TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Everything New is Old Again

Today the Yankees announced plans for New New Yankee Stadium, to be built right across the street from the current House that Ruth Built. The Yanks are mostly paying for it themselves, with the City kicking in the usual hidden taxpayer subsidies in the form of "infrastructure" improvements. The rest of the site is supposed to be developed as a recreation complex, after a due amount of eminent domain has been exercised.

This week the Mets also announced a new stadium, this one to be a sort of reverse Turner field: they're building it as part of the Olympics bid, and the Mets get to play in it in the meantime until it's needed and then again afterwards in an expanded Olympics configuration. (Turner Field was built as the Olympic Stadium for the 1996 Olympics and then sort of cut-down to baseball size, although it still has that oval multi-purpose stadium feel to it at ground level, at least it's more of a Ball Park than, say, the Big O , speaking of a stadium built for the Olympics. Did you know that Cleveland's old Municipal Stadium was also originally intended as an Olympic Stadium? And that the blueprints were adapted by the company that built it to become RFK Stadium, the original Multipurpose 1960s oval, and also with the idea that an Olympics might be hosted there? Now you do.) So, basically, it's the same kind of site plan as for the Yanks, but the Mets have to work around the Olympics bid while the Yankees work around exactly how many luxury suites they want. Pity the Mets once again, once again having the spotlight stolen from them by the Yanks. The Mets' new park (unlikely to be called Shea Stadium II, methinks) is also basically on the same site.

Few will likely lament the passing of Shea Stadium (itself built on the site of the 1939-40 and 1964-65 World's Fairs, more or less). I've seen games there in three different decades, and other than an increasing sense of shabbiness, the character of the place did not change from my initial impression of awkwardness. It was big, set away from the playing field, yet the upper deck is still steep and inconveniently far from anything else in the park. The Jets long since departed for New Jersey, and its very essence became sort of Multipurposeless.

However, the Yankees President, Randy Levine, described Yankee Stadium as "the Cathedral of baseball" at the news announcement that foretold its demolition. What a faithless crew they must be in the Bronx if they're willing to demolish their cathedral. Purists may note that it's not really the same stadium that Ruth built after the 1973 renovations, but it's not like Wrigley Field and Fenway haven't had their fair share of renovations. Neither is there a preservationist effort to preserve the old park, as failed with old Comiskey Park in Chicago and succeeded with Fenway Park in Boston. Fenway's preservation group even included a number of residents rather disinterested in baseball per se, but just concerned about a landmark being tossed aside in the name of incremental profit upon profit.

Here's the dirty secret about Yankee Stadium: it's a lousy place to watch a ballgame. I may be lynched by the Bronx Cheering section, but over the years I've never really enjoyed a game at Yankee Stadium. The seating areas are awkward nearly everywhere in the park, and as the Boss has noted time and again, concessions, bathrooms, and the flow of traffic are not up to modern standards. Maybe it's because I'm not a Yankees fan, but the architecture struck me as being more akin to a college bowl of the 1920s than a baseball stadium. The spot isn't scenic, and nowhere do you get a sense of the greater New York area, unless your mistaken idea of the greater New York area is squalor.

The original Yankee Stadium was itself a model of sorts for a trend in ballpark construction, one shortened in a big way by the depression and only picked up again in the multiuse movement of the 1960s in a modernized and degenerated form. It was intended to expand the size and scale of the baseball spectacle to match the Ruthian proportions of, well, Ruth. The Yanks had played at Hilltop Park and the Old Polo Grounds, idiosyncratic ballparks of the era just before Fenway and Wrigley. (These latter two parks were the ultimate parks of the first generation of "permanent" structures, built of brick and steel, which supplanted the earlier mostly wooden parks of the early professional decades). The interior dimensions were nearly literally built for Ruth: 296 to right field and 461 feet in left center. Unlike Hilltop Park, the arena turned its back on the site, even though the Harlem River (and the Polo Grounds, which for years had a veiew of Yankee Stadium out Center Field) lurked behind home plate and the Manhattan skyline off the foul line, forever blocked out of view by the layout. It was the ultimate enclosure of a sport that had started out on town commons and fallow fields, a gesture of control, enormous scale, and the final exclusion of the standers, knothole gang, and rooftop gapers. Its original charms, such as they are to the modern eye, were largely knocked out by the '73 renovation.

I said that Yankee Stadium was a sort of model for an aborted era in ballpark construction; the only other park actually built on its heels was the simply enormous Cleveland Municipal Stadium, which had a seating capacity of over 80,000 and had an outfield you could have fit all of old League Park into. This was the dawn of urban planning in America, at least in its 20th century form, and while Yankee Stadium was a private project of the club, Cleveland's stadium was the first publically-built stadium. It was a Big Project in the era of "modernity" and constructivism, and as a civic venue it was compared (favorably) to the Roman Colisseum as a potential centerpiece of civic life. Bigger was obviously better to the planners of the time. Similar constructions were planned for a half dozen other cities in the 1920s, all of them except Cleveland's Stadium derailed by the depression. (LA's Coliseum was in fact built for the 1932 Olympics, and later used for baseball, but the idea of using it to attract a major league team in the 1930s was more of an afterthought that had little to do with the ballpark planning).

There is a direct line to the atrocities of the 1960s: RFK, Busch, Three Rivers, Veteran's Stadium, Riverfront Stadium, the Astrodome, and their bedomed companions of the 1970s, the Kingdome, Stade Olympique, and the Metrodome. The builder of Cleveland Stadium was the firm Osborn Engineering, which made RFK as part of one of those benighted urban planning projects that sullied the architecture 1950s and 60s. RFK added a touch of Eero Saarinen (architect of the St. Louis Arch and Dulles Airport, among other iconic buildings of the Planning era) which became even more regularized and homogenized with each subsequent round multipurpose astroturfed abomination. The idea of Yankee Stadium was to raise the scale of the public venue to a depersonalized level, where the individual was absorbed by the idea of the crowd. The later large-scale stadia sought to take this one step further, and smooth out both the irregular corners of baseball and the corners of the city block to make a rationalized, artificially-evened out venue that also followed rationalist and prescriptivist economic models for how they would operate. Needless to say, in addition to being bad places to view games, every last one of these parks was an economic disaster zone. Montreal and Pittsburgh are still paying for their parks. Yankee Stadium, as the bridge to this era from the old personal, small-scale ballparks of the Fenway-Wrigley era, has ended up having most of the negative characteristics of both types. Despite Randy Levine's crowing about Yankee Stadium's iconic status, it's mostly because of what happened in the park and not the park itself that there are strong feelings for the place. And if the Yankees are willing to tear it down, it can't be that much of a landmark.

So, as far as I know, there's no outraged group of Yankee fans threatening to abandon the team. In terms of architecture as well as site design, the new Yankee Stadium resembles the plans for the worst of the "new" ballparks, Comiskey II, aka Cingular Wireless field (or something, I can't keep up with telecom mergers.) Like Comiskey II, it's being built with the kind of shape that is rather colorless -- in fact, it's going to basically be a reproduction, on the outside, of Yankee Stadium I. They are doing more intelligent things with the decks and sight lines than mere mimickry would suggest, but if you look at the artist's renderings, the new decks look a lot like...Shea, RFK, Comiskey II, and so forth in their original "architect's renderings' during the design phase. I contrast this with the exciting look of Camden Yards and a few of the best new parks (SBC/Pac Bell and PNC Park, Jacobs Field to a lesser extent) that leapt out of the first drawings released during the planning phases of those parks.

I can't be too cranky, since the Yanks are at least putting up the bulk of the financing, and they have a right, therefore, to built what they want (unlike Comiskey II, which was built on the public's dime and set up the model for the municipal extortion racket that MLB's been playing for the past decade and a half.) As with picking your GMs, you don't necessarily get what you pay for.

With the new St. Louis ballpark nearing completion, and assuming the planned DC park gets built for the Nationals under the as yet unannounced new ownership group, this means the only other ballpark built before the 1960s other than Wrigley and Fenway will be Dodger Stadium. Anaheim's stadium (whatever it's called these days), which opened in 1966 and has had a bunch of makeovers since. The A's still play in the whatever the Coliseum is called these days; it opened in the multiuse mode to baseball in 1968. Kauffman Stadium in KC, which has always been a pleasant place to watch a game if getting rather tired with respect to amenities and creature comforts, is next on the list, built in 1973. We then move somewhat shockingly to the worst of the worst: The HHH Metrodome in Minneapolis, opened in 1982; Joe Robbie / Pro Player in Miami, opened in 1987 for football; and the OJ Dome (Tropicana "Field") in St. Pete, built to try to lure those White Sox away from dilapidated but loveable old Comiskey.

Baseball's respect for its own architectural history, and its ability to make grand plans about complexes, is a mixed bag at best. I hope the new ballparks in New York will break the overall trend, to be sure, but I'm not wildly optimistic. There are no Cathedrals to Baseball in New York, and there probably won't be five years hence.

posted by The Crank 7:35 PM