Ten baseball seasons have come and gone since I visited an architectural firm in Kansas City to get a sneak preview of the new Comiskey Park.
The design pros at the HOK Sports Facilities Group were only too willing to show off their work. The new Comiskey was going to be state-of-the-art. Every one of its 45,000 seats would be canted toward the infield for unobstructed views of the game. (You could check out the view from any seat using a special HOK computer program.)
Indeed, the new stadium’s design was a model of machinelike efficiency. Even those external switchback ramps, it was explained to me, are ideal for hauling canisters of soft drinks and cartons of foodstuffs to upper-deck concession areas.
Outside, the new Comiskey would be surrounded on three sides by oceans of parking spaces. No more walking to the stadium from private lots operated by curbside entrepreneurs. The new Comiskey was to be self-contained and “user-friendly,” in the corporate cliche of the time.
Before I left HOK’s offices, though, a junior partner beckoned me down a hallway. He had been working on something very different and he wanted me to see it. It was the design for a new, but instantly old-looking, ballpark being built in downtown Buffalo. Owners of the Triple-A franchise there wanted something “old-timey.” So this same HOK firm came up with something that, well, blew me away.
Rather than clear out the surrounding blocks for parking lots, it was decided to leave standing an old post office and some warehouses and design the new ballpark to fit among them. The exterior of Pilot Field, as it was initially called, had window arches like those of the surrounding buildings and an antique green roof over the grandstands. Inside, the seats were pushed in to within 20 feet of the foul lines, tapering to half that at the foul poles.
I didn’t realize it then, but this was the prototype for the new urban ballparks of the ’90s. This was the genesis of Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field. Even back then, it turned out, a new breed of market-savvy owners had discovered what a lot of people in Chicago already knew: Baseball, once the national pastime, had become a Baby Boomer nostalgia trip.
What Boomers want from baseball, the game that dominated our childhood summers and now our daydreams, is not relentless efficiency and machinelike symmetry. We get our fill of that at the office, staring into our Windows 95 and OS/2 operating systems. We want baseball to take us away from that–away from CD ROMS, digital clocks and e-mail and back to the smell of shelled peanuts, spilled beer and White Owls. We yearn for a time before MTV, when a father and son could applaud the same stars. A winning team is fine, but what we really want is the 7th inning stretch and “Take me out to the ballgame.”
No small part of baseball’s nostalgia trip, especially for first-generation suburbanites, is going back to the city. The real city, that is, not some urban renewal zone cleared of housing and stores and anybody (like a peanut vendor) not in possession of a computer-coded admission ticket.
Chicagoans were among the first to grasp the nostalgia thing because we have Exhibit A right here at Wrigley Field. For decades it has mattered little whether the Cubs are in 1st place or last. Boomers want a tradition-rich ballpark set in a real city neighborhood. Even Cubs management understands this, which is why, even though they installed lights so as to compete economically, the masts had to be designed by John Vinci, the city’s leading preservation architect.
Now, we are informed by the sports pages, the owners of the Chicago White Sox are on the verge of admitting they made a mistake or two with new Comiskey. (Nothing like a half-empty ballpark on Opening Day to stimulate frank reappraisal.) So there is talk of retrofitting HOK’s baseball-viewing machine with some Pilot Field touches. No details yet. Perhaps they’ll put a picnic area in center field or do something about that dreadful upper deck, where you can’t see the distant game for all the fans climbing up and down the stairs, blocking your view. (Something the HOK software apparently did not anticipate.)
I’m not sure what can be done inside new Comiskey. But if I were Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, or a director of the state authority that financed the place, I’d get busy on the outside. It’s probably too late to bring back McCuddy’s Bar and Grill, the shot-and-beer joint where Babe Ruth is said to have slaked his thirst between games of double-headers. It’s probably too late to recreate “Tyler’s,” the soul food diner on the 3500 block of South Princeton Avenue where Johnnie Mae used to rustle up turnip greens and corn muffins for African-American players like Oscar Gamble.
It’s not too late, though, to bring life back to the corner of 35th Street and Wentworth Avenue, perhaps by building a block of souvenir shops and sports bars, with apartments above, that would screen off the parking lots behind. Besides bringing back a piece of the old Armour Square neighborhood, such places might turn a profit for the Sox and the state bonding authority. Or at least break even.
We now know, though certain suits will never admit it, that old Comiskey should have been saved and rehabbed; that the old neighborhood around it should have been renewed, not removed.
But it’s never too late to use your imagination. Just close your eyes and remember how it used to be.
