”If it hadn`t been for the people above me who thought I could execute their dream, and the people around me who said, `Let`s do our best to make it happen,` I wouldn`t have been able to help accomplish what we did.”
Of course, if Janet Marie Smith hadn`t been a diehard baseball fan and passionate urban designer, with a generous dose of nerve tossed in, she wouldn`t be in Baltimore these days as major-league baseball`s newest facility opens.
”The scariest part about constructing one,” she said of ballpark design during an interview in her office, ”is that you don`t know how it`ll play until you get in there.” Monday, when the American League Orioles play their season opener against the Cleveland Indians in the 48,003-seat Oriole Park at Camden Yards, in the redeveloped heart of this port city, everyone will find out.
Smith, 34, an outspoken advocate of urban living, is a self-effacing woman whose manner and drawl evince her roots in Jackson, Miss. A veteran of urban projects in New York (Battery Park City) and Los Angeles (Pershing Square), she was appointed vice president of planning and development three years ago by the Orioles` owner/chairman Eli Jacobs and president Larry Lucchino to oversee the design aspect of their field of dreams.
Jacobs yearned for an old-fashioned, urban ballpark that called up memories of the Wrigleys and Comiskeys of baseball-diamond history, rather than today`s domes and open-air, cookie-cutter, multipurpose monoliths with their expressway accesses.
That called for someone to translate the idea into what Smith termed
”things that can be quantified.” For example, the old parks were asymetrical.
”They all sat parallel to the street,” she explained, displaying photos of old ballparks. ”They were built of steel and had masonry facades. The rhythm and the geometry of the exterior of the building gave it a civic imagery. Those are all quantifiable things.”
Smith is one of several women who have played central roles in this collaboration in traditionally male preserves-sports stadium design and construction.
Kay Lantrip, stadium project manager for the George Hyman Construction Co., Bethesda, Md., is a 12-year veteran of the firm. Colleen Cullen, an architect with New York-based Lehrer, McGovern and Bobis, is construction project manager in charge of creating the concession areas plus lounges and private clubs in an adjoining red-brick warehouse that was incorporated into the ballpark`s design.
Kim McCalla is assistant project manager for the Maryland Stadium Authority, owners of the property, which has leased the new facility to the team for 15 years. And Helen Maib is the on-site representative for the Kansas City-based architectural firm of Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum.
Smith is the point person for the team.
”I speak for the Orioles,” she said matter-of-factly. But she declined to give an example of a particular idea of hers that has been incorporated into the project, viewing it as a collaborative effort. She did acknowledge that her input has been part of the decision-making process on a range of items, from the orientation of the seats to the ticketing system to the ballpark itself.
The new facility, for example, features open archways in the rear of the lower deck, a tribute, Smith says, to the Chicago White Sox`s old Comiskey Park. And with its turn-of-the-century logo on everything from clocks to souvenirs, it tips its cap to Wrigley Field`s famed entrance sign.
Smith came recommended to Jacobs and Lucchino in a letter-her own.
”I was living in Los Angeles and had to give a speech in Philadelphia,” she said. ”I decided to see the Orioles play on their home field-that`s the baseball fan in me.”
She decided to take the train from Baltimore to Philadelphia-roughly the distance from Chicago to Milwaukee-because she likes underdogs and the Orioles were having a tough season.
During the course of the game she missed a play that she wanted to record on her scorecard. She asked some nearby fans for play information and that led to a conversation: ”They told me the club was building a new ball park downtown. I just thought, `Way to go!”`
A few months later she was finishing her job on the West Coast and looking for a new venture.
”I thought, `That ballpark would be a great thing to work on. They probably don`t have anybody managing it.` I`m not an architect with a capital A, but I guess I`d like to think I know something about good urban and graphic design and architecture-the whole gamut. What I really do is manage a project.”
She wrote to Lucchino, describing her background and experience. By design, though, she didn`t ask him if he needed someone.
”I wrote, `You need someone.` There`s an important distinction.”
As it turned out, they did, and she was hired.
Memorial Stadium, the Orioles` home until last October, also is within the city limits but several miles to the north of Baltimore`s downtown area and much-publicized Inner Harbor, a gentrified residential, commercial and cultural center area. The fact that the new park was slated to be constructed four blocks from that focal point-on the site of an old railroad yard and, it turned out, the site of one of several taverns operated by Babe Ruth`s parents in the early 1900s- was immensely appealing to Smith. It tugged at urban heartstrings harking back to her childhood.
Smith grew up in Jackson during turbulent times, the daughter of an architect (”My dad does very traditional work-institutional buildings, pure architecture”) and a university hospital medical records technician. She continued in public schools after many other white children were being shifted to private schools. It left her with a great admiration for her parents and a belief in the need to develop responsible urban citizenry.
She said that she is frustrated that although she deals with the design of cities, ”my ability to shape the framework of the projects I`m engaged in doesn`t get at the heart of some of what`s troubling our cities today-socioeconomic problems.”
”What`s going on is particularly upsetting because you see more people rightfully moving away to avoid it. That`s no crime-to want to live in a safe, clean environment, but it leaves you without people who have either the means- both through their wealth and their standing in society-to do anything about it, or to put into place politicians and give them the backbone that they can do something about it. It leaves them with a constituency that`s not a melting pot anymore.”
Smith saw her first major-league game in Houston`s Astrodome when she was 10 (these days she averages 60 or more games a season).
A longtime Atlanta Braves rooter, she learned to balance her career objectives and her avocation at Mississippi State University, a baseball mecca. (”The architecture school is right out by the baseball diamonds.”)
After graduation from Mississippi State with a degree in architecture and an internship with a New York architecture firm, she spent a year in Washington on a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, then took a position as coordinator of architecture and design for Battery Park City.
”My interest in civic design really comes out of a love for the public ground, of which baseball is one of many components,” says Smith, who also has a master`s degree in urban planning from the City University of New York. With Oriole Park at Camden Yards a realized dream, what`s next?
”The Orioles have been wonderful. They`ve made me feel appreciated, they`ve worked me hard, they`ve given me a chance to test my own limits. They`ve asked me to stick around until we shake all the bugs out-to wait until I get the job done before I worry about what I should do next. It`s like moving into a house-you don`t want to put a picture on every wall until you`re there a while and get a feel for the place.
”At some point I think I`ll probably cease to be excited about moving around geographically, but the nice thing about the East Coast is that conceivably there are a lot of jobs around within shouting distance of where I am now. But I like the development process too much to give it up; it`s what I do.”
