by Neil deMause
When more-suburban, sprawling stadiums seemed the better route to go, owners were all for them. But sometime in the design period of the new Comiskey Park, and before plans for Camden Yards were finalized, the trend in architecture, urban planning, and mall construction toward paying superficial homage to the America of yesteryear took center stage.
Nowhere was this more true than for HOK and the other leading stadium architects. “Right now there’s a kind of mutually beneficial relationship between baseball owners and the architecture firms out of Kansas City and Seattle that do most of these jobs,” Bess says. “The team owners say it has to be this way because the architects say it has to be this way; the architects say it has to be this way because the team owners tell us it has to be this way. That’s sort of another major unrecognized scandal of the business. The corporate architects, the stadium architects, market their services to the tenants of these facilities rather than to the clients—that is to say, the people who pay for them.”
What owners and architects alike missed along the way, however, was that it wasn’t just their old-fashioned use of bricks or steel that made historic ballparks so popular and successful—it was their successful integration with the urban neighborhoods in which they were built. Indeed, though the similarities between the current crop of faux old stadiums and their historic counterparts are often emphasized by team owners and their media cohorts, it is their differences that are worth paying attention to. For it is the ways in which a Coors Field is dramatically different from, for example, a Fenway Park that tell us so much about the ways in which the increasing appetite for profits from owners and others shapes decisions about the games we play, the architecture we love, the way we are entertained. And this, finally, has as much to do with the changing face and function of the American city as it does with our favorite summer game.
Bad Neighbor Policy
Although Bess’s plan would have also required the displacement of some residents—far fewer than the scores who lost their homes on behalf of the new Comiskey—part of the stadium design included the construction of new residences in previously vacant lots for those individuals who lost their homes. Far from being surrounded by parking lots, as the new Comiskey now is, Bess’s proposed stadium would have been directly adjacent to a relocated city park (which would have stood on the grounds of the old stadium and even incorporated its old infield). It may have been this attempt at using the ballpark as a centerpiece of its surrounding neighborhoods that ultimately spelled Armour Park’s doom because in racially stratified Chicago, not everyone wanted to bring people together. The proposed stadium and adjacent public park were seen by some as a positive way of linking overwhelmingly white Bridgeport and predominantly black South Armour Square. Because access to the park would have been from South Armour Square, what had been a mostly white recreational area would have become an integrated public space, and the neighborhood of Bridgeport would have lost a buffer between it and its black neighbors.
“My argument has always been that you can generate the kinds of revenues that are needed in today’s sports economy with facilities that both are less expensive to build and put fans closer to the action,” says Bess. “And so in that sense, with respect to stadium design I’m more of a reformer than I am a revolutionary, because I’m not questioning entirely the premises of the existence of professional baseball. But I do think that where it becomes scandalous is when public moneys are supporting the industry to the extent that they do. And that there could be a lot less public expense involved that could result in better stadiums that still make teams the money that they need. It just wouldn’t be squeezing every last little drop out of the lemon.”
For Bess, the North Side Chicago neighborhood where Wrigley Field is located is a prime example of how stadiums and urban communities can interact—and an example of an increasingly rare successful city neighborhood. “There’s eighty-one baseball games a year there, and it certainly is a national draw; people all over the world come to go to Wrigley Field, to that neighborhood,” Bess explains. “But the neighborhood functions quite well the other 280 days of the year when there’s not a game there. Within a five-minute walk from the pitcher’s mound at Wrigley Field, you’ve got businesses, restaurants, schools, churches, convents, public transportation.”
Those details are not unimportant to Bess and others concerned about urban life. He notes, “There’s a whole city and the life that goes on there. There’s a daily life to the neighborhood that exists independently of the ballpark. The ballpark enhances, and vice versa, but the notion of the city is the notion of a place where people live and work and hang out all the time.”
In successful instances like Wrigley Field, the baseball stadium is not the be-all and end-all of a neighborhood’s existence. In the new old-time ballparks of the 1990s, such communities do not necessarily exist. And being a part of such urban neighborhoods is not what the new stadiums are about. They are attractions to go to, for people to get in their cars in the suburbs and spend a day at, before returning home. “Stadium construction is part of the same phenomenon as interest in casinos, interest in amusement parks,” says Bess. “What’s happened is that the 1990s city is implicitly being understood as an entertainment zone. And stadiums are part of this entertainment zone.” Thus, says Bess, “to some extent all of the major corporate stadium architects market their services as providing entertainment. The assumption is that the city ought to be an entertainment zone because that’s all it can be these days, because nobody really wants to live in the city. Whereas what I’m interested in is making the city better, understood in a traditional kind of way, where people actually live there as well as are entertained there.
“I certainly don’t mind suburbanites coming in to go to baseball games,” Bess continues. “Some of my best friends live in the suburbs. And I even understand political officials who are fairly desperate to keep revenues in the city. I certainly appreciate that dilemma. But I’m concerned about the way in which professional baseball, and stadium architects, are perpetuating this trend, the consequence of which is to reduce the notion of urban life to entertainment.”
For Whom the Ball Wrecks
The problem, of course, is more than just a philosophical treatise on the purpose of cities. Not everyone has fled for the suburbs, and for those left behind—historically, minority, working-class, and poor people—sparkling new sports stadiums and arenas represent both a luxurious form of entertainment and an appalling misuse of increasingly rare public funds. And, adding egregious insult to injury, in city after city, the new sports facilities are often funded by regressive taxes—by flat levies on consumer items that never take into account the consumer’s economic status. Those most needing scarce urban funds to be directed toward improved schools, infrastructure, job opportunities, and the like are also footing a disproportionately high percentage of the construction bill. Those taxed the heaviest are the same abandoned urban residents least likely to be able to afford to go to the new stadiums. As Pastier points out, the proportion of cheap seats has steadily dwindled in the newer stadiums, with larger and larger sections reserved for club seats and other high-priced seating.
Bess’s notion of the neighborhood ballpark also runs against the grain of urban-development policy, which is increasingly concerned not with holding together communities but with creating high-activity “entertainment zones” that draw suburbanites and tourists back within the city limits. Starting in the 1960s, many cities began devoting an increasing amount of dwindling public resources to construction projects geared toward downtown development and the white-collar market. Instead of putting money into housing or schools, cities looking for economic turnaround cast their eyes on ways to draw pocketbooks downtown: first with hotels, corporate headquarters, and the like; then, as the decades passed, they moved on to malls, museums, casinos, and other kinds of entertainment centers. The trend stretched late into the 1990s, in which the search for financial turnaround via downtown enter
tainment-based projects became the norm—in everything from hosting the Olympics in Atlanta to building a costly new arts center in Newark, New Jersey. Perhaps most pertinent for boosters of new-stadium projects was the advent of downtown open-air malls (and sometimes fancy indoor ones as well), designed to imitate the historic districts, which they had in many cases wiped out, while bringing in tourists and suburbanites with the promise of familiar shopping experiences.
In packaging urban history as a way of increasing consumer consumption, the faux old-time stadiums have much in common with the waterfront construction projects designed by developer James Rouse in the 1980s. Beginning with the overwhelming success of Faneuil Hall in Boston, Rouse went on to build the immensely popular Harborplace in Baltimore and the reconstructed South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan. Each of these projects re-creates a historic look—from cobblestone paths to historically designed storefronts and antique-looking signs—in order to reinvent the mall as an authentic walk down memory lane. That practically the only thing distinguishing one city’s “historic” attraction from another’s is the food selection at the chain restaurants within—crab cakes in Baltimore, chowder in Boston—and the city name on the Hard Rock Café T-shirts has not diminished these attractions’ popularity.
M. Christine Boyer, a professor of architecture and urbanism at Princeton, points to the faux villages of Disneyland as the first blow for the “historic-marketplace tableau” that has proven so popular in urban centers. No matter where the Disneyland guest travels in the park, she points out, all roads lead back to Main Street USA and its stretch of souvenir stores. Thus, Boyer writes, “Disneyland is quintessentially a landscape for consumption, not for leisure. In just this manner, South Street Seaport is above all a marketplace, the stage for a particular kind of experience—that of pure desire, where the buyer imagines a fantastical world, which the possession of a certain object seems to promise.”
Sites such as Rouse’s South Street Seaport are “laden with historical allusions to the traditional vision of the city,” writes Boyer, even as they end up contributing to the destruction of the modern American city in its most familiar form. “New York is no longer a city concerned with such high-Modernist aspirations as providing a broad range of housing, efficient public transportation, or leisure and work spaces for the masses.”
These “historic” shopping malls have replaced schools, libraries, and parks as the focus of municipal spending in nearly every American city. Now planners and developers use huge quantities of time, public money, and public space—and receive huge amounts of positive publicity—for new historic storefronts and new historic stadiums. The city itself has increasingly become an entertainment–consumption zone—one that aggressively milks nostalgic images of what the city should be in order to create an unprecedented consumer-based culture. In order to produce the spaces—physical, social, and economic—for such nostalgic projects, actual historic buildings and zones are simply destroyed.
The creation of a forced consumer nostalgia for an artificial past may have reached new levels of absurdity in central Florida, where the Walt Disney Company has opened a new town: Celebration, Florida. Although it has no actual history besides its swampland origins, in the promotional push for the development, Celebration was billed as a “traditional” American town with a not-quite-real grand old history. As Russ Rymer wrote in his compelling look at Celebration in Harper’s magazine, “What Celebration was promising was the restoration of the aesthetic and communal values of pre–World War II America. The town rising out of the palmetto swamp would be the Experimental Prototype Community of Yesterday.”
From the inherent consumerism of Rouse’s harbor projects and HOK’s new-old stadiums comes the next step in the marketing of history and the blending of community with theme park. The town of Celebration, with its combination of six-figure homes and $600-a-month apartments, white picket fences and spacious walkways, is designed to trigger a nostalgia for an idealized American city that never was. There was even early talk at Disney that the town should have an invented history to provide it with “roots.” As Rymer wrote: “What Celebration celebrates, oddly, is an American community that existed precisely in that time before corporations made it their business to build communities—an era before neighborhoods became subdivisions and business districts became malls and culture in all its sources and manifestations became supplanted by the cathode-ray tube and the theme park.”
Changing Neighborhoods
It is impossible to watch a broadcast of a game from Camden Yards, or Jacobs Field, or Coors Field in Denver and not hear constant references to those glittering new stadiums as examples of architectural magic. (TV journalists seldom interview fans about the vast distance from their seats to the playing field.) More important, the facilities are repeatedly referred to as major components in their respective downtowns’ “renaissance.” And certainly, if the number of increased downtown buildings or the pedestrian traffic on game days or at attractive new bars is an indication, those cities have gone through urban renaissances. The problem is, when discussing a downtown revitalization and renaissance, no one ever mentions (or touches base with) the vast majority of working-class and poor residents of those same cities. (A glaring omission but a not uncommon one. Maybe that has always been true of renaissances. It seems unlikely, after all, that fourteenth-century peasants in Florence spent much time admiring art.)
What has happened to these former industrial giants, at the same time that their glittering new stadiums have helped make them official renaissance towns?
Bill Marker wonders just this as he visits one of Camden Yards’ less fashionable neighboring areas, an old district known as Pigtown. He is mulling over some other uses to which the state of Maryland could have put its $400 million in lottery money instead of new twin stadiums for the Orioles and Ravens.
“When I worked representing parents and sometimes children in abuse and neglect cases, if you were losing your kids because of your drug use, we could get you into some sort of program,” Marker says. “But if you’re just generally out on the street and you say, yes, I’ve got a drug problem and I’m ready to deal with it, you should live long enough until there’s a spot for you. And there’s nothing more important than that. Not only in terms of the drug treatment, but guess what? If you had enough drug spots available, there’d be a lot of $15,000-a-year jobs for ex-junkies.”
The impact on U.S. cities—particularly those unfortunate enough to have been long centered on manufacturing and heavy industry—of decades of corporate pullouts, tax abatements, and redirection of public dollars into enormous consumer centers has been devastating. Expensive new stadiums, waterside malls, and development projects—the cornerstones of many an urban renaissance—have received massive public contributions. They’ve meant considerable public sacrifice in the form of gobbling up costly land without paying property taxes, taking over what were once true public spaces, and refocusing urban priorities.3
Community groups have challenged these spending priorities in city after city. In testifying against spending public money on a new ballpark for the Minnesota Twins, Minneapolis Federal Reserve vice-president Arthur Rolnick recalls, “I said, let’s have a referendum on it, because if you’re going to give this money to sports teams, it means you’re not giving it to the schools, and you’re not giving it to fighting crime or cleaning up your parks and your roads. And I suspect when you rank these things, the public would rank [stadiums] much lower, but I said have a referendum. Now of course they didn’t want to do that, because they didn’t want to hear what the public had to say. They were pretty sure the public was going to vote against something like the Twins or the Timberwolves—they didn’t have much support.” In fact, a poll by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in January 1997 found that if given a choice of how to divide their tax money, citizens would spend it quite differently than would stadium boosters: 44 percent for education, 29 percent for crime prevention, 13 percent for transport
ation, and 8 percent for the arts; a stadium ranked dead last, at 6 percent.
Crumbling schools, staggering African American infant mortality, and lingering unemployment are the undiscussed realities behind Cleveland’s stadium-enhanced renaissance. “The result is what has been termed the dual city,” writes Cleveland State University professor Dennis Keating, “in which downtown areas can thrive, and the white-collar sector mostly employing white suburban commuters can grow, whereas poor neighborhoods and their working-class and poor residents, especially blacks and Hispanics, do not share in this growth and must cope with high rates of poverty, unemployment, and other social problems.” Jacobs Field and Gund Arena were built with public money and their tenants given significant tax abatements on the property they were built on. In the state of Ohio, property tax goes to public education, so the progress for wealthy owners is linked to further education cuts. Using numbers from the Cuyahoga County Auditor, the Cleveland Teachers Union charges that city schools lost more than $3.5 million in 1995 alone on tax abatements granted to Jacobs Field and Gund Arena.
When it comes to the $450 million Gateway complex, Cleveland teacher Michael Charney was more outraged by the choice of funding recipient than by the tax-abatement loss of dollars that the Cleveland schools so desperately needed. “The political corporate forces went for an increase in taxes on beer and wine and cigarettes,” Charney points out, “and decided that the most appropriate use of those taxes was for a stadium complex—rather than for either dealing with social service problems or dealing directly with the capital problem of the Cleveland public schools falling apart physically.”