Andrew Schenker ,?? ??? ?? October 24, 2024

Take Me Out to the Mallpark

The downscaling and upselling of the baseball park Ty Cobb statue at Turner Field in Atlanta. The Braves played at Turner Field from 1997 to 2017 and then moved to Truist Park in suburban Cobb County. | Wally Gobetz

On June 22, 1976, in the North Philadelphia neighborhood known as Swampoodle, the bulldozers rolled in, but the old ballpark was already half gone. Since the Philadelphia Phillies had split half a decade earlier for their new South Philly home, Connie Mack Stadium had been picked apart, set ablaze, and abandoned to nature, creating a lingering headache for the city. The stadium’s final owner, Jerry Wolman, could afford neither the mortgage for the site nor the cost to tear it down, and the city itself was reluctant to step in and foot the bill for demolition.

As Bruce Kuklick writes in To Every Thing a Season, his in-depth history of both the ballpark and the surrounding neighborhood, “Whereas officials had few qualms about destroying small single-family dwellings in North Philadelphia, they delayed for as long as they could with the huge old building.” But with the park’s ruins creating a fire hazard and serving as a place for drug users to congregate, and with local neighborhood groups applying pressure, Mayor Frank Rizzo finally gave the order just weeks ahead of the city’s bicentennial celebration: “Tear the fucking thing down!” Beginning its work of demolition that June morning, the Geppert Brothers company finished several weeks later, saving the stadium’s defining feature, the corner tower with its domed cupola, for last.

The first of a new generation of steel-and-concrete baseball stadiums known as jewel boxes, Shibe Park, as it was originally called, opened in 1909 in the then-underdeveloped Swampoodle neighborhood. Replacing a previous generation of more temporary wood constructions that frequently burnt down, the jewel box generation provided new permanent homes to almost every team in Major League Baseball, with a construction boom that created Boston’s Fenway Park in 1912, Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 1914, and Yankee Stadium in 1923. Paid for by the team’s owners, these ballparks were often built in less populated neighborhoods where the owners could acquire cheap land, but which were easily accessible by public transportation. The ballparks themselves were constrained by the city grid, with the irregular angles of outfield walls and classic features like Fenway Park’s towering left-field wall (the “Green Monster”) either the direct result of or a creative response to the demands of the surrounding urban geography. As Brian J. Neilson described it, these ballparks represented an “architectural dialogue between two opposed forces: the diamond, the outfield and the stands pushing outward, and the surrounding streets and structures containing them.”

The jewel box generation, with its well-noted quirks and its central place in municipal life, is still remembered fondly (and in the case of Fenway and Wrigley, revered), particularly when compared to what came next. By the early 1960s, the business of baseball and the urban landscape had changed radically. After a decade of relocation, with six teams switching cities between 1953 and 1961, baseball embarked on its first round of expansion, opening up new markets and requiring new stadiums to be built.

At the same time, changing patterns of urban transportation made the old ballparks inaccessible to many fans. Built before the automobile age, these stadiums were meant to be reached by public transportation; they were surrounded by neighborhoods, not huge parking lots. In addition, the changing racial makeup of many of the neighborhoods where these ballparks were located gave white suburbanites qualms about getting into the big city. This was especially the case in Philadelphia, particularly after the 1964 Columbia Avenue riots that unfolded in the blocks surrounding Connie Mack Stadium. Urban unrest ultimately sealed the ballpark’s fate.

Accommodating new and relocated teams as well as teams looking for less congested sites, seventeen new stadiums were built between 1960 and 1977, including Connie Mack’s replacement, Veterans Stadium. This brought a new generation of construction known as the multipurpose stadium, or the superstadium. Unlike their predecessors, these structures were typically funded publicly, sited in suburbs or outlying areas within the city, and were designed to accommodate not only MLB teams but those from the increasingly popular NFL as well. Generally built from concrete and designed in a circular shape, these stadiums were hailed as modernist marvels at the time but quickly came to be seen as ugly, out-of-date, and ill-suited to both baseball and football, and are today widely viewed as a grotesque remnant of an unfortunate bigger-is-better era.

Not everyone sees them that way, though. Frank Andre Guridy, for one, thinks everybody’s got it backward. In his new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play, Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University, has nothing but contempt for those who fetishize the old jewel boxes, pointedly placing quotes around such commonly used descriptors as “classic.” More to the point, he feels that the mid-century stadium has not gotten its due. “Contrary to what has often been written about the stadiums of this time,” he argues, “these buildings turned out to be the most democratic structures built in the history of American stadiums.” Citing these stadiums’ increased seating capacity, low ticket prices, and multiple uses, he notes that they were home to an unprecedented level of class-, gender-, and race-mixing, as both the structural barriers that kept attendance largely white and male in the earlier ballparks and the playground-for-the-rich orientation of their successors was largely absent from these stadiums. Fulfilling a civic duty that would be unimaginable for a ballpark today, these concrete doughnuts, Guridy argues, reflect “a sensibility that stadiums were to be accessible to a wider social demographic than what existed before and what has existed since.”

Part of it had to do with the way they were funded. In the earlier years of the twentieth century, it was understood that construction was the responsibility of the team, and the ballclub owner wouldn’t think twice about ponying up, often slapping his name on the stadium for his troubles. That began to change during the New Deal. In the 1930s, the Public Works Administration built numerous sports facilities across the nation, mostly college football stadiums such as new facilities for Louisiana State and Ole Miss. Major League Baseball got into the game in 1932, when the Cleveland Indians began playing at the massive new Municipal Stadium on Lake Erie. Publicly owned and operated, the stadium was designed for football as well as baseball and was the longtime home of both the Indians and the Browns.

While fewer new baseball stadiums were built during the Depression, construction began again in the 1950s, as professional sports grew in reach and teams began wielding more political influence. With stadiums increasingly seen by many cities as a matter of civic pride, local politicians were more than happy to earmark public funding to build new ballparks for their existing team or to woo teams from other cities. The results were costly and would get costlier still. Between 1970 and 2019, the American public shelled out the brain-bending sum of $32.5 billion for professional sports facilities, according to writer Craig Calcaterra.

This switch from private to public funding was one of the most consequential—and vexing—developments in the history of stadium construction and represented a major shift in how both the government and the public thought about ballparks and their role in civic life. Today, it’s widely believed that public financing of stadiums is a drain on a city’s resources, failing to provide the economic boost that teams always promise, and diverting much-needed resources from such essential institutions as schools, hospitals, and youth programs. But, as Guridy points out, there is a positive side to public ownership as well—or at least there used to be. “The financial downsides of public investment in stadiums would become well-known,” he writes, “but the upside was that public management made stadiums more likely to be subject to community input.”

Guridy’s book is a selective history of the various stadiums, ballparks, and arenas that have served as institutions of American life since the nineteenth century. Each chapter focuses on a different sports venue that served as either a site of exclusion or a site of democratic gathering or protest. These chapters, which frequently zoom out to provide a larger history of stadium construction, cover such venues as New York City’s Madison Square Garden, which hosted both antifascist and Nazi rallies in the 1930s, and Tulane Stadium, built on a sugar plantation and for years host to a segregated New Year’s Day football game, the Sugar Bowl. One of the more positive developments he traces shows different groups making use of publicly owned venues to stage epochal events, staking the claim of the outsider on venues that were not originally designed for them.

In a chapter on the Black Freedom movement, Guridy illustrates how, during the 1960s and 1970s, black sports teams, musical performers, and civic leaders took over publicly owned stadiums for their own purposes. While sixty thousand fans, most of them black, flocked to Yankee Stadium in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination to watch HBCU powerhouses Grambling and Morgan State play football, the residents of Watts in South Los Angeles sought to reestablish the power of their community following the 1965 uprising by staging the Black Power-fueled Watts Summer Festival. This growing event culminated in the 1972 staging of Wattstax, a music festival featuring acts from the legendary soul label Stax that was held at the Los Angeles Coliseum. Publicly owned, the Coliseum was governed by a commission that took the venue’s role as a public forum seriously and readily approved the concert, provided only that the concertgoers remain in the stands. (Spoiler alert: They didn’t.)

On August 20 of that year, well over a hundred thousand people turned out to watch dozens of black performers and participate in what was believed to then be the largest gathering of black people outside of a civil rights event. In a subsequent chapter, Guridy relates how organizers in San Francisco booked a different publicly owned ballpark, the aging, largely neglected Kezar Stadium, to stage another such event. In 1982, a fraught time for queer rights, former Olympian Tom Waddell engineered the Gay Games, a series of Olympic-style events held among the community that downplayed arch-competitiveness, instead emphasizing unity and pride.

“A key component of stadiums—perhaps their essential component,” writes Guridy toward the end of his book, “is their accessibility to spectators.” Judging by these criteria, the stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s readily fulfill this mandate, as the conjunction of affordable ticketing and ample seating with the civil rights and liberation movements of those decades led to an era of raucous, intermingled crowds at sporting events and a proliferation of civil and political events in those same stadiums.

But functionality is not the whole story of a ballpark and Guridy is too dismissive of those who view stadiums through any other lens. Guridy criticizes fans of newer ballparks who solely rely “on architectural aesthetics to assess stadium construction, ignoring the fact that such judgments are subjective and historically contingent.” Yes, aesthetic judgments change over time and, yes, the superstadiums were once seen as aesthetically pleasing, but that doesn’t mean that there is no value in considering a ballpark’s architectural features or that it is nothing more than a decadent perversion to prefer the quirky charms of older ballparks to the uniformity of the mid-century donuts. And while Guridy is right that aesthetics aren’t everything, neither is a base functionality, and it is by no means a simple case of fetishization to prefer one style of design over another.

But Guridy isn’t so concerned with the old jewel box stadiums as he is with the contemporary ballpark, particularly those that explicitly reference the architecture of the early twentieth-century stadium. Beginning in 1992 with the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, a new wave of retro ballparks took over the stadium landscape. Camden Yards’ design, particularly its incorporation of the neighboring B&O warehouse as an architectural element, explicitly referenced the older jewel box generation of ballpark, while its integration into the surrounding urban neighborhood was both an additional nod to the old-school stadium and a rebuke to the geographically centrifugal stadiums of the previous generation. Notably, too, Camden Yards was home to no team but the Orioles. When the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Ravens four years later, construction for new dedicated stadium was underway, sited right next to Camden.

Camden Yards not only received considerable (and deserving) praise for its design, it proved enormously influential, essentially setting the pattern for the next thirty years of ballpark construction. Impressed by the stadium’s throwback design, its baseball-only usage, and its central urban location, every team soon decided they needed their own Camden, and they would get them too. Over the next few decades, virtually every MLB franchise would either receive a new ballpark (a couple teams would even get two) or have their old one updated, a process known as Camdenization. But it was soon a case of diminishing returns. With the vast majority of the stadiums being designed by the same firm, HOK Sport/Populous, a certain homogeneity began to creep in, whether the stadiums were done up, like Camden, in a retro-classic style, or were designed in the more hybrid, retro-modern style that incorporated more glass and other modern design elements and often featured a retractable roof. As Guridy puts it, “Lost on the legions of baseball fans and architectural critics who have made criticizing the midcentury stadium a cottage industry are the ways that the contemporary stadium has produced its own standardization and banality.” (His commitment to the superiority of the mid-century stadium is truly impressive.)

Apart from this inevitable sameness, though, the contemporary ballpark differs from its bygone models in two significant ways: it is almost always publicly funded, at extremely high cost to the city, and it is relentlessly commodified. In his 2023 book, Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption, Michael T. Friedman offers an exacting, highly researched anatomy of the contemporary ballpark. While the superstadiums of the 1960s and 1970s offered plenty of opportunities for fans to spend their money, mallparks like Camden and its successors are dedicated to extracting every possible cent from their clientele.

These stadiums are deliberately designed with lower seating capacities than their predecessors but far more luxury boxes and club seats, access to which is protected by both physical barriers and an unforgiving security corps. They also feature considerably wider concourses that allow for the sale of a dizzying array of foods and knickknacks. In addition, like shopping malls, these stadiums offer diverse noncommercial activities, such as museum exhibits that sell a nostalgic and blinkered version of baseball history, thus further promoting the product. Going to the contemporary ballpark can be not only an alienating experience but, even for those in the cheap seats, a prohibitively expensive one. The irony of the contemporary publicly funded mallpark is that the fans who pay for these new downtown stadiums are often unable to afford the cost of attending themselves, as the stadium fills up instead with well-heeled suburbanites.

But even this model may be on its way out, as the mallpark proper gives way to the mallpark village. In new constructions like Truist Park in suburban Atlanta, which opened in 2017, the team itself serves as a land developer, partnering with local businesses to create an ersatz mixed-use “neighborhood” around the stadium, known in this case as the Battery Atlanta. “Rather than ‘hoping’ markets respond to the stadium’s presence,” Friedman explains, “the developers of mallpark villages strategically employ collaborative planning between cities and team owners, who invest hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure development actually occurs.” Although Friedman had been largely critical of the mallpark project, he has a more mixed take on this latest wave of stadium development, praising team owners for investing money to spearhead development, while questioning the costs, both economic and social, of the publicly funded half of the equation.

While it’s often a good thing when teams take on construction costs themselves, Truist Park represents nothing less than an apocalyptic moment in ballpark development. Situated in suburban Cobb County, a largely white suburb with a checkered racial history, the ballpark is aptly nicknamed “white flight stadium.” In the move from the central Atlanta neighborhood that served as the Braves’ home for half a century to a suburban space inaccessible by public transportation, the team passed up its civic responsibility in order to be closer to where their wealthier season ticket holders lived and to serve as joint landlord to a new development. Although Friedman sees advantages in the mallpark village arrangement, he is less sanguine about the actual result, at least in Cobb County. “In creating an ‘artificial neighborhood,’” he writes, the “designers attempt to foreclose alternatives and reduce urban life to a highly regulated set of consumption experiences,” as the mallpark experience spills out from inside the confines of the stadium and contaminates the surrounding landscape. Or, as Guridy memorably puts it, “Sports facilities are no longer standalone structures but anchoring monuments to a new form of territorial colonization.”

Throughout his book, Frank Andre Guridy offers up an alternative history of the ballpark as a site of protest, of community gathering, of chance encounter, as people reclaim semi-public spaces that were not necessarily designed with them in mind. But much of this history is in the past. The sporting venue of an earlier generation may have occasionally served as a public square, but the future version, the mallpark village, rejects the very idea of a public, constituting its visitors as a mass of people who exist only to be alternatively fleeced and controlled. The Battery Atlanta is designed, in particular, to ensure control. Subject to heavy monitoring by security, governed by an exhaustive code of conduct, which prohibits such activities as loitering, loud music, distributing materials, and demonstrating without approval, The Battery is sports entertainment taken to its logical dystopian endpoint.

Hostile alike to dissent and spontaneous pleasure, the baseball village of the future is here now, tucked away in the corner of a historically conservative county in northern Georgia and home to a team that is still called the Braves. Bring your wallet and your foam tomahawk but leave your boombox at home.