed one-paragraph engineering report. She compares the terse justification for tearing down the old stadium to a decision to condemn a house because the roof leaked. “Wouldn’t you expect that there would be some kind of analysis or numbers, some kind of detailed description about the state of the girders or the concrete or the wiring or the masonry, or something that would say, ‘Well, here’s this problem, and in order to repair that it would cost this much money’?” O’Connell found herself wondering. “But it was nothing, it was just this one little one-paragraph thing.”
O’Connell responded with an op-ed piece in the Chicago Sun-Times. It was after the piece ran that an acquaintance suggested she get in touch with John Aranza.
Saving the Team
“Now when Mary called me,” Aranza says, “she said, ‘John, we’re starting this group and I really want you to be a part of it.’ And I didn’t want to be. I never did anything, I stayed away from activism and groups, however you want to call it, my entire life, only because none ever appealed to me.
“She would beg me on the phone and I said, ‘No, but good luck to you,’ and she kept calling me, so I agreed to go to one of the meetings that she had proposed, and it was out of that the Save Our Sox was formed.”
The group’s initial focus was on keeping the team in the city and preventing the destruction of Comiskey Park. “Our argument was why rip down one of these [old stadiums] and build a brand-new monstrosity that nobody would want to go and see,” says O’Connell. “Why not play up the fact that you’ve got these two great old ballparks? Use that to attract people and get people to come.” If anything, O’Connell and her colleagues argued, public money could be used to preserve and maintain the site’s history and appeal. To that end, they campaigned to have the old stadium declared a national monument, to be run by the National Park Service. “If you’re going to use tax dollars,” says O’Connell, “let’s build up the charm and intimacy of the historic ballpark that we have.”
Nicknamed the “Baseball Palace of the World” in its heyday, Comiskey Park’s fan-friendly construction (both decks of seating stretched to the playing field, putting spectators right up against the action) and colorful history (Shoeless Joe Jackson and the scandalous Black Sox of 1919 played there, along with the 1959 pennant-winning team) made it a proud city landmark, especially for the team’s traditionally working-class core of fans. Doug Bukowski, a Chicago writer and member of Save Our Sox, points out that Comiskey’s architecture was designed to blend with neighboring Bridgeport’s working-class feel. Its arches, which extended around the old ballpark, “suggest the windows of a church or one of the multistory factories that were once so common here,” Bukowski writes in Baseball Palace of the World, his sometimes humorous, ultimately wrenching look at the old stadium’s last season. “[Charles] Comiskey put his ballpark in the middle of a neighborhood filled with people no more than a generation removed from the fields of the old country. They still viewed life the way peasants did and sought connections between work and play and worship. Comiskey provided that with his ballpark.”
Members of SOS canvassed outside the old stadium, trying to attract sympathetic White Sox fans to their petition campaign and their membership ranks. And many were drawn in that way. Newton Suwe was in graduate school at the time and attended many games at Comiskey. “One day I went to a Sox game,” he remembers, “and there were some radicals out there protesting, trying to form an organization called Save Our Sox, and before I knew it I was one of the radicals.”
Although he had always been interested in politics and sympathetic to liberal and progressive causes, Suwe had never been involved with a grassroots group like SOS before. As was true for many of the group’s members, he found this an issue that cut close to home. “You almost feel like, ‘Geez, is sports that important to me?’ And in a sense yes and no. It sort of struck to close to home.”
In his book, Bukowski writes of his first SOS meeting, in November 1986. Attendees were asked what had brought them to the organization. “One man stood up in a room full of strangers and said that whenever he got really depressed, he liked to drive by the ballpark; it made him feel good. No skyboxes or playoff tickets or official team products necessary, just a swing by the park.”
“I also looked at it as a political and social issue,” Bukowski says now, “like, we’re going to be using tax dollars to build a new stadium. Corporate welfare. If some other company… if I knew they were getting corporate welfare, would I get involved in an organization? Probably not. I’d be upset about it, but I probably wouldn’t get involved.
“Baseball and sports no longer mean what they once did,” continues Bukowski, with more than a hint of bitterness. “They’ve transformed themselves into a major entertainment industry, grossly amoral, which I find offensive. What I was doing, in retrospect, was objecting to that, trying to perpetuate sports as I had thought they existed during my childhood and youth.”
“I always felt like I was a part of it because it was my soul speaking out,” Aranza says. “It was taking away my youth, and I’m sure it was for other people. Taking away their touchstone, taking away their tradition. Like losing somebody—you know that some things maybe are inevitable, but it’s wrong the way it happened. Or you grieve, and you know you’ll always grieve, and I do.”
In their flyers, petitions, and public statements, SOS argued that the team could obtain any needed amenities by simply renovating the historic old park. “Should all of Chicago… be in the style of the Loop and suburban expressway corridor buildings, with windows that don’t open, 24-hour security guards, and steel-and-glass vertical ice cube trays?” read a glossy SOS pamphlet distributed in 1987. “Or is there a place for Comiskey Park, with its tubular railings and wooden seats and overhangs like the balconies of the long-lost neighborhoods of our youth?”
To that end they campaigned and petitioned, held public meetings and lobbied their legislators. At its peak the group was able to generate five thousand signatures on its petition to preserve the stadium, and some positive press coverage. But its core membership was never very large.
Bukowski thinks there are several reasons that there never was a massive outpouring of citywide support for the group and its cause. “The fan base for the White Sox tended to be blue-collar. And blue-collar America since the 1970s has taken it on the chin. People with mortgage concerns, job concerns, aren’t going to have the psychic capital to expend on stadium issues, no matter how much they love the ballpark. They’ve got bread and butter to worry about.” It also probably helped that the Chicago newspapers waged an all-out campaign to support a new stadium. In 1986 the Tribune editorialized: “The ailing mid-South Side needs the economic boost it will get if the rundown Comiskey Park is replaced with an attractive, multi-use stadium.” Without economic figures to back up its contention, the Tribune turned to more ephemeral claims: “The value of a professional sports team to an urban area is
difficult to measure in dollars and cents. The jobs and tax revenue generated may not look impressive in hard figures. But add in what the presence of the team contributes to the overall attraction of living in the area and visiting it, and it becomes immense.” That the neighborhood already had a renowned facility, one that with some renovation costing far fewer dollars could provide just that appeal, was ignored.
But, of course, some working-class Chicagoans did get involved with the campaign—united, more than anything, by a feeling that in losing the historic ballpark they were losing part of their collective memory.
Comiskey Park was built on what had been, in the 1880s, a public dump. Legend has it that infielder Luke Appling once tripped over something during a game in the 1930s. Play was stopped, and when the grounds crew went to investigate by raking the infield, they found he had stumbled over an old teapot coming up out of the dirt. Some fifty years later, John Aranza sneaked into the demolition site of his beloved stadium. “I went down in these deep trenches, which were way over my head, and on the sides of these trenches are layers of history, layers of earth. Bricks, wood, bottles. And I was just picking up things to verify what Comiskey was, even before it was built.” There’s still a note of wonder in his voice, almost ten years later. “I found an old saucepan, in a more shallow trench where they took out the left field wall.”
Though it was rusty, Aranza could see that the saucepan was a blue and white speckled pot—a leftover design from a bygone era. Familiar with the Appling tale, and so many other Comiskey Park legends, Aranza was overwhelmed by the history he had just uncovered. “And I thought to myself, my God, like Aladdin’s lamp I’m holding in my hands, just verifying a wonderful piece of baseball lore.”