by Neil deMause
4. In 2003 the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority granted the White Sox the right to sell the naming rights to the publicly owned building and use the proceeds for additional renovations to the structure. The telecommunications company U.S. Cellular committed $3.4 million a year to rename the building after itself, finally consigning even the Comiskey name to history. The redesigned stadium reopened the following April, with the highest upper-deck seats sliced off, and the addition of a small roof—which was supported, ironically, by view-obstructing columns.
8
Bad Neighbors
To speak logically about the effects of sports facilities on community development should be to speak as much about community as about development. —Chicago architect Philip Bess
The pride and the presence of a professional football team is far more important than thirty libraries. —Baltimore Ravens owner Art Modell
There were alternatives to new Comiskey. Hellmuth Obata Kassebaum, the architects contracted by the White Sox to build their new ballpark, may dominate new-stadium construction, but they can’t stop other would-be sports architects from proposing alternatives to HOK’s assembly-line blueprints. Detroit had its John and Judy Davids with their Cochrane Plan, which would have saved both public money and a national landmark. Chicago had Philip Bess.
Bess looked at the planned demolition of Comiskey Park and saw as much a challenge as a potential tragedy. If the White Sox owners were insistent in their demand for a new stadium, he reasoned, why not take the opportunity to see something positive and productive come out of their blackmailing of the city? An architect and teacher in Chicago, Bess set out to design a ballpark that would reverse the trend started in the 1960s of isolating sports facilities from their surrounding neighborhoods and would instead be truly urban—a facility that would provide an anchor for a neighborhood revitalization that served not just visiting sports fans, but local residents as well.
Especially since Baltimore’s Camden Yards was built with an eye to the ballparks of yesteryear, new “old-fashioned” ballparks have been in favor. These modern structures are meant to mimic the historic stadiums of baseball’s glory days—minus the old-fashioned ticket prices, of course, and equipped with luxury boxes and club seating. Sports commentators and journalists are quick to wax poetic about the new old-fashioned facilities, playing up their contemporary role in the romantic lure of baseball.
And truthfully, for many sports fans—baseball fans in particular—it is difficult to argue with the criticisms of the crop of “modern” circular stadiums that popped up across the country in the 1960s and ’70s. Those cement bowls weren’t very interesting aesthetically, and they weren’t particularly fan-friendly. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, and Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, along with their domed counterparts in Houston, Minneapolis, and Seattle, were built to hold as many people for as many sports as possible, with cheaply maintained AstroTurf replacing fresh grass, and bland circular seating charts that placed fans equally distant from football and baseball games.
Unlike football, basketball, or hockey, for which there are precise standards that vary not at all from facility to facility, so much of the baseball viewing experience is about the sights, smells, and sounds of the stadiums in which it is played. In their sterile uniformity, the new generation of baseball stadiums lost the intricately designed angles and crevices of the playing field and spectator seats that used to make no two stadiums alike (and wreak havoc on pitching records and batting averages).
Accepting the destruction of the magnificent Comiskey Park as a foregone conclusion, Bess began work on an alternative to the plan being presented by White Sox owners and the city. His proposed stadium, Armour Field, was designed—in size, cost, and community function—to more faithfully reflect the traditional ballparks of yesterday. Instead of mimicking Royals Stadium, the suburban stadium in Kansas City that White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf so desperately wanted to replicate, Armour Field was designed to anchor a revived network of public places and community businesses. Instead of throwing out years of evocative and responsive architecture, Armour Field would be a chance to, at a more modest cost, re-create what was so special about the feel and function of old urban baseball stadiums. “For thirty years,” Bess wrote in a description of his plan, “the solution to urban ballpark ills has been urban renewal and the suburban stadium—a dubious practice, analogous to prescribing chemotherapy for a broken leg.”
Back to Basics?
“If you’ve lived in Europe,” says Chicagoan Mary O’Connell, “you know that people try to save the best of the old. There’s not this endless thing of rip it down and build another, rip it down and build another. Some of the most beautiful and attractive parts of European cities are the older sections, where people have saved them and invested in them over time. And Americans go to Europe to see the buildings, to go drink in the pub that’s been there since the sixteenth century, or worship in the places where people have been worshipping for hundreds of years.”
In the United States, O’Connell and her fellow members of Save Our Sox soon found, historic landmarks are often torn down for the sake of progress. In the world of stadium architecture, and especially baseball stadiums, the irony goes a bit deeper. In the last ten years, both old and relatively new baseball or multiuse sports stadiums have been razed—in order to make room for more “old-fashioned” replacements. The architectural facades of urban baseball stadiums cherished for their convenient community locations, fan-friendly seating, and low-cost entertainment experience are being copied—even as the infrastructure of old neighborhoods that used to support them is being eroded or forever altered.
The baseball stadiums built in the first half of the twentieth century were built right in bustling urban neighborhoods—lively communities like Brooklyn’s Flatbush, Chicago’s South Side, and Boston’s Kenmore Square. They were places families could walk to on summer afternoons, places businessmen could get to by taking public transportation, places kids could sneak into on a Sunday afternoon.
“The older ones were not only located in a network of streets and blocks, but they were constrained by the existing network of streets and blocks,” Bess points out. “When you go to Fenway Park or Wrigley Field, the parks are literally kind of shoehorned into the block in such a way to maximize seating capacity within a finite site. And one of the consequences of that is that you get these sort of odd, idiosyncratic kinds of playing-field configurations, like the Green Monster in Fenway, and like the wells in left field, the higher center-field bleachers, that you find in Wrigley. And those are a direct consequence of the site constraints.”
Those idiosyncratic constraints, combined with individuality in design, gave each old ballpark a unique character and feel. Ebbets Field was located in a bustling Brooklyn community of homes and businesses, with a DeSoto car dealership and a gas station behind its famous right-field wall. Built into an already established neighborhood, it had a center-field wall that was a mere 384 feet from home plate—and that served as a constant advertisement for Schaefer beer (the “h” in the word “Schaefer” lit up for hits, the “e” for errors). The Polo Grounds in Manhattan, with center-field bleachers once called “the cigar boxes” for the Irish immigrant fans who crowded in them, had an outfield wall a staggering 505 feet from home.
Like grand old theater houses or performance halls, these historic stadiums each had a unique character and feel that was as much a part of the baseball experience as the game itself. Seeing Luciano Pavarotti at Carnegie Hall, after all, is not the same as seeing him at Tanglewood. There’s a different experience of Bob Dylan at Woodstock than at the Village Vanguard. And certainly seeing Shakespeare performed at the Globe Theater in England has a different feel to it, different sensory and auditory and emotional components, than hearing the same lines performed by the same actors at the local YMCA.
Team owners, meanwhile, latch on to the trend of “old-time” urban ballparks p
redominantly for the sake of increased profits. Luxury boxes, concessions revenues, and naming rights are their holy grails, after all, and when these revenue producers come into conflict with the requirements of an “old-time” ballpark, modern conveniences win the day.
Can’t Tell the Players without a Telescope
Part of the reason, to be sure, has to do with upgraded standards of comfort and the relentless search for new sources of revenue. In the old steel ballparks such as Ebbets Field, the seating capacity was low, often thirty thousand or fewer, and the seats were narrower, with less legroom. Modern ballparks required many more seats and more-spacious accommodations—especially for the high-paying patrons who would be the new stadiums’ most lucrative asset. “You put in club seats, those have even more legroom and wider seats than normal for today,” architect and stadium historian John Pastier explains. “And they usually have to be in a discrete location, which means a deck of their own, and that starts pushing the upper deck away. Then you have all these suites that nobody ever thought of before, and they take up a bunch of space.”
The result: In the typical new ballpark, additional layers—in the case of Jacobs Field in Cleveland, as many as three—of luxury suites and club seats are inserted, raising the upper deck skyward. Because support columns, which allow decks to be stacked more closely at the expense of a few obstructed-view seats, are anathema to modern stadium designers, the upper deck must be set further back from the field—and because a higher deck must be more steeply angled at the same distance from the field, they are moved back still further.
Consequently, as frustrated fans have observed and researchers like Pastier have verified, most fans in the new ballparks are much farther from the action than they were in traditional ballparks. The back row of the upper deck in old Comiskey Park, with columns and no luxury levels, was closer to the field than is the first row of new Comiskey’s upper deck, which sits atop a wall of glassed-in suites. Old Comiskey was 75 feet high; new Comiskey soars 146 feet above the streets of the South Side.
The same is true in modern stadiums across North America. In upper-deck seats in SkyDome in Toronto, fans can’t even see large portions of the playing field. Even the sterile ’60s stadiums score better on Pastier’s scale than do popularly praised new “old-time” ballparks like Jacobs Field and The Ballpark at Arlington in Texas; in exchange for steel and brick and quirky angles, fans had unwittingly subjected themselves to some of the worst seats in sports history.1
Moving the upper decks up and away from the field has another important side benefit to team owners: It dramatically increases the stadium’s volume. “Behind and under the seats, all that space has been growing astronomically,” notes Pastier. “There’s more space for people to move around; there’s much more space for selling them things.”
“If I say ‘Municipal Stadium,’” says Bess, invoking the name of Cleveland’s recently demolished ballpark, “what would be some of the adjectives that come to mind? Cavernous. Well, cavernous Municipal Stadium, which seated seventy-eight thousand, is almost equal in its footprint [the acreage taken up by an architectural project] to Jacobs Field, which seats forty-two thousand. The seats in the upper deck at Municipal, even with that upper deck of seats that goes way back, are closer than they are at Jacobs.”
All that extra space has significantly added to the bloated costs of current stadiums—and not just because of the extra land and construction costs inherent in a larger stadium. “In the new Comiskey Park,” Bess explains, “the kinds of things they wanted in the building that are ancillary to the stadium—the dugouts and the lockers and stuff like that—did not fill up all that horizontal space that was created because of the design. In other words, there was a lot of extra space that was created in the new Comiskey Park that was not programmed, and not finished.”
When that same design was mimicked in later stadium projects by HOK, the leftover space was filled with such costly extras as enormous and expensive workout rooms for players. Once the land was procured, says Bess, there was little excuse not to fill the space, even though it added still further to construction costs. “All of this is a consequence of literally a lack of physical constraint on where you build ballparks,” Bess says, “and on how you build them.”
This tremendous increase in sheer bulk—the typical new stadium of today has double the footprint of an older ballpark—is one reason that construction costs have soared in recent years, from as low as $25 million in the late 1960s to $300 million and up today. Even if you were to completely re-create the few remaining old-time stadiums, and even adding luxury boxes as an economically necessary modern amenity, Bess and others believe cities could save a huge amount of money just by following those same historic space constraints. “If you were to build Wrigley from scratch,” says Bess, “it would cost between $70 and $80 million.”
“Unless you have a client that is passionately committed to building a good ballpark, you’re not gonna get a good ballpark,” says Pastier. In his estimate, of the first five baseball stadiums opened after 1991, Camden Yards is the clear winner. The Orioles, he explains, were willing to make some tradeoffs. “They combined the suites and the club seats. That helped reduce the height of the thing.” At Pastier’s suggestion, they cut down on the number of rows in the upper deck—“one way to get the worst seat in the house closer to the field is by removing it”—and made up the seating by extending the grandstand further into left field, which, he says, “was an improvement, anyway. The old parks tended to have one full upper deck in the outfield, if not two. That helps enclose the space and just creates a much better feeling.” Camden Yards also features slightly tighter legroom than some other ballparks, further shrinking the depth of the grandstand.
Still, the discrepancy is not that great, and the view from the last row of Camden Yards is more like watching a game from a helicopter than like sitting in an older park like Tiger Stadium, or even Memorial Stadium, which the Orioles abandoned for Camden Yards. “You put kids up there where they can’t see,” argues Chicago writer Doug Bukowski, “they get bored. And you don’t make them baseball fans. Which means when they become adults, they don’t want to go. Which means, in the long run, baseball, by pursuing these types of new stadiums, is only eroding its fan base.”
Courting Food
Another area where the character and community feel of old-time stadiums is being eroded by today’s sanitized monoliths is in food services. Any self-respecting 1990s stadium features a huge food court—oftentimes a “foods of the world” hodgepodge where fans are encouraged to buy German sausages, Tex-Mex tacos, and a wide array of international beers. Modern food facilities can ring up millions of dollars a year in added revenues for a team. Boston’s Fenway Park has had its own equivalent for years with its tiny outdoor vendors who crowd together outside the stadium’s venerable gates, selling everything from hot meats and drinks to touristy T-shirts. And yet Fenway’s homespun marketplace came under fire by team officials, who lamented the state of the antique park for several years as the first part of a drive to tear it down.
Fenway Park, with its renowned Green Monster outfield wall and brick-and-steel single-deck grandstand, has drawn comparisons to cathedrals along with nightly sellout crowds. But, hemmed in by streets on all sides, it had few luxury boxes, little room for increased seating—and no space for expansive concessions areas or lush kitchen facilities.
Entrepreneurship, abhorring a vacuum, has provided where the Red Sox cannot. “Have you been to Fenway?” asks Pastier. “You’ve seen that thing along Landsdowne [Street, adjacent to the outfield wall] where Mama Mia has her homemade ziti and clam sauce on a little propane heater, right? And somebody else is making funnel cakes right before your eyes, and somebody else has jerk chicken from the Caribbean. I mean, that’s the most wonderful thing that you’ll find outside of any ballpark, and it makes the Red Sox crazy. That’s one reason they want to be out of Fenway Park, because they see dollar signs evaporating before t
heir eyes.”
“It gets really comical,” Pastier says. “These guys are supposed to be capitalists, and for the free market, but that’s the last thing they want! They want to have a monopoly. The free market exists right outside of Fenway Park, and goddamn it, this is one time they’re right: The free market is wonderful. Because it’s a true free market, it’s individual entrepreneurs doing their thing, and therefore providing variety and choice, at not huge cost.”2
For all the sense of variety, for all the attempts to re-create the spice of life that modern stadiums do in their multiethnic food courts, they are often all run by one snacks provider, usually one of the few big companies that dominate food courts in the entertainment scene. And for the exclusive right to sell in the modern sports palaces, those companies hand over a big share of their profits to team owners. In stadium design, as in every other aspect of professional sports ownership, profit is, and has always been, the bottom line. If artificially re-creating a sense of neighborhood helps in the process, then so be it. Oriole Park at Camden Yards features an outdoor walkway lined with souvenir shops and fast-food outlets—but within the stadium gates, for paying fans only and earning revenue for the team with every purchase. Jacobs Field features a private restaurant and an enormous team apparel shop that doubles as a history museum for the team. In the walkway between Jacobs Field and Gund Arena in downtown Cleveland, a lovely mosaic memorial has been installed. It honors, of all things, the once-thriving urban market that was destroyed to make room for the new sports facilities.
When the Seattle Mariners’ owners had to pick a location for their new stadium, notes Pastier, they had several sites to choose from, at varying distances from a popular shopping district. The team chose the most isolated location. “They’ll certainly get more of the food and the drink and the souvenir sales,” he says. “Once you go to the ballpark, you’re so far away from those established businesses, you’re much more likely to buy those things at the park itself. It’s a captive audience situation.” This, according to Pastier, is why the White Sox moated the new Comiskey with a hundred acres of parking, and why the Milwaukee Brewers refused to build their new ballpark downtown: Convenient access, it turns out, is less important than a captive audience for four-dollar hot dogs and five-dollar beers.