Mallparks: Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption 9781501769290, 9781501769313, 9781501769306

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Part I CATHEDRALS OF CONSUMPTION
Part II THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF BASEBALL STADIUMS
Part III CONCEIVING MALLPARKS
Part IV THE FUTURE OF BASEBALL STADIUM DESIGN
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MALLPARKS

MALLPARKS Baseball Stadiums and the Culture of Consumption Michael T. Friedman

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Friedman, Michael T., 1970– author. Title: Mallparks : baseball stadiums and the culture of consumption / Michael T. Friedman. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049157 (print) | LCCN 2022049158 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501769290 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501769313 (epub) | ISBN 9781501769306 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Baseball fields—Social aspects—United States. | Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects—United States. | Baseball fields—United States— Design and construction. | Cities and towns—Growth. Classification: LCC GV879.5 .F75 2023 (print) | LCC GV879.5 (ebook) | DDC 796.35706/8—dc23/eng/20221025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049157 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022049158

To my partner in life, Sara, whose love and support are everything to me

Contents

Preface Par t I

ix

CATHEDRALS OF CONSUMPTION  1. Leading Off

3

 2. Producing Consumption Space

22

Par t II THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF BASEBALL STADIUMS  3. Grounds, Ballparks, and Superstadiums

43

 4. The Spatial Practices of

63

the Mallpark

Par t III CONCEIVING MALLPARKS  5. Camden Yards: Forever Changing Baseball

95

 6. Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium: The Camdenization

of a Ballpark and a Superstadium  7. Nationals Park: A Mallpark of

Magnificent Intentions

 8. Target Field: Different in the Same Way

120 145 165

Par t IV THE FUTURE OF BASEBALL STADIUM DESIGN  9. Truist Park: Supercharging the Mallpark

191

10. Making Baseball Great Again

218

Notes Bibliography Index

229 273 301

Preface

Fathers, sons, and baseball. Images of males bonding through games of catch, days at the ballpark, and trivia-filled conversations are cultural clichés. Yet that cliché is at the foundation of this book and the perspectives underpinning its analysis. Four men central to my mother’s life have shaped how I see baseball, consumption, shopping malls, and theme parks. The first is my father, Barry. This book is part of a journey that began when I was thirteen years old in June 1984 in the front seat of his Cadillac. Leaving after my brother’s high school graduation, the two of us spent six weeks traveling to attend baseball games in twenty-one major league ballparks. With my father driving the entire ten-thousand-mile trip, we passed through twenty-nine American states and two Canadian provinces, saw thirteen movies together, visited countless shopping malls, ate an unhealthy amount of fast food, experienced the hockey and football halls of fame (but not baseball’s), and cemented a bond between us. On that trip, I walked into Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, and Wrigley Field for the first time and attended my only games at Tiger Stadium and Comiskey Park. We saw the Detroit Tigers once as they moved toward a World Series title and the Chicago Cubs twice as they won a division crown—only to fail to reach the World Series after holding a 2–0 lead against the San Diego Padres in the best-of-five National League Championship Series. We saw the emergence of Dwight “Doctor K” Gooden with eight strikeouts in a complete game, followed the next night by another rookie pitcher, Roger Clemens, who struggled as he gave up six runs in three and two-thirds innings. We saw many players who are now in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, including Steve Carlton, Don Sutton, and Reggie Jackson at the very end of their storied careers; Eddie Murray, Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Ozzie Smith, Dave Winfield, Tim Raines, and Robin Yount in their primes; and Cal Ripken Jr., Ryne Sandberg, Tony Gwynn, and Wade Boggs as they were establishing themselves. I received autographs from Nolan Ryan, Dickie Thon, and Alan Ashby of the Houston Astros and failed, in twenty-one ballparks, to catch a single foul ball. Looking back, much has changed since that summer of 1984. Of the twentyone ballparks we visited, only five remain in use. Our $8.50 box seats at Fenway Park now cost $190 apiece. The city we visited on June 14, Montreal, no longer hosts major league baseball. My father and I were sport tourists without knowing about the concept, and over the miles I became a sports geographer long before ix

x       Preface

I heard that people could study sports and stadiums as cultural objects and that geography was more than knowing the capitals of all fifty states. My father died in 2001 in Las Vegas (yet another influence on this book). I think about him often as I work at his desk and sit in his chair. My perspectives on shopping malls were formed at an early age as my grandfather, Isadore, was a land developer in suburban Washington, DC, and involved in the construction of Wheaton Plaza in Maryland and Tysons Corner Center in Virginia. Although he died almost seven years before I was born, I feel a connection to him every time I visit those malls. As I grew up, I heard stories about his unbelievable work ethic, tremendous foresight, and unimpeachable integrity. I was told his handshake was more reliable than the best contracts drawn up by the most expensive lawyers (and, from what I heard about a court case involving Tysons Corner Center, as enforceable too). My mother’s second husband, Raymond, was a cofounder of Service Merchandise. He came into my life when I was eleven years old, and I got the opportunity to travel with him and my mother on many “site-seeing” trips. Rather than visiting tourist destinations like the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, we would visit Service Merchandise stores, competing catalog showrooms, and potential sites for stores (mostly in malls or strip centers, but I’ve seen plenty of empty lots). Although my head was often in a newspaper’s sports section or some sports book, I paid enough attention to learn the three Ls of retail—location, location, and location. I gained some insights into theme parks through my mother’s fourth husband, Sandy, and his son, Ed, who was an executive at Disney World. Taking advantage of this connection, Mom and Sandy’s wedding took place at Disney’s Boardwalk Hotel, where Mickey Mouse gave my mother away. As my two small children, Ben and Daphne, enjoyed the theme parks and the whole Disney experience, I was challenged to just appreciate being there and take pleasure in my children’s joy as they experienced the rides, ate too much junk food, and interacted with the characters. I was a new graduate student at nearly thirty years old, and I couldn’t turn off my burgeoning sociological imagination. Despite my best efforts, I noticed the various ways that Disney enticed consumption, organized space, and mobilized themes throughout its property. Conversations at family events would often turn to Ed’s work, which provided further insights into Disney’s design and management philosophies. While writing a research monograph can be a lonely process, I’ve had support from many scholars and friends. This book would certainly not be possible without the guidance, editing, and encouragement of David Andrews, who has been my adviser, mentor, colleague, and friend. He remains a singular professional influence as we continue to work together at the University of Maryland. Michael

Preface      xi

Silk and George Ritzer also helped guide my intellectual growth at Maryland and served on my dissertation committee along with Cathy van Ingen and Damion Thomas. I also want to thank my master’s adviser, Dan Mason, who asked me the fateful question “Have you thought about getting your PhD?” more than twenty years ago. I want to offer special thanks to Adam Beissel (now at Miami University), who collaborated with me on the Atlanta research in this book and is the coauthor of chapter 9. I appreciate the help and support of all members of the Physical Cultural Studies Program at Maryland—my fellow faculty members in particular, Shannon Jette, Jennifer Roberts, and Ron Mower—and the many graduate students I’ve had an opportunity to work with over the years. I appreciate all the time people have given to me as I have pursued this book. First, I want to acknowledge the research staff at the Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame under the leadership of Jim Gates and Cassidy Lent. This book would be very different without their help and access to the library’s unparalleled collection. I am grateful to all the people who took time from their busy schedules to speak to me. Thanks to Kevin Clinton, Deborah Ratner Salzberg, Earl Santee, Joseph Spear, and Anthony Williams for providing insight about stadium design and urban development. I’d like to extend special thanks to both Janet Marie Smith and Michael Stevens for multiple interviews they have each given me, first as a graduate student and now for this book. Finally, I also want to acknowledge former San Francisco 49er president Gideon Yu, a fellow alumnus of the University School of Nashville. He showed me around Levi’s Stadium before it opened, and our conversation offered me insight into the stadium development decisions that were made at the very top organizational levels. As this is the first book that I’ve published, I also wish to thank all the people at Cornell University Press for their support, guidance, and patience through this process. Special thanks to Jim Lance who has been excited about this book since I first told him about it and has been an invaluable partner in bringing it to print. Clare Jones has kept me focused and on task and has made sure that I have completed all the paperwork necessary to complete a project of this magnitude. Mary Kate Murphy and Don McKeon have done a tremendous job in copyediting this text, catching many things to which I had become blind over countless hours of editing. I also wish to acknowledge my professional colleagues Natalie Koch and Jeff Montez de Oca, who reviewed the proposal and final manuscript for Cornell. They provided excellent insight and made several suggestions that have improved the book. While I have written about the different men whose influences have led to this book, my mother, Arlene, was my role model and set me on the path that defines my life. When I tried to run a minor league hockey team at age twenty-seven, she was very supportive and, when it failed, wisely suggested that I return to graduate

xii       Preface

school to figure out what to do next. She was a brilliant and accomplished woman whose life of service impacted many people. Never someone to seek the spotlight, she showed me what can be accomplished by doing the hard and necessary work without worrying about who gets the credit. She passed away in July 2022, and I miss her wisdom and guidance. Finally, there is no way this book could have been started, pursued, and completed without the support, forbearance, and love of my wife, Sara, and that of our two (now adult) children. Besides indulging my research trips as I have now attended baseball games in forty-nine major league stadiums, Sara has joined me at many games (hockey too, including game 5 of the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals when the Washington Capitals rewarded my forty long-suffering years of fandom by lifting the cup in Las Vegas), taken countless photographs, edited far too many words, and encouraged me when I felt overwhelmed. Although she is not credited as a coauthor, her emotional labor has been a critical contribution. I cannot thank her enough.

Part I

CATHEDRALS OF CONSUMPTION

1 LEADING OFF

Located in Bloomington, Minnesota, the Mall of America is the busiest and largest shopping mall in the United States. Covering 2.5 million square feet and welcoming forty million visitors per year, it features more than 520 stores, fifty restaurants, the Minnesota Sea Life Aquarium (with ten thousand sea creatures), a comedy club, space for traveling museum exhibitions, a wedding chapel, and the seven-acre Nickelodeon Universe (with seventeen amusement park rides).1 Toward mitigating this potentially overwhelming enormity, the Mall of America is divided into four distinct shopping areas, each with its own theme and design palate.2 Before becoming a shopping mall qua theme park, the site was occupied by Metropolitan Stadium, the home of the Minnesota Twins baseball team and the Minnesota Vikings football team from 1961 to 1981. A plaque embedded in the floor of the amusement park identifies the location of home plate, while a red seat jutting out from a distant white wall marks the landing point of Harmon Killebrew’s longest home run in Metropolitan Stadium. The Minnesota Vikings Locker Room Official Team Store is located on the first level at 126 East Broadway, and Twins items are readily available at any of the nine stores featuring athletic goods and sports souvenirs. Although one can purchase certified memorabilia from games held at the Met in the Field of Dreams shop, the echoes from the cheering masses, great athletes, and legendary managers and coaches who once occupied this space have long since faded. Metropolitan Stadium was. The Mall of America is. The shopping mall has replaced the ballpark.

3

4       Chapter 1

FIGURE 1.  Sign and chair at the Mall of America marking the landing place of Harmon Killebrew’s longest home run at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Twelve miles to the north of the Mall of America and connected by a light rail line sits Target Field, the Twins’ new home—their second since leaving Bloomington. Located on eight acres in downtown Minneapolis, the stadium has welcomed an average of 2.9 million visitors per year since its 2010 opening. The infield sits amid 39,504 seats, beyond which lie three concourses lined with concession stands. Going beyond traditional ballpark fare of peanuts, hot dogs, and beer, attendees have more than eighty food and drink options, including calzones, burritos, smoked-meat sandwiches, Cuban sandwiches, Asian stirfry, walleye fish and chips, vegetarian and gluten-free options, craft beers, and Killebrew-brand cream soda and root beer. Six retail shops and numerous portable outlets offer a variety of Twins souvenirs, including hats, jerseys, novelty items, and authenticated game-used equipment. To make fans more comfortable in the outdoor stadium, permanent heaters warm concourses during early- and late-season games. A 5,757-square-foot high-definition video board and several smaller scoreboards show replays, statistics, out-of-town scores, entertainment, and advertisements.3 Eight conveniently located ATM machines enable continued participation in this cavalcade of consumption.

Leading Off      5

As the Mall of America marks the original landing spot of Killebrew’s 520foot shot, Target Field originally celebrated it by placing the seventy-square-foot Golden Glove art installation at an identical distance from home plate outside the Kirby Puckett right field gate.4 Other Target Field art installations include bronze statues of team legends Puckett, Killebrew, and Rod Carew, paintings of enlarged baseball cards, murals representing Minnesota culture, and The Wind Veil, a vertical installation consisting of fifty-one thousand metallic panels over a seventeen-thousand-square-foot space covering the plaza-side facade of a parking garage. Concession stands and food offerings are named for popular Twins players from the past. The Delta SKY360 Legends Club displays trophies and significant objects from Carew’s, Puckett’s, and Killebrew’s careers. Photographs

FIGURE 2.  The Golden Glove installation on Target Plaza at Target Field in Minneapolis. It is 520 feet from home plate—the same distance as Harmon Killebrew’s longest home run at Metropolitan Stadium. Part of The Wind Veil installation can be seen above the glove.

6       Chapter 1

of state champion baseball teams cover the walls of the Town Ball Tavern, and items from past stadiums decorate the Metropolitan Club.5 The forty-one-minute Metro Blue Line trip between the Mall of America and Target Field does more than take people from place to place, as it connects baseball’s past, present, and future. At the line’s origin in Bloomington, time has separated a ballpark from the shopping mall and theme park. At its terminus in Minneapolis, the ballpark, shopping mall, and theme park have been successfully melded to create a new type of consumption site: a mallpark. The trip from Metropolitan Stadium to Target Field is indicative of not only trends in stadium architecture over the past half century but also broader transformations in consumption practices and the design of consumption sites within an increasingly consumption-oriented society. The mallpark is an emblematic “cathedral of consumption,” a space into which formerly distinct consumption sites have been brought together and merged with thematic elements.6 This fusion produces a spectacular environment within which individualized and individualizing commodity consumption and economic exchange have become the dominant forms of social relations over community and other forms of sociability. In this regard, the mallpark transforms a space traditionally associated with mass consumption, communal identity, and collective forms of affiliation into an atomized experience whose contours are largely determined by the individual consumer’s willingness and ability to spend money within an immersive environment offering a multitude of choices. In describing this transformation, it is important to recognize the centrality of economic considerations to stadium design from its beginning when William Cammeyer opened the Union Grounds in Brooklyn in 1862. By enclosing the field with a fence, the Union Grounds was the first baseball facility to require people pay to watch games that previously had been mostly free. Ever since, team owners, architects, and civic leaders (especially after World War II) have sought to increase economic activity as they chose sites for and outfitted their stadiums.7 Each generation of stadiums has been a larger, more expensive, and more sophisticated generator of revenue. While ticket sales historically have been the primary revenue source, food and beverages, merchandise, souvenirs, advertising, and facility rental all have provided important secondary revenue streams.8 What differentiates mallparks, however, goes beyond simple evolutionary processes resulting in the hypercommerialization of sport-spectating spaces. Mallparks represent broader trends of cultural production that have placed consumption activities at the center of contemporary society. Through their architecture, multitude of consumption options, immersive thematic environments, and usage within urban redevelopment, mallparks are concrete expressions of economic, political, cultural, technological, spatial, and social relations at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Leading Off      7

This book utilizes the theories of French philosopher Henri Lefebvre to examine the production practices and contextual conditions underpinning these multiple relationships. Generally known for its analyses of space and everyday life, Lefebvre’s work was grounded in a humanist Marxism perspective that sought to understand how individuals could shape their conditions against structural forces.9 Publishing for more than sixty years, Lefebvre sought to illuminate and understand exploitative power relations in order to identify possibilities for resistance and change, with much of his work after World War II focused on the increasing commodification of leisure and recreational spaces.10 Lefebvre’s critiques of the processes through which capitalism colonizes everyday life and produces space are at the foundation of this investigation of the mallpark phenomenon. George Ritzer’s work on the sociology of consumption and the production practices shaping consumption provides this book’s second major theoretical influence. “McDonaldization” suggests the fast food industry’s rationalized consumption-oriented production practices of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control are increasingly defining the provision of goods and services.11 Ritzer further recognizes that rationalization alienates consumers and proposes that the designers of consumption spaces attempt to “reenchant” consumption activities through creating spectacles.12 By combining Ritzer’s insights about the spectacularization of consumption spaces with Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space, this book examines the logics that have shaped baseball stadium design since the 1990s. Framing this book’s investigation of the mallpark phenomenon, this chapter first discusses the contemporary context of late capitalism as the production and consumption of cultural products have become a central element in capital accumulation strategies and how this context shapes the production of consumption spaces. This prefaces the definition and description of the mallpark and begins to situate the history of baseball stadium development within broader political and cultural trends. This introductory chapter continues with the cultural studies and Lefebvrean frameworks through which the production of mallparks will be analyzed and concludes with descriptions of each of the book’s chapters.

Producing the Consumption Spaces of Late Capitalism The mallpark is emblematic of broader structural changes within the American economy, prioritizing consumption activities over industrial production. While Karl Marx recognized the essential linkage between production and consumption, traditional Marxist analyses have focused on production as the locus of

8       Chapter 1

capital accumulation.13 Yet the evolution of mass consumption throughout the twentieth century provided new opportunities for the economic exploitation of culture, leisure, tourism, and other areas of life beyond the conditions of production.14 By the 1980s changing production practices and technological advances enabled greater individualization of products, such that people could customize and specialize their consumption and differentiate themselves through consumption activities.15 Building on the work of Ernest Mandel, Frederic Jameson characterizes this new iteration as “late capitalism,” as those with capital have moved from investing in production-oriented activities in heretofore underinvested cultural sectors, such as art, music, theater, mass media entertainment, and sports.16 Within this consumer culture, products are consumed as much (if not more so) for such intangible aspects as novelty, image, meaning, and affective impacts as for their practical utility.17 Jean Baudrilliard demonstrates this as he explains that a washing machine derives use value from its ability to wash clothing but has additional “sign value” through connotative functions offering prestige and comfort.18 B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore go further in suggesting the emergence of “the experience economy,” in which the purely immaterial aspects of experiences provide sensual and emotional satisfaction within a meaningful environment and enable producers to clearly differentiate their products and charge premium prices.19 Companies attempt to develop these connotative and experiential aspects through branding, marketing, and spectacularization.20 Starbucks exemplifies the experience economy as customers choose to spend more than five dollars for a cup of coffee that could be purchased elsewhere for one dollar.21 While ostensibly selling the same good, Starbucks markets an entire coffee experience highlighting gourmet beans from exotic locations (often organically cultivated and sold through “fair trade” practices to allow consumers to feel their consumption is ecologically sensitive and politically progressive), fresh preparation by baristas, and service in a relaxing and trendy environment.22 As the economic importance of consumption of cultural products increased, globalization and political changes relocated industrial production and reframed the role of government. Starting in the 1970s, industrial production began moving away from traditional manufacturing centers in Western Europe and the United States due to escalating costs from labor, regulation, and aging infrastructure toward peripheral locations where conditions were more favorable to capital interests.23 The rise of conservative politicians Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom shifted central government policies further in favor of free trade and capital over labor, reduced federal government spending on social programs, and eased government regulation and oversight of corporations.24 Within the emerging neoliberal context,

Leading Off      9

local and state governments were expected to take entrepreneurial approaches to increase economic activity and broaden their tax bases to provide services for residents.25 The results of these economic, political, and cultural changes are especially evident within cities. Lefebvre wrote, “Each mode of production has ‘produced’ . . . a type of city, which ‘expresses’ it in a way that is immediately visible and legible on the environment, by making the most abstract relationships—legal, political, ideological—tangible.”26 Within industrial capitalism, cities were manufacturing centers as corporate offices in skyscrapers directed large factories to mass-produce goods that were distributed through transportation networks.27 Besides facilitating capital accumulation, factories and skyscrapers symbolized the dominant economic order.28 The shift to a consumption-focused economy is producing a new type of city in which spaces of and for consumption are becoming the primary sites for capital accumulation. With widespread deindustrialization, many industrial sites have been abandoned and fallen into decay or have been repurposed into recreational and leisure spaces. Such sites are considered essential in city efforts to attract capital from visitors and new residents from the “creative classes” of technology workers, knowledge-based professionals, and artists and from young professionals and older empty-nesters—all of whom are believed to be seeking a particular quality of life and whose presence will increase property values and tax collections.29 In this transition, the nature of consumption sites has changed as well. While the experiential aspects of shopping in late nineteenth-century arcades and department stores have been long recognized, Ritzer developed the theory of McDonaldization to explain the rationalization of consumption sites for the purpose of facilitating the sale of goods and services.30 Though identified with fast food, McDonaldization’s production practices help structure the delivery of many consumer products, including higher education, shopping, health care, entertainment, child care, tourism, recreation, and sports. Recognizing the rationalized practices that maximize profitability may also diminish consumer satisfaction by eliminating mystery, unpredictability, and surprise, Ritzer further argues that the settings and structures facilitating consumption are undergoing fundamental changes as producers incorporate experiential and spectacular elements into consumption spaces.31 In this process he describes as “reenchantment,” producers create spectacular environments in four ways: extravaganzas featuring spectacular performances; simulations (re)producing real, historic, or imagined items; implosion eliminating barriers between types of consumption; and implosion of barriers between time and space.32 Whether these spectacles amuse, beguile, entertain, distract, scare, interest, or anger consumers is almost inconsequential as long as consumers feel something other than

10       Chapter 1

boredom. Despite their spectacular appearances, consumption environments remain highly McDonaldized spaces. Ritzer describes such McDonaldized and spectacularized leisure sites as “cathedrals of consumption” that “appear to offer increasingly magical, fantastic, and enchanted settings in which to consume.”33 Cathedrals of consumption, which include such sites as shopping malls, amusement parks, retail stores, cruise ships, casinos, restaurants, sports facilities, and museums, elicit emotions from consumers by providing immersive environments featuring meaningful and engaging experiences beyond basic goods and services. Many of these sites often are clustered in close proximity to create “landscapes of consumption” that attempt to maximize synergistic uses and utilize common infrastructure.34 Such urban entertainment districts (UEDs) result from explicit government plans and policies that seek to revitalize urban centers after their abandonment by manufacturers during the 1970s.35 By offering subsidies, tax preferences, and other inducements, local governments encourage developers and service providers to construct venues, such as hotels, convention centers, and festival marketplaces, that primarily serve visiting suburbanites, tourists, and business travelers.36 As argued in this book, the principles of rationalization and spectacularization that define contemporary consumption spaces have produced the mallpark, whose development has been influenced by three different, though highly related, sites of consumption: the shopping mall, the theme park, and the UED. • Shopping malls, first enclosed in 1956 outside Minneapolis, are highly rationalized retail spaces, with massive parking lots isolating them from the outside world and internally organized to maximize revenue generation and customer flow.37 Giving “architectural form to shopping,” their overly rationalized designs alienated consumers, which by the 1980s led many operators to spectacularize malls to provide experiences to customers.38 • Theme parks, beginning in 1955 with Disneyland in Anaheim, California, are immersive environments produced through theming that utilizes an “overarching symbolic motif ” to create a space full of meaningful cultural referents.39 Operators tantalize visitors with promises of spectacular experiences outside the bounds of ordinary life. However, beneath this presentation lies a highly rationalized space designed to facilitate consumption, which becomes an integral part of the theme park experience. • UEDs, which began during the late 1970s with spaces like Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, represent responses to deindustrialization and suburbanization as civic officials transformed cities from centers of industrial

Leading Off      11

production into sites for leisure consumption. To attract people to come downtown to play, eat, shop, stay, and live, UEDs include several spectacularized consumption sites, including convention centers, festival marketplace malls, museums, hotels, casinos, and sports venues, with the belief they synergistically sustain one another.

The Mallpark Mallparks represent the fusion of highly rationalized consumption processes with a spectacularized environment for the presentation of baseball games. As this book examines, the designs of baseball stadiums since the 1990s follow the principles of shopping mall and theme park design in creating a highly sophisticated consumption environment. As a portmanteau of “ballpark,” “shopping mall,” and “theme park,” the term “mallpark” captures this merger. Although Philip Bess first used the term in 1991 to describe the economic considerations driving the design of Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field, his usage failed to capture the spectacularization of space as fully expressed within the first mallpark— Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which opened in 1992.40 While both stadiums feature a broad range of revenue-generating amenities, Camden Yards uses aesthetic elements alluding to early twentieth-century ballparks to create an immersive, baseball-themed environment and, unlike Guaranteed Rate Field, is located downtown. Although many mallparks are not similarly situated within the urban fabric, Camden Yards has established the basic template combining amenities and aesthetics for the twenty-two Major League Baseball (MLB) stadiums to open since 1993 and has influenced renovations in the nine previously built stadiums that continue to operate.41 This book’s focus derives from baseball’s unique status within the American professional sports landscape for the currency possessed by mythology, history, and particular characteristics of place. Such resonance has allowed sites such as Cooperstown, New York, and Dyersville, Iowa, that have little connection to real baseball events to become destinations for baseball fans.42 This book identifies four generations of baseball stadiums, each with its distinctive materials and architectural designs, available amenities, positions within the urban landscape, and financing arrangements between team owners and public entities: • Baseball grounds (1860s–1900) • Ballparks (1910s–1920s) • Superstadiums (1930s–1980s) • Mallparks (1990s—present)

12       Chapter 1

First, as described by Washington Post architectural critic Philip Kennicott, mallparks are “machine[s] for baseball and for sucking the money out of the pockets of people who like baseball.”43 Economic imperatives have shaped stadium design from the earliest baseball grounds, as the stadium’s basic purpose always has been to commodify the opportunity of attending a baseball game through limiting access to ticketholders.44 In each of its four generations, stadiums have improved their ability to generate revenue through incorporating the sale of ancillary products such as food, drinks, and souvenirs, using new technologies to improve the management of ticket inventories, and adding luxury suites and comfortable clubs to sell premium experiences to wealthy patrons.45 Following the principles of shopping mall design, mallparks are highly diverse, effective, and sophisticated consumption spaces. Second, as described by Ritzer and Todd Stillman, mallparks provide “baseball with a baseball theme.”46 As economic considerations directed stadium design in the first three eras, aesthetic elements tended to be secondary or tertiary concerns. While many baseball grounds, ballparks, and superstadiums may have had a degree of architectural embellishments, these conformed to the tastes of the team owners and civic officials. Quirky elements in ballparks, such as Fenway Park’s thirty-seven-foot-tall Green Monster outfield wall and the fifty-foot “spite fence” at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, were practical responses to site challenges.47 Lacking such constraints within large parking lots, superstadiums tended to have generic and rationalized designs.48 However, as mallpark designers recognize baseball exists within a highly competitive entertainment marketplace, mallparks produce spectacular environments by highlighting baseball history, providing architectural referents to ballparks, engaging baseball’s cultural lexicon, and using local cultural markers to embed mallparks within place. These elements represent a series of aesthetic choices, such that an oversized outfield wall has no functional purpose beyond reminding fans of similar structures that existed in ballparks. Following the principles of theme park design, mallparks are immersive environments offering spectacularized experiences. Third, mallparks are significant buildings within economic revitalization plans of civic officials and placemaking efforts of urban marketers.49 The presence of a professional team has been a marker of a city’s importance since the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings featured the sport’s first all-professional lineup.50 In the 1950s cities began building superstadiums to attract teams and realize image benefits, but locations were determined by utility, and access and tended to be outside the urban core.51 However, this generation of baseball stadiums was “imagined and designed to serve as a link in a larger network of urban amenities—retail space, office space, and even residential development—all intended to drive economic development,” especially as designers recognized

Leading Off      13

that, with their large crowds and broad media coverage, baseball could be a major attraction for UEDs.52 Following the principles of entrepreneurial urban governance, mallparks are important in efforts to transform cities into centers of leisure consumption. Sports stadiums have been topics of academic investigation since the 1970s, with most studies examining the political and economic aspects of stadium development. Although economics is a disparate discipline, there is a general consensus that stadiums and the presence of a professional sports team have minimal positive impact on citywide economic activity, job creation, tourism, total tax revenue, property values, and income tax revenue.53 Narrower analyses show some neighborhood-level impacts, particularly regarding redevelopment activities, but without broader urban economic growth, this suggests existing activity has moved from one area to another.54 Examinations of intangible benefits have found positive externalities, such as civic pride, life satisfaction, and raising the city profile, but these generally relate to team play rather than the presence of a new stadium.55 Moreover, these benefits tend to be offset by negative externalities, such as crime, traffic, noise pollution, and environmental degradation, while the size of the public’s financial commitment raises serious questions regarding opportunity costs.56 Starting with economic analyses showing meager benefits, politically focused analyses explain the prevalence of these policies through variants of public choice theory, suggesting powerful groups promote subsidies in support of their selfinterest.57 Often civic leaders have close ties to wealthy developers and other groups for whom stadiums represent a major project providing significant economic opportunities.58 Politicians seek to gain credit for the construction of a stadium and avoid blame if the team relocates following a city’s refusal to provide subsidies.59 The media tend to promote stadium subsidization because their interests often intersect with urban business elites and teams provide unique and popular content.60 As these groups pursue the concentrated benefits from stadium construction, opposition tends to be relatively weak and disorganized as costs are diffused widely among the city’s population.61 While these issues of political economy are certainly implicated in the development of mallparks and discussed where appropriate, this book focuses on the cultural geography of baseball stadiums. Benjamin D. Lisle describes stadiums as “many things at once”—simultaneously material, experienced, understood, and imagined.62 The work of John Bale not only describes the physical spaces of sports but attempts to explicate the deeper experiential elements of space and the emotional connections people form to place.63 Work in this tradition often analyzes the ways experiential and emotional dimensions are utilized for economic gain and political purposes.64 This book extends this tradition through

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examining the development of baseball stadium design and the spectacularization of mallparks within spectacularized urban environments.

A Cultural Studies Approach To examine mallparks and the production of consumption spaces within the conditions of late capitalist urban governance, this book embeds baseball stadiums within broader political, economic, social, and cultural relationships through a cultural studies approach. While there are many cultural studies traditions, the field generally examines “how the history people live is produced by structures that have been handed down from the past.”65 Focusing on issues of power, domination, and exploitation, cultural studies relies upon “radical contextualism” in which “context is everything and everything is contextual.”66 Social practices can be best understood through analyzing the conditions in which practices occur and of which they are constituent parts and by examining the linkages between conditions and practices.67 Within its radically contextual approach, cultural studies seeks to “produce the best possible knowledge using the most sophisticated intellectual tools” by utilizing whatever theoretical and methodological approaches seem most appropriate to the project.68 Based on his theories regarding the social production of space and nonreductionist, regressive-progressive methodology, Henri Lefebvre’s oeuvre is appropriate for this research. Although Lefebvre’s The Production of Space has become an important text in cultural geography since its 1991 translation into English, he was not a geographer, nor was his theorization of space an end to itself. Rather, Lefebvre sought to critique the exploitation, alienation, and mystification that prevented individuals from fully enjoying the products of their labor, achieving self-actualization, and living as free individuals in a truly democratic society.69 Lefebvre’s objects of analysis, which over seven decades included such disparate topics as space, everyday life, rural life, politics and the state, and fascism, were entry points into much deeper critiques of existing political structures and economic relationships during times of substantial change.70 Lefebvre’s three-volume Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1947, 1961, and 1981, sought to understand the ways in which consumer capitalism “colonized” and commodified people’s lives outside the relationships of industrial production. Similarly, Lefebvre’s spatial analyses were more about examining the power relations manifested in and through space than about investigating space as an object.71 Lefebvre’s theorizing about the production of space is highly useful for understanding how mallparks are emblematic of contemporary capitalism and the ways in which they are embedded within urban redevelopment strategies.

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Lefebvre describes space and the city as the products and producers of social relations, the stakes in conflicts between groups, and the media through which groups and ideologies need to constitute themselves.72 As such, groups, classes, ideas, representations, and values are subjected to a “trial by space” in which they “succeed in making their mark on space . . . [or] lose all pith and become mere signs, resolve themselves into abstract descriptions, or mutate into fantasies.”73 By being products and producers of social relations, mallparks are locations in which this trial by space occurs. As described earlier, the results of the trial by space are literally concretized within the city, which expresses the multitude of political, economic, and social relationships within the mode of production.74 This can be seen in the position of cathedrals within medieval cities that testified to and reproduced the power of religious elites. Factories and skyscrapers similarly represented and reproduced elite power within industrial capitalism. This book proposes that mallparks are emblematic of this era’s aesthetically based consumer capitalism and, through an examination of the ways in which mallparks contain, produce, reproduce, and challenge dominant perceptions, conceptions, and uses of space, can be critically examined to expose the abstract relations of power within the present mode of capital accumulation. This book examines mallparks through Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” of spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation, which seeks to understand the “long history of space . . . [as] a set of relations and forms” rather than being an inventory of things in space or as a discourse about space.75 In keeping with Lefebvre’s belief in dialectical analysis, this triad is “no mechanical framework or typology . . . but a dialectical simplification, fluid and alive, with three specific moments that blur into each other.”76 The relationship between the three parts is neither stable nor linear, as no part of the triad is considered superior or determinative. As their balance is historically specific and contextually dependent, elements of the triad could reinforce or contradict one another.77 Given these considerations, Rob Shields explains that “Lefebvre’s real object of study is the process of the production of space, and its configuration in any given historical period.”78 Spatial practice, which Lefebvre has described as “perceived space,” encompasses more than just the physical environment by including all the things that people do within it—everyday routines and activities and the multitude of human interactions.79 Moreover, “spatial practice regulates life” by helping to physically organize and structure social relations, often through architecture assigning functions to a space, establishing boundaries between spaces, and allotting particular interactions to different spaces.80 Part II of this book examines the spatial practices of mallparks in terms of their consumption amenities,

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immersive thematic environments, and positions within their broader urban landscapes. Described as “conceptualized space,” representations of space are the second of Lefebvre’s categories, as they encompass the mental realm of symbolic elements in which spaces are constructed through discourse.81 Representations of space are heavily influenced by the intersection of knowledge and power as elite groups attempt to produce dominant understandings of a space to further their interests.82 In this regard, Andrew Ballantyne explains that architecture helps demonstrate what “we really care about, as individuals and as a society.”83 While not necessarily ideologically driven, the work of government officials, civic planners, architects, and elite interests is constrained within the structures of capitalism and underpinned by its assumptions. Part III of this book examines the ways in which various designers (team officials, civic leaders, architects) conceive space as they build and renovate mallparks. As Richard Johnson suggests about the meanings of any text, production is not the sole province of producers, as consumers imbue texts with meaning through use.84 With Lefebvre suggesting that spaces can be read as texts, spatial production through use is evident within spaces of representation (also described as “lived space”).85 Although producers can largely shape spatial perceptions and conceptions, lived space is much more fluid because people can use spaces in unintended ways and invest spaces with unintended meanings.86 Rather than romanticizing spaces of representation for their resistive potential, it is important to note that peoples’ activities often conform to expectations and reinforce narratives that dominant groups seek to instantiate into the space.87 Given the complexity of the lived experiences constituting spaces of representation, this project focuses on spatial practice and representations of space. In doing so, it attempts to understand the ideologies and logics of designers in terms of how they want people to use space and the concretization of these intentions, ideologies, and logics into space. This focus does not deny the critical importance of spaces of representation as the ways in which people produce stadiums through use certainly inform designers as they build new facilities and renovate mallparks. However, a detailed analysis of lived space would require a deeper ethnographic investigation conducted in several sites over time and, even then, would barely capture the diversity of uses, practices, and meanings within mallparks. Toward providing some insight into representations of space, many chapters open with my experiences of baseball stadiums and the urban landscape as I use, interpret, and navigate space with the perspective of a critical researcher and lifelong baseball fan that is informed by visits to MLB games at forty-nine different stadiums over forty-five years and a formative boyhood trip during the

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summer of 1984. Although these descriptions provide insight into one person’s lived experiences of space, they are not intended to make broader statements regarding how people produce space through use. Recognizing this limitation, it is the intention of this book to understand the production practices of designers and their concrete products working within the contexts of late capitalism and neoliberal urban governance. To produce this deep contextualization of mallparks through the spatial triad, this research uses Lefebvre’s regressive-progressive approach to analyze complex societal structures within conditions of local specificity. Lefebvre identified two types of complexity—horizontal and vertical—which “intertwine, intersect and interact.”88 Horizontal complexity involves “techniques and structural relations” made by and occurring between people.89 Vertical complexity involves the conditions of historical development. To disentangle the confused mass of facts related to any phenomenon, Lefebvre’s regressive-progressive approach involves three analytical phases—descriptive, analytico-regressive, and historico-genetic— which “describe,” “date,” and “explain” a particular phenomenon.90 Within the descriptive phase, Lefebvre proposes theoretically and experientially based inspection of a phenomenon through participant observation and interviews.91 This has been done through site visits to twenty-five mallparks, which have often included participation in stadium tours offered by teams, and interviews of key designers representing cities, teams, and architects. In the analytico-regressive phase, Lefebvre suggests analyzing the described reality by contexualizing its development within historical conditions.92 This analysis has been conducted through textual materials, including newspaper and magazine articles, books, and other media and electronic sources, which have been collected through archival research at the Baseball Hall of Fame library in Cooperstown, New York, and found within various databases and websites. In the historico-genetic phase, Lefebvre recommends explaining the transformation and preservation of elements of the phenomenon by linking them to broader social structures, institutions, and functions.93 The three phases of analysis are not discrete but combine with historical trends illuminating the present and contemporary conditions illuminating the past, thus “disclosing aspects and moments of it hitherto uncomprehended.”94 Additionally, Lefebvre’s approach deeply contextualizes social phenomena within specific local realities. With Lefebvre recognizing that “the sociologist’s perspective interacts with the historian’s, and vice versa,” this approach answers David L. Andrews’s challenge: “As much as we have to be diachronous, so we must be equally synchronous in our thinking.”95 Similarly, just as the past and present inform one another, both suggest possibilities for the future.96

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Chapter Overviews To present this cultural studies analysis of contemporary baseball stadiums as cathedrals of consumption, this book is divided into ten chapters in four parts. The first part defines mallparks and discusses the shopping mall and theme park principles influencing their design. The second part discusses the spatial practices of mallparks by examining the historical development of the physical aspects and symbolic elements of the built environment in and around the stadium. The third part focuses on mallparks as conceived spaces, through a series of case studies that examine the motivations, intentions, and processes of stadium designers, including team executives, urban planners, and architects. The book concludes with discussions of possible futures for baseball stadium design and the meanings of mallparks. Chapter 2 examines the physical and symbolic environments of shopping malls, theme parks, and UEDs. Today’s cathedrals of consumption and the broader landscapes in which they are constituent parts have evolved in response to and to shape consumer demand for goods, services, and experiences. By discussing processes of rationalization and reenchantment, the chapter explores the history, development, and principles of shopping mall, theme park, and UED design. While these consumption spaces have developed in different ways, their underlying design principles have converged as each consumption space offers highly rationalized and varied consumption opportunities within environments rich with meaningful symbolic elements. This chapter provides essential context to understand the spatial practices and conceptions of mallparks. Chapter 3 examines the development of spatial practices in terms of consumption amenities, aesthetic environment, and position within the urban landscape over the three generations of baseball stadiums before the mallpark. Baseball grounds were a series of experiments to create spaces for baseball consumption. Built inexpensively of wood, baseball grounds established the basic stadium form that has guided subsequent development. Ballparks, built of concrete and steel, were the next stage of development as they were pragmatically designed to facilitate consumption and fit within urban neighborhoods. Due to their varied architecture, quirky features, and the events they hosted over a half-century, ballparks became idealized as the proper sites for watching baseball. However, by the 1950s aging structures, geographical changes, and a new form of urban governance resulted in all but four ballparks being replaced by superstadiums, which were round, concrete facilities located on the urban periphery within large parking lots with easy highway access. Initially celebrated for their highly functional, futuristic modernist designs, superstadiums were lucrative for teams and provided cities with a useful civic amenity. However, superstadiums aged poorly

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as generic designs, poor sightlines, lack of intimacy with the game, and isolation from the surrounding urban fabric alienated fans, especially as mallparks began opening in the 1990s. Chapter 4 discusses the ways in which contemporary baseball stadiums are highly efficient spaces for consumption, immerse consumers within themed environments, and exist within broader urban landscapes. Mallparks offer diverse, price-differentiated experiences for consumers that go well beyond the capabilities of previous stadium generations. These upscale amenities, multiple dining and shopping options, and various recreational offerings are presented within sophisticated thematic environments that call upon historical and cultural memories about baseball and are essential parts of the mallpark experience. Thematic elements also include embedding mallparks within the local context, as civic leaders use baseball stadiums as key sites for urban regeneration efforts. The third part is a series of case studies examining the production practices of team officials, civic leaders, and architects as they plan, design, and build mallparks. Chapter 5 examines the conception of Camden Yards as designers—the Baltimore Orioles (the team), the Maryland Stadium Authority (the government agency), and HOK Sport (the architects)—worked together to produce MLB’s first retro stadium by merging a thematic environment with a highly rationalized, consumption-oriented structure.97 This analysis also focuses on how designers attempted to incorporate Camden Yards physically into the surrounding urban landscape and more symbolically into Baltimore’s tourist-oriented redevelopment strategy. Chapter 6 focuses on the transformation of older stadiums into mallparks. Although exemplars of ballpark and superstadium design, respectively, both Boston’s Fenway Park and Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium have undergone many changes since their original constructions in 1912 and 1962. Facing economic pressures from mallparks, the Red Sox and Dodgers have adopted many mallpark design practices during the physical and aesthetic renovations of their facilities. As the chapter examines such efforts, it focuses on the role of Janet Marie Smith, who supervised both renovations, represented the Orioles in the design of Camden Yards, and has consulted on mallpark projects. The perspectives of urban decision makers are central to chapter 7, which examines Nationals Park in Washington, DC.98 From Washington’s establishment in the 1790s, the city’s development has been guided by a series of plans that have shaped, destroyed, and remade its fabric. This chapter explores how the location of Nationals Park in the city’s Near Southeast neighborhood fit into the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative and Mayor Anthony Williams’s overall strategy for inclusive development. Going beyond simply trying to understand Nationals

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Park as part of a visitor-oriented strategy, this chapter examines the implications of development and gentrification. Chapter 8 examines the production practices of the architectural firm Populous during the design of Minneapolis’s Target Field. Having been involved in the construction and renovation of twenty-two mallparks, Populous’s dominance within the field of baseball stadium design has become self-reinforcing as its expertise has allowed the company to efficiently generate construction-ready designs and positioned it as the favorite for new baseball stadium commissions. Although Populous’s dominance has led to increasing homogenization of mallpark design, this standardization is not materialized through generic designs similar to superstadiums. Rather, it has been produced through isomorphic pressures as Populous reproduces basic spatial organization and successful amenities across commissions but draws aesthetic elements from local contexts. As such, differences between mallparks tend to be superficial. The final part examines the future of baseball stadium design in chapter 9 (written with Adam Beissel) by focusing on the conceptions of space and spatial practices found in Atlanta’s Truist Park and its associated The Battery Atlanta multiuse development. Opened in 2017, Truist Park has achieved two distinctions by being the first stadium to replace a mallpark (Turner Field) and, built in the edge city of Cumberland in suburban Cobb County, by being the first stadium since the 1970s to be farther from the downtown core than the facility it is replacing. New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger argues that Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta, designed with the amenities and immersive environment of mallparks, “[blur] the distinction between the real city and the artifice of the ballpark.”99 The $1.1 billion mixed-use development features high-end retail stores, chef-driven restaurants, a four-thousand-person capacity theater, a sixteen-floor hotel, 550 residential units, and a nine-story office building, such that Goldberger describes The Battery Atlanta as “a theme park version of the city.”100 Moreover, as the Braves have extended their economic control beyond the stadium’s walls, Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta may portend a new generation of baseball stadium design, with mallparks becoming economically obsolete as other teams attempt to replicate the Braves’ enhanced revenue model. In this new era, teams will become developers of commercial real estate as their stadiums anchor multi-billion-dollar development projects. The concluding chapter, 10, takes a broad view of mallpark development and offers thoughts about the future of baseball stadium design and usage. As the first part of the conclusion recognizes that the same cultural trends underpinning the nostalgic appeal of retro-stadium designs are implicated within the political rise of Donald Trump, the book ends by imagining what baseball stadiums could become if sports leagues and stadium design in the future are shaped by different,

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more inclusive principles related to Lefebvre’s “Right to the City.” Just as Lefebvre proposes a participatory urban political system based upon inhabitance rather than citizenship that would elevate use value over exchange value, a “Right to the Stadium” would prioritize a person’s commitment to the team over their ability to pay and would reimagine the relationships between stadiums and their surrounding communities.

2 PRODUCING CONSUMPTION SPACE

A beautiful summer afternoon, and I feel like an evening watching baseball at Camden Yards. I make the familiar trip to Baltimore—south on 270, east nine miles on 495 toward College Park, north twenty-seven miles on 95 to Baltimore. Nearly an hour without traffic, but there is always traffic. I turn onto 395 to head into the Inner Harbor. I pass the Horseshoe Casino and M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens play. In front of me, I see office buildings. Camden Yards is at the foot of the off ramp, the B&O Warehouse on my left, across the light rail tracks. I can go straight to a parking lot attached to the Royal Farms Arena, but I turn right before the Baltimore Convention Center onto Conway Street toward a lot next to the Hyatt Regency. I find a space near the bridge crossing Light Street to Harborplace. For a ten-year-old, the shopping complex’s magical food hall was a highlight of trips to see the Orioles at Memorial Stadium in the early 1980s, but now it’s a shell of its celebrated early days—a handful of national chains, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, a lot of empty spaces for rent. I head up the hill to Camden Yards instead. The Warehouse, with its painted sign “Welcome to Oriole Park at Camden Yards,” dominates my view as I walk past the Convention Center. Street vendors offer $1 bags of peanuts and $2 bottles of water—much cheaper than I can get inside the stadium. I cross Howard Street and the light rail tracks and walk past Camden Station, which was the largest train station in the United States when it opened in 1857 and welcomed the Orioles to Baltimore when they moved from St. Louis in 1954. No train has stopped there in my lifetime, as it sits empty after hosting a pair of museums recently. I notice two historical markers, one for 22

Producing Consumption Space      23

Maryland’s Civil War Trail and another about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. I walk the half-block to the stadium entry plaza, turn left in front of the Babe Ruth statue (a “native Baltimorean”), navigate the seven retired uniform numbers cast in steel, and walk up to the ticket window at the end of the Warehouse. The ticket sign shows multiple colors, each representing a different seating area, with prices ranging from $15 to $60, depending if it is a “value,” “classic,” “select,” “prime,” or “elite” game. Tonight is a “classic,” even with both teams heading to one hundred losses. I choose a $27 upper box seat in section 320. There is a short line to get into the Eutaw Street gate—nothing like Camden Yards’ early days when games were frequently sold out. I empty my pockets and walk through a metal detector. The gate attendant scans my ticket. I buy a $5 game program. I head over to check out the six statues in Orioles Legends Park and see a sign telling me the MLB Ballpark App offers an “Augmented Reality Experience” that will show highlights from the legends’ careers on my phone. After struggling to make it work, I begin my stroll down Eutaw Street to experience reality in its mundane form. The Budweiser Rooftop Deck is on my right—a fairly recent addition. I’m disappointed that Gino’s (the favorite fast-food restaurant of my childhood) is no longer selling hamburgers in the concession stand

FIGURE 3.  View of Oriole Park at Camden Yards from West Conway Street in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

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under the deck; it now sells shucked oysters and lobster salad sandwiches. The air is full of the smell of roasting meats from Boog’s BBQ, and the line seems pretty reasonable. It’s now enclosed in a faux shack, I suppose to remind people of barbecue’s perceived southern heritage. (I saw quite a few barbecue shacks when I lived in Nashville.) Former slugger Boog Powell, now in his seventies, is greeting fans as he has done at many games since 1992, signing autographs, talking baseball, and posing for selfies. I think about getting a pit beef sandwich, a Baltimore specialty, but I want to explore my options before I make my choice. Eutaw Street offers a kaleidoscope of sensations: the smell of barbecue; fans in Orioles shirts, jerseys of other teams, baseball caps; families with children, couples on date nights, friends gathering, a group of kids in little league uniforms, ushers, vendors, and first responders in their uniforms; people talking, drinking, shopping, eating, walking around, waiting in line; children running. Someone pushes past me. Fans gather on the flag court, those on the rail yelling out to the player below, asking for a baseball. I check out the plaques honoring the members of the Orioles Hall of Fame, window-shop the Orioles Team Store, check out the menu at Dempsey’s (named for the 1983 World Series MVP). On the ground, I notice a baseball-sized plaque identifying the landing spot of one of the hundred or so home runs hit onto Eutaw Street: “Boston Red Sox, Mo Vaughn, July 7, 1996, 419′.” (I think I had Vaughn on my fantasy team that year.) One concessionaire selling lemonade, another dumplings (that’s new), gyros, Camden Franks. In Orioles Authentics, I see game-used items and a bottle of real Camden Yards infield dirt (only $20!), complete with a certificate of authenticity. I’m not impressed by the three Orioles from the 1980s signing autographs (but was later disappointed to learn they were followed by some top minor league prospects). A right turn at the end of Eutaw Street puts me on the main concourse. I pass the playground on the way to the escalators to the upper decks. An usher makes sure that I don’t get on the one to the exclusive club level. Once upstairs, I check out my food choices (most stands are closed) and regret skipping Boog’s. I want to go back, but the escalators are only going up for now. It is only a short walk to my section. As I emerge from the tunnel, I see the green of the field, the “Camden green” of the mostly unoccupied seats, the green ivy at the edge of the batter’s eye in center field, the not-green of the metal-and-glass Baltimore Hilton, and the red brick of the Warehouse. I’m a little sad that I can no longer see the distinctive Bromo Seltzer clock tower, but it is blocked by the Hilton, and I guess a new convention center hotel is good for Baltimore. I walk down to my row, whose end features the 1890s Orioles team logo in wrought iron. I place my drink on the ground (only the lower two levels get cup holders), sit down in my seat, take out my pen, notice the lineups on the scoreboard, and open my program to the scorecard as I wait for the game to begin.

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People can experience Camden Yards in many ways as they participate in different activities, interact with other people, respond to sensual stimuli, and recall particular memories and distant places. Although each person’s experience is unique and cannot be determined in advance, mallpark designers—consisting of architects, team officials, and civic leaders—work to structure spatial practices as they conceive how stadiums are organized, include certain activities and amenities, decorate stadiums in various ways, and incorporate stadiums into the surrounding urban landscape. In order to understand the design practices producing mallparks, this chapter provides a theoretical context and examines the general practices producing consumption spaces, shopping malls, theme parks and UEDs.

Producing Space As described in chapter 1, mallparks are cathedrals of consumption—highly rationalized and highly spectacularized spaces. While cathedrals suggest something sacred, within medieval society they were much more than religious sites, serving both practical and symbolic functions by anchoring local economies, reproducing the social order, reinforcing the power of elites, and marking significant places.1 With awe-inspiring architecture and decorations of stained glass, precious jewels and metals, and religious art, cathedrals symbolized the centrality of religion and the power of elites in medieval life.2 Through the patronage of kings, nobility, and the Catholic Church, cathedrals were major public works programs that continued for decades. The cathedral’s relics attracted pilgrims, whose pilgrimages supported a network of businesses.3 Although today’s cathedrals of consumption do not serve similar religious purposes (though megachurches attempt to do so), their spatial practices and underlying conceptions fulfill similar functional and symbolic purposes as they (re)produce and (re)present the dominant social order. Chapter 1 described spatial practice as being synonymous with “perceived space,” which Shields suggested is considered “commonsensical” and “ignored one minute and over-fetishised the next.”4 Physically, spatial practices encompass the buildings, landscaping, roads, paths, barriers, walls, and other material elements that structure the ways in which people use space. Spatial practices also incorporate human behavior as people navigate space through routines, actions, and interactions with other people.5 Spatial practices further include symbolic aspects through which people assign meanings to space. Ultimately Lefebvre argues that “spatial practice regulates life” as certain spaces are perceived as accessible, forbidden, or places of abode and as spatial practices identify certain spaces

26       Chapter 2

as juncture points, establish boundaries between spaces, and assign specific types of interactions to particular spaces.6 Yet spatial practices do not exist independently of the people designing and using space because before a space is created, it must be conceived.7 Peoples’ experiences in and usages of space provide designers with inspiration, guidance, and material as they conceive new spaces, often responding the needs and desires of dominant groups. During the medieval period, this symbolic order celebrated the nobility and church. In the present era, designers of space concretize the pursuit of capital accumulation into space as architects, developers, urban planners, civic elites, and other powerful groups determine project parameters, including the location and intended uses of the space and the resources available to build it.8 Working within parameters, architects conceive space through drawings, blueprints, and computer-aided design programs as they translate abstract ideas into buildable objects. Once the objects are built, designers retain a degree of control as they reinforce spatial practices through rules regulating use and renovations that reshape space. Recognizing buildings are practical and symbolic, Lefebvre argues spaces need to be understood through their functional uses, peoples’ experiences, and the meanings that people ascribe to them.9 Designers may shape a space to facilitate certain activities, but its organization and aesthetic elements also communicate things about the space and the people within it. For example, skyscrapers functionally facilitate efficient corporate management by clustering executives. Yet skyscrapers also express many things as, for example, office location and design characteristics can mark an employee’s status within the company, while the skyscraper’s height symbolizes the company’s broader importance.10 Given such symbolic dimensions, spaces become places with emotional significance and meaning with which people form affective connections. People can develop positive place attachments, which Yi-fu Tuan calls “topophilia,” through feeling communal connections, comfort, and security and/or by engaging in ritual activities.11 Alternatively, topophobia or placelessness can develop in spaces provoking insecurity or fear, lacking distinctive identities, or providing generic experiences.12 As designers recognize people ascribe emotional significance to space, suppose people associate emotions with aesthetic features present within those spaces, and assume that similar features in other spaces can elicit those emotions, architects use aesthetic markers within their designs in efforts to create a sense of place.13 The relationship between functional and symbolic aspects of space can be seen in the two major architectural movements of the twentieth century: modernism and postmodernism. Guided by a belief that architectural design could improve human life, modernism minimized ornamentation in promoting a

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rationalized aesthetic in which “form follows function.”14 While such buildings were highly functional, many people found them to be dehumanizing and alienating because they seemingly celebrated dehumanized corporate power and impersonal bureaucratic government structures.15 Postmodernism developed as a response to modernism as architects reintroduced ornamentation and aesthetic elements back into building designs.16 According to Edward C. Relph, architectural modernism began in the early twentieth century “in several independent reactions against pointless ornamentation on manufactured goods, and against stale revivals of gothic and classical architecture.”17 In form, “the International Style” offered “undecorated surfaces, clear edges, mass-produced components, angular shapes and the honest expression of materials.”18 Beyond the cost savings of eliminating useless embellishments, space-efficient designs maximized functionality.19 Yet these were more than aesthetic and financial choices, as architects and urban planners believed their buildings and redesigned cities would help create a better world that would be more rational and functional.20 Clear delineations between work, leisure, and residential spaces would improve people’s lives.21 Homes would be “machines for living in,” as residential spaces were inexpensive and well equipped. With large apartment buildings replacing dilapidated rowhouses and apartments, this more efficient use of space would make large, open spaces available for many public uses.22 A rationally designed road system would enable people to get to their destinations quickly, especially as urban planners carefully organized cities with amenities satisfying people’s needs and satiating their desires.23 Where many architects saw beauty in the simplicity and cleanliness of modern design, critiques developed surrounding rationalization, placelessness, and alienation.24 As form followed function, modernist buildings tended toward homogenous designs facilitating their intended uses and suffered from placelessness because function-shaped spaces lacked distinctiveness.25 In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi and his coauthors argued that the lack of ornamentation silenced many of the communicative and symbolic aspects of building design and was emotionally dissatisfying for users.26 At its extreme, modernist architecture could be dystopian—for example, when the promise of public housing in large apartment buildings as conceived in planning documents was belied by inhumane living conditions.27 Postmodern architecture’s emphasis on symbolism can be seen as a reaction to the aesthetic sterility of modernist design.28 Architects such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, John Portman, and Rem Koolhaas abandoned unadorned appearances and straight-line efficiency to challenge conventional understandings of architecture through designs that pushed the limits of form, structure, and materials, inverted expectations of space, and changed orientations of buildings.29

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However, most architects lacked such ambitions. In their efforts to break free from the aesthetic austerity of modernism, Relph suggests that architects produced “fantastic Disneylands, idealised Historylands or futuristic Expositions” by decorating their buildings with decontextualized but symbolically rich pastiches.30 However, rather than reimaging what buildings could be, architects essentially produced packages “of standardized space to be gift-wrapped to the clients’ taste” as aesthetic facades covered structures that otherwise were essentially modernist.31 Such depthless designs led Ada Louise Huxtable to argue that postmodernism became the “architecture of facile illusion, of image over substance, of artifice over art.”32

Producing Consumption Spaces These critiques can be applied to cathedrals of consumption as they envelop standardized, rationalized cores within spectacularized environments.33 Through McDonaldization, designers attempt to maximize the economic productivity of consumption spaces through efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control.34 As rationalized spaces tend toward homogeneity and placelessness, designers try to minimize consumer alienation with designs promising fun and excitement and offering various aesthetic markers to generate emotional satisfaction. Cathedrals of consumption attempt to transform mundane activities such as dining, shopping, travel, education, and even funeral services into experiences saturated with meaning.35 A Johnny Rockets restaurant does not just serve diner food but attempts to recreate a 1950s diner experience, complete with jukeboxes filled with 1950s music, servers in period uniforms, and posters of period advertisements. A NikeTown retail store does not just sell athletic wear but also provides a complete Nike experience, with museum-quality displays, celebratory videos of Nike-sponsored athletes, and sport-themed art.36 While baseball games have always had experiential aspects, mallparks expand opportunities for consumption with diverse amenities and intensify the experience by incorporating many symbolic aesthetic elements. The functions of a cathedral of consumption often determine the forms manifesting McDonaldized spatial practices. For a McDonald’s restaurant, efficiency means quickly serving customers, while casinos try to keep people on the gaming floor to increase revenue generated through the mathematics of the house’s odds advantage.37 As calculability prioritizes quantifiable characteristics over toughto-define qualitative properties, McDonald’s minimizes extraneous decorative elements that cause customers to linger, while retail stores follow formulas in organizing product displays to maximize sales per square foot.38 Predictability

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ensures that consumers know what to expect, so McDonald’s offers mostly standardized menus, layouts, furniture, furnishings, and décor throughout the world. Similarly, hotel chains maintain standards for room design, amenities, and cleanliness, which are supported with bulk purchases of furniture, furnishings, and personal hygiene products.39 McDonaldized consumption spaces establish control by substituting nonhuman technologies for people, as customers can place their orders through machines at McDonald’s rather than interact with an employee, while Disney theme parks carefully script interactions between visitors and front-of-house workers (“cast members”), who are required to remain in character and costume.40 Although people appreciate goods and services that are fast, safe, and reliable, such rationalized design practices can diminish the experiential aspects of consumption.41 While McDonald’s provides inexpensive, mediocre food, eating is reduced to being a completely functional activity stripped of the social interactions, cultural meanings, aesthetic satisfactions and sensual qualities often associated with food and meals.42 People may accept shortcomings due to circumstances (e.g., limited time and money, the need to feed small children), but there is little special about eating fast food in generic and placeless restaurants. Many other consumption sites have also been described as “nonplaces” due to their generic and highly rationalized forms, their designs for particular functions (travel, commerce, or leisure), and as they mediate social relations through the space’s ostensible functions.43 Often perceived as inauthentic, contrived, and/ or artificial, nonplaces are produced through technocratic planning processes occurring outside the contexts of people’s lives and, because they lack organic development, provide few distinctive elements to which people can form emotional attachments.44 As a result, nonplaces can be alienating and discourage consumption.45 In contrast, Pine and Gilmore argue consumers will pay more for experiences that provide sensual satisfaction, facilitate opportunities to socialize, and deliver unpredictability, mystery, and surprises.46 To engage the symbolic and intangible dimensions of consumption, Ritzer explains that designers attempt to “reenchant” consumption spaces though extravaganzas, simulations, imploding barriers between forms of consumption, and imploding barriers between time and space.47 Extravaganzas use ornate architecture, famous artworks, popular entertainers, and/or spectacular performances to attract attention.48 Simulations produce idealized versions of spaces, events, or activities by breaking down “distinctions between the real and imaginary.”49 As implosion eliminates boundaries between consumption forms, retail, education, and dining activities are transformed into experiences, such as the “shoppertainment” offered at a NikeTown store.50 A second form of implosion eliminates boundaries between time and

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space to create fantastic environments.51 While spectacular practices do not directly facilitate economic exchange, they attempt to satisfy intangible needs and emotional desires as they work to extend the time people consume within a space and encourage return for future consumption.52 Designers often spectacularize consumption through theming, which Scott A. Lukas defines as using an “overarching symbolic motif that seeks to instantiate a unified and immutable idea throughout a space.”53 Themes use culturally resonant symbols taken from broad categories of time, place, culture, and brand to impregnate a space with meanings drawn from other contexts. Timebased themes allude to a nostalgic past or suggest an idyllic future, place-based themes represent distant locales, culture-based themes refer to popular media products, and brand-based themes use advertising-based corporate identities.54 Such themes are represented within architecture, décor, food, music, employee clothing, and merchandise, which ideally will produce a coherent themed environment.55 Las Vegas’s hotel-casinos are archetypal themed environments. For example, Caesar’s Palace represents the luxury of imperial Rome in its architecture, interior décor, signage, and employee uniforms and incorporates other culturally relevant themes, with gaming machines based on popular movies, celebrity chef-branded restaurants, and extended residencies by popular musicians.56 The combination of rationalization and spectacularization that produces cathedrals of consumption has been widely critiqued. Although it is hyperstylized “through the use of exotic decoration, gaudy colours, grotesque adornments, and the indiscriminate borrowing of styles and names from the most popular places of the world,” Relph proposes people recognize the depthlessness of “other-directed architecture . . . [which] suggests almost nothing about the people living and working in them.”57 Such spectacular buildings are abstracted from historical and geographic contexts, as they are based in “a surrealistic combination of history, myth, reality and fantasy that have little relationship with a particular geographical setting.”58 As a result, Huxtable suggests consumption spaces tend toward placelessness and possess transitory appeal as people become inured to spectacle and recognize buildings as “one-dimensional con games, their attractions and satisfactions limited, illusory, and equally out for the money.”59 Many cathedrals of consumption demonstrate this as their “idealised Historyland” themes are more “historicist” than “historical” by conforming to nostalgic beliefs about the past rather than representing actual material conditions.60 As designers stage “living history” in Colonial Williamsburg, they struggle with problematic narratives surrounding slavery.61 As designers invite visitors into historical spaces such as Philadelphia’s Constitution Hall, buildings are decorated not with the actual furniture used during historic events but with period pieces

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or replicas. As designers display historical objects such as USS Constellation, they strive to offer “authentic” representations of objects in use but face histories full of repairs and renovations that maintained functionality or reflected changing tastes. Moreover, as such sites exist within a competitive marketplace for leisure experiences, the ephemeral nature of spectacle demands that designers upgrade sites with new objects and different stories. While the processes of McDonaldization and spectacularization coexist within mallparks and other cathedrals of consumption, spatial practices and conceptions of space have evolved over time as designers pursued particular goals, responded to specific challenges, and adopted practices successful in other contexts. Whether through trial and error or copying others, the designers of baseball stadiums have adopted design practices influenced by shopping malls and theme parks, while incorporating stadiums within urban landscapes of and for consumption.

Producing Shopping Malls From their earliest days, enclosed shopping malls have been defined by their “shared parking lots, common ownership and management, uniform and aesthetically pleasing design, clear and consistent marketing goals, a carefully controlled commercial environment, a tenant mix designed to provide variety, and a wide range of consumer goods.”62 Bearing the rationalized features of modernist architecture and McDonaldization, early shopping malls facilitated commercial exchange, with virtually all aspects of design, aesthetic décor, and permissible activities related to this purpose. Shields identified two antecedents to shopping malls: luxury arcades and department stores.63 Arcades were private city streets that were covered, closed to vehicular traffic, and lined by diverse shops.64 Department stores housed collections of specialty shops and tended to be located downtown.65 Although both facilitated shopping as a utilitarian act, arcades and department stores added important experiential dimensions as retailers worked to transform shopping into a leisure activity full of pleasure and diversion.66 The first enclosed shopping mall, Southdale Mall, opened in 1956 in a Minneapolis suburb. Its “dumbbell” design—two department stores connected by a store-lined pedestrian corridor—was quickly copied, with eighteen hundred similarly designed malls built by the late 1960s.67 These malls were highly McDonaldized, as the locations of benches, kiosks, and other obstacles subtly pushed shoppers to storefronts, success was measured on a sales-per-square-foot basis, formulaic mixes of stores favored national chains, and strict rules regulated store operations and visitor behavior.68 Following the tenets of architectural

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modernism, Southdale Mall architect Victor Gruen lamented that they had become “machines for selling.”69 Gruen had wanted malls to be more than utilitarian shopping spaces. Beyond providing immersive experiences in which, like arcades and department stores, the spectacle of goods and shops would elicit affective responses (and continued consumption) from consumers, he had hoped malls would become “regional, multifunctional town centers that would improve the quality of life in surrounding residential areas,” as placeless suburbs lacked organic opportunities for pedestrian-based sociability.70 However, as malls emphasized commercial activity, were isolated from surrounding communities by large parking lots, and proscribed most activities unrelated to shopping, Gruen’s community-oriented intentions were not achieved.71 As the overrationalization of malls undermined the experiential aspects of shopping and led to growing boredom, disaffection, and dissatisfaction, many malls closed during the 1970s due to declining sales.72 With older models of mass merchandising failing, developers sought to produce new retail experiences by spectacularizing environments and diversifying consumption opportunities with food courts, high-end restaurants, multiscreen cinemas, children’s play areas, and other entertainment amenities.73 Megamalls, outlet centers, and urban festival marketplaces (notably those designed by Jon Jerde and developed by the Rouse Company) intentionally attempt to produce a sense of community, use aesthetic features to incorporate themes, and create “moments of surprise and excitement.”74 Although such features do not directly generate revenue, the Jerde Partnership claims its designs produce retail sales between $500 and $800 per square foot (greatly exceeding the industry average of $341) because spectacular elements enhance the mall experience and entice people to come to the mall and stay longer.75 C A S E S T UDY: TH E M A LL O F A M E R I C A

The Mall of America may be the quintessential expression of the principles of shopping mall design. Goss argues it “represents nothing less than the imagined totality of the geography and history of the consumer world, and that by its name, scale, and ambition, it is the apotheosis of the modern mall.”76 Just six miles from Gruen’s Southdale Mall and located on the former site of Metropolitan Stadium (see chapter 1), the Mall of America is the country’s largest and busiest, covering 4.2 million square feet and attracting more than forty million visitors per year.77 While the enormity of the Mall of America is spectacular in itself, the diversity of available consumption amenities intensifies the spectacle. Visitors can shop, dine, watch a movie, enjoy theme park rides, visit an aquarium, experience a flight simulator, explore Barbie’s Dreamhouse, get married and have their

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wedding reception, laugh at comedy club, go bowling, or hang out at a sports bar. As one of the major tourist attractions of the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, the mall has a five-hundred-room Radisson Blu hotel attached to it. In addition, the mall offers several free, community-oriented activities, such as events for young families on Toddler Tuesdays and its Mall Stars Walking Club targeting retirees. Of course, these free programs support the mall’s commercial purposes because participants often engage in other consumption activities.78 Although the mall’s size allows diverse activities and is an attraction, it can be alienating and disorienting. Architect Jerde solved this through “placemaking,” which his firm defines as creating “experiential environments” that blend “architecture, landscape, interiors, environmental graphics, lighting and water features” and “carefully arrange programmatic elements and the pathways to connect them.”79 As such, the Mall of America has four separate themed neighborhoods, each possessing distinctive building materials, decorations, colors, and signage, thematic motifs, and particular mixes of stores and activities.80 Despite these differences, each themed neighborhood contributes to the mall’s broader narrative of Americana.

Producing Theme Parks While shopping malls use experiential elements to enhance consumption in highly rationalized spaces, theme parks rationalize spaces to better facilitate the consumption of experiences. Using rides, shows, games of chance and skill, and other attractions, theme parks sell the promise of thrills and excitement that take visitors beyond the confines of work and community that define their lives.81 Theme parks produce experiences that engage the imaginations, fantasies, desires, and emotions of consumers as they participate in active recreation and enjoy sensual pleasures from the movement of rides, eating theme park foods, seeing spectacular architecture, aesthetics, lights, and performances, and hearing the theme park’s cacophony of music and noise. Although many theme parks claim to be the first to embed rides and amusements within a themed, immersive environment, Disneyland established in Anaheim, California, the template for contemporary theme park design with its combination of offering family-oriented entertainment experiences within a highly rationalized consumption space. The theme park may be a mid-twentieth-century invention, but it has several antecedents that provided visitors with temporary escapes into spectacular environments. Lefebvre describes the festivals and fairs of medieval Europe that enabled people to enjoy extraordinary experiences, events, and commercial trade.82 As European urbanization intensified during the eighteenth century,

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“pleasure gardens” such as Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and London’s Vauxhall Gardens blended manicured natural features with limited entertainment, amusements, and food.83 World’s fairs, such as London’s 1851 Great Exhibition and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, were temporary events celebrating historical occasions, technological progress, and the growth of nation and empire through spectacular architecture, exotic displays, and exciting entertainment.84 Amusement parks, typified by those in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, used similar techniques to produce smaller and permanent versions of world’s fairs.85 Theme parks remove people from their daily experiences and into spaces that expose them to different sensations and subject them to alternative codes of conduct. Rollercoasters propel riders at high speed and feature sudden changes of direction that can disorient riders or push them together. “Dark rides” that are enclosed within indoor spaces use darkness and isolation to create unexpected thrills and other surprises as they immerse visitors within the ride’s narrative.86 Interesting architecture transports visitors to other times and places, exotic animals offer different types of spectacles, and shows tell stories through music, dancing, humor, special effects, and stage décor. Theme parks attempt to create thematic coherence across disparate elements as they tell stories as diverse as Jesus’s crucifixion, at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience; Dolly Parton’s Appalachian upbringing, at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; and life in nineteenth-century England, at Dickens World in Kent, England.87 Opened in 1955, Disneyland became the prototype for theme park design. Rather than including the rollercoasters and the seedy amusements associated with Coney Island, Walt Disney designed his theme park for families and children.88 With themes such as the future in Tomorrowland, the antebellum South in New Orleans Square, and the nineteenth-century Old West in Frontierland, Disneyland’s seven interior “lands” were designed with thematic coherence expressed through rides, foods, music, entertainment, merchandise, architecture, and appropriate references to Disney Studio films and characters.89 Despite differences between the lands, Disneyland maintains an overarching narrative unity centered on the Walt Disney Company, nostalgia for the small-town America of Disney’s youth, Americana, and fantasy. C A S E S T UDY: DI S N EY WO R LD

As Disneyland’s success attracted motels, souvenir shops, and fast-food restaurants that Walt Disney did not want outside the park’s gates in Anaheim, Disney World in Orlando, Florida, more fully realizes his vision by providing diverse recreation and leisure options within its forty-three-square-mile property. Disney World offers four theme parks: the family-oriented Magic Kingdom; the world’s fair–inspired EPCOT Center; Disney’s Animal Kingdom, featuring wild

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animals; and the movie-themed Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Visitors can stay at thirty-four hotels and resorts, dine at more than 140 restaurants, and enjoy many other forms of consumption on the Disney property. These spaces seamlessly integrate thematic environments with highly rationalized consumption practices.90 The Pirates of the Caribbean ride, originally opened in Disneyland in 1967, demonstrates both the spectacularization of McDonaldized consumption and the McDonaldization of spectacular consumption. The eight-and-a-half-minute water-based dark ride is fairly simple in form and execution: high-capacity boats carry visitors through several scenes of a pirate story performed by animatronic people and animals.91 Before getting on the ride, visitors stand in a queue whose wait time is calculated and transmitted to information boards throughout the park. Once the ride is complete, visitors exit through the Pieces of Eight gift shop, which sells ride-themed clothing, souvenirs featuring Disney characters in pirate clothing, and photographs of guests on the ride. In an act of cross-platform promotion, in 2003 Disney released a Pirates of the Caribbean film, whose popularity inspired sequels that have grossed more than $3 billion in global ticket sales. In turn, characters, places, and plot elements from the movies have been woven into the ride’s story and around Adventureland, in which buildings have been designed to look like seventeenth-century Tortuga, the base for many Caribbean pirates. The Plaza del Sol Caribe Bazaar sells pirate-themed merchandise (including movie memorabilia), the Tortuga Tavern offers Caribbean-inspired food, and costumed actors dressed as Jack Sparrow and other movie characters interact with visitors. As such, the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is embedded within a complex intertextual weave of Disney’s film, television, cartoon, theater, and theme park products, a successful formula that has been reproduced in Disney theme parks in Anaheim, Shanghai, and outside Tokyo and Paris.92 This merger of highly rationalized consumption with a themed environment extends beyond Disney World’s theme parks. Each hotel is themed with consistent architecture, room furniture and furnishings, staff uniforms, costumes for Disney characters, restaurants, and retail stores.93 The ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex offers nine venues capable of hosting various sports and four golf courses. Disney Springs features high-end shopping, chef-branded restaurants, unique entertainment from Cirque du Soleil, and a twenty-four-screen cineplex. Many swimming pools and manicured beaches on freshwater lakes satisfy visitors looking for a quiet day, while several hotels pamper guests with spa experiences. Although most experiences are designed for visitors, just outside of the property Disney has manufactured the community of Celebration, where the company provides a small-town, residential experience with carefully controlled aesthetics and corporate governance.94 Thus, Disney World provides much more

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than theme parks as it offers highly integrated and diverse consumption experiences designed to appeal to many different interests and most demographic groups.

Producing Urban Entertainment Districts The merger of rationalization and spectacularization defining shopping mall and theme park design has transformed many consumption sites, including retail stores, restaurants, casinos, museums, aquariums, zoos, college campuses, cruise ships, and mortuaries.95 Similarly to how shopping malls concentrate stores take advantage of common infrastructure, many sites are clustered within landscapes of consumption, which have become common within urban areas and contribute to the transformation of cities from sites of production into places for consumption.96 As described earlier, urban spaces concretize the abstract relations within the dominant mode of production.97 Urban governance also expresses social relations as civic leaders exercise government authority. In the late nineteenth century, the private sector generally developed urban space because people then believed in limited government.98 At the start of the twentieth century, civic leaders inspired by the City Beautiful movement began planning cities’ downtown core.99 However, laissez-faire attitudes toward development remained until the Great Depression, during which urban planning became a dominant, comprehensive practice as cities followed activist Keynesian governance principles.100 This mode of governance lasted until the urban crisis of the 1970s, to which neoliberal entrepreneurial governance emerged as the dominant response.101 The combination of suburbanization, deindustrialization, and decreased support from the federal government challenged urban America.102 Highway construction and subsidized Veterans Administration housing loans propelled 1950s suburbanization, along with racially discriminatory housing and banking practices that disadvantaged Blacks and motivated white residents to leave urban neighborhoods.103 Urban rioting in the late 1960s and forced busing accelerated “white flight,” but the Fair Housing Act opened the suburbs to Blacks by outlawing housing covenants and redlining.104 By the 1970s deindustrialization further destabilized cities as corporations began relocating from traditional manufacturing centers to lower-cost, lower-regulation areas and left behind unemployed workers, decaying factories, and polluted environments.105 Unemployment led to rising poverty and associated ailments of crime, drug use, and family breakdown. The federal government exacerbated challenges with policies that reduced direct spending for urban needs.106 Overall, shrinking tax bases from disinvestment

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limited the ability of urban governments to provide quality education, public safety, and other services to residents, which encouraged further capital flight due to rising taxes and the declining quality of public services. By the end of the 1970s, cities were seen as places of danger, decay, and deviance.107 To break this spiral of decline, civic leaders adopted a variety of marketoriented entrepreneurial strategies.108 Local governments provided direct subsidies and/or guaranteed private development risks to attract corporate investment and often devolved part of its authority for collecting fees and providing services to quasi-public business improvement districts.109 Investments in visitor-oriented infrastructure were intended to attract consumers into UEDs by offering suburbanites, tourists, and business travelers diverse retail, cultural, entertainment, and dining experiences within safe “tourist bubbles” aggressively patrolled by police and easily cordoned off from the surrounding city.110 UEDs have helped transform cities into places for consumption—products offering varied experiences that could be marketed to potential consumers and residents because civic leaders believe a revitalized urban core makes the city a more attractive place to live for upwardly mobile young adults and wealthy older couples without children.111 As visitors and new residents expand the urban tax base through increased economic activity and property values, the vicious cycle of decay is replaced by a virtuous cycle of growth. Since many cities have adopted similar visitor-oriented strategies, competition and the limited duration of spectacle require cities to “feed the downtown monster” through further public investments, adding new amenities and experiences.112 In this competition, cities differentiate themselves by leveraging distinctive local historical, environmental, and cultural features.113 Once central to the production and transportation of industrial goods, waterfronts have become leisure sites featuring walking paths, marinas, day cruises, and party boats. Beyond being tourist sites, buildings, monuments, and locations of historical events represent the city’s identity as they are featured in urban marketing campaigns and incorporated into souvenirs.114 Local music, culinary, and artistic cultures are similarly promoted as parts of the urban consumption experience. Such distinctive elements are particularly important within the competition for visitor spending because they cannot be copied. While Las Vegas can produce a simulation of the Statue of Liberty, a person must travel to New York Harbor to see the real thing. C A S E S T UDY: BA LTI M O R E’ S I N N E R H AR B OR

Baltimore exemplifies the process of transforming a city into a place for consumption. In the mid-1960s, civic leaders began the process of replacing the

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empty warehouses of the Inner Harbor with shopping malls, restaurants, hotels, museums, a convention center, and sports facilities.115 Simultaneously, Baltimore began remaking its image for potential visitors, among whom the city enjoyed little positive recognition. While some hail this strategy as being successful, with more than ten million people annually visiting the Inner Harbor, more critical analyses question the costs borne by the public, the fact that beneficiaries tend to be nonresidents, and the relative paucity of benefits enjoyed by Baltimore residents.116 Reaching a population of 950,000 at the end of World War II, Baltimore began a decline in the 1950s as residents began moving to suburban Baltimore County. Suburbanization accelerated in 1968 after ten days of rioting during which fifty-eight hundred people were arrested and a thousand businesses were damaged or destroyed.117 To revitalize downtown, civic leaders promoted the $180 million Charles Center project in the 1960s and redeveloped the formerly industrial Inner Harbor for commercial, residential, tourist, entertainment, and retail use.118 From 1979 to 1981, four flagship projects opened (Harborplace, the National Aquarium, the Hyatt Regency, and the Baltimore Convention Center), the success of which led the London Sunday Times to proclaim the city’s renaissance: “The decay of old Baltimore slowed, halted, then turned back.”119 Yet Baltimore’s image of “urban renaissance” was fairly illusory and required substantial resources to maintain. During the 1980s Baltimore’s population continued to decline, from 785,000 to 735,000, as two-thirds of the city’s manufacturing jobs were eliminated and the city’s poverty rate rose to 22 percent.120 The early excitement of the Inner Harbor passed, especially as other cities built similar amenities, and despite the city’s substantial investments over four decades into two expansions of the Convention Center, two sports stadiums, two major additions to the National Aquarium, several hotels, a children’s museum, a renovation of the Pratt Street Power Plant, the Power Plant Live! entertainment complex, the Horseshoe Casino, and various events.121 Yet Baltimore’s population has continued to decline, to 576,498 in 2021, and the poverty rate remains largely unchanged.122 Poverty-related problems continue unbated as well, with Baltimore ranking first among large American cities for murder, violent crime, drug-related emergency room visits, and teen pregnancy in 1999 and continuing to be among the nation’s leaders in these categories two decades later.123 When paired with aggressive policing that showed little respect for residents living in Baltimore’s most impoverished neighborhoods, these disparities of wealth and urban investment helped to fuel three days of rioting in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray, a young Black man, at the hands of Baltimore’s police.

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Conclusion A scene in the 1991 movie City Slickers, in which Billy Crystal goes on a cattle drive with two close friends in the midst of midlife crises, highlights the emotional connections people form with baseball stadiums. Passing time by discussing the “best days” of their lives, Crystal’s character, Mitch, describes attending his first game at Yankee Stadium, during the 1950s when he was seven years old. He recounts emerging from a dark tunnel into the light and being overwhelmed by the immensity of the facility and its green grass, brown infield dirt, and “great green copper roof.” He continues by talking about the events of that day: sitting with his father, learning how to fill out a box score, watching Mickey Mantle hit a home run, and seeing the Yankees win. Mitch’s friends validate the significance of this memory as they smile, nod, and express their agreement that it was, indeed, “a good day.”124 Despite being an inextricable part of the experience, the day’s consumption went unspoken. At a minimum, Mitch’s best day required the purchase of two tickets and a scorecard but also may have included hot dogs, sodas, ice cream, and Yankees souvenirs. However, these other transactions or his father’s total spending did not merit comment in Mitch’s reminiscence, which focused on the day’s experiential aspects. Moreover, this day was not a singular experience, as he became a lifelong baseball fan, something demonstrated by Mitch wearing a New York Mets hat for most of the movie’s cattle drive (with the donning of a cowboy hat at the climax of the film marking his transformation from “city slicker” to “cowboy”). As Mitch’s story produces pleasurable emotions for himself and friends and, though fictionalized, it presumably resonates with the movie’s audience. Teams, civic officials, and architects attempt to tap into this resonance of place as they design mallparks. According to Paul Goldberger, “baseball is connected intimately to the place in which it is played and derives much of its aura from that place.”125 As such, stadiums should be recognized as much more than spaces for the presentation of professional baseball games while conceptions of space and spatial practices attempt to induce consumption and produce topophilia. Designers hope to create lifelong baseball fans like Crystal, whose first visit to Yankee Stadium in the 1950s (on which the City Slickers scene is based) generated a deep emotional connection to the game and resulted in a lifetime of consumption.126 To do this, teams and architects have designed mallparks to be “machine[s] for baseball and for sucking the money out of the pockets of people who like baseball”127 and wrapped highly rationalized processes within immersive environments offering “baseball with a baseball theme.”128 Civic officials attempt to leverage this connection to place to promote cities as consumption

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sites because more than two million people annually attend games and games are broadcasted to local, national, and international audiences. As this book explains, the production of mallpark spaces is embedded within multiple contexts, designed to achieve several goals, and influenced by many factors. Mallparks are shaped to fulfill several functions. At their core, stadiums are spaces in which to present baseball games as they accommodate the field and a variety of support spaces to enhance performance, including locker rooms, practice areas, team offices, and groundskeeping facilities. Beyond these performance spaces, mallparks provide multiple experiences for thirty-five to fifty thousand spectators with seats in which to watch games and concourses on which to purchase food and souvenirs and to participate in other experiences. These consumption areas also require a large backstage area for the preparation of food, storage of retail items, maintenance of spectator safety, and production of the entertainment experience. The mallpark itself is also shaped by its position within the urban fabric and the uses for which civic officials have provided public subsidies. Yet mallpark forms are shaped by much more than their functions. Mallparks are embedded within multiple histories, distinctive places, and broader processes of consumer culture and neoliberal urban governance. Baseball history, in terms of its players, events, and facilities, provides material for designers as they decorate mallparks but also constrain available aesthetic choices. Local histories, cultural elements, and aesthetics enable designers to strengthen the mallpark’s connections to its surrounding area and with its host city. Consumer culture impacts mallparks because designers must meet consumer expectations for consumption activities as baseball competes with other recreational and leisure opportunities for consumer spending. Broader political contexts determine the conditions in which mallpark design occurs, by providing budgetary limits and establishing where stadiums are located. While form often follows function, this book explores how designers produce mallparks while working within these multiple contexts and the broader implications of what their decisions say about the contemporary moment.

Part II

THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF BASEBALL STADIUMS

3 GROUNDS, BALLPARKS, AND SUPERSTADIUMS

They called it Dreyfuss’s Folly. No baseball stadium like Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field had ever been built when it opened in 1909—twenty-five thousand seats in three seating tiers along the infield, boxes on the grandstand roof, and a level of bleachers to the foul poles.1 Like Philadephia’s Shibe Park, the ballpark was built of concrete and steel, unlike the wooden baseball grounds where Pittsburgh’s teams had played since 1882.2 Exposition Park was rebuilt three times but was susceptible to flooding from the Allegheny River, while Recreation Park could seat only 2,500.3 Luckily, there had never been a fire similar to grounds in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.4 The folly was not in its design, but in its unbelievable $1 million price tag (a record amount for a baseball stadium) and “distant” location in the Oakland neighborhood (three miles and ten-minute trolley ride out of downtown). Built in just four months, a record 36,338 people came out to see Dreyfuss’s Folly on June 30, 1909.5 The Pirates lost 3–2 to the Cubs that day but would later win the 1909 World Series. Despite playing only half the season at Forbes Field, the team drew 534,950 attendees that season—a Pittsburgh record that stood until 1922. As it turned out, Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss’s ballpark was not a folly after all. Forbes Field grew with the city, with renovations in 1925 and 1938 expanding its capacity to thirty-five thousand and the addition of lights in 1940. Over its sixty-one-year history, the ballpark hosted forty-seven hundred Pirates games, three championship Pirates teams, the Negro leagues’ legendary Homestead Grays, and players Honus Wagner, Josh Gibson, and Roberto Clemente, as it consistently drew crowds ranking around the middle of the National League.6 43

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Forbes Field also was the home of University of Pittsburgh football from 1909 to 1924 and the Pittsburgh Steelers of the National Football League (NFL) for thirty seasons and hosted a variety of boxing matches, traveling circuses, and vaudeville shows.7 The location turned out not to be a problem either, as Oakland grew around Forbes Field and hosted the main campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University and many of the city’s cultural institutions.8 As Pittsburgh’s population more than doubled from 321,000 in 1900 to 671,000 at the beginning of World War II, Oakland became centrally located, and the municipal Schenley Park, on which Forbes Field bordered, was the city’s second largest, at more than 450 acres. However, by the mid-1950s, Forbes Field was described by a Pittsburgh sportswriter as “joyless as a prison exercise yard” due to its physical decline.9 With automobiles replacing trolleys, Forbes Field lacked easy access to highways and sufficient parking. Despite facility limitations, the Pirates were playing some of their best baseball behind Clemente and won the 1960 World Series in a major upset over the New York Yankees on a dramatic walk-off home run by Bill Mazeroski at Forbes Field in the seventh game. With teams relocating and MLB expanding to reap profits in new, publicly financed superstadiums, civic leaders decided in the mid-1960s that “to keep pace with other cities, Pittsburgh needed a multipurpose sports stadium that is second to none.”10 Located near the site of Exposition Park at the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers, Three Rivers Stadium had direct highway access, parking for forty-five hundred cars, and shuttle service to downtown. Costing $55 million, it had a capacity of just over fifty thousand, and the Pirates and Steelers were equal cotenants.11 Three Rivers Stadium’s artificial turf field would significantly reduce weather-related cancelations, end football games being played in the mud, and allow the stadium to host many different events, even “midget auto races.”12 Pittsburgh Stadium Authority director Burrell Cohen promised, “Every aspect of Three Rivers Stadium has been planned and designed to provide the best possible environment for sports and other entertainment for the patrons as well as the performers.”13 Three Rivers Stadium offered convenience, comfort, efficiency, and experiences that were unavailable at Forbes Field. Signage, ramps, and escalators facilitated movement and enabled the stadium to empty in ten minutes. Fans enjoyed twenty-one-inch-wide plastic seats, wide aisles, unobstructed views of the playing field, and clean, modern restrooms. The fully computerized, thirty-foot-high, 274-foot-long scoreboard provided basic game information, messages, artwork, animated cartoon sequences, “photo-likenesses” of players, and statistics.14 Large concourses were filled with concession stands, including seven Zum Zum specialty snack bars selling Bavarian sausages, hamburgers, bratwurst, French fries,

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and hot roast beef sandwiches. Wealthy fans could watch games from forty-one luxury boxes outfitted with heating, air conditioning, upholstered chairs, and other modern conveniences. Visitors could also explore the Three Rivers Sports Theater Hall of Fame, which celebrated the city’s “rich sports heritage” through wax statues and “the latest audio-visual techniques.”15 Although Three Rivers Stadium may have been “second to none” when it opened in 1970, by the 1990s the city of Pittsburgh, the stadium’s tenants, and its patrons were complaining about the facility’s obsolescence. Players found little distinctive about Three Rivers Stadium, with Richie Hebner observing, “When I go up to bat, I can’t tell whether I’m in Cincinnati, Philly, Pittsburgh, or St. Louis. They all look alike.”16 Although located just across the river from downtown, the stadium’s insular design prevented fans and television viewers from seeing the city. Its expanded capacity of fifty-nine thousand was a problem for both tenants because the Steelers consistently sold out and developed a lengthy season ticket waiting list, while the Pirates struggled to attract fans and began covering eleven thousand upper-deck seats with tarpaulins in 1993.17 With an estimated loss of $65 million from 1990 to 1995, the Pirates were forced to maintain one of MLB’s lowest payrolls, resulting in poor performance that further depressed attendance and revenue.18 Given these dire circumstances, Pirates owners requested a new facility and suggested that refusal could lead to the team’s sale and relocation. The changing spatial practices within Pittsburgh’s baseball stadiums over a century reflect broader changes within consumption, design, and urban America. Late nineteenth-century baseball grounds were experiments as team owners attempted to figure out how to effectively commodify baseball spectatorship. Following a half-century of experimentation and the emergence of a stable baseball industry, the brick and steel of ballparks represented the permanence and prominence of the sport during a period of urban growth and rapid industrialization. Forty years later, the concrete superstadium recognized the emergence of professional football, expressed the practicality of modernist architecture, and served as a valuable public amenity for an automobile-centered suburbanizing culture. As will be described in chapter 4, the transition to the mallpark expressed further changes in consumer demands, aesthetic trends, and urban development and governance.

Baseball Grounds In 1862 William Cammeyer opened the first commercial space for baseball, Brooklyn’s Union Grounds.19 Since the first recorded game in 1845, baseball had grown from a social activity into an organized sport attracting popular interest

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and possessing business potential. As newspapers and magazines promoted and profited from baseball, an 1858 game between New York and Brooklyn all-stars was the first to charge admission.20 Cammeyer sought to profit from baseball’s growing popularity by offering free rent to the most popular clubs and selling opportunities to watch high-quality games by building grandstands, a separate “bettor’s ring” for gambling, and a fence limiting access to ticket holders.21 Cammeyer’s business model did not include owning a team because the first professional league was not founded until 1871. The final thirty years of the nineteenth century saw multiple business models for baseball as the industry experimented to find a stable, profitable structure. The relatively informal structure of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players lasted only from 1871 to 1876, when it was replaced by the centralized National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (NL) that continues to this day. Two team-centric leagues, the American Association (AA) and the Union Association (UA), sought major-league status, with the AA agreeing with the NL to not compete for markets or players in 1882 and the UA failing after one season (1884).22 The player-centric Players League, a cooperative venture between players and investors, challenged the NL-AA cartel in 1890.23 However, cutthroat competition in an oversaturated marketplace led to the entire industry suffering large financial losses and only an expanded twelve-team NL surviving.24 Though building and operating baseball grounds represented a team’s most significant expense, their wooden construction enabled them to be built quickly during a single off-season but also left them susceptible to fire. Teams preferred locations in underdeveloped urban neighborhoods with access to mass transportation, where they could rent large, relatively inexpensive lots, but had to move when landowners found more lucrative opportunities.25 Locations were also determined by the other business interests of team owners, who used baseball to generate interest in real estate or customers for trolley lines.26 By the end of the nineteenth century, a few locations had become deeply associated with baseball. In Detroit the intersection of Michigan and Trumbull Streets hosted professional games from 1895 to 1999, with Bennett Park being replaced by Tiger Stadium in 1912.27 The New York Giants played in three different Polo Grounds on Coogan’s Bluff in Manhattan from 1889 to 1957.28 Grounds featured different seating configurations and amenities as owners experimented to create a viable economic model. Chicago’s Lakefront Park included eighteen private boxes atop its grandstand roof, and Cincinnati’s Palace of the Fans included covered grandstands, nineteen opera-style private boxes above carriage stalls, and field-level standing-room sections.29 With amusement park rides, a beer garden, and a racetrack, St. Louis’s first Sportsman’s Park was

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promoted as “the Coney Island of the West,” which prompted the Sporting News to complain about “the prostitution of a ball park.”30 Because grounds lacked concession facilities, teams invited vendors to sell food, beverages, and souvenirs in the stands.31 Options reflected both the business interests of team owners and overall league philosophies. The NL banned alcohol in an effort to cater to middle-class spectators. Alternatively, the AA was known as “the Beer and Whiskey League” because many team owners had investments in saloons, breweries, or distilleries.32 Due to inexpensive materials and designs, Brian J. Neilson describes most baseball grounds as offering the “unadorned pragmatic linearity—and also the utilitarian charm—of the sheds, stables, and factories by which they were often surrounded.”33 Yet a few grounds had higher architectural ambitions, as with ornamentation from towers and turrets providing Boston’s South End Grounds with an appearance of fun.34 Michael Gershman identified Cincinnati’s Palace of the Fans as the first baseball facility “with a distinct architectural style” when it opened in 1902 with a Beaux-Arts design and hand-carved concrete columns decorated with “vaguely Egyptian detailing.”35 Despite having no functional or economic benefit, such aesthetic features symbolically marked grounds as recreational spaces. Although no MLB team played in a wooden baseball ground after 1915, they are significant insofar as they “contained the genetic code for future parks.”36 Designers experimented to find the right mix of aesthetics, seats, amenities, and entertainment to satisfy late nineteenth-century consumers. Some elements such as turrets were design fads and have not been reproduced, while luxury boxes and amusement park rides were well ahead of their time. However, baseball grounds’ most important contribution to stadium design is the direct impact they had on the team owners and architects who designed the thirteen reinforced concrete ballparks that replaced them from 1909 to 1915.

Ballparks As the twentieth century began, the baseball industry went through a brief period of turmoil before fully stabilizing. After the NL contracted to just eight teams in 1900, the minor Western League renamed itself the American League (AL) and claimed major league status in 1901 by placing teams in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Washington. Refusing to honor NL player reserves, AL teams signed many top players to firmly establish the league.37 After competing for two years, the AL and NL agreed to form a new cartel (MLB) and, with the Baltimore and Milwaukee teams moving to New York

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and St. Louis, respectively, produced a major league map that remained static until 1952. Two factors determined this map—market size and transportation accessibility. Needing a large fan base, the five largest cities in the country (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Boston) each had multiple teams, with three located in New York. The remaining five MLB teams were located in cities among the country’s fifteen largest. Additionally, all teams were in the Northeast and Midwest, with St. Louis as MLB’s westernmost and southernmost city. While these regions contained thirteen of the country’s largest fifteen cities, this geography was also practical because baseball played 154 games within six months and traveled by rail. Although the other two cities in the top fifteen could have supported MLB teams, New Orleans was a twelve-hour train trip away from St. Louis (the nearest MLB city) and San Francisco required a two-day journey. Ballparks were built because team owners wanted facilities reflecting baseball’s status as a mature industry and the “national pastime.” Though inexpensive, baseball grounds were impermanent, with landowners occasionally selling the real estate beneath them, and dangerous because they were susceptible to fire and collapse. Built from 1909 to 1923, reinforced concrete ensured ballparks were durable and safe, while increased costs incentivized team owners to purchase ballpark sites. As ballparks were built to last, owners incorporated various architectural features to symbolize the importance of baseball within the city and broader culture.

Urban Spatial Practices Ballpark locations were selected on the same criteria as baseball grounds. Owners purchased land in underdeveloped urban neighborhoods where they could find large, inexpensive lots near the city center and mass transit that could provide synergies with their other business interests.38 These parameters led to Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Forbes Field being initially criticized for their “remote locations” far outside the experiences of city residents.39 The sites of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and Chicago’s Comiskey Park were previously garbage dumps, while Philadelphia’s Shibe Park was built near the city’s smallpox hospital.40 Despite the sites’ unattractive nature, their acquisition was also challenging without governmental assistance. For example, Shibe Park required separate purchase agreements with seven landowners.41 Given ballparks were wholly private ventures and the era’s public policy preferences, ancillary development was a private concern. Many bars and restaurants, such as McCuddy’s Tavern outside Comiskey Park and Hoot Robinson’s Bar and Grill in Detroit, may have become associated with neighboring ballparks, but

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they needed patronage from local residents to survive on a year-round basis.42 Ballparks also provided their communities with economic opportunities. Surrounding building owners occasionally set up wildcat bleachers on rooftops overlooking the outfield. Street vendors competed with ballpark concessionaires.43 As automobiles surpassed mass transit after World War II, neighbors rented scarce parking spaces to suburban-based fans.44

Consumption Practices Cost and functionality were central to ballpark design, with many built in stages, as new sections, upper decks, and lights were added to enlarge capacity and generate additional revenue. However, such piecemeal construction resulted in facilities that were medleys of different styles and impacted the consumer experience, as when, for example, upper decks required support posts that obstructed views from lower-deck seats.45 Only Yankee Stadium, the sole ballpark built after 1915, was mostly complete upon its opening in 1923.46 Ballparks generally featured three types of seating: box seats, grandstands with individual seats, and benches in the bleachers. Although capacities ranged from twenty-five to fifty thousand, designs were intimate, with both upperand lower-deck seats close to the field (made possible by support posts that obstructed views from many lower-deck seats). Large capacities did not result in high average attendance, as few teams drew more than ten thousand fans per game before 1945.47 Instead, ballparks were designed to accommodate the large crowds expected on weekends and holidays because many fans worked during afternoons when games were scheduled. Team owners sought to maximize ballpark usage with multiple baseball tenants and by hosting diverse events. In Philadelphia and St. Louis, AL and NL teams shared ballparks for several years. In Boston, the Red Sox rented Braves Field for the 1915 and 1916 World Series because Fenway Park was not large enough to hold the expected crowds.48 Negro leagues teams were frequent tenants, and the Homestead Grays often drew larger crowds in Washington and Pittsburgh than their MLB landlords.49 Teams earned additional rental income from professional and college football games, boxing matches, concerts, and other large events. Sales of food and merchandise offered a tertiary revenue stream. Wrigley Field included the first permanent concession stands as its builder, Charles Weeghman, earned his fortune from lunch counters.50 Until their ballparks added permanent concession facilities during renovations, teams contracted with concessionaires to operate temporary stands and hired vendors to sell goods while walking through the aisles. Food and beverage offerings became fairly standardized as menus featured hot dogs, peanuts, Cracker Jacks, popcorn, ice cream, soda, and

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beer, with minor local variations.51 Although scorecards were popular sellers, other souvenirs were offered, though with limited selection and availability.52 Most teams provided little entertainment beyond the game. Bill Veeck, who owned three MLB teams from 1946 to 1980, deviated from traditional practices with unique promotions and memorable events.53 Veeck recognized that spectacles, such as midget Eddie Gaedel’s plate appearance in 1951 and Comiskey Park’s “exploding scoreboard” that shot fireworks, played music, and randomly flashed strobe lights after a White Sox home run, could generate interest, intensify fan experiences, and increase attendance and concession sales.54 While advertisements, concessions, entertainment, and facility rental provided significant income and often provided the difference between profit and loss for a team, it is important to note that ticket sales produced the bulk of team revenue before the introduction of television in the late 1940s.55

Aesthetic Practices Although ballparks prioritized functionality, Neilson described them as “ ‘architectural’ in ways not seen before.”56 Aesthetic embellishment conveyed a sense of grandeur similar to other major civic buildings; Gershman explained Shibe Park’s design suggested that it was “a dignified palace reminiscent of a bank or a library.”57 The most distinctive features, such as the Tiger Stadium’s Home Run Porch, Fenway Park’s Green Monster, and Wrigley Field’s ivy, tended to be practical responses to specific design or site challenges. Such elements helped to provide ballparks with an ambiance and distinctive sense of place.58 Ballparks are not defined by a single architectural style. The brickwork facades of Shibe Park were influenced by Georgian and French Renaissance design. The green and buff tiles of Forbes Field’s facade followed the Beaux-Arts style.59 Yankee Stadium was designed with an “austere neo-Roman imperial vocabulary.”60 Many design elements served little purpose, such as the Shibe Park cupola, the Ebbets Field rotunda, and the Polo Grounds’ row ends stamped with the Giants’ logo.61 Such elements were limited, as Karl B. Raitz noted that “owners painted the poured concrete walls and exposed steel girders, but did little else to improve their appearance.”62 A sense of place in ballparks often emerged from functional or practical features. Forbes Field’s sunshade protected fans during day games. Hand-operated scoreboards conveyed basic game information. Wrigley Field’s ivy cushioned the outfield’s brick wall.63 Other distinctive features now seem strange. Built from three materials, the right field wall at Cleveland’s League Park challenged outfielders, as “playing the ball off that wall was a bit like picking the right door on Let’s Make a Deal.”64 Outfields in Detroit and New York featured obstacles in the

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field of play: the Tiger Stadium flagpole was 440 feet from home plate, and the Yankees placed several monuments in deep center field.65 Neilson characterized each ballpark as “the unique product of its circumstances and of the architectural dialogue between two opposed forces: the diamond, the outfield and the stands pushing outward, and the surrounding streets and structures containing them.”66 In this dialogue, ballparks conformed to existing streetscapes and lot conditions. In Detroit the Home Run Porch overhung the outfield by ten feet because owners, facing site constraints, sought to maximize seating capacity.67 Similarly, public streets bordered ballparks in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Boston, producing asymmetrical outfields, restricting distances to outfield fences and increasing home runs, and enabling neighbors to enjoy games from their apartments or profiting from wildcat bleachers on rooftops. To minimize the impacts of these factors on gameplay and attendance, teams built tall outfield walls, such as Shibe Park’s “spite fence” and Fenway Park’s Green Monster.68 C A S E S T UDY: E B B E TS FI E LD

Opened in 1913 at a cost of $750,000, Ebbets Field helped to define Brooklyn and its Flatbush neighborhood.69 An irregular lot shaped an irregular field whose dimensions were altered by several renovations, while millions of fans passed through its rotunda over forty-five seasons. With minimal foul territory, Ebbets Field created an intimacy between players and the Dodgers’ long-suffering fans. Gershman describes Ebbets Field as a “shrine to Brooklynness,” as the ballpark grew to reflect the idiosyncrasies and disorderliness of the borough and was the focal point for a distinctive Brooklyn identity following its loss of political autonomy in New York City’s 1898 consolidation.70 Ebbets Field was built on the cheapest land in Brooklyn, a Pigtown garbage dump, but to acquire the full site, team owner Charles Ebbets spent more than $200,000 to purchase twelve hundred parcels of land from fifteen owners.71 Despite using dummy corporations, Ebbets couldn’t maintain secrecy about his intentions during the four-and-a-half year process, which increased prices to the extent that he had to sell part of the team to complete construction.72 The marginal nature of Pigtown turned out to be a minimal problem as Brooklyn grew, and four million people could easily travel to Ebbets Field along nine trolley lines, two subway lines, or many roads.73 Ebbets Field was shaped by its irregular quadrangular lot created by four Brooklyn streets. These boundaries limited the distance to the right field foul pole to 301 feet and prevented the Dodgers from placing seats beyond the right field wall, which was built to forty-feet high to protect homes built during the 1920s and contained Ebbets Field’s hand-operated scoreboard.74 While not as

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ornate as other ballparks, its facade included arches, pilasters, and federal-style double-hung windows.75 The Ebbets Field rotunda was eighty feet across and twenty-seven feet high at its center and decorated with a mosaic floor patterned with the stitches of baseball and a chandelier designed with facsimiles of baseball bats and balls.76 While Ebbets Field is remembered for such distinctive architectural elements, it is celebrated for its perceived intimacy and the bond between Brooklyn and the Dodgers.77 Longtime broadcaster Red Barber observed, “If you were in a box seat at Ebbets Field, you were so close you were practically an infielder.”78 With the Dodgers usually uncompetitive and perceived as lovable losers, fans, such as Hilda Chester, “Albie the Truck Driver,” and the “Sym-Phony Band,” helped to define the Ebbets Field experience.79 Such fan loyalty was rewarded from 1941 to 1956 as the Dodgers won seven NL titles and the World Series in 1955. During those sixteen seasons, Ebbets Field attendance exceeded one million fans all but two years and ranked twelve times among the NL’s top two. With strong fan support and broadcast revenue from New York’s lucrative media market, Brooklyn was the NL’s most profitable team during the mid-1950s.80 Yet Ebbets Field was nearing its useful end, with mounting maintenance issues, changing neighborhood demographics, and a lack of nearby parking for fans driving from the suburbs. In 1953 Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley proposed addressing these issues by replacing Ebbets Field with a privately built domed stadium next to Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards train station.81 Remembering the difficulties of assembling the Ebbets Field site, O’Malley asked New York City master planner Robert Moses to use eminent domain to force property sales, but Moses refused.82 Although O’Malley would pay for the new stadium in order to remain in Brooklyn, Moses wanted the stadium to be built at Flushing Meadows in Queens on a site that could accommodate parking for twelve thousand cars and was close to three highways. Without Moses’s support, the Atlantic Yards project failed. At that point, as Goldberger noted, “it didn’t matter . . . if [O’Malley] took the team ‘five miles or 3,000 miles away.’ ” O’Malley ultimately moved to Los Angeles, where civic leaders gave him three hundred and fifteen acres of public land in Chavez Ravine for a stadium.83 In 1962, when the NL granted New York an expansion team to replace the Dodgers, Shea Stadium was built at Moses’s preferred site.84

Ballparks as Spaces of Spectacular Consumption Ballparks were highly rationalized spaces when they were built. Form certainly followed function as ballparks were shaped by their baseball fields and were designed to effectively profit from selling spectatorship to baseball games

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and other events. Piecemeal construction reflected the financial constraints and expectations of team owners, with initial capacities much higher than the baseball grounds they replaced but insufficient to handle the larger crowds that eventually would come to games. Renovations added seats, concession facilities, scoreboards, lights, and other areas as baseball’s revenue model changed to incorporate night games, food and beverage sales, and broadcast media. Yet ballparks were constrained by their neighborhoods and public policy preferences that limited the use of public authority for the benefit of private actors. Ballpark aesthetics also reflected the time in which they were built. Team owners wanted their facilities to be seen as major public buildings and to be associated with housing the national pastime by using common architectural styles. Whether the Beaux-Arts style of Forbes Field, the neo-Palladian style of Shibe Park, or the neo-Romanesque style of Yankee Stadium, ballpark architecture showed that these were significant buildings within the urban landscape that hosted important events and contributed to urban life. Additionally, because playing fields were large expanses of grass within urban neighborhoods, ballparks represented natural spaces within heavily industrialized areas devoid of such spaces, in a manner similar to Olmsted-designed urban parks in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington.85

The End of the Ballpark Era In many respects, ballparks reflect the story of urban decline from suburbanization, corporate relocation, and disinvestment that was described in chapter 2. All but four were replaced by superstadiums from 1953 to 1974.86 As longtime fans moved to suburbs, their previous neighborhoods declined due to disinvestment. As fears of crime dissuaded suburbanites from coming into the city, difficulties accommodating automobiles exacerbated the challenges of ballparks, which possessed limited parking and poor highway access because they were built in an era when cars were a luxury item. Often suburban fans parked in driveways where residents would overcharge them or pay money to local kids who promised to watch their cars for a fee.87 Crime was problematic inside Shibe Park, with frequent robberies and even a murder in the stands, while outside Shibe Park police escorted sportswriters back to their cars in a neighborhood scarred by urban rioting in 1964.88 Ballpark interiors reflected this decline as well, as they showed the impacts of age and delayed maintenance. Compared to the superstadiums opening elsewhere, ballparks had many more problems than could be fixed by a coat of paint, with obstructed views from lower decks, splinters from seats, and dirty bathrooms. Many ballparks had become topophobic spaces.

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The Superstadium When they opened during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, superstadiums were considered substantial improvements over aging ballparks. For civic leaders, superstadiums elevated their city’s relative status and were amenities improving the quality of urban life by providing opportunities for recreation and leisure.89 Baseball fans enjoyed greater comfort, better experiences, and enhanced consumption opportunities. Public financing reduced team expenses by removing facility maintenance costs and provided new revenue-generating opportunities. Superstadiums were built in a very different context than ballparks. The Great Depression redefined the role of government, as civic leaders, following Keynesian principles, expended public resources on diverse projects to directly provide benefits to residents and granted urban planners substantial authority to rationally shape cities.90 National and local geographies changed due to the rise of the Sun Belt and suburbanization, in which industrial production and residents relocated from their traditional locations in industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest to formerly peripheral areas. In 1900 just three of the largest thirty American cities were outside MLB’s footprint, but there were eleven such cities in 1950. These new conditions impacted baseball stadiums in several ways. First, the growth of broadcast revenue from radio and television changed baseball’s economic model, which enabled many more cities to support a team and undermined multiteam markets. Second, while the geography of baseball was limited by rail at the start of the twentieth century, new commercial air travel made accessible all major cities in the mainland United States and Canada. Third, with superstadiums understood as civic assets, cities invested substantial public resources to build them. Together, these factors led to a rapid reordering of the MLB map, as from 1952 to 1977 ten teams relocated and another ten cities were granted expansion franchises.

Urban Spatial Practices In 1932 Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium became the first superstadium. Civic leaders had promoted the publicly built and owned facility as capable of hosting diverse cultural and entertainment activities, which would symbolize the city’s growth and progress, and said that it would be part of the city’s downtown monumental core.91 While no other stadium for an MLB team would be built during the Great Depression, New Deal programs constructed swimming pools, recreation centers, fairgrounds, parks, community centers, and sports facilities throughout the country and established an active role for government in the provision of leisure facilities.92

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Superstadiums symbolically validated a city’s “major league” status, as the attraction and retention of an MLB team became a matter of public concern by the 1950s.93 For growing cities such as Atlanta, the arrival of a team represented a city’s emergence as a major metropolis (see chapter 9), while leaders in industrial cities such as St. Louis believed a new downtown stadium would proclaim their city’s continued relevance and signal the importance of the downtown core against rising suburbs.94 Symbolic factors may have determined whether a city would pursue a team, but practical considerations of highway access and parking determined stadium sites, whether located downtown, in suburban areas, or on the urban periphery.95 Ten miles from Minneapolis and St. Paul, Bloomington’s Metropolitan Stadium fifty-acre site was near two highways.96 When it opened in 1970, civic leaders claimed that Cincinnati’s downtown Riverfront Stadium was built atop the “world’s largest garage,” with a capacity of twenty-five hundred cars.97 While assembling such large sites had challenged ballpark designers, planners could use public property or take private property through condemnation or eminent domain. Although Moses did not use this authority to help the Dodgers, several cities used stadium construction within large-scale urban-renewal programs that displaced lower-income communities.98 As described by Janet Marie Smith, “basically they were a tool for urban renewal and a justification for cities clearing huge chunks of land.”99 Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium displaced residents from the Black working-class Summerhill neighborhood (see chapter 9).100 Riverfront Stadium was central to Cincinnati’s waterfront revitalization plan that removed the Bottoms neighborhood of warehouses and slum housing.101 Direct highway access and large parking lots isolated superstadiums from surrounding areas, even in downtown. Although this isolation minimized negative impacts of event-related traffic, noise, and light pollution on residential areas, such placement also minimized the impacts of superstadiums in support of broader urban revitalization efforts, especially as planners did not effectively incorporate stadiums into broader community or economic development initiatives.

Consumption Practices As cities built superstadiums as civic amenities, their improved comfort, cleanliness, convenience, and capacities promised a vastly different environment for watching games for fans and new sources of revenue for teams.102 Following the tenets of architectural modernism, superstadiums were highly rationalized spaces. Superstadiums could host diverse events, with their horseshoe or circular designs and capacities exceeding fifty thousand. Though not in all superstadiums, artificial-turf fields required less maintenance than grass and could better withstand frequent usage. Domes in Houston, Seattle, Montreal, Minneapolis,

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and Toronto eliminated impacts from adverse weather and further increased the events that could be accommodated.103 Unlike piecemeal construction practices of ballparks, superstadiums opened fully developed (though many were subsequently renovated). Superstadiums also featured many new revenue-generating amenities. Although some baseball grounds included proto–luxury boxes, they were a regular feature in superstadiums. New Yorker writer Roger Angell described how the Astrodome’s fifty-three Sky Boxes provided patrons with a “living room, bathroom, refrigerator, and closed-circuit TV set.”104 Numerous superstadiums situated their luxury boxes between the lower and upper decks along the loge level. Many new features improved experiences for all fans, with more comfortable seating and unobstructed views as individual, plastic seats replaced wooden grandstands and bleachers and as cantilevered designs eliminated the posts needed to support upper decks.105 Concession and souvenir offerings were more diverse within superstadiums, as larger concourses accommodated more permanent stands that were outfitted with multiple points of sale to speed up service and appliances to assist in food preparation. Menus were expanded to include nachos, hamburgers, different types of sausage, fresh seafood, pizza, and local specialties.106 Some superstadiums offered restaurants, lounges, and limited-access private clubs that served fans before games and were opened all year.107 Souvenir offerings expanded as teams diversified their product lines. To compete for leisure spending, superstadiums enhanced game experiences, with computerized scoreboards, video screens, and upgraded entertainment. Scoreboards displayed game information, messages, and advertisements, prompted fans to cheer, and executed elaborate preprogrammed routines featuring flashing lights, loud sounds, and pyrotechnics.108 During the 1980s, technological improvements enabled superstadiums to install large video screens to show replays, videos, and advertisements.109 Teams began wearing colorful uniforms, marketing their players, and hiring mascots, such as the San Diego Chicken and the Phillie Phanatic, to entertain crowds with their antics on a nightly basis.

Aesthetic Practices In addition to delivering a better game experience, superstadiums were considered aesthetically superior when they opened. With form following function, the extensive use of plastics and high-tech, air-conditioned domes, modernist superstadiums offered a futuristic appeal with their ability to accommodate diverse uses and efficiently provide mass entertainment. Writing in 1975, Bill Shannon and George Kalinsky explained, “Space-age gadgetry is now the byword in

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ballpark construction, complete with fountains, waterfalls, light shows, exploding scoreboards, escalators, posh clubs, and form-fitting chairs now the order of the day.”110 Yet Neilson describes superstadiums as being “absolutely representative of the civic and corporate building ambitions of the 1960s and 1970s in which ‘prestige’ is identified with a universalizing abandonment of all local, particular, or historically resonant architectural references, in favor of the triumphantly neutral technocratic style.”111 The seventeen superstadiums opened from 1960 to 1977 were particularly generic, with just San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium, Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, and Montreal’s Olympic Stadium “realizing in the designs of their façades the sculptural possibilities inherent in reinforced concrete.”112 Although generic in form, superstadiums were not identical. Shea Stadium’s exterior was decorated with blue and orange steel panels and the interior featured multicolored plastic seats to differentiate seating areas. For Anaheim Stadium’s first twelve years, its scoreboard was framed with a 230-foot-tall A topped by a halo.113 Emblematic of the Brutalist architectural style, Jack Murphy Stadium was square rather than round.114 Local referents were also utilized as St. Louis’s Busch Stadium incorporated ninety-six arches reminiscent of the iconic Gateway Arch and Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium was topped with a five-thousand-pound, nineteen-foot-tall replica of the Liberty Bell.115 Within this era of generic design, two superstadiums are notably distinct: Dodger Stadium and Kauffman Stadium, which not coincidentally were two of the three long-term facilities designed solely for baseball.116 As will be discussed in chapter 6, Emil Praeger’s design of Dodger Stadium expressed its Los Angeles identity by using a pastel color scheme and providing views to the San Gabriel Mountains, and its parking lots allowed at-grade entry into all stadium levels, eliminating the need for circulation ramps.117 As will be discussed in chapter 8, Kivett & Myers (a direct predecessor of Populous) designed Kauffman Stadium as part of the two-stadium Truman SportsPlex. Seating in baseball-only Kauffman Stadium followed the field’s shape, and an open-outfield design placed most seats between the two foul poles. Its sixty-foot-tall scoreboard topped with the Royals logo provided distinction, along with a 322-foot-wide water spectacular that featured a waterfall and fountains operating on computerized sequences that could shoot up to fifty-thousand gallons to celebrate a Royals home run or victory.118 C A S E S T UDY: H O U S TO N A S TRO D O M E

Houston’s Astrodome exemplifies superstadium development. In 1900 Houston’s population was less than forty-five thousand and ranked as the country’s eighty-fifth largest city. By 1960, fueled by the oil industry and World War II

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manufacturing, Houston had grown to be the nation’s seventh-largest city, with a population exceeding one million,119 That year, Houston was identified as a candidate city for the Continental League, a start-up that sought to become a third major league and would have Branch Rickey as its commissioner. But MLB thwarted this effort by expanding by four teams, including one in Houston that would begin play in 1962. In recognition of the city’s western heritage, its team was named the Colt .45s and played three seasons in a temporary facility during the construction of a publicly funded domed stadium that would eliminate the impact of Houston’s hot and humid summers.120 When completed for the 1965 season, the team was renamed the Astros and the building the Astrodome in honor of the Houston-based NASA space program. Consistent with Texas’s reputation for size, the space program’s futuristic image, and claiming to be inspired by the Colosseum, team owner Judge Roy Hofheinz hyperbolically declared the Astrodome to be “the Eighth Wonder of the World”—a technological wonder built on a gigantic scale.121 Its roof spanned 645 feet without supports on the playing field or stands, rose to a height of 218 feet, and included forty-six hundred clear panels over eight acres.122 The Astrodome seated forty-five thousand for baseball, fifty-two thousand for football, and up to sixty-six thousand for other events. Each of its six tiers featured its own color of cushioned and upholstered plastic chairs to provide comfort and aesthetic appeal. A “modern, revolutionary Control Center” operated a 6,600-ton air-conditioning system with a computer doing work of 280 people.123 The Astrodome’s 474-footlong computerized electronic centerfield scoreboard was claimed to “put the Aurora Borealis to shame,” with its fifty thousand lights and ability to provide game information, electronic pictures, and exciting extravaganzas.124 The Astrodome offered spectacular experiences to go along with its built spectacle. Its fifty-three luxuriously outfitted, exotically decorated Sky Boxes featured five restaurants and clubs, with upscale dining and the ability to serve 3,280 people at one time.125 The facility hosted diverse events, with the NFL’s Oilers as a long-term tenant, the 1973 Billie Jean King–Bobby Riggs “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, NCAA and NBA basketball games, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, concerts, and numerous conventions, including the Republican Party’s national convention in 1992.126 To access this spectacular space, the Astrodome claimed it would be “nation’s easiest stadium to reach” for customers living within Houston’s five hundred square miles of suburban sprawl.127 Located seven miles southwest of downtown on the South Loop Freeway, the Astrodome’s thirty-thousand-car, 260-acre parking lot was served by fifty lanes of traffic from ten different roads. To manage this traffic, the site featured a “traffic control” tower to enable the lot to empty in less than twenty-five minutes “under normal conditions.”128

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However, problems began fairly quickly. When glare from the clear roof panes impacted games, building managers painted them, which blocked sunlight and killed the grass. In response, the Astrodome became the first stadium to install artificial turf (which was called AstroTurf). Located on the Astrodome’s top ring, the Sky Boxes provided, according Angell, “approximately the same view of the ballplayers as [a patron] might have of a herd of prize cattle seen from a private plane.”129 He further observed that the “Cool Bubble” undermined the experiential qualities of attending a baseball game, with its sterile environment, highly distracting scoreboard, and programmed nature of spectatorship.130 New York Times journalist Jim Yardley described that after the Oilers moved to Nashville in 1996 and with the Astros moving into a downtown mallpark in 2000, the “space-age Astrodome became antiquated” and “as outdated as a polyester leisure suit.”131 Reduced to trade shows, tractor pulls, and other insignificant events, the Astrodome’s final high-profile use occurred in 2005 as a shelter for twenty-five thousand New Orleans evacuees from Hurricane Katrina.132 The Astrodome was closed to the public in 2008 and designated as a state landmark in 2017.

Superstadiums as Spaces of Spectacular Consumption Angell observed that Three Rivers Stadium and other stadiums of the era “remind one of motels or airports in their perfect and dreary usefulness; they are no longer parks but machines for sport.”133 These rationalized consumption spaces were highly McDonaldized. Superstadiums efficiently presented many different events on their round performance surfaces. To ensure maximum usage, superstadiums sacrificed experiential quality by placing seats far from the field and, for baseball, orienting seats toward center field rather than home plate. Artificial turf surfaces ensured predictable bounces, and domes provided certainty that games would occur and be reliably comfortable. Elaborate scoreboards and game programming directed fans when and how to cheer and eliminated much of the spontaneity associated with ballparks.134 In their machine-like dreary usefulness, superstadiums were also “nonplaces” (see chapter 2). Describing them as being “among the more dreadful examples of late-modernist American architecture,” New York Times architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne argues superstadiums “were particularly ill-suited for baseball. Modernist architecture is about symmetry, contemporaneity and the idea of universal solutions; its marriage with baseball, easily the most idiosyncratic and traditional of sports, was doomed from the start.”135 While each ballpark was unique, limited embellishments did not distinguish superstadiums from one another. As site conditions imposed odd dimensions on ballpark playing

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fields that favored different styles of play, the playing fields of superstadiums were largely identical, with standard distances and symmetrical outfields. Superstadiums lacked the intimacy of ballparks, with large playing surfaces and cantilevered decks that distanced players from fans. This placelessness extended beyond superstadiums that were completely isolated from surrounding landscapes, with full seating rings, domes, and large parking lots with convenient highway access that ensured that fans could enter and leave superstadiums without interacting with local residents. Unadorned structural concrete and artificial turf were also the antithesis of the rus in urbe yearning of being able to look upon nature within urban areas that Goldberger argues is fundamental to the allure of baseball.136

The End of the Superstadium Superstadiums aged poorly. By the end of the 1980s, modernist architecture had fallen out of favor, especially within consumption sites where visitors had rising expectations. Although superstadiums were more comfortable, offered better food, entertainment, souvenirs, and convenience, and were less likely to cancel games due to weather, many people began feeling that baseball was missing essential qualities that had been present in ballparks.137 As this alienation was exacerbated by labor actions, drug scandals, and tell-all books that reduced the game’s heroes, a haze of Ronald Reagan–inspired nostalgia helped erase memories of decrepitude from the final years of most ballparks. Instead, Forbes Field, Shibe Park, and Ebbets Field were remembered as topophilic places that had unique designs and quirks, hosted innumerable on-field events, encouraged sociability in the stands, and maintained relationships with surrounding neighborhoods. Within the popular imaginary, ballparks became the proper settings for baseball—idealized spaces serving as implicit critiques of the game’s presentation within superstadiums. Yet nostalgic yearnings for an aestheticized past provides only a partial explanation for the demise of superstadiums. Baseball’s economic model continued to change and, as superstadiums were built as spaces for mass recreation, they were incapable of generating sufficient revenue for teams and providing experiences demanded by consumers. Although superstadiums featured some luxury boxes, exclusive clubs, and upgraded amenities, they were built to accommodate very large crowds and provide most patrons with essentially the same experience. Large seating capacities meant that tickets were plentiful and inexpensive, and mass-produced food tended be bland and of relatively low quality. However, the trends described in chapter 2 that led to changes within shopping mall design practices in the 1980s also impacted baseball stadiums, with much greater focus on producing experiences for individualized consumption. Additionally,

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as government taxation policies facilitated greater concentrations of wealth and cultural expectations celebrated excessive displays of wealth, corporations and upper-class consumers were more likely to purchase luxury suites and club seating. Because superstadiums were unable to meet such consumer demand, owners sought public financing for new facilities that could. With local governments transforming downtown areas from spaces of production into places for consumption, civic officials were receptive to such requests and eager to build new stadiums to attract attention, excitement, large crowds, and economic activity into their UEDs.

The Stadium That Began Changing Baseball Seeking to capitalize on nostalgia, Pilot Field opened in downtown Buffalo in 1988 as the centerpiece of the city’s bid for an MLB expansion franchise. Although Pilot Field had initially been built with 19,500 seats for the minor league Bisons, civic leaders commissioned HOK Sport to design a facility capable of being expanded to 40,000 to reach major league standards.138 Pilot Field had all the amenities expected in an MLB stadium, including thirty-eight luxury suites, a full-service restaurant, a food court, multiple concession stands, and a state-ofthe-art scoreboard, but it was its aesthetic that set it apart from its contemporary superstadiums, including Toronto’s SkyDome, Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium, and Tampa’s Tropicana Field. Rather than being designed to host multiple events and with minimal ornamentation, Pilot Field was an outdoor, baseball-only facility that incorporated multiple referents to ballpark architecture, natural grass, and an asymmetrical outfield. Washington Post baseball writer Richard Justice describes Pilot Field as calling “to mind Ebbets Field and [Shibe Park], with its arches, backlit colonnades and marble tiles” and fitting in well with the buildings in Buffalo’s historic preservation district.139 Neilson describes Pilot Field as recreating “the scale and intimacy of the classic ballpark, [while] outside, it wears a post-modernist, neo-Palladian face, frankly ‘architectural’ and unapologetically historicist, that resonates urbanely with its neighbors.”140 Buffalo baseball fans responded with season-long attendance surpassing one million as, on some nights, the Bisons outdrew MLB teams. Justice recognized Pilot Field’s throwback appeal and trendsetting potential by describing it as “maybe the next logical step” in stadium design.141 Although Buffalo ultimately did not receive an expansion team, Pilot Field’s retro aesthetic established the new trend in stadium design, which HOK Sport developed further in its designs of Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field and Baltimore’s Camden Yards (see chapter 5). Postmodernism had come to baseball,

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though characterized by architectural critic John Pastier as “bad postmodernism. Not done with the kind of wit good architects would build. Crude and simplistic. Terribly inadequate.”142 Unlike the postmodern designs associated with strong idea firms and renowned starchitects such as Frank Gehry (see chapter 8) that may have sought to reimagine what a baseball stadium could be, HOK Sport’s postmodernism produced a standardized, rationalized baseball consumption space and wrapped it beneath a retro facade.

4 THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF THE MALLPARK

“The Best Ballpark in AmericaTM”—that’s what the tour guide called it. The phrase is even on the logo of Pittsburgh’s PNC Park. I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been to MLB games at forty-nine stadiums—all but one that are currently in operation and twenty that are no longer in use. At social events, I’m often asked for my opinion of the best one when it’s known that I’m writing a book about baseball stadiums: “Of course, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.” “Dodger Stadium is beautiful.” “Yes, Camden Yards” (which residents of Maryland’s DC suburbs expect, but no one mentions Nationals Park). “I love the beach at San Diego’s Petco Park.” “The Giants’ owners paid for San Francisco’s Oracle Park.”1 PNC Park is on my list, but I’ve only been there once—more than a decade ago and before I began this project. So, I feel the need to go to Pittsburgh to examine it with a critical eye. I stay downtown, near Market Square, rather than in one of the hotels that have opened near the stadium. I follow my typical research protocol: explore the stadium area early in the day, take a ballpark tour to enter otherwise inaccessible backstage and luxury areas, and buy a moderately priced game ticket to see the stadium in operation. My navigation app calculates the walk to PNC Park to be a mile. A few turns take me to the bridge crossing the Allegheny River. It is one of the Three Sisters— three virtually identical self-anchored steel suspension bridges built in the 1920s. Originally named the Sixth Street Bridge, the Seventh Street Bridge, and the Ninth Street Bridge (informative, if not imaginative), they’ve been renamed to honor prominent Pittsburghers Rachel Carson (Ninth Street), Andy Warhol (Seventh Street), and Roberto Clemente (Sixth Street). The first two were 63

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natives. The third was born in Puerto Rico, starred for the Pirates for eighteen seasons, and accumulated exactly three thousand base hits before his life ended tragically in a 1972 plane crash as he attempted to travel to Nicaragua on a relief mission following an earthquake. The Roberto Clemente Bridge is the closest to PNC Park. The tour begins on the hour with two guides leading twenty-five visitors. Similarly to other tours, the guide starts by asking us where we are from. Many say, “St. Louis” (the Cardinals are in town). I say, “Washington, DC,” and when told that I am a Nationals fan, quickly respond, “Orioles,” as fandom is a lifelong thing that can only be changed if the team moves away. The guides begin the narrative by explaining Forbes Field II was the stadium’s working title, but PNC Bank offered “millions of reasons” for a different name. They point out the steel beams painted blue, the sunshade above the upper deck, and a couple of other items inspired by Forbes Field and tell us that we will go from the bottom to the

FIGURE 4.  Sign at PNC Park, Pittsburgh.

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very top of the stadium. They encourage us to visit in the off-season, when the tour visits the home clubhouse, and lead us to the Legacy Theater to show us a video of the clubhouse instead. The Legacy Theater is located in Legacy Square. When I visited PNC Park in 2008, this was my favorite area because it honored the Negro leagues greats who played in Pittsburgh for the Homestead Grays and the Crawfords. Legacy Square had seven statues, interactive interpretive displays, and decorative eighteen-foot fiberglass bats suspended above the area. However, in 2014 Legacy Square was repurposed, the statues auctioned off, and the displays removed. All that remain above the nondescript entry plaza are seven banners, each featuring a Negro leagues great on one side and a good, longtime Pirate on the other. Jason Bay and Al Oliver should not be honored in the same way as Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson. I’m very disappointed. As the presentation begins in the Legacy Theater, we are told that one can only visit this area on the tour. Photographs on the walls document some of Pittsburgh’s MLB “firsts” (the first game on radio, the first World Series night game, the first all-minority lineup in 1971), and the front wall displays memorabiliafilled lockers from Forbes Field, Three Rivers Stadium, and PNC Park. The guides discuss Clemente’s game-worn jersey from 1969, given to the team by his widow. After the video, we are given time to look around before entering the service tunnel to see the ballpark’s “nerve center.” There is something fascinating about the backstage: cinderblock walls, painted concrete, open conduits full of cables, offices and locker rooms, training and medical areas, indoor batting cages, and images, words, and deeds of past Pirates players and teams painted on the walls to inspire current players. Three players walk by toward the clubhouse. (I recognize none.) We enter the home dugout (just like every other stadium tour) and are told to stay off the grass (just like every other stadium tour). We stop for a time at the Pirates’ indoor batting cage, where the walls are painted a blue reminiscent of Forbes Field and there’s an artificial turf surface from Three Rivers Stadium, plus high-tech pitching machines and monitors to help hitters analyze every aspect of their swing. The elevator takes us up to the press box, where we see one of the best views of downtown Pittsburgh. The guide describes the area and then tells a story from the park’s construction that “some PhD” told them to expect many home runs to be hit on the fly into the Allegheny River, but only five have been hit in twenty seasons. (I hold my tongue. Maybe the issue is the quality of Pirates players rather than the PhD’s analysis.) After describing the groundskeepers’ work, we go down to the Pittsburgh Baseball Club level, which has three unique clubs—the 3000 Club, Gunner’s, and the Keystone Club—and a fourth area of seven party suites. We spent some time in the Keystone Club, which refers to both Pennsylvania’s

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state nickname and second base, the latter to honor Baseball Hall of Fame second baseman and hero of the 1960 World Series Bill Mazeroski. Since PNC has only two decks, I’m impressed with how designers managed to produce a differentiated club level by separating the bottom rows and giving them an exclusive fully enclosed concourse. Designers even attached sixty-five suites to the underside of the upper deck without obscuring views from the lower deck. Whether PNC Park really is “The Best Ballpark in AmericaTM” is inconsequential for this book because it is a mallpark much like any other, with similar spatial practices producing its place identity, amenities mix, and immersive aesthetic environment. PNC Park is of Pittsburgh in the same way that Progressive Field is of Cleveland, Comerica Park is of Detroit, and Nationals Park is of Washington. PNC Park offers Pittsburgh’s elite similar luxury to that available in St. Louis’s Busch Stadium, Minneapolis’s Target Field, and Seattle’s T-Mobile Park. Pirates fans have experiential opportunities similar to those of Diamondback fans at Phoenix’s Chase Field, of Brewers fans at Milwaukee’s American Family Field, and of Rangers fans at Arlington’s Globe Life Field. PNC Park celebrates Pirates history in much the same way that Atlanta’s Truist Park celebrates Braves history and Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park celebrates Reds history. While the specific design practices and conceptions of space are examined in much greater depth in following chapters, this chapter describes how the spatial practices of mallparks are rooted in baseball’s urban history and the design principles of shopping centers and theme parks.

From Superstadiums to Mallparks Following the construction of Buffalo’s Pilot Field, baseball stadium design began shifting away from antiseptic, generic, and placeless superstadiums. As described at the end of the previous chapter, spectators were dissatisfied with the experiential qualities provided by multiuse facilities, and team owners recognized their limited ability to generate revenue. With cities redeveloping downtowns into consumption-oriented UEDs, conditions converged to facilitate the emergence of a new generation of baseball stadiums. The transition from superstadiums to mallparks is evident in the development of Pilot Field, Toronto’s Rogers Centre, and Chicago’s Guaranteed Rate Field, as facilities were becoming better able to generate revenue, more aesthetically focused, and built in downtown areas. Each possessed two of these elements. As described in chapter 3, Pilot Field incorporated retro aesthetics into a downtown ballpark but did not fully develop its consumption environment. Rogers Centre offered a sophisticated consumption environment within downtown Toronto

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but lacked themed aesthetics. Guaranteed Rate Field merged its sophisticated consumption environment with retro aesthetics but was located in its predecessor’s parking lot far from downtown Chicago. Although John Bale describes Rogers Centre as a “postmodern stadium” due to its consumption environment, it is the apotheosis of superstadium design, with its large capacity, ability to host multiple events, retractable roof, and symmetrical field of artificial turf.2 Claiming to be “the World’s Greatest Entertainment Centre,” Rogers Centre opened with a hotel, seven restaurants and bars, a fitness club, a movie theater, and the world’s largest video board.3 Additionally, Rogers Centre opened with sixty-seven food and beverage stations (including four by McDonald’s), a club level, and 161 private suites. Yet, given its minimal aesthetic embellishments, Bale describes Rogers Centre as “an environment where sport is reduced to packaged consumption in an antiseptic, safe and totally controlled landscape.”4 Guaranteed Rate Field was the first MLB stadium to develop a thematic environment. It was built to replace Comiskey Park, which was one of the least distinctive ballparks due to team owner Charles Comiskey’s notorious parsimony and the limited success of the White Sox from 1910 to 1990 (just three AL titles and one World Series win). In 1988 the Illinois State Legislature approved the construction of a new stadium to prevent the White Sox from moving to the newly opened Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. With Comiskey Park being one of four remaining ballparks, architect Philip Bess proposed a replacement, Armour Field, as a model for a new generation of “traditional urban baseball parks” that could address teams’ economic needs and Chicago’s urban development priorities, as well as improve fan experiences within an aesthetically pleasing, baseball-only facility.5 Built north of Comiskey Park, Armour Field would reproduce the most appealing aspects of the ballpark in a contemporary but inexpensive manner and serve as an anchor for redeveloping Armour Square and the surrounding neighborhood. However, HOK Sport, which received the commission from the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, had a different vision. Instead, Guaranteed Rate Field was a traditional 1980s-style superstadium (though designed exclusively for baseball) with superficial retro aesthetic elements reminiscent of the original ballpark cast in structural concrete.6 Built with an “aura of currency,” Guaranteed Rate Field included eighty-eight luxury suites, an 1,850-seat club level, and forty-foot wide concourses that enabled the White Sox to position concession stands on both sides without impeding circulation.7 Describing the new stadium as a “mallpark,” Bess wrote, “Every other review . . . likens the concourse to a shopping mall, differing only on whether that observation is intended as a criticism or a compliment.”8

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Despite initial positive reviews, Guaranteed Rate Field’s allure quickly faded because it lacked intimacy due to an upper deck that began at the same height as the original ballpark’s roof and was farther away from the field than its last row and aesthetics that paled in comparison to Camden Yards, which opened the next year.9 Upon seeing plans for Camden Yards, Goldberger proclaimed it would be “a building capable of wiping out in a single gesture fifty years of wretched stadium design, and of restoring the joyous possibility that a ball park might actually enhance the experience of watching the game of baseball.”10 As shown in chapter 5’s examination of the designer’s conceptions of the Baltimore stadium, Camden Yards seemingly achieved this potential and became the first mallpark by combining diverse consumption amenities with a highly developed aesthetic template and being located within a UED. In this way, Goldberger recognized that Camden Yards “was not some sort of romantic aberration, but the harbinger of a whole new way of building for baseball.”11

The Mallpark in the City The relationship between cities and baseball stadiums has changed, with public officials strategically using mallparks for economic development. While previous stadiums tended to be standalone projects, sports facilities began being incorporated into UEDs, civic marketing, and broader development efforts in the 1990s.12 With games broadcasted to local, national, and global audiences, mallparks are imageable buildings that showcase cities through their architecture and integration into the urban landscape.13 As annual attendance exceeds two million visitors, mallparks are used to catalyze UED redevelopment by providing potential customers for bars, restaurants, retail stores, and other commercial establishments.14 Mallpark spatial practices regarding location, civic promotion, and urban development contrast with those of previous stadium generations. The locations of baseball grounds and ballparks were largely determined by inexpensive real estate found in peripheral urban neighborhoods, while transportation concerns were the primary determinant of superstadiums’ sites.15 The presence of an MLB team has long been recognized as a status symbol for cities, as civic promotion was a primary motivation for the owners of the first all-professional team (the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings) and for the mid-twentieth century subsidization of superstadiums by cities. Economic development was not a priority because baseball grounds and ballparks were wholly private enterprises, which team owners sometimes sought to leverage for the benefit of their other business interests, and superstadiums were built as public amenities.

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Mallpark Location Ideally, all mallparks would have been built within downtown UEDs. As described in chapter 2, cities have been subsidizing private investments or directly using public resources to develop visitor-oriented amenities and infrastructure since the 1970s in efforts to transform downtowns from spaces of production into places for consumption.16 Such public investments have been made with the intention of attracting tourists and suburban residents to consume in the city, which would provide bars and restaurants, entertainment venues, and retail shops a critical mass of consumers.17 With UEDs providing multiple lifestyle options, they would also become enticing places for “creative class” members, young professionals, and retirees to live.18 Mallparks contribute to these efforts with their broad media reach and by attracting large crowds. Location in a UED enables mallparks to use existing transportation infrastructure—large parking lots, convenient highway access, and proximity to public transit—and is not disruptive to the many residents who have chosen to live in the neighborhood to enjoy such recreation options. However, downtown real estate can be expensive, difficult to acquire, and increase the mallpark’s cost when compared to the minimal expense of building in a parking lot of a superstadium being replaced. As a result, twelve of twenty-four mallpark projects have been built in such parking lots, while eleven have been built in or near existing or developing UEDs.19

Urban Promotion A mallpark and its MLB tenant convey more than status, as they have become central elements of urban marketing efforts.20 Unlike the festival marketplaces and convention centers anchoring early UEDs whose effectiveness waned due to competition and fading novelty, mallparks cannot easily be replicated, monopolistic leagues control the supply of teams, and each game is a unique event.21 Moreover, with games broadcasted to different media audiences, potential visitors are exposed to the city’s virtues as broadcasters discuss their activities within the city, as images from UEDs feature prominently within commercial “bumps,” and as flattering views of downtown and surrounding areas provide backgrounds for gameplay.22 Mallpark aesthetics support such marketing efforts. Although utilitarian and generic architectural designs helped reduce the costs of superstadiums, mallparks use local aesthetic, cultural, and natural markers to reinforce visual connections with the surrounding city. As will be discussed later in the chapter, cities provide thematic elements within mallpark design, but cities also use mallparks to showcase their most distinctive features. In St. Louis the Gateway Arch is visible from

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Busch Stadium, while in Washington the US Capitol can be seen from Nationals Park. Downtown buildings form the backdrop of outfields at Cleveland’s Progressive Field and at PNC Park, while Coors Field provides a view of the Rocky Mountains from downtown Denver. Oracle Park celebrates the San Francisco Bay as kayakers congregate in McCovey Cove to fight for the home run balls that leave the stadium.

Economic Development While civic leaders claim to be using mallparks as economic development tools, faulty locational choices and poor integration into broader plans have blunted their effectiveness. Building in the parking lots of previous facilities that failed to encourage development generally has repeated previous development mistakes. Additionally, private developers have unevenly responded to an all- toofrequent “if you build it, they will come” attitude, in which many civic leaders seem to believe that a new stadium is sufficient incentive to attract investment and new businesses to its neighborhood.23 As will be discussed in chapter 9, more cities are shifting to making strategic investments rather than just hoping that markets respond, by requiring team owners to invest in developing stadium neighborhoods.24 As noted earlier, many mallparks have been built in superstadium parking lots, which reduces project costs and avoids uncertainties relating to site acquisition and resistance from potential neighbors. Unsurprisingly, such mallparks generally have failed to encourage development, just as their predecessors in virtually the same location had failed to do for more than thirty years. As civic leaders have begun to recognize this mistake, a few mallparks are beginning to incorporate commercial entertainment areas into stadium parking lots. Within the South Philadelphia Sports Complex, Comcast Spectacor, owner of the NHL Philadelphia Flyers, have developed Xfinity Live! near Citizens Bank Park. Outside Great American Ball Park, the former site of Riverfront Stadium has become The Banks, Cincinnati, with seventeen bars and restaurants, two condominiums, one hotel, a separate football stadium, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and Riverfront Park. Many cities have been more strategic in the location of mallparks, as they have been used to anchor new UEDs in Denver, Detroit, Cleveland, and Phoenix.25 In Baltimore, Camden Yards and the NFL Baltimore Ravens’ M&T Bank Stadium were “part of an essential second stage of downtown festival development”26 by functioning as “a special activity generator.”27 However, by leaving development to private investment decisions, results have been mixed. As Mark S. Rosentraub states, “simply put, too many cities did more ‘hoping’ than they did planning a strategy or establishing partnerships with private capital to achieve success.”28

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While Cleveland’s Gateway and Denver’s LoDo districts are celebrated as success stories, Detroit and Phoenix are perceived as cautionary tales that failed to reinvigorate surrounding neighborhoods.29 Beyond relying upon market forces rather than strategic planning for growth, mixed results also can be explained by the contradictory objectives of team owners and cities regarding the location of economic activity. Team owners want spending to occur within facilities, while cities want businesses thriving outside the stadium’s gates. As competition decreases revenue, team owners benefit most when external development fails to occur and facilities are isolated from surrounding areas. However, as chapter 9 says about experiences in San Diego, St. Louis, and Atlanta, recent policies creating mallpark villages have begun to overcome this inherent contradiction by providing development rights to team owners and requiring investment in the surrounding neighborhood. With mixed-use projects, including retail, commercial, residential, and recreational elements, cities and teams collaborate to produce stadium neighborhoods that are vibrant throughout the year.30

Mallpark as Shopping Mall Similarly to shopping malls, mallparks combine shops offering products and services to produce a retail environment meeting diverse consumer desires. Large team stores function as department stores, with a broad range of merchandise. Concourses are similar to the mall’s main corridor, as they are lined with specialty shops selling clothing, trinkets, toys, home furnishings, art, sporting goods, reading material, and sports memorabilia. Sometimes items are available from portable kiosks in the midst of circulation spaces. Banking services facilitate consumption, with ATMs and applications for team-cobranded credit cards. Mallparks further increase the economic productivity of space by selling advertising signage and kiosk spaces. However, just as shopping mall operators realized by the 1980s that consumers required more than just retail options, mallparks incorporate a variety of dining, entertainment, and noncommercial options that satisfy consumer demands while spectacularizing the consumption environment. Gruen’s late-in-life critique of shopping malls can apply to mallparks, as well, as both are “machines for selling.”

Watching the Game: Providing Different Experiences Nonmediated consumption of professional baseball begins with a ticket—the license granting admission into the stadium. Historically, teams have offered three types of tickets: box seats, grandstands, and bleachers, each of which

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provided consumers with essentially the same experience, albeit with different proximity to home plate and minimal differences in comfort. Mallparks have transformed this basic item. Computer-based ticketing programs enable teams to sell many categories of tickets, while “dynamic pricing” policies further calibrate prices based on the day of the week, the opponent, and promotions. This can be seen in the different price structures for Baltimore Orioles tickets during the 1980 and 2019 seasons. In 1980 the Orioles offered seven categories of tickets,

FIGURE 5.  2019 Baltimore Orioles ticket chart, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore.

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with prices ranging from $2 to $7.31 In 2019 the Orioles offered single-game tickets in twenty-four distinct seating areas, which were further classified into five types of games, with prices ranging from $15 to $53 for “value” games and $15 to $102 for “elite” games. Yet, even as the schedule and pricing card grouped seating areas by using ten colors and showed 120 boxes filled with ticket prices, the bottom read, “Seating areas and prices are subject to change.” However, segmentation goes beyond seat location because mallparks offer tangibly different experiences by adding exclusive entertainment and premium amenities to the most expensive tickets. Controlled-access concourses, suites, and club levels provide leather seating, heat and air conditioning, high-definition televisions, gourmet catering and restaurants, bars with premium liquors, attentive wait staff, private restrooms, and exclusive stadium restaurants and lounges. Many mallparks have transformed the very best box seats behind home plate into exclusive clubs demanding the highest prices and offering the highest level of comfort and amenities. The revenue from premium seating can be extraordinary: New Yankee Stadium rents each of its sixty-eight suites for as much as $800,000 per year and sells season tickets for the New York Yankees Legends Suite behind home plate for as much as $125,000.32 While New York may be the only baseball market that can support a $1,500 ticket, premium tickets in most mallparks exceed $200 per game and provide a high level of service, comfort, exclusivity, and convenience. Atlanta Turner Field’s 755 Club offered its premium ticketholders a gourmet buffet featuring “panfried Georgia mountain trout, carved steamship round, cooked-to-order pasta, the freshest vegetables and an astonishing dessert bar.”33 Many club levels have concierges to provide business services and supply valet parking and exclusive lots to speed patrons to and away from the game, with Seattle’s T-Mobile Park’s premium lot having direct highway access. Globe Life Field even has a helipad for those wishing to avoid traffic altogether. Ushers and security guards strictly control access, while architectural features reinforce separation with special entrances, express elevators and escalators, and barriers. Beyond hardwood walls, marble floors, and leather furniture, the decorations in premium areas include original artworks and artifacts from the team’s history. Oracle Park’s Virgin America Club level contains many museum-quality items and three World Series trophies, while championship trophies are also similarly displayed in St. Louis and Minneapolis. Many teams offer unique backstage experiences, as premium ticketholders can observe indoor batting cages and media interview rooms through two-way mirrors. At New Yankee Stadium, Legends Suite ticket holders can watch batting practice from the field and attend pregame press conferences and special events.34

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FIGURE 6.  View of a Padres indoor batting cage from inside the Lexus Home Plate Club at Petco Park, San Diego.

Dining at the Mallpark While most ticketholders may not access premium amenities, they still possess several consumption options. Expansive public concourses offer many dining, shopping, museum, amusement park, theater, and recreation experiences that appeal to attendees of all ages and levels of interest in baseball. These concourses are designed to efficiently serve consumers, with Busch Stadium selling food and drink at twenty-four permanent concession stands and 238 point-of-sale stands within its 750,000 square feet of concourses over three levels.35 Just as the shopping mall’s food court satiates diverse tastes, mallpark menus encompass a wide variety of foods. While traditional offerings of hot dogs, peanuts, and ice cream remain, newer choices include sushi, fish and chips, tacos, brick-oven pizzas, barbeque sandwiches, funnel cakes, churros, vegan selections, and distinctive signature items. Concessions also reflect local food culture by offering regional specialties (e.g., cheesesteaks in Philadelphia) or being operated by well-known local restaurants (e.g., Prince’s Hamburgers in Houston). Such stands may be near those operated by such national chains as Panda Express, Little Caesars, Cold Stone Creamery, McDonald’s, Hooters, and Waffle House.

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FIGURE 7.  View of the food court at Comerica Park, Detroit.

Many mallparks offer full-service restaurants where patrons can watch the game, some of which are operated by chains such as Hard Rock Café (Toronto) and TGI Fridays (Phoenix, Milwaukee). Beverage menus also have expanded beyond beer and soda, with gourmet coffee, craft beers, hard liquor, and mixed drinks. T-Mobile Park sells freshly prepared coffee at five Grounds Crew Espresso stands and microbrews at Good Hops beer carts. Mallparks also offer different drinking experiences, with specialty bars like Target Field’s 2 Gingers Pub, which hosts the stadium’s organist and provides an “old-fashioned, summertime, front-porch feeling” and sells a specialty drink.36 Sports bars and party decks allow fans to stand and socialize while enjoying their drinks and the game. Tropicana Field even features a cigar bar, complete with premium liquor, televisions, leather seats, and a pool table.

Shopping at the Mallpark The mallpark’s shopping environment meets a variety of consumer desires. Each concourse features a central team store, with the largest located at street level where it remains open throughout the year, while smaller permanent stands, shops, and portable kiosks feature a limited selection of the most popular items. Specialty shops sell particular clothing items, such as hat stores operated by retailers New Era or Lids, a Dodger Stadium shop selling replica jerseys, and Guaranteed Rate

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Field’s Red Jacket store that carries exclusive vintage clothing. Targeting women, Pink by Victoria’s Secret sells designer fashions at Globe Life Park, while a boutique in Citi Field sells both Pink products and Touch team-branded apparel designed by actress (and sports fan) Alyssa Milano. Other stores enable fans to customize replica jerseys, bats, and other equipment. Rather than reuse, donate, or dispose game-used equipment, practice jerseys, practice baseballs, broken bats, and champagne bottles from victory celebrations, MLB Authentics sells certified team-used memorabilia, along with autographed collectables and baseball artifacts. Dodger Stadium and Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California, have art galleries where people can purchase “museum quality” photographs, paintings, prints, other sports art, and collectables to decorate their homes.37 Just as shopping malls have stores targeting families and children, most mallparks feature a shop selling children’s clothing and souvenirs, which tend to be located near playgrounds and youth-oriented entertainment areas. Several mallparks have toy stores, such as Dodger Stadium’s two Hello Kitty stands that market T-shirts, plush toys, backpacks, blankets, and sundry other items showing the iconic Japanese character in a Dodgers uniform. Mallparks in St. Louis, Washington, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and Cleveland have included Build-a-Bear

FIGURE 8.  Display of merchandise in a store at Petco Park, San Diego.

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Workshops, where, in addition to purchasing various team-themed stuffed toys and teddy bears, patrons can produce their own stuffed team mascots. Beyond merchandise, teams also promote youth-oriented fan clubs that offer specialized promotional items and publications, access to special events, and opportunities to purchase discounted tickets.

Entertainment beyond the Game As described in chapter 2, many shopping malls offer diverse noncommercial activities, such as walking clubs, children’s play areas, and holiday events, to provide comprehensive mall experiences. Similarly, mallparks have diversified entertainment offerings beyond the core product of baseball. Although such offerings are often sponsored by corporations, ancillary options do not directly produce revenue. Instead, museums, theaters, playgrounds, game arcades, waterparks, art spaces, sophisticated scoreboards, and Internet connectivity encourage visitors to stay longer and generally enhance the consumer’s mallpark experience, all of which are assumed to result in additional consumption and increase the likelihood of a return visit. Many mallparks use museum-quality exhibits along concourses to present team and local baseball histories through artifacts, memorabilia, and photographs. The Braves Hall of Fame at Turner Field exhibited more than two hundred original artifacts, including Harry Wright’s scorebook from the first year (1871) of the franchise in Boston, a 1950s railroad sleeper car used by the Milwaukee Braves, and the bat and ball from Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715th home run.38 As the Tampa Bay Rays franchise began only in 1998, Tropicana Field borrows from baseball’s broader history with the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame. Children’s activities are designed to develop baseball fans at an early age. Baseball-themed playgrounds feature bounce houses, climbing equipment, imitation baseball diamonds, and opportunities to meet the team mascot. Teenagers can test their baseball skills at pitch-speed machines and batting cages or their video gaming skills in areas sponsored by EA Sport’s Baseball 2K series. Comerica Park features amusement park rides, including a fifty-foot Ferris wheel with twelve baseball-shaped passenger cars and a carousel that substitutes painted tigers for the traditional horses, while Tropicana Field offers a carnival midway complete with games of skill and carnival foods. Many mallparks display extensive art collections, which besides being a popular amenity also fulfills local requirements to produce and display art within public buildings. The Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places Initiative installed five major artworks in Marlins Park, including a seventy-two-foot yellow, blue, and

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neon-pink sculpture, Homer, produced by pop artist Red Grooms that features seagulls, flamingos, and a neon marlin that “leaps” when the team hits a home run.39 T-Mobile Park’s $1.3 million public art package features nine original works inspired by ballparks, baseball equipment, and moments in team history.40 Several mallparks have water features. Tropicana Field has a ten-thousandgallon “touch tank” full of rays, while Marlins Park has positioned behind home plate two 450-gallon aquariums, which are protected by shatterproof acrylic glass.41 Chase Field rents a field-level swimming pool for $7,000 per game, which includes thirty-five tickets, a hot tub, a beach area, a buffet, pool towels, and lifeguards. At Petco Park, visitors can hang out in the sand at The Beach below the center-field bleachers. In tribute to one of Veeck’s many promotional ideas, Guaranteed Rate Field provides on its center-field concourse an outdoor shower where fans can cool off. Mallparks have further expanded entertainment offerings with theater, nightclub, and sports bar experiences. Turner Field included a concourse stage on which emerging musicians played for visitors before games.42 Marlins Park’s Clevelander swimming pool claimed to bring a “South Beach Pool + Patio vibe

FIGURE 9.  Homer by Red Grooms in Marlins Park, Miami.

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to a small piece of the diamond,” with DJs, dancers, and stilt walkers performing in its art deco bar.43 Sports bars show out-of-town games and incorporate sports betting parlors. Scoreboards have become ever larger and sophisticated, such that some mallparks claim to provide media viewing experiences superior to those available at home.44 To further improve the in-stadium media experience and realize new revenue, teams are improving wireless connectivity and making baseball-related applications more robust. The MLB At Bat application offers replays of game action from different angles, access to advanced statistics and other game information, and individualized notifications.45 MLB monetizes the app through subscription services, advertising content, and by enabling in-stadium purchases of seat upgrades, concessions, and merchandise, which can be collected from dedicated areas, delivered to seats, or mailed to people’s homes. Teams use enhanced connectivity to supplement marketing efforts as they encourage use of social media apps to post photographs and comments about the game experience.46 Of course, once patrons exhaust themselves dining, shopping, learning about baseball history, appreciating artwork and baseball artifacts, supervising children in the play area, playing video games, and feeding sea creatures, they can even watch a baseball game.

Beyond Game Day Although the MLB schedule guarantees eighty-one events, more than 75 percent of days remain unscheduled. Rather than the mallpark being left dark, a variety of events provide incremental revenue from facility rental. Weeklong road trips during the season allow mallparks to host major concerts and large public gatherings such as papal visits. During the off-season, stadiums have hosted the National Hockey League’s outdoor Winter Classic, exhibition soccer games, and college football bowl games. Teams promote club areas as event spaces for business meetings, trade shows, fundraisers, holiday parties, and life events, with Citi Field identifying twenty-one separate areas and offering dedicated staff to provide planning support and event services.47 In 1995 Camden Yards hosted a cat show on its club level. Several mallparks generate rental income from dedicated retail, hospitality, and office spaces. Chase Field rents space to a fitness club and a TGI Fridays. Globe Life Park included a four-story office building overlooking center field, and the Maryland Stadium Authority promotes the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards as one of Baltimore’s most desirable addresses for professional offices (see chapter 5). Many mallparks also have commodified the stadium’s backstage and premium spaces through organized tours. With prices ranging from $10 to $25, fans can

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see the upscale seating areas and their exclusive amenities and visit usually inaccessible backstage areas where games and the stadium experience are produced. Tours take groups through service corridors, look into exercise and training rooms, show off indoor batting cages and pitching mounds, and enter the home team dugout. To avoid interactions with players, tours only enter the visitors’ clubhouse during off-days and the home clubhouse during the off-season. Tours may also visit the press box and broadcast facilities, game operation centers, central catering kitchens, and storage areas. However, spaces related to security and public safety remain off-limits. The all-pervasive nature of the mallpark’s commodification extends even to surrounding sidewalks on which teams sell commemorative bricks engraved with personalized messages. Although this money is often allocated to charitable foundations, teams receive nonmonetary benefits as proceeds are part of community outreach efforts through which the team works to improve its image as a good corporate citizen, can claim a tax deduction, and display the benefits from the public’s substantial subsidies for stadium construction.

The Themed Mallpark As described in chapter 2, immersive environments spectacularize consumption activities by engaging consumers at an affective level. This spectacularization is particularly important in baseball because, like other forms of entertainment, the sport provides little utility beyond emotional satisfaction. However, not all baseball consumers enjoy games in the same way. Highly knowledgeable fans may appreciate the game’s strategy and subtlety of skills, while other committed fans may enjoy game action and broader narratives surrounding players, the season, and team history. Recognizing in the 1940s that these two groups, while necessary core consumers, were insufficient to ensure a team’s financial success, longtime owner Bill Veeck sought to appeal to additional groups by providing spectacular experiences.48 In spectacularization efforts, mallpark designers complement programmatic elements with aesthetic features to produce immersive environments in a manner similar to those of theme parks. Thematic elements are intended to intensify experiences, elicit emotional responses, resonate with preexisting associations, and obscure the rationalization of consumption spaces. When effectively mobilized, themes tell coherent, culturally meaningful stories. In mallparks, Ritzer and Stillman suggest “baseball” is the dominant overarching narrative, which is produced in four ways.49 First, mallparks represent baseball history through statues, museums, and displays. Second, mallparks simulate aesthetic elements from

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ballparks within architectural features. Third, mallparks use baseball discourses, items, and symbols as decorative items. Fourth, mallparks are embedded within the local environment through contextually consistent design elements and other cultural allusions. As aesthetic elements are multivalent, themes are not mutually exclusive. For example, Camden Yards’ celebration of Babe Ruth mobilizes historic, cultural, and local elements.

Baseball History Bale describes stadiums as repositories of history and memory in which teams and fans celebrate significant events and players.50 While the century-old ballparks Fenway Park and Wrigley Field have the inimitable distinction of being places where baseball greats Ted Williams and Ernie Banks actually performed, mallparks rely on memorabilia, statues, artworks, videos, photographs, advertisements, and signage to situate themselves within local, team, and baseball histories. Such displays are more than decorative, with Murray G. Phillips arguing they have an “objective of influencing public opinion and [serving] as indirect advertising for the sport as a commodity in a competitive marketplace.”51 Players feature prominently in these historical celebrations, with special tributes reserved for the team’s greatest players. St. Louis has honored Stan Musial at Busch Stadium with a ten-foot-tall bronze statue standing atop a six-foot marble base listing his considerable achievements from a twenty-two-season career with the Cardinals. The statue stands on the entry plaza outside the Stan Musial Gate, near the stadium’s Stan Musial Bridge. Similar treatment has been given to franchise icons Willie Mays in San Francisco and Clemente in Pittsburgh. Going beyond these baseball greats, teams recognize popular longtime players through the names of stadium areas. At Target Field, the Twins named lounges within the Delta SKY360 Legends Club for Hall of Fame members Rod Carew, Harmon Killebrew, and Kirby Puckett, while “lesser” players, such as Frank Viola and Juan Berenguer, are honored with concession stands selling pizza and Latin American food, respectively.52 Some teams have erected statues or named plazas for former team owners, while others honor longtime broadcasters with concourse displays and in the names of media areas. While most tributes tend to be fairly traditional, several teams honor the past in more creative ways. At Chase Field, four mascots dress up in oversize, caricaturized heads of the Diamondbacks’ greatest players and run a race along the edge of the field between the fifth and sixth innings. Teams generally reserve a special honor for one player: a named specialty food stand. These concession stands have become formulaic as they recognize a longtime, popular player from the 1960s or 1970s and feature an item representative of the local food culture. Camden Yards’ Boog’s BBQ is the prototype for this

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FIGURE 10.  Statue of Willie Mays outside Oracle Park, San Francisco.

type of concession stand. Boog Powell starred for the Orioles from 1964 to 1975 and remains popular in the city. He frequently visits the stand to sign autographs, pose for photographs, and interact with fans while selling pit barbecue sandwiches (a cooking style strongly associated with Baltimore’s food culture). Due to its popularity, a second Boog’s BBQ stand operates on the club level, while another was open for several years on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. Although mallparks emphasize the home team’s players and achievements, they also recognize superlative performers and performances in baseball history, especially those with local associations. Although Jackie Robinson never played for the New York Mets, the team has named the rotunda inside Citi Field’s home plate entrance for the Brooklyn Dodgers great, installed a statue of his number (42), recognized his achievements with words inlayed on the marble floor, and depicted his personal values in nine large murals. A statue at Turner Field honored the Georgia-born Ty Cobb. Tropicana Field includes the Ted Williams Museum and Hitters Hall of Fame, as Williams, despite being born in San Diego and playing his entire career in Boston, retired to Florida’s Gulf Coast. Suites

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at Globe Life Park and T-Mobile Park are named for Hall of Fame players and incorporate their images and memorabilia into the decor. Chase Field decorates its Diamond Level with original artworks depicting iconic baseball moments such as Carlton Fisk’s home run in the sixth game of the 1975 World Series.

Baseball Architecture Mallpark architecture reinforces nostalgic feelings through simulations, reproductions, and items from previous stadiums. While such efforts often copy functional but aesthetically evocative items from ballparks, they do so without a practical purpose or a design logic beyond the connotative functions of such items, especially as aesthetic elements are removed from the historical and spatial contexts from which they derived their original meanings.53 Andrews characterizes this process as the “random cannibalization of the past,” in which the resulting pastiche exemplifies “the historical artifice, depthlessness, and discontinuity of postmodern culture.”54 This “random cannibalization” can be seen in outfield dimensions of mallparks. As described in chapter 3, outfield dimensions in ballparks were sitedriven, with property boundaries producing irregularity. While lacking similar constraints, superstadiums featured symmetrical outfields. Mallparks have severed the connection between property conditions and outfield dimensions. Although large lots could easily accommodate symmetrical outfields, programdriven designers have chosen to create irregular outfields to add unpredictability to the game and for the connotative and symbolic functions of alluding to ballparks.55 While outfields may be the most prominent example, mallparks are replete with other simulations and contrivances. Stadium scoreboards generally have incorporated the latest technology, as Wrigley Field’s mechanical center-field scoreboard represented a significant innovation and with superstadiums celebrating their computer-operated systems in the 1960s and installing cutting-edge Diamond Vision video screens during the 1980s.56 While mallparks continue this trend with ever-larger and technologically sophisticated high-definition displays, T-Mobile Park, Minute Maid Park, and Coors Field featured supplementary hand-operated scoreboards. With lights flickering on and off to identify essential game information and numbered slates displaying runs scored or out-of-town scores, hand-operated scoreboards provide no information beyond that readily available on the mallpark’s multiple electronic scoreboards. Simulations of ballpark elements sit alongside various reproductions. The sunshade above the upper deck at Camden Yards copies the one from Forbes Field. Wrigley Field’s ivy-covered outfield fence has inspired natural covering

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for the batter’s eyes at Camden Yards and Progressive Field. T-Mobile Park, PNC Park, and Citi Field built rotundas in tribute to the rotunda at Ebbets Field. During its early twenty-first-century renovation, Fenway Park even installed old-style signage, with designs following the template used for Fenway Park’s signs in 1934 (see chapter 7). Although mallparks are full of reproductions and simulations, many reuse “authentic” items from previous stadiums, as when the foul poles in Seattle, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Arlington were transferred from earlier facilities. At Target Field, the hardwood floor in the Town Ball Tavern originally covered the Minneapolis Armory where the NBA Lakers played before moving to Los Angeles. T-Mobile Park’s hand-operated scoreboard was originally located in Seattle’s first major league stadium, Sicks’ Stadium, and Guaranteed Rate Field’s main scoreboard reproduces the pinwheels and fireworks of Comiskey Park’s “exploding” scoreboard.57 Fans can even sit in seats rescued from a previous facility: the benches in a section of the center field bleachers at Globe Life Park were originally located in Arlington Stadium.58

FIGURE 11.  Original pinwheels from Comiskey Park located in Goose Island Craft Kave at Guaranteed Rate Field, Chicago.

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Baseball as a Cultural Form Baseball’s cultural significance is represented through its status as America’s national pastime. Despite its derivation from an English children’s game and its rules being codified in New York City, baseball has been promoted as expression of American exceptionalism and an embodiment of the frontier lifestyle idealized within constructions of American identity.59 The Abner Doubleday myth reflects these beliefs, with its claim of baseball’s invention by the future Civil War general in 1839 in Cooperstown, a small Upstate New York town named for the family of frontier novelist James Fenimore Cooper.60 This myth not only provides a wholly American origin story for the sport but also symbolically positions stadiums, with their large green fields, as rural spaces within urbanized cities.61 With this cultural status, baseball’s language and iconography are widely recognized beyond the sport and provide thematic material for mallpark designers. Baseball imagery is featured prominently in artworks outside and around mallparks. Chase Field’s entry plaza displays Based on Balls, a ten-by-ten-byforty-one-foot kinetic machine that includes miniatures of players, baseballs, hot dogs, and a xylophone playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Baseball bats are the material and subjects of artworks in T-Mobile Park, Citi Field, and Nationals Park and are used as decorative door handles at Comerica Park. The large, concrete antiterrorism barriers outside numerous mallparks are shaped and painted to look like baseballs, just like the eight cars of Comerica Park’s Ferris wheel. Oversized equipment, uniforms, and other team wear serve decorative functions. Oracle Park features a twenty-seven-foot-high, twenty-thousand-pound steeland-fiberglass sculpture of a 1927 baseball glove.62 Outside Angel Stadium, differently colored bricks on its entry plaza suggest an infield, while two “size 649½” steel Angels hats serve as shaded meeting places. This iconography is melded with baseball’s particular lexicon, as many concession stands are named with baseball references or clever turns of phrase. Nationals Park offers sandwiches at Change Up Chicken, named for the pitch. Angel Stadium sells a traditional menu of hot dogs and ice cream at The Grand Stand and beer at the Draft Pick stand. Marlins Park offers grilled cheese sandwiches at The High Cheese (a nickname for a fastball) and dessert items at the Sweet Play stand. Miller Field offers Italian food at its MVP: Most Valuable Pizza stand. The double play names the Double Play Tap & Grill at Busch Stadium and is used for a pun in the Dublin Up Irish Pub at Globe Life Park. Baseball phrases, such as “out of left field” and “right off the bat” are featured prominently within T-Mobile Park’s Six Pitches art installation.63

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FIGURE 12.  Sign for a Baseline Burgers concession stand at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore.

Mobilizing the Local Taken together, baseball history, architecture, and culture produce a nonspecific, placeless baseball discourse from which mallpark designers draw. According to Relph, these elements can “have little relationship with a particular geographical setting” because mallparks celebrate athletes and reproduce architectural elements from ballparks regardless of geographic origin.64 However, rather than building generic baseball theme parks that could be anywhere, designers conscientiously work to embed the mallpark within its surrounding context by utilizing distinctively local architectural, environmental, aesthetic, and cultural elements. While modernist superstadiums designs tended toward placelessness, mallparks intentionally use architectural design to be embedded within their home cities. The Coors Field’s facade is the same height of other buildings in LoDo, while the coloring of its bricks is consistent with its neighbors. Claiming inspiration from Washington’s status as the capital city of the United States, Populous’s Joseph Spear sought to represent “the transparency of democracy” within his design for Nationals Park.65 Petco Park’s sandstone facades and southwestern architectural style are common in San Diego, while its beach beyond the center

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FIGURE 13.  The Western Supply Building, built in 1909, was incorporated into Petco Park, San Diego.

field fence represents the city’s seaside culture. Camden Yards, Minute Maid Park, and Petco Park also incorporate historic early twentieth-century buildings into their designs. As architecture represents that mallparks are of a place, open designs ensure people recognize mallparks are in a place. Cleveland baseball historian Jonathan Knight suggests the stadium’s most important element is that “no matter where you were in Jacobs Field, you could see some hint of the Cleveland skyline or some architectural reminder of where you were.”66 While the urban marketing uses of mallparks is discussed earlier this chapter, this connection to place is part of the mallpark experience, as when a sign at Oracle Park identifies the number of “splash hits” (home runs) hit into San Francisco Bay and when tour guides at PNC Park and Great American Ball Park discuss the number of home runs hit into bordering rivers. This physical embedding in place is paired with a symbolic one through references to local iconography. Groundskeepers at Busch Stadium pattern a likeness of the Gateway Arch into the outfield grass. Home team home runs cause a big apple to rise at Citi Field, a Liberty Bell to light up at Citizen Bank Park, and a cable car to run along a track at Oracle Park. Murals depict life in Wisconsin

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(Miller Park), Minnesota (Target Field), Cincinnati (Great American Ball Park), and Arizona (Chase Field). Globe Life Park’s exterior facade is adorned with eight bas-relief friezes representing Texas history, and the steel trusses along its concourses are punctuated with “lone stars.” Beyond visual elements, mallparks perform place through food and beverages. Locally produced beer and hot dogs have long been concession menu staples, but mallparks add such regional specialties as crab cakes in Baltimore, garlic French fries in San Francisco, and tri-tip sandwiches in San Diego.67 Popular local restaurants provide signature items in Seattle (Ivar’s clam chowder), Pittsburgh (Primanti Brothers sandwiches), and Washington (Ben’s Chili Bowl half smokes). Food even contributes to the mallpark spectacle through oversized food items, which, playing upon the claim everything is bigger in Texas, began at Globe Life Park with the introduction of the Boomstick—a twenty-four-inch beef hot dog smothered in chili, cheese, onions, and jalapenos. Food offerings are paired with a wide variety of local beverages. Mallparks in Milwaukee (Miller Park), St. Louis (Busch Stadium), and Denver (Coors Field) are named for major international beer brands that originated in their cities.68 Many mallparks have concession stands featuring locally produced microbrews and artisanal distilled spirits. Beyond alcoholic beverages, soda producers are major corporate sponsors in all mallparks, but Coca-Cola has a special connection to

FIGURE 14.  The two-foot-long Boomstick is covered in chili, nacho cheese, jalapenos, and caramelized onions and contains nearly four thousand calories. During the 2020 World Series, it sold for $27.50 at Globe Life Field, Arlington, Texas.

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its hometown Atlanta Braves. At Turner Field, Coca-Cola was the name sponsor of the children’s play area, while Truist Park features a Coca-Cola sign spanning the length of the three upper-deck sections that are known as Coca-Cola Corner.

The Neoliberal Mallpark Baseball nostalgia presents an idealized view of the sport as a democratic space. On the field, this means the sport is a meritocracy where the only thing that matters is a player’s performance, while in the stands fandom transcends group differences as people sit together to cheer for their team. Of course, the historical realities have always been much more complex, with various forms of segregation based on race, gender, and class. Mallparks exacerbate divisions between the sport’s democratic rhetoric and exclusionary commercial spatial practices. As described in chapter 3, commercial imperatives always have been central to the spatial practices of baseball stadiums. Fences and gates limit access to paying customers, and concourses offer food, drink, souvenirs, advertisements, and other experiences to the audience. Yet there is no equality in the mallpark’s consumption environment, where exclusivity and exclusion define experiences of the sport to an unprecedented level. Although grounds, ballparks, and superstadiums employed fences and gates, most public areas were accessible to all attendees. Ushers and security personnel ensured fan safety, intervened before disruptions intensified, and generally allowed attendees with less expensive tickets to occupy vacant seats in higher-priced sections during the later innings of games.69 However, in mallparks, divisions have proliferated with the growth of limited-access areas, the presence of physical barriers and structural elements limiting movement, and aggressive efforts by ushers to ensure ticket holders sit only in the seats they had purchased—no matter the inning or location. These practices have virtually eliminated the potential for accidental interaction between premium ticket holders and other attendees. Yankees chief operating officer Lonn Trost highlighted this exclusivity in February 2016 when he defended the team’s policy of refusing to accept print-at-home tickets, common in the resale market, by saying, “It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket and (another) fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it’s frustrating to the purchaser of the full amount. . . . And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.”70 This disconnect between idealized versions of the past and the spatial practices of mallparks are also evident within thematic environments celebrating a version of baseball in which consumption is central. As described in chapter 2,

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the character of Mitch from City Slickers is particularly emblematic of the idealized version of baseball’s past. As Mitch remembers his “best day” in idyllic terms and focuses on his feelings, the commercial transactions making the day possible are not mentioned. Framed in this way, the day’s purchases become a small price to pay for the day’s pleasures and the memories created. This nostalgic image of a father and son bonding at a baseball game was later used by MasterCard in the first advertisement of its longterm “Priceless” marketing campaign, by which the credit card company promotes the idea that the significance of an experience matters much more than its financial costs and, therefore, justifies debtfacilitated consumption.71 This idea is one of the many narratives through which mallparks promote consumption within their symbolically rich environments. However, this orientation toward consumption tends to be highly problematic, as nostalgic presentations minimize past controversies, transform collective understandings about the past, and obscure the material impacts of spatialized power relations within urban America. As teams celebrate baseball history and locate themselves within it, there is a tendency, as noted, generally within corporate sports museums to “minimize or ignore controversial, contested, or potentially divisive issues as well as marginalise a great deal of cultural, gendered, political and social context.”72 This can be seen in ways in which mallparks generally treat the Negro leagues, which are celebrated through artifacts, photographs, artworks, statues, and the names of concession stands. Despite these celebrations, there is little acknowledgement of MLB’s institutional racism that kept the sport segregated for more than sixty years and destroyed this Black institution after Robinson’s 1947 debut. Moreover, attempts to celebrate the Negro leagues have also fallen short. Although PNC Park’s Legacy Square was supposed to be a permanent space to “honor and preserve the history of the Negro Leagues,”73 its displays were removed after the 2014 season to facilitate entry through the Legacy Square gate.74 This spatial marginalization produced through the mallpark extends to the broader urban landscape. At its core, the UED is highly exclusionary because it invites visitors to spend money and consume its myriad pleasures while minimizing the presence of residents, who are generally limited to service roles and otherwise heavily policed. The tourist bubble is designed to ensure that visitors, who are adding money into the local economy, are protected from contact with the surrounding city.75 This dynamic extends more broadly to neoliberal urban governance generally, as visitors and members of the consuming “creative class” are prioritized over residents, who are seen as net tax losses with their consumption of public services exceeding their contributions. The mallpark’s contribution to this dynamic is evident in the escalating cost of game attendance. In 1991 the Team Marketing Report’s Fan Cost Index estimated the cost of attendance for

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a family of four to be $78.76 By 2015 it had risen to $211, with prices increasing at twice the rate of inflation.77 In comparison, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the monthly entertainment budget for the average American household to be $207.78 At such prices, middle-class consumers are consigned to watch baseball from the distant “cheap” seats, while working-class fans cannot afford to attend, although they are present in low-wage jobs as ushers, vendors, custodians, and concession workers. This rising cost of attendance is coupled with rising public costs for mallpark construction as local governments use stadiums as part of their entrepreneurial efforts to revitalize downtown areas, especially because, as Populous architect Earl Santee suggests, each client wants to incorporate the best elements from previous facilities and surpass their designs.79 As a result, facilities have become larger, increasingly luxurious, and more technologically robust, which substantially increased construction prices.80 The first mallpark, Camden Yards, opened in 1992 and was built for $106 million (or $268 million in 2021 constant dollars). In 2020 the most recent baseball stadium to open (Arlington, Texas’ Globe Life Field) cost $1.1 billion, while St. Louis’s Busch Stadium is the only mallpark to open in the past fifteen years whose constant-dollars cost was not at least double that of Camden Yards. As teams insist upon having all the newest amenities and cities compete to possess the best stadium, local governments commit to everhigher capital expenditures and bond-service payments that reduce their ability to borrow money for other necessary public works and allot resources toward other public priorities. However exclusionary these spatial practices may be, it would be a mistake to identify this exclusion to be the deliberate intention of mallpark designers, much less to argue that mallparks are designed as part of a broader ideologically driven neoliberal political project. Rather, each mallpark designer is motivated by their basic self-interests: teams want to maximize income, local governments want to promote economic growth, and architects want to produce spaces that meet their client’s requirements and, in so doing, secure future commissions. As will be examined in the next section about conceptions of space, these designers are producing mallparks within a much broader context framed by a neoliberal ideology that shapes assumptions and limits the range of possible outcomes. Working within this frame, mallpark designers have produced neoliberal spaces par excellence.

Part III

CONCEIVING MALLPARKS

5 CAMDEN YARDS Forever Changing Baseball

Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards (Camden Yards) is the quintessential mallpark. Offering an immersive baseball-themed environment, Camden Yards celebrates ballpark architecture with its brick facade and steel trusses, commemorates baseball and the team’s history with statues of the Orioles enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame, is decorated with various baseball signifiers, and provides a strong sense of the city.1 This thematic environment serves as a facade over a highly rationalized consumption space with seventy-two luxury suites, a club level with 5,125 seats, twenty-five distinct areas with ten different ticket prices, and fifty-two-foot wide concourses allowing for ease of movement and offering ample points of sale for food and merchandise.2 Camden Yards is located on the western border of the Inner Harbor, where I-395 enters downtown, and serves as “part of an essential second stage of downtown festival development.”3 As the culmination of the baseball stadium and urban design trends discussed in the previous chapters, Camden Yards’ 1992 opening was described by columnist George Will as one of baseball’s three most important events since World War II, along with integration in 1947 and the beginning of free agency in 1975.4 Describing the stadium as “an act of historic nostalgia,” Will notes that sixteen of twenty subsequent baseball stadiums were built downtown and changed the way people view and use cities.5 Yet this “act of historic nostalgia” primarily served financial considerations, as Camden Yards is the first major league stadium in which designers (team owners, civic planners, and architects) have been able to fully monetize baseball history as an amenity and as an aesthetic resource. While

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Fenway Park and Wrigley Field may be more historic and other mallparks may have nicer architecture or more effectively produce revenue, none has influenced baseball stadium architecture more than Camden Yards. This is captured in the Orioles’ trademarking of the phrase “the ballpark that forever changed baseball” in 2012. According to Populous senior principal designer Earl Santee, “the essence of Camden Yards is embodied in every building since.”6 With part II extensively detailing the spatial practices of mallparks, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that they are the intentional products of multiple designers. Lefebvre explained that before a space can be perceived, it must be conceived as designers shape representations of space through the intersection of knowledge and power.7 Designers first imagine what a space could be and do, render abstract notions into visual forms (such as blueprints or detailed development plans), and concretize them into the built environment. After construction, such conceptions continue to shape the production of space, as with rules and codes of conduct while they try to ensure inhabitants use a space in the intended ways. While chapter 1 identified the complexities of lived space as being beyond this project’s scope, part III will analyze how the intentions of designers are deeply embedded within and strongly shape spatial practices. The case studies in these four chapters examine the perspectives of different stadium designers as they transform abstract ideas of what a baseball stadium should be, what it should do, and how it should relate to its broader urban context into the concretized spatial practices of mallparks: • This chapter explores the conception of Camden Yards through the interactions between the Orioles, public entities of the city of Baltimore, the state of Maryland, and the Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA), and the architects of HOK Sport. • Chapter 6 explores the team perspective by examining the renovations of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. The process of “Camdenization,” which has added amenities and aesthetic features, has transformed these two historic, privately owned and operated venues into mallparks. • Chapter 7 examines the public policy perspective through the case of Nationals Park in Washington, DC. Civic officials there have used the construction of the mallpark to shape redevelopment efforts within its Near Southeast neighborhood and attract new residents into the city more broadly. • Chapter 8 focuses on architectural practices during the construction of Target Field as Populous applied its expertise in stadium design, mediated the desires of team and civic officials, and responded to the limitations of a challenging site.

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Conceiving Spaces of Urban Consumption Lefebvre’s representations of space encompass the ways in which designers imagine space and translate ideas into material physical structures.8 During this development phase, government actors, private developers, architects, and urban planners determine the purposes of a space, imagine how it could be structured to achieve those purposes, and then build it for those purposes.9 Designers’ imagined abstractions of space are transformed into concrete realities that can be used, produced, and reproduced by people, often in ways unintended by designers. In other words, spaces must be produced mentally before they can be produced physically or through lived experience. However, the transformation from abstract ideas into physical reality is not simple. As Jeremy Till argues, architecture is a highly contingent practice that is deeply embedded within many political, economic, social, spatial, and cultural relationships.10 It is also subject to constraints imposed by “local regulatory systems, financial cycles, socially acceptable aesthetic discourses and vernacular design histories, and political decision-making processes.”11 As architects navigate the complex contexts shaping their work, they are further constrained by the intentions, tastes, and budgets of those commissioning the project. These four chapters examine how broader social structures and relationships shape mallpark designs and how designers navigate the challenges arising from these conditions. Although Lefebvre states that designers see space as “a container ready to receive fragmentary contents, a neutral medium into which disjointed things, people and habitats might be introduced,” designers must contend with material realities that may render a site and its intended purposes incompatible.12 Natural features, preexisting uses, infrastructure, and property boundaries can all impose limitations. Yet physical restraints are often reduced to abstractions as designers begin to imagine how a site can be shaped to achieve certain goals and objectives. These four chapters examine the abstract assumptions underlying mallpark development as articulated in consultants’ reports, calls for proposals, and project outlines within which designers express their intentions, claim to be open to possibilities, and identify project constraints. The practices of architects and urban planners begin to transform representations of space from imagined abstractions into concrete realities as they mediate the disparate ideas, goals, and parameters of those commissioning the project into executable plans and buildable blueprints.13 Architects and planners often claim their work is autonomous and ideologically neutral due to its technocratic or artistic nature. However, as their work is embedded within broader social structures, Lefebvre argues that it is highly ideological and “their every gesture

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makes this fact concrete.”14 Although architects can avoid explicit political or social content in their designs, Till suggests architecture can easily be appropriated by market forces and reduced to aspects that can be commodified or contribute to the control of space.15 As a result, architects “are indeed complicit in providing a velvet glove of seductive surface to cover the hard fist of economic expediency.”16 Recognizing that such ideologies are legible within space and design documents, these four chapters examine the architectural and planning practices conceiving mallparks. During construction, this process of imagining possibilities and translation into material reality continues as designers respond to challenges and opportunities that inevitably arise. Sometimes these relate to engineering and geology because designs may be impossible to complete, materials may be insufficient for the project, or site conditions may offer unanticipated problems. Other issues relate to exogenous factors, such as budget reductions, changes in economic conditions, regulatory changes, and opponent actions. These four chapters examine the dynamic processes involved in the development, management, and renovation of mallparks as designers respond to project challenges and opportunities, attempt to regulate spatial uses, and refurbish spaces to maintain and enhance their effectiveness. Beyond the materiality of site conditions, the drafting process, and the construction phase, conceiving space also includes the design of purely symbolic dimensions.17 The building itself can signify a society’s priorities and its importance (or that of its designers) through the resources devoted to its construction, general attention it receives, and how it is used. For example, the spectacular designs of skyscrapers and many signature buildings can help define urban identity, while enabling architects and other designers to accrue symbolic capital.18 Aesthetics and structure within the building’s design also can convey messages regarding its uses, its users, and which uses and users should be prioritized.19 Of course, users can read and use space in multiple, unintended, and transformational ways. The dynamic processes of conceiving space can be seen in the transformation of downtown areas from spaces of production to places for consumption—an effort essential to mallpark development. As described in chapter 2, from the 1950s to the 1980s, many American cities were trapped in a spiral of decline caused by suburbanization, deindustrialization, and reductions in direct transfers from the federal government. This led to civic leaders becoming more entrepreneurial, with many cities implementing consumption-based strategies in hope of producing a virtuous cycle of growth fueled by attracting mobile capital from visitors.20

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At the abstract level, conceiving a consumption-based strategy would seem rather straightforward. A potentially attractive downtown area in need of revitalization would be identified as a UED, to which the city would target public resources and incentivize private investment to develop visitor-oriented infrastructure and amenities.21 Visitor safety would be assured through extensive electronic surveillance, designs that enhance visibility and control access, and the physical presence of police and security personnel.22 In theory, the city would become an attractive place to visit and would benefit from new economic activity that supports job creation and increases tax collections. However, just like Prussian field marshal Helmuth van Moltke (the elder) observed that in war no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, a city’s material realities and changing circumstances can challenge the implementation of a consumption-based strategy. The picturesque waterfronts featured in planning documents can be highly polluted from decades of industrial production and require substantial mitigation efforts.23 New venues can attract thousands of visitors, but as novelty fades quickly and competition provides alternatives, cities may need to make additional public investments to keep their UEDs vibrant and attractive.24 Structural changes within the hospitality industry, unanticipated events like COVID-19, regular business failures, and regulatory changes such as the widespread legalization of casino gambling provide new challenges and forms of competition. Given changing conditions, the process of conceiving the spaces of urban consumption is never complete.

Conceiving Baltimore’s Inner Harbor As David Harvey suggests Baltimore is “emblematic of the processes that have moulded cities under US capitalism, offering a laboratory sample of contemporary urbanism,” the city also has been an innovator in UED development.25 The case study in chapter 2 briefly describes how Baltimore became a major industrial city, suffered disinvestment due to deindustrialization and suburbanization, and transformed its downtown core into consumption space. The 1970s redevelopment of the Inner Harbor has been central to this effort as it led to more than eighteen million people visiting the Harborplace festival marketplace and surrounding amenities, such as the National Aquarium, the Maryland Science Center, and USS Constellation during the early 1980s. Baltimore featured prominently in Time magazine’s 1981 cover story about Harborplace developer James Rouse, who was making cities “fun” again.26 This activity and attention suggested Baltimore had found the formula for reversing urban decline.

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Baltimore’s consumption-oriented urban redevelopment strategy was driven by the intersection of the business community’s economic interests with the political leadership of Mayor William Donald Schaefer. In the 1950s the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC) of business leaders sought to use the Charles Center complex to revitalize downtown, where no major office buildings had been built since the 1920s. During the 1960s the GBC’s attention shifted to the Inner Harbor, which was adjacent to the Charles Center and no longer an active port. The GBC proposed its redevelopment with mixed commercial, residential, and recreational uses.27 However, the project languished until Schaefer’s election in 1971. Believing that economic growth required a strong partnership between business and government, Schaefer’s administration prioritized downtown redevelopment, with particular focus on the Inner Harbor. Yet Harvey describes “rot beneath the glitter,” as downtown redevelopment did little to slow Baltimore’s decline, which actually accelerated during Schaefer’s tenure with rising unemployment, mass poverty, increasing rates of drug use and violent crime, failing schools, and poor public health.28 During the 1970s and 1980s the city’s population declined by 13.2 percent, and its share of the MSA’s population fell from 42.8 percent to 30.4 percent, while deindustrialization eliminated most of the city’s manufacturing jobs. Rising unemployment led to poverty-related social problems as Baltimore ranked first among large American cities for murder, violent and property crime, drug-related emergency room visits, and teen pregnancy.29 Life expectancy for Baltimore residents fell fourteen years below the national average, and children were trapped in underfunded schools. Given the disparities between rhetoric celebrating Baltimore’s redevelopment and the reality of life in Baltimore, the situations of the city’s two major league sports teams, the NFL’s Colts and MLB’s Orioles, challenged the city’s renaissance narrative.

Sport in Baltimore In addition to signifying Baltimore’s rise into the upper echelon of American cities during the early 1950s, the Orioles and Colts were culturally significant as being emblematic of the city’s blue-collar heritage. The Colts were led by quarterback Johnny Unitas, whose steel-town childhood in Pittsburgh resonated with Baltimoreans, while the baseball team followed “the Oriole Way,” which was defined by hard work and a methodical approach to the game.30 Under the ownership of Baltimore natives Carroll Rosenbloom (Colts) and Jerold Hoffberger (Orioles), the teams were very successful, with the Colts winning NFL championships in 1958 and 1959 and Super Bowl V in 1971 and the Orioles winning two World Series (1966, 1970).31

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The teams shared Memorial Stadium, originally built in 1922 but rebuilt in 1953 for major league sports. Unlike other superstadiums, Memorial Stadium possessed a horseshoe design, and its urban neighborhood location lacked direct highway access and sufficient parking. By 1973 the Maryland Sports Complex Authority (MSCA) assessed Memorial Stadium as “beset with adverse conditions,” citing three thousand obstructed-view seats, poor leg room, inadequate concession facilities, and the difficulties related to converting the facility between the two sports.32 With both teams dissatisfied with the stadium, the MSCA endorsed the construction of a $114 million, seventy-thousand-seat domed stadium in the Camden Station Railyards. This project failed due to lack of support in the Maryland General Assembly and as Baltimore voters passed a referendum that blocked the use of city funds.33 As the problems of Memorial Stadium remained unaddressed, Rosenbloom and Hoffberger sold their teams to non-Baltimoreans—Robert Irsay (the Colts, in 1972) and Edward Bennett Williams (the Orioles, in 1979). Failing to receive a new stadium, Irsay alienated fans by openly exploring relocation options, starting in 1976.34 With the Colts generally uncompetitive, attendance fell below forty thousand per game during the 1983 season. Offered a lease by Indianapolis to play in a new domed stadium and threatened by a bill in the Maryland General Assembly allowing the state to seize the franchise by eminent domain, Irsay moved the Colts in the middle of the night on March 29, 1984, to escape Maryland’s jurisdiction. As the headline of the next day’s Baltimore Sun exclaimed, “Baltimore’s Colts are gone,” with a photo of Schaefer in tears, many considered Baltimore’s relegation to minor league status to be inevitable. Due to the absence of baseball in Washington, DC, presence of a better stadium in DC, and Williams’s status as a prominent DC-based attorney, there were concerns that the Orioles would be the next team to leave—this time, for the nation’s capital.35 Although Williams frequently pledged to keep the Orioles in Baltimore, the qualifier “as long as the city supports the team” and his management of the organization worried many Baltimoreans.36 To appeal to Washingtonians, Williams promoted the Orioles as a regional franchise, removed the city’s name from team uniforms and marketing materials, and increased the team’s media and retail presence in the market.37 Additionally, the Orioles refused to sign a lease longer than three years and openly explored potential stadium sites in suburban Laurel and Columbia between the two cities’ beltways.38 Although the Colts’ departure motivated Schaefer and civic leaders to satisfy the Orioles’ demands for a new stadium, uncertainty about Williams’s intentions remained palpable until the Orioles and the MSA signed a fifteen-year lease for a new stadium in the Camden Station Railyards on May 2, 1988.

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Conceiving Oriole Park at Camden Yards In anticipation of the lease’s completion, in the fall of 1987 the MSA issued a request for proposals (RFP), “For the Design and Planning Contract for the State of Maryland’s Twin Stadium Project.” While highlighting the requirements for the planning and construction of two state-of-the-art facilities for MLB and NFL teams, the RFP identified that master planning of the eight-five-acre Camden Station Railyards site would be “of equal importance.”39 As such, three aspects of the RFP stand out: • First, the MSA wanted a plan “responsive to the context of the cityscape as well as the constraints of the site’s relatively limited dimensions.”40 In this regard, the MSA intended the stadium complex to advance the city’s redevelopment efforts by being incorporated into the Inner Harbor UED, sensitive to the needs of adjoining communities, and integrated into Baltimore’s physical, aesthetic, and historical contexts. • Second, the twenty-three-page RFP included eight pages describing programmatic elements that would ensure the new baseball stadium “will provide a minimum standard of efficiency and comfort to its principal tenant and the area’s baseball fans . . . [which] are necessary to address the specific operating requirements of a Major League Baseball team in the 1990’s and beyond.”41 In this regard, the MSA requested a stadium that could comfortably meet the needs of fifty thousand spectators, facilitate the production and media transmission of MLB games, and generate significant revenue for the Orioles. • Third, the MSA’s design parameters emphasized “intimacy, character and an ‘old fashioned park.’ ”42 While the MSA could have been satisfied with a generic stadium completed within the project’s budget, the Orioles demanded that Camden Yards not follow the dominant stadium design idioms of 1980s, so much so that CEO Larry Lucchino would later tell Washington Times columnist Thom Loverro that he had declared the “S word” to be off limits and issued $5 fines for any Orioles staff member who called the project a stadium.43 Commitments to urban design, programmatic elements, and aesthetic design would combine to create “a state-of-the-art, old-time ballpark with modern amenities and a traditional baseball feel,” according to 1989 MSA executive director Bruce Hoffman.44 In analyzing conceptions of Camden Yards, this section will examine the identities and intentions of the mallpark’s designers before exploring issues surrounding urban design, programmatic elements, and aesthetics separately. Then

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these issues will be examined together regarding the retention of the historic B&O Warehouse, which has become the stadium’s most iconic feature. However, it is important to note that the process of production and conception did not end when Camden Yards opened in April 1992. Attendees have produced the stadium anew through their use over time, and designers have frequently renovated Camden Yards to maintain its functionality, enhance its spectacle, and improve its ability to generate revenue.

The Designers Similar to the cases analyzed in the next three chapters, Camden Yards is the product of negotiations among multiple groups, each of whom possessed particular interests and goals. Dissatisfied with the limitations of Memorial Stadium, the Orioles wanted a new facility that could substantially increase franchise revenue and the team’s underlying value. The state of Maryland established the MSA to build and manage new sports facilities with the goals of retaining the Orioles and attracting an NFL team. Once the Orioles agreed to a long-term lease for Camden Yards, architects from HOK Sport mediated the Orioles’ and the MSA’s disparate visions and concretized them into space. T H E LA N D LO R D: TH E M A RYLA N D S TAD I U M AU THO R I TY

The Colts’ departure resulted in the formation of several governmental bodies focusing on the future of professional sports in Baltimore. In April 1984 Schaefer empaneled the Mayor’s Special Sports Task Force (Mayor’s Task Force), which hired Ron Labinski from HOK Sport to produce a report assessing the market for Orioles baseball, evaluating twenty-two sites in the city, offering a preliminary stadium design with cost estimates, and studying a potential renovation of Memorial Stadium.45 Later that spring, Governor Harry Hughes established the thirteen-person Special Advisory Commission on Professional Sports and the Economy (State Advisory Commission), which hired global engineering firm Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff (HNTB) to assess sites in the city and surrounding counties.46 These separate efforts were consolidated in April 1986 with the establishment of the MSA, whose initial mandate included negotiating with the Orioles, enticing the NFL to return to Baltimore, and selecting a baseball stadium site.47 With Hughes unable to run for reelection due to term limits, stadium issues were important for the 1986 gubernatorial election, in which Schaefer and Maryland attorney general Stephen Sachs were the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination.48 While Schaefer advocated construction in the Camden Station Railyards, Sachs backed a suburban site that would be more accessible for people

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living around Washington.49 Once Schaefer secured the Democratic nomination and faced token opposition from a Republican, his election in November 1986 increased pressure on the MSA to select the incoming governor’s preferred site.50 Although Schaefer would have preferred to appoint the MSA’s five-member board after the election, in September 1986 Governor Hughes used his authority to appoint Baltimore lawyer Herb Belgrad as chair.51 Among its first actions, the MSA hired accounting firm Peat Marwick to consolidate the findings from multiple consultants’ reports and develop recommendations. While the NFL remained on its agenda as Belgrad negotiated with St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill Bidwell, the MSA’s focus was on finalizing long-term lease with the Orioles.52 T H E T ENA N T: TH E BA LTI M O R E O R I O LE S

As mentioned earlier, the team was owned by Edward Bennett Williams, who claimed he would keep the Orioles in Baltimore as long as the team received support. Fans provided that support, as the Orioles enjoyed considerable revenue growth during Williams’s decade of ownership. Local media revenue increased from $1 million to $6.3 million, while attendance averaged 1.75 million after never exceeding 1.25 million fans in any single season during Hoffberger’s twenty-five years of ownership.53 Yet Memorial Stadium’s significant financial limitations were highlighted by the Mayor’s Task Force, which estimated that a new downtown stadium could increase team revenue by $70 million over five years.54 Williams’s health added further uncertainty about the Orioles’ future: he fought inoperable cancer at the start of 1988. Many people feared that Williams would die before the completion of a stadium deal and that his estate would sell the team to someone who would move it to another city.55 Williams’s protégé Larry Lucchino represented the Orioles in negotiations with the MSA. A partner at Williams’s law firm, Lucchino had joined the Orioles front office as general counsel in 1979.56 Having grown up in Pittsburgh as a baseball fan and attending games at Forbes Field, Fenway Park, and Tiger Stadium, Lucchino disliked superstadiums and wanted to build an “old-fashioned traditional ballpark with modern amenities.”57 According to Belgrad, “Larry was the first person to mention building a park that was both old and new. . . . He had a definite vision about what he wanted.”58 As the deal neared completion, Williams and Schaefer worked out final issues within the team’s fifteen-year lease, which required little contribution by the Orioles toward construction costs, gave the team control of advertising, and guaranteed premium ticket sales.59 While these items received public attention, Lucchino insisted on “design concurrence,” which meant all important design elements required the Orioles’ approval. As he told state officials, “we don’t drive Yugos

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and we really don’t want to play in a Yugo.”60 To oversee design and construction, Lucchino hired Janet Marie Smith, a lifelong baseball fan with a background in architecture and urban planning. According to Peter Richmond, design concurrence became a “club to wield in order to get what they wanted” as Smith sent copious daily correspondence to the MSA and architects.61 After Williams’s death in August 1988, his estate sold the team to a group led by New York investment banker Eli Jacobs for $73 million—a $60 million gain over nine years. Purchasing a 9 percent interest, Lucchino remained CEO. Claiming no intention of moving, Jacobs hoped the Orioles would remain in Baltimore “in the 22nd century,” while also announcing that he would defer to Lucchino on stadium and baseball decisions.62 However, as Goldberger notes, Jacobs had a “longstanding amateur’s interest in architecture,” and the new owner was involved in the design process, making several suggestions that were incorporated into Camden Yards.63 T H E A RC H I TE C TS : H O K S PO RT

Although a new baseball stadium would enable the MSA to achieve its goal of retaining professional sports and facilitate the Orioles maximizing their financial returns, neither possessed the technical skills to actually design a baseball stadium (despite Jacobs’s amateur interest in architecture). In the fall of 1987, the MSA’s RFP was sent to four finalists: HOK Sport, HNTB, Bechtel Civil Inc., and Burgee Architects.64 Though the last three groups were older companies and the Burgee bid included Philip Johnson, described by Edward Gunts as the “dean of American architects,” HOK Sport was considered the leading candidate.65 Despite being just five years old in 1988, HOK Sport’s design team had a much longer lineage under the leadership of Ron Labinski, who has been described as “the father of sports architecture” (see chapter 8).66 Recognizing the field’s potential, Labinski began specializing in stadium and arena development in the early 1970s.67 In 1980 Labinski and four associates at his Kansas City architectural partnership joined HNTB, and Labinski became head of its sports architecture division. However, cultural differences and clashes over clients at HNTB led Labinski and his associates to move to Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum in 1983.68 HOK Sport quickly earned commissions for several projects, including Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, and Pilot Field in Buffalo.69 In general, HOK Sport’s designs were seen as highly functional but lacking aesthetic ambition.70 Although HOK Sport was familiar with the project’s parameters through its reports for the Mayor’s Task Force and the MSA, Lucchino preferred a different architect. He did not believe the firm was capable of producing the type of stadium he desired because, according to Goldberger, HOK Sport had designed

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“an ample share of the very concrete hulks [Camden Yards] has been designed to get away from.”71 Such a design was included in HOK Sport’s Mayor’s Task Force report of 1985, which showed a multiuse stadium with three tiers of unbroken seating around the field, a series of exterior concrete circulation ramps, and a sea of parking lots around it. In addition to the field being shown at grade, the design notably did not include the B&O Warehouse. Recognizing that the design “was about as about as good as you can do from a geometry standpoint, but would have been horrible for baseball,” HOK Sport senior designer Joseph Spear claimed this image was a placeholder for a stadium that would be designed for its context.72 Despite the Orioles’ preference for HNTB, the MSA selected HOK Sport because it “demonstrated it could coordinate all of the firms in its architecturalengineering team” of fifteen firms.73 Hired for its technical expertise and logistical mastery rather than its design creativity, HOK Sport’s role was ultimately to deliver a satisfactory design to their clients. As Belgrad explained, the MSA “came up with the concepts, but couldn’t translate them into a blueprint.”74 Goldberger recognized HOK Sport’s role by attributing the design to “the determination of the Orioles and the city of Baltimore to honor a set of values other than packing the most people into the biggest pile of concrete in the middle of the biggest suburban parking lot.”75

Conceiving an Urban Stadium In his November 1989 review of the stadium’s design, New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger favorably observed that Camden Yards would give “just enough of a sense of the city to make it clear at every moment, from every seat, that you are under the sky of Baltimore.”76 As described in chapter 3, ballparks and superstadiums had different connections to place that were shaped by surrounding urban landscapes and designer intentions. Ballpark forms were largely shaped by adjacent streets and the designs of nearby buildings, which provided them with a “certain eccentricity” that made ballparks special places with particular qualities.77 In contrast, Lowry describes superstadiums as being “conceived as freestanding objects” because they were often situated within large parking lots.78 Camden Yards should be seen as the first MLB stadium purposefully designed to be integrated into and to reshape the urban fabric. The decision to build downtown rather than in the suburbs was the first extremely consequential choice in a series that has transformed the design of sports facilities throughout the United States. During the entire design process, the MSA, the Orioles, and HOK Sport struggled with questions of how to ensure that Camden Yards was not just in Baltimore but of Baltimore.

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As mayor, Schaefer had a top priority of keeping the Orioles within the city’s limits, which was reflected in the Mayor’s Task Force 1985 report examining twenty-two potential sites in Baltimore. With its broader charge, the State Advisory Commission considered locations within the city and in surrounding counties. Although neither group ranked the Camden Station Railyards as its top choice due to the estimated costs of the eighty-five-acre site, the area had several advantages. First, it had been selected by the MSCA for its stadium in the early 1970s. Second, when Schaefer became governor, the railyards were his preferred site for its proximity to the Inner Harbor.79 Third, the Orioles accepted the site for its accessibility for fans coming from the Washington area.80 Fourth, the area could take advantage of extensive existing transportation infrastructure.81 The stadium’s impact on downtown Baltimore would be both physical and symbolic. Located alongside the I-395 ramp bringing visitors into the city, the boarded-up Camden Station and B&O Warehouse were incongruous with Baltimore’s renaissance image, but the stadium complex would transform the area into an attractive gateway. Existing infrastructure also recommended the Camden Station Railyards, with two exits from I-95 and public transportation links to light rail, Baltimore’s subway, the state’s commuter rail service, and around two dozen bus routes.82 The location would also reduce the trip to games from Washington by forty-five minutes compared to Memorial Stadium and offered plenty of parking, with five thousand on-site spaces (twenty-five hundred after the football stadium was built) and another twenty thousand spaces within walking distance.83 A generic, multiuse stadium surrounded by acres of parking could have met the functional needs of the Orioles and the MSA but would have failed to achieve their urban design objectives. The Orioles, the MSA, and city of Baltimore wanted a stadium that would fit spatially and architecturally into disparate communities. Toward these ends, HOK Sport hired RTKL Associates to develop the stadium’s urban design master plan, which identified five specific project goals that could be achieved through eight measurable urban design objectives. Rather than discuss all of these, this section focuses on the third: “respond to the urban context by making clear connections from the site to the Central Business District and the Inner Harbor and by protecting the integrity of the adjacent residential neighborhoods.”84 First, Camden Yards’ connections to the Inner Harbor UED and Baltimore’s central business district would encourage game attendees to consume and experience downtown. Rather than providing sufficient on-site parking, designers explicitly decided to utilize existing parking garages throughout downtown. As fans walked to the game and returned to their cars, they would pass the Inner Harbor’s bars, restaurants, and retail stores. Expected consumption would produce

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an estimated direct economic impact of $78.5 million annually and support 948 new jobs.85 Additionally, planners recognized that Camden Yards would be “the signature piece for people coming into the city,” according to Chris Delaporte, the MSA’s first executive director.86 As such, it needed to be an attractive facility that could showcase Baltimore to people watching games on television and entice them to visit the city. Planners also considered ways to more actively incorporate Camden Yards into the UED by using the historic Camden Station as a potential visitors’ center, museum, restaurant, or functional part of the stadium.87 While choosing not to build much on-site parking helped make clear connections to the Inner Harbor and the central business district, integrating the stadium into and protecting the integrity of surrounding neighborhoods required designers to make more active decisions. In this regard, Smith credited Jacobs for pushing a “design philosophy that would be respectful of historic buildings in the area.”88 Architecturally, this was done by designing facades and entrances to be congruent with the brickwork of surrounding neighborhoods.89 Designers sought to ensure the stadium would not overwhelm neighborhoods, in two ways. First, by building the field sixteen feet below grade, the upper deck remained below the Warehouse’s roof. Second, by setting the upper deck back from the facade, pedestrians would see a five-story building rather than the stadium’s full nine-story height.90 Gunts suggested these touches provided Camden Yards with a “more human scale,” such that the stadium “engages the city, rather than standing alone like a fortress.”91 Camden Yards transformed the way in which designers conceive the relationship between the stadium and its surrounding urban landscape. For the most part, the connections formed between ballparks and their neighborhoods had been fortuitous outcomes rather resulting from intentional efforts. Superstadiums were designed as isolated spaces prioritizing automobiles with convenient highway access and large parking lots. Though not all mallparks have shown similar sensitivity to urban design goals as Camden Yards, many have followed Baltimore’s example, at least rhetorically. Goldberger recognizes that “Baltimore is not the first city to understand the virtues of urban design, but it is the first one to prove that they need not be incompatible with the pleasures of professional sports.”92

Conceiving the Program As described in chapter 3, superstadiums built during the 1980s were increasingly sophisticated generators of revenue, with the addition of luxury suites, club levels, upgraded concessions, and video scoreboards. These innovations further disadvantaged the Orioles due to Memorial Stadium’s obsolescence.93 The MSA

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found that renovating Memorial Stadium would cost at least $75 million to expand it to sixty-five thousand seats for football, add sixty-seven suites and a stadium club, improve bathrooms and concessions, modernize team facilities, and include a parking garage.94 While these changes would improve Memorial Stadium to 1980s standards, they could not solve the stadium’s locational issues. Smith considered the construction of a single-use facility to be one of the three key decisions for Camden Yards, along with a downtown site and keeping the Warehouse.95 However, this was not a simple decision because multiuse facilities had been the dominant design since the 1930s, with the construction of just three baseball-only stadiums. However, multiuse stadiums were problematic. As Goldberger observes, “shared stadiums, like halls built to house symphonic concerts and opera, are compromises that fail to serve either tenant well.”96 Bale attributes much of this to the different field shapes and dimensions of football and baseball that, as described in chapter 3, meant that seats were poorly oriented and too distant from the field.97 Although the MSA and Peat Marwick estimated a multiuse facility at the Camden Station Railyards would cost $175 million, the MSA believed a two-stadium complex would only have an incremental cost of $30 million due to the much simpler programmatic, engineering, and spatial requirements of single-use facilities.98 Moreover, the consultants recognized a highly salient pragmatic point: a two-stadium plan would be the one most likely to satisfy the Orioles and entice the NFL’s return, especially as Spear explained the Orioles would only commit to a year-to-year lease in a multiuse stadium.99 In building Camden Yards, designers focused on three programmatic areas: accommodating crowds of fifty thousand people, producing the game and entertainment experience for in-person and media audiences, and generating revenue for the Orioles. The first two are essentially logistical and engineering challenges, which is why engineering firms tended to dominate ballpark and superstadium design. Buildings capable of accommodating fifty thousand people in comfort and safety to watch baseball have specific spatial needs regarding seat and tread sizes, the slopes of decks, and numbers of circulation ramps and require a certain number of facilities and amenities, including bathrooms, concession and souvenir stands, public telephones, ticket windows, turnstiles, security and firstaid facilities, drinking fountains, elevators, and escalators. For game production, stadiums require clubhouses, team administrative offices, medical and training facilities, groundskeeping areas, concession kitchens and storage areas, operations centers for scoreboards and sound systems, and media production facilities. All of these are detailed within HOK Sport’s 1985 report and the MSA’s RFP. HOK Sport established its dominance in baseball stadium architecture through its ability to deliver designs that quickly and effectively deliver such programmatic elements at a high level. Careful studies identified the gender-specific

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ratios necessary for restrooms to ensure that women had “potty parity” and did not have to wait in much longer lines than men. HOK Sport suggested one concession’s point of sale of “approximately five linear feet” per three hundred people was both necessary and sufficient to serve fans and allow them to quickly return to their seats.100 These concession stands are supported from a central kitchen and twenty miles of pipes that distribute beer from a central refrigerated storage area.101 Camden Yards’ Prescription Athletic Turf grass field, which sits atop layers of sand and gravel, irrigation and drainage pipes, and heating coils, helps minimize rain delays and canceled games by removing seventy-five thousand gallons of water from the field in less than an hour.102 Media needs are accommodated in a press box that includes more than one hundred workstations, three booths each for radio and television broadcasts, a television production studio, and thirty-seven different locations for television cameras, compared to just ten in Memorial Stadium.103 HOK Sport further differentiated itself with its ability to produce stadiums capable of generating revenue for teams when it developed the first club level in an American sports facility at Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium. Camden Yards’ club level had the potential to generate nearly $13 million in new revenue for the Orioles in 1992, with seventy-two suites selling for $55,000 to $95,000 per season and 5,125 club seats selling for $18 each game.104 This premium area featured the extensive amenities detailed in chapter 4: upgraded furniture, furnishings, and decorations; attentive service from waiters, ushers, and concierges; shorter lines at concession stands, souvenir stores, and bathrooms; dedicated elevators and escalators with controlled access; and climate control for comfort. The seventh floor of the Warehouse also included the exclusive Camden Club, where after paying a $1,000 initiation fee, members could dine on steamed lobster, blackened turkey, or cashew chicken while watching the game or looking out toward the Inner Harbor.105 In the rest of the stadium, the Orioles increased nonpremium ticket prices by more than 31 percent, from an average of $7.59 in Memorial Stadium’s last season to $10 during Camden Yards’ first season.106 Concourses, which were thirty-five feet wide at Memorial Stadium, were fifty-two feet wide to facilitate both movement and commerce. Fans had a much broader range of concession options, with “an extensive array of food services in this ballpark of the ‘90s to satisfy fans of the ‘90s,” according to Joseph Costa, regional vice president of Camden Yards concessionaire ARA Services.107 ARA offered 120 menu items, including traditional ballpark fare, various gourmet offerings, and Maryland favorites such as the pit barbecue sold by Orioles legend Boog Powell.108 Souvenirs were available at seventeen stands and a team store located on Eutaw Street.109 With this range of improvements, Washington Post writer Robert Fachet noted that “annual profits can be expected to soar.”110

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Camden Yards exemplifies HOK Sport’s highly rationalized programmatic model with the ways in which the stadium efficiently accommodates large crowds with improvements in safety, comfort, and general service. With efficient concession stands and spacious bathrooms, fans no longer were trapped for innings waiting in line for cool hot dogs and warm beer or to enter bathrooms designed in another era with different assumptions of who would be attending games. Game production improved as well, with clubhouses becoming spaces where players could spend many hours improving their bodies and perfecting their craft, sophisticated playing fields resulting in fewer games being rained out, and high-tech scoreboards and sound systems ensuring attendees would be entertained, no matter the quality of the game. With the Orioles reaching new levels of profitability, Camden Yards seemed to be win for everyone involved. However, Camden Yards also helped begin the gentrification of baseball stadiums. As ticket prices increased by 31 percent in 1992, only the number of high-end box seats increased (by 53 percent) as reserve seats were reduced by 41 percent and the least expensive general admission seats were reduced by 73 percent.111 Crowds at Camden Yards reflected this shift. Fans at Memorial Stadium were embodied by “Wild Bill” Hagy, who was described as “once the most famous baseball fan in America” by being the hard-drinking leader of diehard Orioles fans and developing the distinctive O-R-I-O-L-E-S cheer in which he contorted his body to spell each letter.112 However, the Baltimore cab driver stopped coming to Memorial Stadium in 1985 after the Orioles instituted a policy prohibiting fans from taking beer into games, as part of Williams’ family-friendly marketing strategy.113 Asked about Camden Yards in 1993, Hagy called it a “beautiful facility,” complained about the lack of available tickets, and observed, “When I used to go to a ballgame at Memorial Stadium, it never cost me more than 10 bucks a night. That’s the ticket, the parking and the beer I took. . . . Now you’re talking, if you go down there with a $50 bill, you’re coming up with nothing.”114 Though Hagy attended games at Camden Yards, he also noticed differences about the crowd. “At Memorial Stadium, you used to say, ‘Ain’t the beer cold?’ At Camden Yards they say, ‘Is the chardonnay chilled yet?’ ”115

Conceiving an “Old Fashioned Park” As described earlier, the MSA’s RFP described the stadium’s design parameters as being “intimacy, character and an ‘old fashioned park.’ ”116 The MSA defined intimacy as “seating the fans as close as possible to the field of play.” Character would be design elements that made the stadium’s “physical appearance distinctive and memorable,” while the standard for being an old-fashioned park would be those things that would make the stadium “an ideal place in which to enjoy America’s

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‘National pastime.’ ” Architects were encouraged to highlight the “elements of space, lighting, design, color and texture of materials” that would produce such an old fashioned, intimate stadium full of character.117 While Lucchino’s appreciation for the ballparks of his youth was a major factor in the RFP’s parameters, so too was the recognition that superstadiums represented “50 years of wretched stadium design” and detracted from the experience of watching baseball games.118 This nostalgic view of baseball history was part of broader 1980s nostalgia that looked back to a “better” past before the significant political, economic, social, and cultural changes that followed World War II. While such nostalgia was expressed within the design of Pilot Field in Buffalo, the Cochrane Plan in Detroit to save Tiger Stadium, and Philip Bess’s proposal for Armour Field in Chicago, it was also evident in the celebration of daytime baseball (and resistance to lights) at Wrigley Field, the marketing of throwback uniforms, the growth of the sports memorabilia into a $1 billion industry, and movies such as The Natural and Field of Dreams.119 Toward Camden Yards being an “old fashioned park,” designers closely examined the aspects of ballparks that made them distinctive. An undated memorandum found in Smith’s Ballpark Development Collection at the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Giamatti Research Center states, “The goal of the Orioles in directing the design of the new baseball park is to create a facility that has both the features of old ballparks that will give it an historical, intimate urban character and the modern amenities that will generate revenue and provide fan comfort.”120 Seeking to emulate ballparks and avoid the problematic aspects of superstadiums, the Orioles used photographs, drawings, and measurements to identify those things that enhanced and detracted from the stadium experience. They examined seating configurations and colors, field dimensions, structural shapes, designs of scoreboards and advertisements, how exterior walls related to streets, facade designs and materials, symbolic entranceways, and pedestrian approaches. However, as Smith stated, such efforts were not intended to make Camden Yards “a period piece, [they were] meant to reflect the spirit of the game and its architecture.”121 As an example, designers hired the Baltimore firm Ashton Design to create an aesthetic vernacular within signage providing an “old-time” feeling.122 This included not only informational and directional signage but advertisements as well, with the Orioles requiring sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Budweiser to go into their archives to find appropriate retro designs to complement Camden Yards’ appearance.123 Smith also created an “intimacy index,” which included the distance of the field from seats, the slope of upper deck, having slatted seats all of one color, and making bullpens visible to fans, to assess how Camden Yards could “grab some of the emotions people hold for some of the old-time parks.”124 As described

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by Spear, “the Orioles were very concerned that this not end up like a modern stadium instead of the old parks where the fans feel on top of the action.”125 Practically, this meant reducing foul territory to bring seats closer to the action, decreasing the slope of the upper deck to thirty-one degrees from the thirtyseven degrees of many superstadiums, and becoming the first stadium with tiered bullpens in the outfield.126 To make Camden Yards memorable, the Orioles incorporated many distinctive elements from ballparks and created some new ones. Like many of the ballparks whose shapes and outfield were, as described by Smith, “dimensions were generated by the site,” Camden Yards was shaped by surrounding streets and the Warehouse, which produced an asymmetrical outfield and seemingly necessitated a tall right field wall.127 The rest of the outfield wall was set at seven feet to increase both the numbers of home runs and exciting over-the-wall, home-runrobbing catches. Such memorable characteristics were complemented with subtle touches that could be easily overlooked but offered something new for spectators to notice on repeat visits. For example, each wrought-iron row end was decorated with the team logo of the 1890s Orioles, the scoreboard was topped by two ornithologically correct, six-hundred-pound oriole-styled weathervanes (that hardly ever move), and, similarly to ballpark scoreboards, Camden Yards identified hits and errors by lighting up the H or E in “THE SUN,” an advertisement for Baltimore’s daily newspaper located just below the weathervanes. The decision to produce a retro design rather than a generic cookie-cutter stadium contributed to higher construction costs, which increased from initial estimates of $78.4 million to $105 million.128 Richmond identifies increases of $17 million for design work and another seven million for a sunshade above the upper deck and lighting and sound system upgrades. Though Smith did note “it doesn’t take more money to do things right than it does to do things wrong,”129 these increases conflicted with the MSA’s mandate, which required the public entity to adhere to budgetary parameters and cost-effectively manage the project.130 However, the Orioles were very insistent on ensuring the stadium would meet its aesthetic and programmatic preferences and did so by repeatedly invoking the design concurrence clause in the stadium agreement.131 This tension can be seen in the Orioles’ insistence on framing Camden Yards with steel trusses rather than structural concrete, which was the dominant material in stadium construction. Initial cost estimates by HOK Sport subcontractor Delon Hampton Associates placed the difference between the two materials at $11 million.132 Additionally, HOK Sport considered structural concrete to be aesthetically superior, with one engineer telling Smith and the Orioles that they didn’t “fully understand the ‘look’ they were getting.”133 However, the Orioles wanted that old-fashioned look, as they believed structural concrete would

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provide a “mausoleum effect.”134 Invoking design concurrence, the Orioles demanded a new estimate, which found that in addition to saving two months of work, steel trusses added only $611,000 to the project’s cost, though there would be an additional maintenance cost of $1 million once a decade for repainting.135 Given this much smaller difference and the Orioles’ commitment to pay half of the annual maintenance, the MSA approved steel truss construction. In this desire to have an “old fashioned park” with “intimacy” and “character,” Camden Yards’ designers ensured that they would not reproduce the problematic aspects and limitations of ballparks described in chapter 3. Instead, Camden Yards would be an idealized vision of the past fused with the luxury- and revenue-producing elements of the newest stadiums.136 Jacobs concluded, “I wish we could have designed an Ebbets Field without the pillars, but I think what we have is even better, the best of the old combined with the best of the new.”137 In this formulation, aesthetics possessed considerable economic value for the Orioles executives because they believed that like the Cubs fans in Wrigley Field, visitors would come to Camden Yards for the quality of the stadium, separate from the quality of the team.138

The Warehouse The B&O Warehouse sits at the confluence of urban design, programmatic needs, and old-fashioned aesthetics as it provides “an urbane introduction to the park for those arriving by foot on city streets” and has become Camden Yards’ most distinctive element.139 As Smith stated, “in hindsight, it is hard to imagine Camden Yards without the Warehouse because it shaped everything from the playing field to the brick façade and the color of the steel trusses.”140 However, early designs did not include it, and its future remained uncertain in RTKL Associates’ master plan of November 1988. Lucchino stated when Camden Yards opened in April 1992 that it had been a “close call whether we should keep the Warehouse or put a wrecking ball to it.”141 To facilitate that decision, RTKL asked (1) whether the building was physically sound and its reuse economically viable as a functional stadium space, (2) whether the Warehouse could be integrated into the stadium’s design in ways acceptable to both the Orioles and MSA, and (3) to what degree the Warehouse could impact games by altering wind currents and adversely affect the maintenance of a grass field by casting shadows.142 Goldberger described the Warehouse as “one of those noble and somber industrial buildings that once filled the downtowns of this country.”143 Built in 1905, it was the longest building on the East Coast, at 1,016 feet, but only fiftyone feet wide.144 The eight-story building had been abandoned in 1974 and was

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decaying by the mid-1980s. To assess the possibility of the Warehouse’s reuse, Delon Hampton Associates evaluated its structural integrity and found that, exclusive of the roof, the building needed only $706,000 of structural repairs and replacement.145 Keeping the Warehouse enabled designers to meet several of the Orioles’ programmatic needs, including team offices, ticket windows, groundlevel retail, catering and concession kitchens, and event spaces. Additionally, the Warehouse enabled the sixty-foot-wide Eutaw Street to serve as a stadium concourse on game days and to remain open as a pedestrian street the remainder of the year with, as Smith explained, the ground-level retail stores opening each day and enabling Camden Yards to better contribute to urban life.146 With only half of the Warehouse in line with the stadium and the Orioles utilizing 60 percent of the building’s 414,000 square feet, the MSA retained the remaining 40 percent, within which they placed their offices and generate nearly $4 million annually in rental income from one of Baltimore’s highest-profile commercial office spaces.147 In terms of design integration, the Warehouse helped fulfill the RFP’s requirements for an “old-fashioned park” with urban connections. MSA chair Belgrad preferred its retention because the Warehouse would provide “a sense of enclosure and intimacy that’s important in a ballfield” and Camden Yards with a signature feature.148 Moreover, the Warehouse imposed limitations of the stadium’s design that offered some of the quirkiness that would satisfy the Orioles’ desires for a distinctive ballpark. Syracuse University architectural student Eric Moss demonstrated the possibility of retaining the Warehouse in his master’s thesis project when he attached a thirty-five-thousand-seat stadium to the building, which would become the right-field wall.149 However, Moss was not alone his in his advocacy, as Baltimore’s Planning Department and the members of the Urban Design Committee of the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects also promoted designs retaining the Warehouse.150 The MSA responded to this discourse by unveiling a stadium model that incorporated part of the Warehouse in October 1987—the same month in which it issued the RFP for architectural design.151 Although this did not represent a commitment to retain the Warehouse, it signaled the MSA’s intention not to accept a generic stadium design and challenged architects to be creative. As the four finalist firms completed their proposals, representatives stated they realized “the historical value of the [Warehouse] and would try to incorporate it into the complex, if appropriate and feasible.”152 With studies showing that winds off the Warehouse would have negligible impact on games and shadows from the Warehouse would not adversely impact a grass field, the MSA announced on February 2, 1989, that it would become part of the stadium, with acquisition and renovation costs ranging from $10 million to $20 million considered to be

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reasonable and because the Orioles believed the Warehouse would “give the ballpark a traditional look and flavor.”153 Ultimately, the Warehouse is a simulacrum that signifies Baltimore’s industrial past and its own functional history. Every 125 feet or so, eight large signs with worn paint identify the Warehouse’s different areas. However, these signs are not the residue of the building’s previous use but the conscientious choice of designers who recreated the weathered state of the signs following the handcleaning of each of the Warehouse’s three million bricks. As part of the baseball stadium, the Warehouse has been revived into a second life, one that “serves as a backdrop to right field and lends the stadium a historical aura.”154 It has become a target for lefthanded power hitters, as the 460-foot clout to reach it would be a highlight on sports shows throughout the country (it has never been achieved during game play), and it facilitates consumption within Camden Yards. As such, the Warehouse now presents an image of fun and leisure rather the industrial labor it once housed and that no longer exists in downtown Baltimore. Bluecollar workers have been replaced with white-collar workers working in the law offices, investment firms, engineering firms, and medical offices that have leased space in the southern end of the Warehouse, while the northern end has been given over to the event and recreation purposes associated with the Orioles franchise and its games.

FIGURE 15.  B&O Warehouse at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore.

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The Mallpark That Forever Changed Baseball At first glance, the Orioles’ claim that Camden Yards is “the ballpark that forever changed baseball” could be dismissed as hyperbole, but it is appropriate, as Camden Yards is the first MLB stadium to make aesthetic and urban questions central to its design. Spear stated, “We want people to see that the Baltimore ballpark is a unique design, not a cookie cutter. . . . I hope they will keep in mind that what we did in Baltimore is a response to the city, not a Disneyland-type experience.”155 Designers created an immersive, themed environment that was integrated into the surrounding city and fused with a highly sophisticated consumption environment that improved not only the Orioles’ financial performance but transformed baseball’s economic model and led to the construction of twenty-two mallparks over twenty-five years. As GQ magazine responded to Camden Yards’ opening with “Every baseball fan should kneel down this moment and thank God for Baltimore,” the writers easily could have substituted “owner” for “fan.”156 With the stadium having one of the sport’s most owner-friendly leases, writer Mark Potts was correct in suggesting it would be a “gold mine” enabling the Orioles to become one of baseball’s most profitable teams and increasing the team’s value.157 In October 1991 the Orioles estimated that their 1992 profits would be $18.4 million, which represented a doubling of the team’s 1991 performance at Memorial Stadium and a fourfold increase over Jacobs’s first season of ownership in 1989.158 By the end of June 1992, these highly optimistic projections were raised above $20 million, as team revenue was expected to exceed $80 million, which would place the Orioles among the highest-grossing MLB teams despite relatively low broadcast revenue.159 When Jacobs’s financial troubles forced an auction of the team in 1993, the Orioles sold for $173 million, the highest price paid for an American sports team at the time and $100 million more than Jacobs had spent just five years earlier.160 Such financial performance encouraged other owners to prospect for their own “gold mines” as they demanded new facilities from cities eager to emulate Baltimore’s perceived success. While programmatic elements were the Orioles’ primary concern, Camden Yards elevated urban questions within its design. According to Matthijs Bouw and Michelle Provoost, beginning with Camden Yards, HOK Sport “set the tone for a succession of stadia aimed at revitalizing inner-city areas” and created an expectation for stadiums “to merge programmatically and architecturally with its surroundings.”161 Although several superstadiums had been built in downtown areas, they were minimally connected to surrounding neighborhoods because they were isolated by parking lots and highways. In contrast, civic leaders, the Orioles, and HOK Sport designers wrestled with the questions how

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Camden Yards could be integrated into the Inner Harbor, promote the city to visitors, and provide a sense of Baltimore to those in the stadium and watching on television. Part of this was accomplished by relying on existing downtown parking and expecting visitors to consume in the Inner Harbor before and after games. Facades were designed to be congruent with the neighborhoods they faced, while the stadium itself was designed to not overwhelm those neighborhoods and surrounding streets. This was further reinforced by the decision to retain the Warehouse and ensure that people inside the stadium could see out into downtown Baltimore. While many superstadiums had been located in downtown, Camden Yards was the first baseball stadium designed to be part of downtown. Before Camden Yards, stadium aesthetics had been mostly a secondary concern, if they were considered at all. The quirky elements of many ballparks were produced by site conditions, real estate markets, and surrounding urban streets. While ballparks often had notable architectural features, such as the Ebbets Field rotunda and the Forbes Field facade, these were generally confined to a limited portion of the overall design, which primarily consisted of concrete walls interrupted only by functional entry gates. Some superstadiums had some architectural elements, notably Jack Murphy Stadium’s brutalist design and renditions of the Gateway Arch within the second Busch Stadium, but these were overshadowed by the era’s unadorned and generic modernist architecture. Camden Yards was the first MLB stadium in which aesthetic concerns were fully integrated into its design, and every subsequent mallpark, whether retro or not, has been similarly architectural. As described by Bill Johnson, director of design for Ellerbe Becket’s sports design group, “it was the beginning of retro buildings, buildings that look like old buildings but have all the new materials that people demand on the inside.”162 The questions of aesthetics and urbanity, along with those surrounding amenities within the broader programmatic issues, have been central to the conceptions of mallpark spaces since Camden Yards’ design. Over the past three decades, there have been innovations in amenities that have responded to new technologies, new ways in which people watch games and use mallpark spaces, and changing consumer tastes and demands. There have been aesthetic variations as designers work to incorporate stadiums into their local contexts and meet the tastes of civic officials and team owners who seemingly want something different than a Camden Yards–style retro stadium. Further adjustments have been made to respond to the unique qualities of mallpark sites, their relationships to surrounding areas, and the policy goals of civic leaders. Each of the three following case studies focuses on how a different designer

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has responded to these issues within the conception of their mallparks. The concluding part features a case study of Atlanta, which brings these perspectives together again as designers wrestled with twenty-five years of mallpark design to produce Truist Park and possibly begin the next generation of baseball stadium design.

6 FENWAY PARK AND DODGER STADIUM The Camdenization of a Ballpark and a Superstadium

The 2018 World Series was a sports marketer’s dream. Two of baseball’s premier and most popular teams were facing off—the Boston Red Sox representing the American League and the Los Angeles Dodgers representing the National League. The teams had many stars, including Mookie Betts, Clayton Kershaw, J. D. Martinez, Manny Machado, Chris Sale, and Cody Bellinger. The games would be held at two of the sport’s most iconic venues: Boston’s Fenway Park and Los Angeles’s Dodger Stadium. Although the two managers, Dave Roberts (Los Angeles) and Alex Cora (Boston), had been teammates with the Dodgers and played on different Red Sox championship teams, the organizations had remarkably few players, management personnel, and front office staff that had been at one time employed by the other. Yet the two stadiums had a very important person in common: Janet Marie Smith, who as senior vice president of planning and development of the Red Sox from 2002 to 2009 led Fenway Park’s renovation and, in holding a similar title for the Dodgers since 2012, has overseen Dodger Stadium’s renovation. Opened a half-century apart, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium were designed completely differently. Fenway Park exemplifies ballpark design, as it is embedded within an urban neighborhood, constrained by surrounding streets, can be best reached through public transportation, possesses very limited parking, and was built in piecemeal fashion through numerous renovations. Dodger Stadium is the jewel of superstadium design, with a capacity of fifty-six thousand that has never changed, and is emblematic of Southern California’s 1960s automobile-centric culture, with access to four freeways and sixteen thousand parking spaces on its 315-acre site. However, both Fenway Park and Dodger 120

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Stadium faced significant challenges from mallparks because neither opened with the extensive revenue-generating amenities common within newer facilities. Led by Smith, who oversaw the design of Camden Yards for the Baltimore Orioles (see chapter 5), both stadiums have been transformed through a process of “Camdenization” that has added new amenities to increase their revenuegenerating capacities and created themed environments similar to those of mallparks.1 This chapter examines stadium design from the perspective of team owners and management in the conception of mallparks by focusing on the renovations of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. Given their construction several decades before Camden Yards, this may seem a counterintuitive choice. However, as two of only five privately owned MLB facilities, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium offer the clearest views into the intentions and priorities of teams.2 Unlike public stadiums, whose designs and renovations involve public authorities, private ownership provides franchises with broad (though not unlimited) discretion to develop renovation plans while leaving them wholly responsible for costs. As mallparks opened, the futures of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium were placed into doubt due to perceived deficiencies in their luxury seating options, concessions, and general amenities mix. Although attendance at both stadiums remained high throughout the 1990s, with average crowds exceeding 80 percent of capacity at Fenway Park and more than three million people attending games most seasons at Dodger Stadium, significant questions existed whether they could be adapted to produce the revenue required by team ownership and meet the heightened expectations of baseball consumers. The Red Sox and Dodgers managements responded to this challenge by essentially transforming Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium into mallparks. The term “Camdenization” was first used in 2003 by Red Sox president Larry Lucchino, who had been Orioles president during the design of Camden Yards, to describe the influence of Baltimore’s mallpark on the renovation of Fenway Park.3 In this book’s usage, Camdenization has two defining features: first, adding new amenities, particularly focused on premium seats, to increase revenue potential and improve consumer experiences and, second, creating a themed environment using similar aesthetic techniques as mallparks by emphasizing baseball history, baseball architecture, baseball culture, and local identity (see chapter 4). Camdenization raises significant questions regarding the preservation of historic buildings, especially as designers changed and adapted them over time. Despite being the home venue of the 1918 and 2018 World Series champions, today’s Fenway Park is vastly different from its earlier incarnation due to renovations that have improved the ballpark’s functionality, aesthetics, and/or economic potential. A major renovation in 1934 added a second deck, rebuilt the outfield

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bleachers, and constructed the iconic Green Monster left-field wall, which was not painted green until 1947, the same year that lights were added. The right-field bullpens were built in 1940. Modern additions include a fully electronic scoreboard in 1976 and the luxury 600 Club in 1988, as well as the numerous additions made since 2002. While Camdenization may have ensured the continued use of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium for now, such preservation may limit future adaptations and ultimately imperil their long-term survival.4 Complex issues also surround the use of history within aesthetic renovations, as Camdenization is not about recreating the material realities of stadiums as they previously existed. Instead, designers create historicist interpretations intended to reinforce nostalgic beliefs by offering patrons sanitized narratives about the past that celebrate the events, players, and general histories associated with those spaces (see chapter 2). These performances are similar to those of Colonial Williamsburg, whose interpretation of preindependence America occurs within the town that was the capital city of colonial Virginia.5 Although little different in general form from the simulacra of Disneyland’s Main Street, USA or the Las Vegas resorts that lack direct spatial or historical ties to their thematic inspirations, such historical sites promote historicist performances as being “the real thing.”6 To offer a stage for such performances, the designs of old buildings and spaces are reverted to and frozen in an unspecified moment representing “the past” by removing elements inconsistent with the designer’s desired narrative and the implementation of an aesthetic template.7 As discussed in this chapter, Camdenization acts in a similar manner as the cacophony of aesthetic styles that resulted from decades of changes within ballparks and superstadiums are swept away and replaced by an aesthetic coherence that had previously not existed. In so doing, Camdenization transforms ballparks and superstadiums into secondorder copies of themselves. To understand the perspectives of franchise ownership and management in conceiving mallpark designs and examine questions surrounding historical preservation, this chapter focuses on the Camdenization of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. First, it discusses MLB’s market structure and broader entertainment environment to define the challenges offered by mallparks that framed ownership goals for renovations to their stadiums. However, rather than articulating goals directly to architects, both the Red Sox and Dodgers hired Smith to represent their interests and direct the design processes that transformed both Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium into mallparks. While the chapter discusses new amenities and aesthetic renovations to these facilities, the focus is on designer logics as team owners and management conceived what Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium should be in the mallpark era. This chapter concludes by assessing the implications of Camdenization.

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The Market Structure of Baseball Competition is at the foundation of MLB’s structure. Games with uncertain outcomes is the sport’s core product. The season is a 162-game competition as teams seek to accumulate enough victories to earn a spot in the postseason, where they need to win several rounds to claim the season’s championship. Franchises compete for management talent and to build the best rosters by acquiring and developing young players in the minor leagues, within trades with one another, and by attracting free agents. Often teams cite these multiple forms of competition to justify their requests for public stadium subsidies by claiming higher revenue will improve the team’s ability to compete for a championship. Given all these spaces in which teams compete, it is easy to assume that baseball teams are also business competitors. This is not the case. MLB operates as a legal cartel in which each franchise possesses exclusive territorial rights as defined by their home city and surrounding counties, though the five largest combined metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore/Washington, and the San Francisco Bay Area— possess two teams each.8 Territorial exclusivity protects teams from competition for local media contracts and ticket sales. With teams based in major cities and promoted on regional sports networks, fan bases are regional. For example, the Red Sox are the most popular team in New England. Teams receive revenue from three main sources: broadcasting, in-stadium sales, and licensing.9 Before World War II, in-stadium sales from tickets and concessions predominated, but media revenue has steadily increased, first from radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s. Although team owners were initially hesitant to broadcast games because they feared detrimental impacts on attendance, lucrative payments overcame this reluctance, as media rights accounted for nearly a quarter of team revenue by 1974 and half in 1990.10 Much of this growth was driven by the emergence of cable television in the 1980s, while the development of digital media over the past two decades has further increased the percentage of team revenue associated with broadcasting. In 2019 in-stadium sources accounted for less than 40 percent of MLB’s $10.5 billion revenue.11 Although MLB’s thirty franchises earned average revenues of $350 million in 2019, there are large disparities, with the New York Yankees ranking first at $683 million and the Miami Marlins ranking last at $222 million.12 This difference is attributable to local sources accounting for 70 percent of franchise income, but this is mitigated by extensive revenue sharing that requires each franchise to contribute 48 percent of most local revenue to the league’s central

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fund.13 Revenue sharing helps maintain competitive balance and accounts for nearly one third of franchise value, which averages more than $1.8 billion.14 While franchises are financially connected and do not compete for market share, they are deeply embedded within a highly competitive entertainment industry. Within their territories, franchises directly compete with teams from other professional leagues and major college conferences for ticket sales and fan interest, media viewership and attention, and corporate support and sponsorship. More broadly, the sports industry competes against movies, television, museums, travel, physical activities, and general recreation for people’s leisure consumption. Similar to other entertainment products, baseball games have no practical use value and provide consumers with intangible benefits based on experiential qualities (see chapter 2). Chapters 3 and 4 extensively discussed how baseball stadiums produce an entertainment experience. While new facilities generate excitement and increased attendance, their novelty fades after the first season, though subsequent attendance remains higher than that of the previous facility.15 With ballparks averaging around fifty seasons before replacement, teams used renovations to expand capacity, improve functionality, and offer new experiences. As superstadiums, whose average age before replacement was closer to thirty-five seasons, were designed more holistically and owned by public authorities, renovations were less frequent and extensive. Renovations incorporated new technologies, expanded consumption opportunities, and responded to changing consumer expectations. However, as mallparks opened during the 1990s, many people began questioning whether older facilities could be adapted further to provide the revenue demanded by franchise owners and experiences demanded by consumers.

The Mallpark Challenge The emergence of cable television during the 1980s transformed baseball economics as overall MLB revenues increased from $350 million to $1 billion during the decade.16 Franchises, which sold for an average of $12.6 million during the 1970s, increased in value to an average of $110 million in 1991.17 This escalation allowed MLB to sell expansion teams in 1993 for $95 million compared to $6.25 million in 1977.18 By 1999 MLB revenues reached $2.76 billion, and team values had risen to an average of $286 million.19 Although broadcast rights drove much of this growth, in 1998 MLB commissioner Bud Selig declared that “Camden Yards may have been the single most important change in the economics of sports.”20 Chapter 5 described how Camden Yards enabled the Orioles to become one of the most profitable and valuable

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MLB teams and motivated other franchises to seek their own mallparks. Despite requirements that franchises financially contribute to construction, this has not been a difficult decision for most owners whose teams were tenants in superstadiums with limited amenities and generic aesthetics (see chapter 3). Mallparks offered largely publicly financed solutions for both problems, with luxury suites, club sections, expansive retail and concession offerings, and attractive themed environments. However, a few teams faced much more complex decisions. Four teams—the Red Sox, Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, and Chicago Cubs—owned their stadiums, while the Detroit Tigers were tenants in a ballpark they had sold to the city. The Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Angels were sole tenants in superstadiums. Political factors were important for the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics, who could not secure sufficient support for publicly subsidized facilities. While Detroit built a mallpark for the Tigers and the Giants and Cardinals largely financed construction privately, the other six teams now play in renovated facilities. Although the Camdenization has ensured the continued use of a few ballparks and superstadiums, many of the issues previously discussed in this book have a different salience in renovated facilities. First, while cost precludes many working-class fans from attending games in mallparks, many long-term fans are now unable to access spaces in Camdenized facilities where they were previously present. Second, such exclusion contradicts the narrative of continuity that is central to the appeal of Camdenized facilities, whose long histories of players, events, and fandom are promoted within team marketing. Third, the imposition of an aesthetic template leads to further homogenization within mallparks as accretions of the past are swept aside if they are inconsistent with the desired image of designers or, if they have the right appearance, placed next to new inclusions that elide the distinctions between the present and the past. As such distinctions are lost, so too are many of the aesthetic differences between stadium generations, which, despite the amenities that have recently been packed into older facilities, could leave ballparks and superstadiums as pale imitations of themselves and inferior versions of mallparks.

Janet Marie Smith Aside from the Populous architects who have been involved in twenty mallpark projects (see chapter 8), Janet Marie Smith may be the person most responsible for mallpark design by representing franchise perspectives and interests. Lucchino credits Smith, who served as the Orioles’ vice president of planning and development from 1989 to 1994, as the person who translated the concept of “a

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traditional old-fashioned park with modern amenities” into a concrete reality as “she gave life and meaning to that concept in 100 different ways” in the development of Camden Yards.21 Subsequently, Smith has worked full-time in executive capacities for three other organizations to develop another mallpark, Atlanta’s Turner Field, and oversee the renovations of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium.22 With a background that includes an undergraduate degree in architecture from Mississippi State University and a master’s degree in urban planning from the City College of New York, Smith elevated aesthetic and urban development concerns from team perspectives into discussions about stadium design. A lifelong baseball fan who attended her first game at the Houston Astrodome, Smith first used her interest in baseball as an excuse to travel while working on projects such as the revitalization of Pershing Square in Los Angeles and the design of Battery Park City in New York City during the 1980s. Smith found such travel to be helpful within her work as she “came to discover that being in a major-league baseball park was like looking at that city under a microscope” due to the unique nature of each experience.23 In 1988 Smith heard that the Orioles were looking to hire an in-house architect during the construction of Camden Yards and sent an unsolicited application to the team, which was rejected on first review by the team’s longtime human resources director and not forwarded to Lucchino.24 After being unimpressed by the résumés given to him, Lucchino quickly reviewed all the applications and noticed Smith’s. Bill King wrote that Lucchino told his human resources director, “This is a woman who is an architect with a master’s degree in urban planning. Don’t you think that’s the sort of person we ought to be talking to?” Lucchino invited her for an interview.25 Lucchino opened the interview by asking her which league had the designated hitter.26 Expressing offense at this patronizing question (though recently admitting that it was “perfectly fair” and “cool,” as it was necessary for the team’s director of ballpark planning to know about the sport), Smith quickly impressed Lucchino with her assertive attitude and deep knowledge of baseball, stadiums, architecture, and urban design. After the formal hour-long interview, Lucchino asked Smith to review the master plan, drawings, and other design materials.27 Her attitude led Peter Richmond to describe Smith as “the Woman of Steel,” referring both to her aesthetic preferences of building materials and her determined promotion of the Orioles’ interests during the design of Camden Yards.28 Soon after the project’s completion, Smith was hired by Atlanta Braves president Stan Kasten to represent the team’s interests in the design of Turner Field. The facility was conceived for two purposes: first, as the main stadium for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games and, second, to be converted into the Braves’ long-term home (see chapter 9).29 Similarly to her work in Baltimore, Smith’s

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detail-oriented approach translated into material reality Kasten’s vision that Turner Field should be a “fan’s park” but that it should have a more contemporary architectural design than Camden Yards.30 Once Turner Field opened, Smith continued as president of Turner Sports and Entertainment Development, where she oversaw the construction of Philips Arena, which opened in 1999 as the home of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers. Besides overseeing the renovations of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, since 2000 Smith has overseen renovations to Camden Yards (2008–12) and the construction of the Orioles’ spring training facility and, most recently, consulted for Lucchino in the construction of Polar Park in Worcester, Massachusetts. While having backgrounds in both architecture and urban planning, Smith considers herself as more of a project manager as she coordinates the architects, engineers, graphic designers, landscape architects, and others involved in the design and development of stadiums. She explains, “My goal is to make the most of the idea from someone who’s entrusted me with their vision and aspiration.”31 This movement of ideas to material reality is particularly challenging because architectural drawings, models, and renderings can be beautiful but may not work as a physical structure.32 Her job, Smith says, is to “figure out how to make a building come to life and how to make it resonate with fans.”33

Camdenizing Fenway Park Over its century of use, Fenway Park has been the home of eight championship teams, was the site of numerous disappointments during the eighty-six-year “Curse of the Bambino” as the Red Sox did not win any championships between 1918 and 2004, was the longtime home field of MLB greats Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Roger Clemens, and David Ortiz, and has hosted countless interactions among the more than 160 million people who have watched in excess of eight thousand games from its (depending on the year) 33,368 to 37,755 seats. Together, these have produced what the activists of Save Fenway Park! (SFP) have called the “Fenway Factor,” which comprises the “Park’s unique history, physical features, and ‘sense of place.’ ”34 However, as discussed earlier, there is no singular “authentic” Fenway Park that could be “saved” because the ballpark has been a vibrant venue that has been renovated frequently as designers have responded to changing times, technologies, economic demands, and tastes. The Green Monster, baseball’s most iconic architectural feature, embodies this vibrancy. Fenway Park’s original left-field wall was twenty-five-feet high and fronted by Duffy’s Cliff, a ten-foot incline named for Red Sox outfielder Duffy Lewis due to his mastery of its challenging terrain.35 In baseball’s dead-ball era,

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the reported distances of 315 feet along the foul line and 335 feet to left center field had limited impact on games.36 However, as Ruth popularized home runs with the Yankees during the 1920s, the height and proximity of Fenway Park’s leftfield wall transformed many fly balls that would have been outs in other ballparks into home runs. After buying the team in 1933, owner Tom Yawkey attempted to rectify this by making at least twenty offers over the years to purchase Lansdowne Street from the city but was rejected each time.37 Yawkey’s alternative solution was to remove Duffy’s Cliff in 1934 and rebuild the wall to its current height of thirty-seven feet. In 1936 the Red Sox added a twenty-three-foot-tall net to further protect the street and buildings on the opposite side.38 Fenway Park’s hand-operated scoreboard was added in 1934, but the wall, which had been covered by advertisements, was not painted its signature green until 1947. Over the next several decades, no advertisements were on the wall, although changes were made with the addition and later removal of a scoreboard for National League games, the incorporation of Tom and Jean Yawkey’s initials in Morse Code within the borders of the scoreboard, replacement of most of the wall’s tin with Formica in 1976, and the addition of Coca-Cola advertising to light towers.39 Current Red Sox ownership has extensively commodified the Green Monster with a seating

FIGURE 16.  The Green Monster at Fenway Park, Boston.

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area perched at its top and covered it once again in advertisements in their efforts to maintain the economic viability of Fenway Park.

Responding to the Mallpark Challenge As publicly financed mallparks opened and provided their tenants with new revenue, the Yawkey Trust, which gained ownership of the team after Jean Yawkey died in 1992, faced a significant dilemma: to renovate Fenway Park or seek a new facility. Despite its ranking in MLB’s top five of stadium revenues, in 1999 Red Sox president John Harrington declared Fenway Park to be physically and economically obsolete. He proposed a “New Fenway Park,” whose home plate would be 206 yards from that of the original. Harrington claimed the design would preserve “all that is good about baseball in Boston” through reproducing Fenway Park’s aesthetics but would add the “affordable family entertainment, conveniences, and the community benefits of a Camden Yards.”40 The HOK Sport design featured a replica of the Green Monster, complete with a manual scoreboard, in-play ladder, and an almost identical view of the distant Citgo sign.41 Other reproductions included outfield dimensions, bullpen locations, and the reuse of the Pesky Pole—the right-field foul pole named for former second baseman and manager Johnny Pesky. However, unlike the cramped original, New Fenway Park would have broad concourses facilitating many more concession points of sale, five thousand club seats, one hundred luxury boxes, and a capacity exceeding forty-five thousand.42 Fans, preservationists, and neighborhood residents opposed Harrington’s proposal out of concern for the $545 million public cost, the necessity of taking land from twenty-four property owners to form the fourteen-acre site, and topophilia for the original. As stated by SFP’s Dan Wilson, many fans “don’t want the 14th replica of Camden Yards.”43 Where Harrington saw obsolescence that diminished fan experience and decreased attendance, SFP claimed the ballpark’s long history added valuable experiential qualities to attendance that offset perceived defects. The group argued that the emotional connections Red Sox fans had formed with Fenway Park could not be easily transferred, like the Pesky Pole, from the old stadium to the new. Growing opposition, soaring costs, and financing difficulties placed Harrington’s plan into trouble by the summer of 2000 and led the Yawkey Trust to sell the team. Attracting bids from nine groups, the Red Sox were sold for $700 million (the highest price paid for an MLB team to that point) to a group led by investment manager John Henry, television producer Tom Werner, and Lucchino. As the only group not committed to new construction, the new owners first wanted to test if renovation could remedy Fenway Park’s perceived limitations. Besides

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recognizing that the Red Sox had failed repeatedly to get a new stadium since the 1960s and Harrington’s proposal had been overwhelmingly rejected, Lucchino stated, “We were trying to imitate Fenway when we designed and built Camden Yards, so it seemed the height of irony not to make an effort to preserve the model.”44

Renovating Fenway Park Although Lucchino noted, “Our predisposition was always that [Fenway Park] should be saved if it could be saved,” financial considerations would ultimately decide the ballpark’s future because “it had to be saved in a way that enabled us to generate the kinds of revenue necessary to be competitive.”45 Columnist Sean McAdam was among the skeptics, as he feared “the mere addition of seats— many of them situated far away from the playing field—will not begin to provide the club with the revenue necessary to compete against well-heeled adversaries, most of whom play in stadiums with more luxury boxes, more club seats, more points of sale for concessions and more parking.”46 Arguing Fenway Park’s revenue potential had already been maximized as the team charged MLB’s highest prices, McAdam warned that remaining would “spell doom for the Red Sox.”47 To translate ownership’s concept of preserving Fenway Park into a material reality, Lucchino once again hired Smith, with a mandate to “continue to play baseball here at Fenway Park and yet have it seem more spacious, gracious and revenue-producing.”48 As Lucchino recognized the delicate balancing act of making changes “without detracting from the magic and the energy of Fenway,” he made Smith and all those working on the renovation “take the Hippocratic oath . . . : ‘Do no harm.’ ”49 In her efforts, Smith needed to assess two things: first, whether Fenway Park could physically accommodate baseball in the twenty-first century and, second, whether the ballpark could generate sufficient revenue to remain economically viable. Fenway Park’s physical problems were extensive due to its early twentieth-century design, accretions from ninety years of use, and numerous extemporaneous improvements made without a holistic vision for the ballpark. Player facilities were limited, with a four-thousand-square-foot clubhouse, an exercise room that was four feet wide, and substandard medical and training facilities—all of which led to questions about whether the Red Sox would be able to attract and keep talented players.50 The field, which had been redesigned in the 1970s, had drainage problems that led to longer rain delays and more canceled games than newer facilities.51 Fenway Park also had several problems throughout the seating bowls and concourses. Restrooms were old, and there were not enough for female fans. The seats that had been installed in 1934 were narrow and uncomfortable.

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General inefficiencies of space included ramps to nowhere and many underutilized spaces. Despite Fenway Park being among the highest revenue-producing venues in baseball, its economic limitations seemed irreparable. Its capacity of 33,933 was MLB’s lowest and substantially below the average of 47,500 of the six mallparks opened during the 1990s. Additionally, Fenway Park offered very limited premium seating, with fifty-two luxury suites and 610 seats in the 600 Club, which, according to Dan Shaughnessy and Steve Grossfeld, “[rose] behind home plate like a monster aquarium filled with rich fish” as its glass front disconnected patrons from the game.52 Concourses were narrow and offered few concession stands, which were further constrained by an electrical system of such limited capacity that Smith was even forced to deny a concessionaire’s request to add a pizza oven.53 The Red Sox began renovations in 2002, with the first few projects being described by Smith “low hanging fruit” that, as the organization was confirming the building’s structural integrity, could help it assess whether it could justify a long-term economic commitment.54 Comfort and circulation were improved when the Red Sox replaced and refurbished seats, removed unnecessary walls to expand concourses, added new staircases and ramps, and repaired and waterproofed concrete.55 To address physical limitations, the team installed an entirely new field and drainage system when owners recognized that eliminating a single postponement would pay the project’s entire cost, and it overhauled the electrical system during the 2004 off-season.56 As Smith considered each functional improvement, she sought to increase the space available for fans to congregate and consume. She noted, “We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much usable square footage we’ve been able to reclaim and make available to our fans and to our operation just by thinking of it differently.”57 The Red Sox’ completion of a weight room and interview room in 2005 exemplified this perspective. Besides adding six thousand square feet of backstage space above the player’s parking lot, the team designed the roof to accommodate new concession stands and to be a space for people to watch games.58 This strategy has directly linked Fenway Park’s physical improvements to changes enhancing its ability to generate revenue. Increases of seating capacity by 10 percent to 37,755 mean that Fenway Park is no longer MLB’s smallest facility and have placed it within 10 percent of the MLB median as twenty-first-century mallparks have opened with capacities near 40,000 and as other facilities have reduced their seats. Despite McAdam’s fear that new seats would be distant from the field, most are within premium or club areas, such as above the Green Monster, atop the right-field roof, behind home plate, and next to the dugouts. The Team Marketing Report identifies 20 percent of Fenway Park’s seats as premium—the

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third-highest percentage in all of baseball.59 Additionally, Christopher Condon and Michael McDonald note, “Advertisements now adorn almost every available façade and a number of sections named for corporate sponsors.”60 As two analyses of Fenway Park’s structural integrity from 2002 to 2005 found the ballpark to be safe and stated that, with proper upkeep, it could last for several generations, the Red Sox began more extensive renovations.61 Fenway Park’s fiftytwo suites were remodeled in 2007 and 2008, and windows were removed from the 600 Club, which has been divided into two clubs (the Dell Technologies Club and the State Street Home Plate Pavilion Club) offering “exceptional cuisine in a first-class setting, with sweeping views of the field.”62 The Lansdowne Shop, which sold souvenirs, was replaced by the Ford Clubhouse and is now “the premium club space for Dugout Club Members . . . [providing] a comfortable atmosphere for members to enjoy a meal or drinks before the game.”63 Beyond premium spaces, all fans can enjoy numerous new concession stands with upgraded and expanded menus, a new team museum, picnic areas, and a kids’ play area. Seven new scoreboards, including three full-size, high-definition video boards, provide game information, replays, video packages, and other sponsored content. The Red Sox also opened the Game On! Sports Bar as a year-round restaurant and function space, replacing a bowling alley that had rented the corner of Brookline Avenue and Lansdowne Street from the team since the 1950s. The most visible change may be the incorporation of Jersey Street into Fenway Park as a concourse.64 Before 2002 the street had been closed to traffic before games, with Shaughnessy and Grossfeld describing it as “like a European marketplace . . . [where] smells whet the appetite for what lies inside.”65 Independent vendors sold food and souvenirs to the public, who could enjoy the atmosphere surrounding games regardless of whether they held a ticket to enter the stadium. Integral to the Fenway Park experience, it was described by the Orioles organization as the inspiration for their design of Eutaw Street.66 Now privatized for several hours on game days, Jersey Street functions as a twenty-five-thousandsquare-foot concourse for the exclusive use of attendees.67 The physical and financial renovations have been supplemented by aesthetic changes that are designed, as Smith stated, to “identify what is special about historic Fenway and improve on it without changing its basic look.”68 Similarly to the ad hoc approach to physical improvements in Fenway Park’s first ninety years, Red Sox management had not applied a consistent aesthetic template. This led to a hodgepodge of styles across generations as new signs and advertising met the tastes of the day or sponsors.69 Under Smith, aesthetic changes were much more coordinated and controlled because “we wanted to peel back nearly a century of layers and celebrate the good, eradicate the bad, and fill in what was missing.”70 Ashton Design explored the Red Sox archives to develop, according to Smith,

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a “palette of what was here at Fenway” based on styles and materials from the ballpark’s history.71 This palette was applied within every aspect of Fenway Park’s renovation, including directional signage, the design of advertisements, the look of seats on the Green Monster and the right-field roof, and the typeface used on scoreboards.72 As Lucchino stated that Fenway Park possesses “a kind of magic in the place, an energy and a history that is impossible to duplicate,”73 the Red Sox emphasize the team’s past with historical images and former players in their advertising, in the team museum, and in honoring 1970s pitcher Luis Tiant with a named concession stand on Jersey Street that sells Cuban sandwiches. However, Fenway Park’s age enables the Red Sox to use history differently, as seen in the celebration of their greatest player, Ted Williams. Similarly to how mallparks celebrate their franchises most iconic players, such as Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and Cal Ripken Jr., a Williams statue stands outside gate B at Fenway Park, the 600 Club was temporarily renamed the .406 Club in his honor, and the Red Sox Museum features numerous Williams artifacts and images. The Red Sox remind fans that Fenway Park was Williams’s home field for his nineteen-year career, as, for example, a red seat in the center-field bleachers marks the landing spot of his longest home run, in 1946. Fans can sit in “the Williams seat” and compare the reactions of Red Sox left fielders to balls hit off the Green Monster with those of Williams from the 1940s and 1950s.

Fenway Park at 111 The decision of Henry, Werner, and Lucchino to renovate Fenway Park has proven successful for the Red Sox on many levels. Where Harrington saw economic obsolescence, current Red Sox ownership recognized significant untapped potential, which they have accessed by investing $285 million over ten years.74 This investment, along with fielding competitive teams, resulted in Fenway Park recording an MLB-record 820 consecutive sellout games from 2003 to 2013, consistently ranking among MLB’s top revenue-generating facilities, and celebrating its hundredth anniversary during the 2012 season. In its annual assessment of sports team values, Forbes Magazine has estimated that the Red Sox are now worth $3.3 billion.75 The changes to Fenway Park coincide with the most successful period of Red Sox history since Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees in 1920.76 Victimized by the Curse of the Bambino, the Red Sox failed to win a World Series Championship for eighty-six years as the team suffered some of baseball’s most heartbreaking moments. With triumphs in the 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018 World Series, the record streak of sellout games, and the team’s multi-billion-dollar value, no one

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is now questioning the future of Fenway Park. Perhaps saving Fenway Park provided the franchise with good fortune, or maybe Henry’s ownership group has managed the franchise in a much better way, both on and off the field.

The Camdenization of Dodger Stadium Having helped save Fenway Park, Smith returned to Baltimore to oversee Camden Yards’ first major renovation and, after its twentieth anniversary, was hired by Kasten, now president of the Dodgers, to update Dodger Stadium. While most facilities of the era were aesthetically lacking, multiuse, and fairly generic, Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962, is considered the jewel of its generation, as it was designed exclusively for baseball, to fit into its spectacular site in Chavez Ravine, and to celebrate Southern California’s automobile-centric culture. For these reasons, Smith stated, “This assignment is very different,” insofar as she was working with a superstadium rather than a ballpark.77 Nonetheless, changes to Dodger Stadium are consistent with Camdenization, with renovations improving amenities to contemporary expectations but featuring the 1960s aesthetics from Dodger Stadium’s early years rather than those associated with ballparks.

The Taj O’Malley As described in chapter 3, the Dodgers had a long and storied history in Brooklyn before owner Walter O’Malley moved the franchise to Los Angeles in 1957. With air travel making a team on the West Coast practical, Los Angeles had several factors in its favor besides being the third largest American city, with a large and wealthy corporate community. As the first team on the West Coast, the Dodgers could develop a media network throughout the entire Southwest, and the city offered O’Malley the Chavez Ravine site for a stadium. Chavez Ravine’s controversial history predates the Dodgers, but many people believe baseball to have caused the dispossession of its residents.78 Located one mile from downtown, it had been home to a working-class Mexican American neighborhood that could trace its roots to 1781. However, the area’s topography left the community of thirty-three hundred residents relatively isolated and with limited retail options and few municipal services. After World War II, civic leaders sought to address the region’s housing shortage by developing a plan to build 10,000 units of public housing, 3,360 of which would be located in Chavez Ravine.79 Public housing became a central issue during 1953 elections for the Los Angeles City Council and mayor. Opponents declared public housing to be a socialist plot and exploited racial tensions to elect Norris Poulson mayor.80

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However, Chavez Ravine had already been declared a slum and seized by the city, and most of its residents removed. This left the area in limbo as Mayor Poulson repeatedly failed to find an appropriate use and purchaser for the land.81 Although Los Angeles offered the land and to build a stadium, O’Malley preferred private ownership to maximize his control over the stadium and site.82 With O’Malley spending $18 million to build Dodger Stadium, the city contributed $2 million to grade and excavate Chavez Ravine and another $2.74 million to build access roads.83 O’Malley hired Emil Praeger, an engineer and architect, to design Dodger Stadium. This background was essential because Chavez Ravine’s challenging terrain required moving eight million cubic yards of dirt to reshape the area to accommodate the stadium and parking lots.84 Praeger’s design was fairly unique among superstadiums.85 Unlike almost all multipurpose facilities, Dodger Stadium was designed solely for baseball and, rather than encircling the field with stands, it was open, with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Each of its five levels had a distinctive pastel color scheme and could be directly accessed from the terraced sixteen-thousand-car parking lot, which eliminated the need for internal circulation ramps and escalators. With the parking lot located near four freeways, Dodger Stadium’s design made “it possible for fans to drive right up to the stadium edge, leave their cars and walk directly to their seats.”86 When it opened, sportswriter Jim Murray described it as “not just any baseball park but the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, and Westminster Abbey of baseball.”87 Soon, other writers nicknamed it the “Taj O’Malley.”88 Fans responded to Dodger Stadium and the team’s early success in Los Angeles as the Dodgers were first in NL attendance twenty times in the stadium’s first thirty years of operation. The Dodgers were the first MLB team to draw three million fans in a season and held baseball’s attendance record from 1962 to 1990, resetting it four times during this period.89 The O’Malley family continued its ownership, with Walter’s two children, Terry Seidler and Peter O’Malley (who had assumed day-to-day operations of the team in 1970), inheriting the team in 1979. Although the O’Malley family prioritized Dodger Stadium’s maintenance, which included keeping it very clean and repainting it every year, the stadium received only minor renovations during its first thirty-five years of operation.90 In the early 1970s its wooden seats were replaced by plastic seats, and in 1980 Dodger Stadium unveiled the first full-color matrix board, Diamond Vision by Mitsubishi, to provide fans with television-quality images and replays.91 The O’Malleys decided to sell the franchise in the mid-1990s, partly because of estate-planning issues that would make it difficult to pass the team to the next generation and baseball economics that required corporate ownership with access to greater resources.92 As the Dodgers were consistently the second-highest

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grossing team in MLB (trailing only the Yankees), the team sold in 1998 to Fox Corporation for $311 million, nearly double the price of MLB’s previous highest sale (the Orioles to Peter Angelos in 1993 for $173 million) and the highest price for any American sports franchise at the time.

Responding to the Mallpark Challenge Fox was the ideal owner for baseball in the 1990s due to Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire and its extensive use of sports programming.93 Broadcast media companies had long understood the synergistic possibilities between television and sports, with CBS buying the Yankees for $13.2 million in 1964. However, CBS could not effectively monetize its ownership and sold the franchise in 1973 to George Steinbrenner and his partners for $10 million.94 Although most teams had contracts with local over-the-air television stations, the spread of cable television during the 1980s transformed baseball economics. This movement was led by the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs, as terrestrial stations owned by team owners (TBS in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago) were carried nationally as part of basic cable packages and used baseball as a central part of their programming.95 Several other teams were featured on different regional sports networks, such as Home Team Sports in the mid-Atlantic and the New England Sports Network, that were established during that decade. While a limited number of Dodgers games were carried on premium channels and available on a pay-per-view basis during the 1980s, games were primarily available on terrestrial television until 1996, when Fox Sports West purchased the cable broadcast rights for forty-five Dodgers games per season for $6 million annually.96 In 2001 Fox signed a new twelve-year contract with the Dodgers that paid the team $300 million.97 Although Dodger Stadium attendance remained strong through the 1990s, the stadium was beginning to show its age. In-stadium revenue was lagging behind those of mallparks, especially as O’Malley kept ticket prices low, with the Team Marketing Report’s Fan Index estimating attendance costs in 1996 at $91.76, which ranked seventeenth in the MLB.98 Moreover, Dodger Stadium lacked luxury seating options, and long lines at concession stands and bathrooms detracted from the game experience.99 Despite these issues, few people were surprised by the record purchase price, given the team’s history of high attendance and popularity, the value of the land surrounding Dodger Stadium, and the considerable wealth in the Los Angeles region. Upon taking control, Fox sought to realize Dodger Stadium’s untapped potential. Management considered new construction but quickly rejected it due to cost estimates of $200 million and a low likelihood of receiving public subsidies.100 Instead, Fox chose a limited $50 million renovation plan that included

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thirty-three suites, a new dugout club, and one thousand new high-end, fieldlevel seats.101 Suites were priced from $185,000 to $390,000 annually, while the 565 dugout seats, which included parking passes, waiter service, and an upscale pregame meal catered by celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, could generate nearly $10 million per season.102 According to Dodgers President Bob Graziano, “What we’re trying to accomplish is to enhance Dodger Stadium so it can be economically competitive with the newer ballparks throughout the industry.”103 However, Fox lost money operating the team and, with broadcast rights secured for the next decade, sold the franchise to Boston real estate developers Frank and Jamie McCourt for $430 million in 2003.104 The McCourts, who had attempted to purchase the Red Sox in 2002, renovated Dodger Stadium to a much greater extent than Fox by spending $140 million from 2004 to 2008.105 Explaining his goals for the renovation, Frank McCourt stated, “What we’re trying to do is build on the history and tradition of this wonderful facility and balance that with improvements that we make that give our fans the amenities that they would have in the new ballparks.”106 These renovations added sixteen hundred seats in prime locations as dugouts were moved forward by four rows, installed a thousand-foot-long electronic message board to provide new advertising opportunities, replaced all the stadium’s seats, repaired twenty-two miles of concrete, built new clubs on a field-level concourse that was widened by fifteen feet, and doubled the amount of concessions and restrooms.107 In 2008 the McCourts announced a plan to completely modernize Dodger Stadium for its fifty-year anniversary in 2012. The $500 million project over five off-seasons featured an entrance promenade that would replace two thousand parking spaces with team offices, retail stores, restaurants, a Dodgers museum, and two new parking lots.108 According to Jamie McCourt, “families will have a reason to come early and stay late any day of the year,” as Dodger Stadium became a destination for more than baseball.109 Yet Los Angeles Times architectural critic Christopher Hawthorne argued the project would be a “direct challenge to the relationship the ballpark has forged with fans since 1962,” as the “car-seat-car” organization of its design would be interrupted by “a maze of attractions” to entice consumption.110 However, this project never materialized, due to the 2008 economic collapse, which forced the already heavily leveraged McCourts to borrow against the team to support their other real estate holdings and maintain their lifestyle.111 As divorce proceedings in 2010 resulted in details of their precarious financial position becoming known and the team being placed into bankruptcy, MLB commissioner Bud Selig forced the sale of the franchise.112 Guggenheim Baseball Management (GBM), a ten-person group led by investment banker Mark Walter, purchased the Dodgers for $2.15 billion—another record price for an American

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sports franchise. Similarly to Lucchino’s inclusion in the purchase of the Red Sox, GBM includes longtime baseball executive Stan Kasten, who had been president of the Atlanta Braves (1986–2003) and the Washington Nationals (2006–10).

Janet Marie Smith Goes West In order to justify the team’s purchase price, the Dodgers needed to substantially increase revenue. Part of this was accomplished in 2014 when the Dodgers partnered with Time Warner Cable to form a regional sports network, SportsNet LA, and signed a twenty-five-year contract with an estimated value of $8.35 billion.113 Kasten hired Smith to oversee additional improvements to Dodger Stadium, which Kasten said would add “the kinds of things you find in modern ballparks,” including “kids’ areas, more bars and restaurants, relaxation areas, history display, interactive areas.”114 However, these amenities would be added in a manner that, similarly to Fenway Park, would not fundamentally change Dodger Stadium’s “feel.”115 Despite Fox and McCourt investing nearly $200 million in various renovations over fifteen years, significant limitations remained in Dodger Stadium. Its clubhouses were small and lacked the training, medical, workout, and video facilities common in mallparks.116 The scoreboard and sound system were outdated, and Dodger Stadium provided poor cell phone coverage and limited Wi-Fi service. Although located on an expansive site, space was at a premium within Dodger Stadium, as concourses remained narrow.117 With Praeger’s design allowing each level to be entered at grade from parking lots and not including internal circulation ramps, each level was isolated from the others. The Dodgers addressed these issues with major $100 million renovations following the 2012 and 2019 seasons and in smaller projects during other off-seasons. For Smith, Dodger Stadium provided a very different challenge. Rather than working on new construction in an eastern city with a historic downtown or renovating a historic building, she was renovating “something so architecturally different” from her previous projects.118 While Lucchino banned the “S-word” during Camden Yards’ construction and it really didn’t apply to Fenway Park, Smith embraced the fact she was working on a “stadium,”119 with its “1960’s architecture and the quirkiness of its colors and forms.”120 While the project would address Dodger Stadium’s limitations and raise the stadium to meet contemporary expectations, Smith stated her assignment from Kasten was “don’t change the postcard view.”121 Within the 2012 renovation, Smith began addressing infrastructure by improving water, electrical, sound, and data systems, installing high-definition LED scoreboards, and excavating under the stands to expand player facilities.122

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Concourses were widened by eight to fifteen feet with the removal of up to four rows from the back of each section and by moving entrance gates toward the parking lot about an average of thirty-five feet. These changes enabled the addition of restrooms, concession stands, retail stores, a kid’s area, and expanded picnic facilities to the concourses—all of the things that contemporary fans expect.123 The 2019 renovation added escalators, elevators, and bridges to make entire facility accessible to all fans for the first time.124 Earlier renovations had upgraded Dodger Stadium’s premium amenities extensively with new luxury boxes, the transformation of the third level into the club level, and the addition of club seats on the field level. Smith continued these improvements by expanding the Dugout Club level and adding Dodgers memorabilia to decorate club and suite areas.125 On the concourses, new concession stands offered expanded menus and numerous specialty stores opened,

FIGURE 17.  A Hello Kitty souvenir stand at Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles.

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including one featuring specially Dodgers-branded Hello Kitty items. To provide different viewing experiences, drink rails edged the concourses, and the bullpens were augmented with overlooks where fans could stand and watch pitchers warm up.126 As part of the 2019 renovation, the Dodgers transformed two acres of parking lots into a plaza with several new concession stands, a beer garden, two sports bars, a children’s play area, and spaces for live music before and after games.127 As Smith sought to improve Dodger Stadium’s aesthetics, she again hired Ashton Design to develop a consistent aesthetic vernacular. Unlike previous renovations whose aesthetics were “almost ruthlessly forward-looking,” this one drew directly from Dodger Stadium signage from the 1960s.128 This included scoreboards that were returned to the hexagonal shape from the stadium’s opening, which, as Smith stated, “is so distinctive to Dodger Stadium and we didn’t want to lose what’s distinctive.”129 Beyond aesthetic references to the Dodger Stadium of the 1960s, renovations highlighted team history in numerous ways. The 2012 renovation included the addition of oversized decorations throughout the stadium, including bobblehead dolls wearing Dodgers uniforms, World Series rings celebrating each Dodgers championships, and baseballs honoring each Dodgers pitcher to win the Cy Young Award, as well as steel sculptures of the Dodgers’ retired numbers and historically themed paintings.130 In 2017 the Dodgers unveiled a statue of Jackie Robinson, which was moved in 2020 to the new Legends of Dodger Baseball area, where it now stands alongside a newly installed Sandy Koufax statue and plaques honoring other Dodgers greats.131

Dodger Stadium at Sixty-One In his review of Dodger Stadium’s 2012 renovation, Hawthorne states that the Dodgers were attempting to fundamentally “change how fans think about and interact with Dodger Stadium . . . [, as] one essential goal of Smith and her collaborators has been to make the fifty-one-year-old stadium more public.”132 While describing Praeger and O’Malley’s design “as private and individualized experience as you can imagine in a building that seats 56,000” and isolated from Los Angeles despite a location only one mile from downtown, Hawthorne explains that Dodger Stadium has become more public by slowing the movement from cars to seats and as Dodgers management reconsidered the relationship between the stadium and the surrounding city.133 While the Camdenization of Dodger Stadium has greatly improved its ability to generate revenue, the Dodgers have barely begun to exploit the organization’s asset with the greatest revenue potential: the real estate beneath its parking lots. The McCourts’ 2008 plan would have created a year-round consumption destination with shops, restaurants, and entertainment amenities and suggested the

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possibility of residential development. As will be discussed in chapter 9, mallpark village projects already have extended the economic reach of team owners beyond mallpark gates in San Diego, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Arlington, Texas, and characterize the designs of potential projects in Tampa and Oakland. Given the trend of team owners becoming real estate developers, it is not difficult to imagine Chavez Ravine becoming a residential neighborhood once again—this time housing wealthy consumers looking to purchase safe, prepackaged urban experiences next to baseball’s third-oldest stadium.

The “Same Old” Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium? Camdenization has enabled Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium to remain viable in the twenty-first century as the Dodgers and Red Sox rank second and third in MLB for operating revenue and franchise values.134 While maintaining their “postcard views,” Smith’s renovations have transformed the experiences of baseball at Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium physically, economically, and aesthetically. From 2002 to 2012, as average MLB stadium revenue increased by 78 percent, Fenway Park’s revenue, which already had been among MLB’s top five, increased by 104 percent to $310 million.135 Including substantial growth in their broadcast rights fees, Dodgers revenue has increased from $230 million in 2012 to $556 million in 2019.136 Both renovations seem to be guided by the same principles: increase revenue and highlight history but try not to change the underlying sense of place. As Smith commented about Fenway Park but is applicable to Dodger Stadium as well, the changes were about making “a more gracious Fenway, a more commodious and welcoming Fenway, but it’s still the same old Fenway.”137 However, there has never been a “same old” Fenway Park or Dodger Stadium that could be maintained or restored. Throughout their histories, both Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium have changed in major and minor ways as owners have added lights, video replay boards, and luxury clubs to meet rising consumer expectations. Yet, in saving Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium by ensuring they are the “same old” places, Camdenization has fundamentally changed them in the short term and potentially imperiled their futures. As suggested by Ada Louise Huxtable, “with the best intentions, we turn real history and the places where it was made into selective stage sets. . . . One faces a dilemma peculiar to the very process of preservation: in saving the thing, the thing is lost and a substitute provided.”138 As each stadium has become more gracious, commodious, and welcoming, the experience of attending games has been transformed from economic inclusivity

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to exclusivity. Despite its long-term association with the wealthy and celebrities, Jerald Podair describes Dodger Stadium as “probably Los Angeles’s most diverse cultural institution, one of the rare patches of common ground for a city stratified along lines of class and race.”139 This was possible when the O’Malleys kept ticket and concession prices affordable. Although Dodger Stadium’s spatial organization ensured separation between fans in each of its five tiers, fans largely enjoyed similar experiences. Fenway Park’s history is similar in this regard, as its bleachers were often full of working-class fans and students attending the Boston area’s numerous colleges.140 Since Fox’s purchase of the Dodgers and Henry’s purchase of the Red Sox, emphasis has shifted to providing upscale experiences to the wealthiest attendees. As capacities of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium are limited by law, renovations added luxury seating and premium experiences and removed less expensive options, such as the standing room tickets at Fenway Park and the back rows of sections at Dodger Stadium.141 As ticket prices have increased, bleachers are now occupied by wealthier classes of consumers. These economic changes also dislocate longtime fans, such as Irving Zeiger.142 As the first person to purchase Dodgers season tickets in Los Angeles, Zeiger kept his four seats on the aisle directly above the Dodgers’ dugout for forty-three seasons. When the Dodgers relocated the dugout and built four rows of seats behind it during the 2004 off-season, Zeiger was given first option to relocate his seats to remain in a similar position. However, prices for that location increased from $20,000 to $120,000 annually. In response, Zeiger stated, “I just don’t feel like the Dodgers are my team anymore. . . . I doubt that they are even L.A.’s team anymore. It’s no longer about relationships. It’s about business.”143 Despite Zeiger’s nostalgic yearnings, baseball has been a business since the Civil War, although corporatization since the 1980s has increased the industry’s sophistication, of which mallparks are one manifestation. As Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium have increased their prices and diversified their consumption offerings, they seem to be more popular than at any time in their histories, with the Red Sox selling more than 90 percent of their ticket inventory each year since 2002 and each of the Dodgers’ top ten attendance seasons occurring since 2006.144 However, as rising prices increase team profitability and support rising franchise valuations, there is growing concern for the future, as many families cannot afford to bring children to games with a frequency that will make them lifelong fans.145 The “same old” experiences of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium have also been aesthetically and physically transformed in fundamental ways, even if the postcard view remained the same. Frequent renovations and changes often resulted in new features being placed into uneasy coexistence alongside older items. In Fenway Park, this resulted in several ramps to nowhere and general

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inefficiencies in the use of space. Although few physical changes were made to Dodger Stadium, the multiple projects undertaken by Fox and the McCourts resulted in an aesthetic cacophony, as items from different renovations clashed with one another. In taking a holistic view and applying a consistent aesthetic template to each stadium, Smith has homogenized differences in a manner typical of mallparks. Second, Camdenization could be seen as turning Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium into historical stage sets in much the same way that mallparks have used history as a design element. Before Camdenization, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium did not extensively refer to the events and players that had occurred within their gates, with much of that history enjoyed as individual memories among the most passionate fans. While aesthetic changes have made this history more widely accessible, to do so Camdenization decontextualizes elements and creates official narratives similar to those in mallparks. Recycling signage aesthetics from the 1930s or 1960s does not recreate the experiences of fans from those eras but defines those of contemporary fans and limits future aesthetic forms. This historical emphasis is especially dissonant in Dodger Stadium, which was designed in an architectural modernist style that rejected such affectations. While private ownership lessens the salience of questions surrounding urban governance, the ways in which Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium fit into their cities continue to change. For Boston, Henry’s decision to save Fenway Park provides significant benefits beyond the city not needing to spend $545 million and seize fourteen acres of private land in order to build a replica. Fenway Park serves as a focal point for Boston identity, especially after the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013, and an iconic element within the city’s marketing by rating as one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations, alongside the Freedom Trail of American Revolution sites, which includes Faneuil Hall—a site Rouse transformed into a festival marketplace during the 1970s.146 Although Dodger Stadium holds a similar position in the marketing of Los Angeles, having been among the most Instagrammed places in the world during the early 2010s, it continues to reinforce Southern California’s car culture of the 1960s.147 When Dodger Stadium opened, its huge parking lot on hundreds of acres of land near downtown was a cause for celebration. However, traffic, pollution, sprawl, climate change, and political liberalization has led many Southern Californians to reevaluate land use and transportation.148 How the Dodgers choose to respond is a particularly fraught question, especially given the considerable racial injustices associated with Chavez Ravine’s seizure during the 1950s. Although Camdenization has ensured the continued use of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium by transforming them into mallparks, they are certainly not the “same old” places, as claimed by Smith. Such preservation would result in their

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ultimate destruction because they would completely lose the dynamism that has defined their uses for many decades and their uniqueness in an era defined by simulations and replicas. Part of this damage is irreversible, as the quirky physical accretions and dissonant aesthetic styles that had accumulated over time cannot be restored after their removal. Moreover, rising prices are difficult to reverse, especially given the level of profits required as a return on Dodgers ownership’s $2.15 billion investment, even if those costs hinder the development of future fans. For Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium to truly continue, Camdenization will need to be just another moment in their developments—a moment that must be followed by another.

7 NATIONALS PARK A Mallpark of Magnificent Intentions

January 1, 2026. The changes in Washington, DC, in the past quarter century have been incredible. In the last half of the twentieth century, the city’s population fell from 800,000 to 575,000, but the city has experienced a resurgence, as more than 700,000 people now live there. Jobs, never one of the city’s biggest problems, have similarly surged, with 125,000 new positions, but, most important, many of these workers are DC residents rather than commuters from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.1 Much of this century’s growth has occurred along the Anacostia River. In twenty-five years, the river has been transformed from being one of the country’s most polluted and a symbol of division in the city into a vibrant, public space that is central to twenty-first-century Washington and a cornerstone for the greater National Capital Region as people live and work in sustainable neighborhoods and congregate for recreation and leisure. This transformation represents the successful completion of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI), which, with the judicious investment of $8 billion in public money, has spurred the construction of twenty thousand new housing units and twenty million square feet of commercial, office, and retail space; provided sites for ten new tourist destinations; thoroughly cleaned the river, such that people safely swim in it and wildlife has returned, including the symbol of our nation, the bald eagle; and created an integrated river-park system of eighteen hundred acres of parkland accessible to all of the city’s residents, who can fish in the river, ride bikes, play golf, or just stroll along the Riverwalk and relax in the sun.2 145

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Near Southeast is most symbolic of the transformation of the Anacostia River, as the area supports a mixed-income population of twenty thousand and employs sixty thousand people.3 Where there was once urban blight and severe poverty is now a vibrant, active, integrated community anchored by The Yards and Nationals Park. The recently completed The Yards project is a marvel of integrated urban design, having transformed the empty Southeast Federal Center into an exciting neighborhood with twenty-six hundred residential units, two million square feet of office space, retail, and culture space, a five-and-a-half-acre park, and a riverside mall catering to the needs of visitors and residents.4 The Yards forms a synergy with Nationals Park, as 2.5 million Nats fans annually shop and dine in The Yards, along Half Street, and within the surrounding Ballpark District.5 This remarkable transformation has once again placed the Capitol Building at the center of city life. Just as the McMillan Plan of 1901 created the National Mall and extended the city’s monumental core toward its western border, recent developments have created, consistent with Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original design, grand ceremonial entrances to the central city along North Capitol Street, East Capitol Street, and South Capitol Street.6 Of these new areas, the South Capitol entrance is the grandest of them all, the Champs-Élysées of Washington, as it welcomes visiting dignitaries, tourists, and light-rail passengers into the city along the breathtaking new Frederick Douglass Bridge, past the new Supreme Court building and Nationals Park.7 This introduction represents a vision of Washington’s future derived from several planning documents produced from 1996 to 2006. Remarkably, the city has achieved some of its goals, as the city’s population has grown to 713,000 and total employment to 800,000 in 2020, from 572,000 and 672,000 in 2000.8 The Anacostia River is much cleaner due to the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority’s $2.7 billion wastewater project.9 A $480 million replacement of the Frederick Douglass Bridge was completed in 2021.10 Of course, not all the goals will be realized. There are no plans for a new Supreme Court building, and the only thing South Capitol Street and the Champs-Élysées have in common is that they are both major roads in capital cities. Plans have guided the city’s development, most notably L’Enfant’s original design in 1790, the McMillan Plan of 1901, and the continuing efforts of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC). Writing in 1842, Charles Dickens described Washington as a “city of magnificent intentions,” observing “spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that

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only want houses, roads and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament.”11 While Washington’s twentieth-century emergence as a global capital cured its lack of development, Dickens’s critique captures the city’s continuing dissonance between the intentions of designers and the realities of urban life.12 Designed to function as the US government’s legislative, administrative, and judicial center and to rhetorically celebrate democracy, the District of Columbia is home to 713,000 US citizens who are denied representation within a Congress possessing authority over the city.13 This disenfranchisement is mirrored in planning practices that have elevated the interests of the federal government over residents and (re)produced the city’s physical and social divisions. As Howard Gillette Jr. notes, “as [the federal government] created an aesthetically pleasing monumental core at the heart of Washington, it allowed many of the surrounding neighborhoods to fall into the social and physical decay now considered endemic in urban areas.”14 Although some power disparities have been addressed in the past half century, this chapter examines the fundamental divisions between conceptions of the city by planners and the lived experiences of residents that are evident in the construction of Nationals Park and the redevelopment of its surrounding Near Southeast neighborhood. To provide necessary context for this discussion, this chapter first examines the city’s particular histories of governance and planning. This is followed by positioning Anthony Williams, who was elected mayor in 1998, within broader trends of entrepreneurial urban governance. As Williams set a goal of attracting a hundred thousand new residents, he sought to bridge the city’s divides through the AWI, which prioritized the marginal Near Southeast neighborhood for redevelopment. With Nationals Park as its highest-profile project, $3.3 billion in public and private investment, and almost ten thousand new residents, Near Southeast has become an engine for the city’s growth. Although many observers identify Nationals Park as central to this transformation, this chapter concludes by critiquing such claims and discussing how the mallpark embodies the city’s continuing contradictions between planning and practice.

A Divided City Washington’s unique structure of governance and longtime planning practices have produced two very different but overlapping cities coexisting within its borders.15 “Federal Washington” encompasses the spaces related to the US government and includes the monuments and museums symbolizing and celebrating the nation. While many people living in the “local Washington” may be employed

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by government, their daily lives are not defined by the functional and symbolic aspects of the federal city.16 The historical fact that many of these residents have been Black largely explains Congress’s governance of the city and the resulting deficit of democracy.17 This division has been reflected in the planning practices guiding the city’s development, with the prioritization of federal interests over local needs. The city’s divisions are also manifested geographically by a quadrant system centered on the Capitol Building and informally by the Anacostia River. With the Potomac River defining the city’s southern border, Southwest DC is the smallest quadrant. Northwest DC is the city’s wealthiest area as the location of most buildings, monuments, and employment associated with the federal government.18 Southeast DC and Northeast DC have tended to be the centers of the Black community, with the city’s historic dividing line being the Anacostia River, which, according to Nufar Avni and Raphaël Fischler, is the city’s “forgotten river” and has been a symbol of “environmental degradation, severe contamination, and disinvestment.”19 When Washington was founded in 1790, most of the ten-mile-square federal district’s land was uninhabited marshland, except for the towns of Georgetown in Maryland and Alexandria in Virginia.20 To design its capital city in the style of great European cities, the government hired French architect L’Enfant, who “envisioned a new kind of city suited to the American space and reflecting the conditions of its national growth,” complete with broad, tree-lined streets, integrated open spaces, sites for public assembly and monuments, and locations for industry, culture, commerce, and residences.21 This vision remained unrealized through the nineteenth century as Congress continually underinvested in the city’s development. After the Civil War, Congress granted territorial status and self-governance to DC. Trying to quickly reverse congressional neglect, the city amassed an $18 million debt (approximately $425 million in 2020 dollars) as sewer, road, and lighting projects tripled initial estimates.22 In response to this spending and the fact that Blacks had gained significant political power, Congress revoked territorial status in 1874 and imposed a three-person Board of Commissioners that directly governed the city for the next century.23 Rather than answering to the residents impacted by their decisions, DC commissioners were accountable to the two congressional committees overseeing the city’s affairs.24 Often led by southern congressmen and senators, these committees frequently denied spending (often derived wholly from local sources) and initiatives that could benefit the city’s Black community or provide it with meaningful political power.25 South Carolina congressman John McMillan’s tenure as chairman of the House District Committee from 1948 to 1972 exemplifies this

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as, seen as Washington’s de facto mayor, he ruled the city “with courtly indifference to the demands and concerns of the city’s residents,” once claiming “no one seems to object to the work performed by this committee except the public.”26 As Congress limited residents’ participation in governance, the professionalization of urban planning intensified residents’ marginalization within the city’s development. As the twentieth century began, Daniel Burnham and the City Beautiful movement promoted planning as able to improve urban life and civic virtue through monumental buildings and public parks.27 Burnham, who designed the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair using City Beautiful concepts, argued for comprehensive planning, stating, “Make no small plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”28 With Congress exercising its planning authority, in 1901 Senate District Committee chairman James McMillan of Michigan (unrelated to John McMillan), appointed Burnham, architect Charles McKim, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead Jr. to develop a plan that could revive, refine, and extend L’Enfant’s vision.29 Focusing on the city’s monumental core, the McMillan Plan created the National Mall, the Tidal Basin with the Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and Union Station and developed the city’s park system.30 Additionally, the McMillan Plan proposed the Federal Triangle project to centralize the city’s federal bureaucracy, and its Classical Revivalist style became the architectural vernacular for American public buildings.31 While the City Beautiful movement emphasized downtown areas and limited public investment to infrastructure, by the 1930s urban planning became more ambitious, with comprehensive plans focusing on major public buildings, transportation, and slum-clearance initiatives.32 New York City master planner Robert Moses personified these efforts by directing the development of New York’s highways, bridges, and roads, public housing, urban-renewal programs, and other infrastructure projects for almost half of a century.33 In Washington, planning authority was invested in the NCPC, which was created in 1926 to continue implementing the McMillan Plan and produce plans for parks, recreation and community facilities, mass and automobile transportation, and general development.34 The NCPC’s signature projects include the redevelopment of Southwest Washington and the creation of the Capital Beltway in the 1950s and the initiation of the Metro subway system in the 1970s, with the last two projects fueling suburban growth.35 The redevelopment of Southwest, a poor community of 23,500 people located in prime real estate less than a half mile from Capitol Hill, exemplifies the NCPC’s historic elevation of federal priorities over local interests. With the goals of eliminating slums and reducing white flight, Southwest’s four hundred acres of structures were razed.36 Because 80 percent of its residents were Black, community

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leaders criticized the project as “Negro removal.”37 Despite developers’ promises regarding affordable housing, community facilities, retail establishments, and commercial projects, actual development fell short due to market conditions, competing visions, and business failures.38 Overall, Southwest’s redevelopment is widely considered a failure for several reasons, including social justice, aesthetics, and general quality of life.39 Although this experience highlighted the need for meaningful participation by DC residents in the city’s governance and planning, the granting of home rule in 1974 provided only a partial solution. Congress placed several conditions that have made governance problematic, if not untenable, and continues to deny congressional representation to residents: • First, Congress has the right to approve DC budgets and laws. This has left the city vulnerable to micromanagement by members of Congress, many of whom otherwise decry federal interference in the decisions of local governments elsewhere.40 In a city supporting Democratic presidential nominees with an 85 percent average vote since 1964, congressional Republicans have imposed conservative social programs such as school vouchers, prohibited a needle-exchange program, and prevented the Council of the District of Columbia from establishing a cannabis regulatory regime following legalization in a 2014 referendum.41 • Second, Congress restricts the DC government’s ability to raise revenue. The city cannot tax commuters’ incomes (commuters represent approximately two-thirds of the workforce), despite their use of city services and infrastructure.42 Property tax collections are constrained, with 50 percent of the city’s real estate exempt due to ownership by the federal government, embassies, or nonprofits and by the Height of Buildings Act, which reduces property values by imposing a 130-foot limit.43 These restrictions shift costs for public services and infrastructure to DC businesses and residents, who bear the country’s highest tax burden.44 • Third, Congress gave the city responsibility for services typically managed by state governments, including vehicle registration, the justice system, Medicaid, and welfare.45 Additionally, Congress rarely compensates DC for the full costs of being the capital city, including those related to the protection of federal officials and foreign dignitaries, hosting presidential inaugurations, national celebrations, and political demonstrations, and taking extraordinary precautions to protect against terrorism. These have combined to create a structural deficit estimated by the General Accounting Office in 2003 as being between $470 million and $1.1 billion

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annually.46 Exacerbated by corruption within the city’s government under Mayor Marion Barry, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s.47

Entrepreneurial Governance in Anthony Williams’s Washington As described in chapter 2, urban governance shifted during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s away from managerialism focused on the welfare of residents to entrepreneurialism primarily concerned with attracting mobile capital.48 This shift occurred as neoliberalism replaced Keynesianism as the philosophy shaping local government priorities and policies in response to the challenges facing industrial cities.49 As the “company town” of an expanding federal government, Washington did not develop an extensive industrial economy and was spared some effects from the widespread unemployment and escalating poverty faced by other cities.50 Yet the city was in financial crisis in the mid-1990s.51 To respond to the city’s deteriorating economic condition, Congress installed an independent Financial Control Board (FCB) rather than trust Barry and the DC Council, who were generally stripped of their authority.52 With a mandate to gain control over the city’s finances, Congress granted sweeping powers to the unelected FCB to develop long-term plans, restructure contracts, and enforce budgetary discipline.53 Anthony Williams, who was serving as chief financial officer for the US Department of Agriculture, was appointed to the same role at the FCB. With a personality that seemed “shy and mild-mannered to a fault,” Williams was more of a bureaucrat than a politician, as he had worked several publicsector jobs.54 Leading the FCB, Williams quickly transformed Washington’s $772 million deficit into a surplus by dramatically reducing the size of the city’s workforce.55 Despite Williams’s claim to have no political ambitions, political activists from Northwest DC drafted him to run for mayor after Barry chose not to run for reelection in 1998. Running on a platform essentially promising boring competence, Williams was elected with 50 percent of the votes in a race that included three council members.56 As mayor, Williams’s priorities were to get “the city working, restore respect for the city, and to really create a vision for the Anacostia River,” while also maintaining disciplined public spending and improving city services.57 According to Kevin Clinton, chief operating officer of Federal City Council (an economic development nonprofit), Williams “was one of a cadre of mayors who were more focused on management and results and accountability than fighting the largest

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battles on social issues that were facing the city.”58 To increase public revenue, Williams’s probusiness strategy prioritized downtown growth as the “locomotive” for economic development throughout the entire city.59 Simultaneously, Williams desired Washington to become “an inclusive city,” with the city’s 2006 comprehensive plan seeking to “ensure that economic opportunities reach all of our residents, and to protect and conserve the things we value most about communities.”60 With the commuter tax ban limiting the benefits from increased employment, Williams pursued a consumption-oriented strategy targeting the 4.3 million people residing in the city’s Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Besides attracting suburbanites’ spending, Williams set a goal to increase the city’s population by one hundred thousand people by 2010, which he described as being “met by indifference [because] nobody took me seriously.”61 This was partly because the city’s population had been consistently decreasing from its high of 802,000 in 1950 to 572,000 in 2000, which included a 35,000 decline during the 1990s.62 This effort focused on well-educated young professionals and wealthier empty nesters by promising an urban experience incorporating cultural diversity, retail and recreational opportunities, and easier commutes.63 To do this, the city improved public safety, subsidized development of downtown consumption amenities, and focused on neighborhood development with such things as bike lanes and dog parks.64 The development of Penn Quarter in Northwest as the city’s entertainment district was an essential element of this strategy. In 1995 the city and the federal government began this process by providing substantial tax incentives and infrastructure improvements to Abe Pollin to build the $200 million Capital One Arena and move his two sports teams, the NBA Washington Wizards and the NHL Washington Capitals, there from suburban Landover, Maryland.65 This was followed with $74 million in public funds to subsidize the $274 million mixeduse Gallery Place, which included a movie theater, restaurants, retail outlets, and nearly two hundred luxury condominiums. Reviewing the neighborhood’s entertainment venues, museums, bars, restaurants, retail outlets, hotels, condominiums, and office buildings, Derek Hyra identifies a total of $436 million in public incentives for additional development, as the neighborhood has become one of the city’s “most sought-after downtown living, dining, and entertainment spaces.”66

The Anacostia Waterfront Initiative As Northwest is DC’s wealthiest quadrant, it was the first area to which developers made significant commitments. Yet Williams signaled his intentions to create

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“a more inclusive city” by announcing his first mayoral campaign on the banks of the Anacostia River, an area that was seen as “a near-synonym for abandonment and urban decay.”67 Prioritizing the river’s revitalization, Williams recognized it as an underutilized resource for business, recreation, and neighborhood development.68 Announcing the AWI in 2003, project manager Uwe Brandes promised it would be an “effort . . . on a par with the McMillan Commission Plan . . . [and] completely overhaul the quality of life in the District.”69 Although DC had not developed an extensive industrial economy, the Anacostia River was one of the most polluted US rivers due to untreated overflows of sewage, stormwater, trash, and fertilizer.70 In addition, the public could not access much of its 6.8 miles of waterfront within the city because of restrictions imposed by government agencies, which controlled 90 percent of the AWI’s 3,070 acres. Guided by five major principles, the AWI sought to reclaim, open, and revitalize the river by attracting public and private investment of $8 billion over a twenty-five-year period. To do this, the AWI intended to do the following: • Restore “a clean and active river,” primarily through the $2.7 billion DC Clean Rivers Project, which should reduce combined sewer overflows into the river by 98 percent when finished in 2023.71 • Connect the city by “breaking down barriers and gaining access” by improving transportation infrastructure across the river and within adjacent underserved neighborhoods.72 • Build “strong waterfront neighborhoods” by encouraging development and investment within neighborhoods on the eastern side of the river.73 • Produce “a great riverfront park system” by developing open spaces and providing continuous pedestrian and bicycle access to the waterfront.74 • Create “cultural destinations of distinct character” that could provide residents with shared experiences and attract visitors to move beyond the city’s federal core.75 The construction of Nationals Park has been central in this effort.

Pursuing Baseball In its evaluation of Williams’s mayoral tenure, the Washington Post editorialized, “Mr. Williams restored the city’s stature and, as a result, its sense of self. He got the city out of the red, made sure streets were plowed and brought baseball back to the nation’s capital.”76 In placing baseball on par with achieving sound fiscal management and providing quality public services, the newspaper’s editorial board recognized the symbolic power of sports and baseball’s long history within the nation’s capital. Often intersecting with the city’s broader racial politics, this

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tradition includes the success of the Negro leagues’ Homestead Grays, the relocation of two Washington Senators teams, and the thirty-four-year absence of MLB from DC. A charter member of the American League in 1901, the Washington Senators were more relevant culturally than competitively, as Charles Dryden’s 1904 jibe, “Washington: first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” was generally accurate.77 The Senators’ lack of success is mostly attributable to the team’s ownership by the Griffith family, which lacked the financial resources needed to operate a competitive franchise.78 The Homestead Grays, which were originally based in Pittsburgh, had much greater success in Washington, as the team won eight of nine Negro National League titles from 1937 to 1945. Renting Griffith Stadium by paying 20 percent of gate receipts, the Grays’ payments (ranging between $50,000 to $100,000 annually) often provided the Senators with the difference between profit and loss.79 The city’s changing economic conditions and racial composition resulted in Washington losing MLB teams in 1961 and 1971 despite the opening of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium (originally named District of Columbia Stadium but known as RFK Stadium) in 1962. After Clark Griffith died in 1955, his nephew Calvin inherited the franchise and sought a new home because “the trend in Washington is getting to be all colored.”80 Moving the team to Minnesota before the 1961 season, Calvin Griffith explained his choice in 1978 by stating the region “only had 15,000 black people . . . [and] you’ve got good, hardworking white people here.”81 The AL responded by granting Washington an expansion team, but after eleven years featuring just one winning season and nine among the three lowest attendance figures in the AL, the expansion Senators moved to Arlington, Texas, in 1972.82 Despite repeated failures, most Washingtonians believed that MLB would quickly return.83 As described in chapter 5, the franchise up the road in Baltimore was the most likely candidate, as Washington-based lawyer Edward Bennett Williams bought the Orioles in 1979. Other Washingtonians attempted to purchase the San Diego Padres and the San Francisco Giants during the 1970s and were involved in failed bids for expansion teams in 1977, 1993, and 1998.84 By the 1990s DC’s Northern Virginia suburbs were considered the most likely home for Washington’s third MLB team due to Camden Yards’ success, the Orioles claim that Washington was within its marketing territory, and as the financial difficulties of the DC government precluded public subsidies for a new stadium. While baseball was not near the top of Williams’s original mayoral agenda, he recognized the impact of Capital One Arena on Penn Quarter and believed that a baseball stadium could have similar impact in another neighborhood.85 When MLB began seeking a new home for the Montreal Expos in 2002, DC was one of

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seven areas pursuing the franchise. Early in the process, MLB favored Northern Virginia to minimize the impact on the Orioles, whose new owner, Peter Angelos, was staunchly opposed to a downtown DC site.86 However, MLB’s interest in Northern Virginia waned as the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority could not secure a site or public funds.87 Williams’s first offer to MLB in January 2003 promised to pay two-thirds of the project’s anticipated $300 million cost. Relocation committee chair Jerry Reinsdorf responded, “We were thinking of a different split. We were thinking three-thirds and no-thirds.”88 MLB kept the process open, however, and in April 2004 received a proposal from Williams offering to pay the entire project cost, then estimated at $436 million.89 According to Stephen Green, special assistant to Williams for economic development, “the Mayor’s instructions to me were very clear. He said, ‘I’d rather slightly overpay and get it, than underpay and not get it.’ ”90 With MLB seeking additional offers, negotiations continued for another four months.91 However, needing to set MLB’s 2005 schedule and resolve the Expos’ status after almost five years of uncertainty, on September 29, 2004, Commissioner Bud Selig announced baseball’s return to Washington.92 In the deal that was considered one of the most generous seen by MLB officials, DC agreed to pay the full project costs and any overruns, though MLB did contribute $20 million as costs escalated to $670 million.93 The team received limited financial exposure, rent that increased at a rate lower than inflation, and virtually all stadium revenue.94 The project would be financed through incremental taxes realized in the stadium and the Ballpark District, while a “baseball tax” would be levied on the city’s largest businesses through the extension of an otherwise expiring gross-receipts tax.95 As compensation for losing the DC market, the Orioles received a 90 percent interest in a new regional sports network (declining to two-thirds over time, with the remaining share owned by the Nationals) and a guaranteed minimum sales price.96 In 2005 the Nationals went a surprising 81–81 as the team drew 2.7 million fans to RFK Stadium, which remains the team’s highest yearly attendance.

Bringing Baseball to Near Southeast Needing to identify a stadium location as part of its offer to MLB, Green described site parameters as including Metro access, a plot exceeding sixteen acres, and “no significant residential displacement.”97 After considering thirty-five sites, the city identified one finalist in each of DC’s quadrants: Mt. Vernon Square near the new Washington Convention Center in Northwest, the RFK Stadium parking lots in

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Northeast, the Banneker Overlook near the Southwest waterfront, and one block north of the Anacostia River in Near Southeast.98 Each of the first three sites had significant problems. Although Mt. Vernon Square was initially favored, it was the most expensive site by $100 million and perceived by Green to be “two stoplights from the guy in Baltimore.”99 Building next to RFK Stadium was the least expensive option, but offered little potential for economic development, was close to an established residential neighborhood, and would have required expensive environmental mitigation—the same factors that previously prevented an agreement for a new NFL stadium at the site.100 The Banneker Overlook site promised to help revitalize the Southwest waterfront but faced resistance from residents and posed security concerns.101 Offering the fewest problems, Near Southeast emerged as the city’s preferred site.

Redeveloping Near Southeast Historically, Near Southeast has been one of the city’s few industrialized areas and, as a result, possessed a working-class character.102 L’Enfant intended the Anacostia River to have the city’s commercial waterfront, and the Washington Navy Yard became the city’s first major employer, with workers finding nearby housing.103 From its earliest days, developers recognized the area’s potential but realized disastrous results. In one early example, three speculators invested in residential construction during the 1790s, accumulated debts of $13 million, and were incarcerated in a debtor’s prison.104 Until the late 1990s, other development efforts enjoyed little more sustained success. As planning in Near Southeast repeatedly failed, the community developed its own character despite aesthetics such that Washington Post writer Debbi Wilgoren characterized “the journey from the aging Frederick Douglass Bridge up South Capitol Street to the U.S. Capitol [as] a mile-long tour of urban ugliness.”105 The neighborhood possessed a mix of light industrial uses, government buildings, and sexually oriented businesses and nightclubs serving the LGBTQ+ community. Most of the neighborhood’s 1,853 residents lived in poverty within the Arthur Capper / Carrollsburg public housing project, and the area employed 16,500 people.106 With the area having few retail options and no cultural or entertainment centers, Jacqueline Dupree, who began chronicling changes in Near Southeast in her JDLand blog in 2002, explained, “I think that it was a pretty common feeling among the people [living] on Capitol Hill, that unless you went to the nightclubs or to the Navy Yard . . . there’s just nothing there and really probably best to stay away.”107 Sustained development efforts started succeeding in 1997 when the Naval Seas Systems Command, the US Navy’s procurement division, announced its relocation

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to the Washington Navy Yards in 2001. To accommodate anticipated demand from defense contractors complying with procurement regulations, developers started building Class A office space on M Street SE.108 In 2000 Congress permitted private development on the vacant fifty-five-acre Southeast Federal Center site, which was divided between the US Department of Transportation’s new headquarters and Forest City Enterprises’ The Yards—a $1 billion, eighteen-year project to develop twenty-six hundred housing units and two million square feet of office, retail, and cultural space.109 In 2001 the DC Housing Authority received a federal HOPE VI grant to replace 707 units of public housing at the Arthur Capper / Carrollsburg project with 1,562 units of mixed-income housing.110 In 2007 the Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District (CRBID) was established, and its initial estimates for the neighborhood at buildout in 2040 included twelve to fifteen million square feet of office space, nine thousand residential units, twelve hundred hotel rooms, eight hundred thousand square feet of retail space, and four public parks.111 While rapid development of Near Southeast was desired, there was concern about the public’s role as “market forces . . . will rapidly overtake and make irrelevant any set of unrealized ideas—no matter how grand, elegant, or visionary.”112 Civic leaders were worried that the neighborhood could become another K Street NW, which was dominated by office buildings leased by lawyers, political consultants, federal contractors, and lobbyists who would commute from the suburbs, were exempt from paying DC income taxes, and leave the area empty after work. Instead, Williams and city planners preferred “a mix of uses” that would help create “a real city where everything’s mixed up, complicated and energized.”113 Such a mixed-use area would help the city attract new residents. Although The Yards was such a project, plans for other areas in the neighborhood were trending toward office development. The sixty-acre South Capitol Gateway between South Capitol Street, First Street SE, M Street SE, and the Anacostia River was considered a “doughnut hole,” with its relative lack of anticipated projects.114 Nationals Park and the Ballpark District offered the city an opportunity to exert much greater control over the nature and pace of the neighborhood’s development.

The Ballpark District In this way, the selection of the stadium site was not intended to create new development where there otherwise would have been none but instead to guide private-sector development activity toward ensuring that Near Southeast would become a “vibrant mixed-use waterfront destination.”115 On game days, the Ballpark District would be a “ ‘decompression zone’—a place where fans would pause to eat and shop because they would feel they have arrived at the ballpark even

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though they are not yet inside.”116 Half Street would be closed to automobiles to facilitate consumption on a public promenade with sidewalk cafés, bars, restaurants, boutiques, and kiosks that would “encourage people to linger well beyond the event of the ballgame.”117 Beyond the baseball season, the Ballpark District would become a year-round attraction by offering a “concentration of shops, restaurants and entertainment uses . . . that will energize the open space with a critical mass of activity.”118 Nationals Park would be part of the neighborhood’s vibrancy, with several storefronts on First Street and as the “romance of the field and the spatial drama of the empty seating bowl will develop the destination uses surrounding it and become one of the City’s and the neighborhood’s most memorable and appealing public gathering places.”119 Initial estimates suggested the Ballpark District could add annually up to $100 million in tax revenue.120 While Nationals Park was under construction from 2006 to 2008, Monument Realty anticipated developing 1.5 million square feet in the Ballpark District, including 320 condominiums and rental apartments, a two-hundred-room hotel, and ground-level shopping and restaurants.121 Additionally, development company Akridge planned to construct two office buildings, a residential building, and fifty-five thousand square feet of retail space. Although these projects would not be completed when the stadium opened in April 2008, quick development of the Ballpark District was anticipated, as existing structures were demolished and the eastern side of Half Street was excavated to prepare for construction. This expectation was not met, as just two projects in the Ballpark District were completed between baseball’s return to Washington in 2004 and 2016. The 2008 financial crisis and associated crash in commercial real estate contributed to this delay because Lehman Brothers, whose bankruptcy was the largest in American history and considered one of the crisis’s precipitating events, was an equity partner in Monument Realty’s Half Street project. With the project indefinitely delayed due to bankruptcy proceedings, Jonathan O’Connell identified its excavated site as “Washington’s most infamous hole in the ground” and “an illustrious local example of the excesses of the real estate bubble.”122 Uncertainty also slowed Akridge’s development plans for the western side of Half Street. In 2009, seeking to cater to stadium crowds, Akridge erected The Bullpen, an enclosure consisting of several shipping containers to serve as a pregame and postgame entertainment area, with food, beverages, and live music.123 Designed to be temporary, The Bullpen continued to operate into 2022, though its length had been reduced in 2016 after Akridge broke ground on its West Half project. Once the financial crisis passed, construction resumed in other areas of Near Southeast as, anchored by development in The Yards, twenty-three major projects were completed from 2009 to 2016. However, as more than twenty

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million people visited Nationals Park during this period, development remained uniquely stalled in areas beyond Half Street within the Ballpark District. This may be attributable to the fact that these visitors came to Near Southeast on fewer than ninety days per year, which is not sufficient to support businesses that have to maintain payrolls, pay rent, and utilize utilities all year. In this regard, Michael Stevens, the CRBID’s executive director, describes Nationals Park as one leg of a “three-legged stool,” with its patrons enabling businesses make “huge money” during the baseball season but also reliant on workers and residents to provide a critical mass of consumers necessary for businesses to remain viable for the rest of the year.124 Although proponents in Washington generally avoided making the grandiose promises associated with other mallparks, there is considerable difference between being a leg of a stool and an anchor for development.

Assessing the Impacts of Nationals Park Over the past twenty-five years, Near Southeast has undergone a massive transformation into one of Washington’s most vibrant neighborhoods, with 6.2 million square feet of office space, ten thousand residents, thirty-four thousand workers, four hotels, and almost one hundred retail and dining establishments. In 2018 Forbes Magazine recognized the area as one of its “12 Coolest Neighborhoods in the World,” with a “cool factor” lacking in most other DC neighborhoods.125 Although the article identified Nationals Park as the area’s main attraction and Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell has called the stadium “an urban redevelopment triumph,” such assessments overstate the $670 million stadium project’s impact by confusing correlation with causation.126 While part of the story, Nationals Park plays a peripheral role, as significant redevelopment would have happened along the Anacostia waterfront, throughout Near Southeast, and on the stadium site regardless of baseball’s return to Washington. To properly assess its impacts, this conclusion positions Nationals Park within those contexts and the broader histories of planning and development in DC. First, the transformation of Near Southeast has been remarkable, as public investment of $1.1 billion has been matched by more than $2.2 billion of private investment toward an expected $10.4 billion at buildout in 2040.127 Development activity now stands at an aggregate total of fourteen million square feet, with another twenty-three million square feet expected in the next two decades.128 In 2018 the area produced $287 million in total tax revenue for the general fund (three and a half times higher than in 2007), with cumulative net tax collection expected to reach $8.3 billion at buildout.129 While these figures are consistent with initial expectations, the nature of development shifted as demand for

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commercial office space substantially declined after the financial crisis. Estimates from 2007 of fifteen million square feet of office space, eight hundred thousand square feet of retail space, and twelve thousand residential units are now eleven million square feet office, 1.3 million square feet retail, and twenty-two thousand residential units.130 Rather than eventually hosting eighty thousand workers and eighteen thousand residents, as anticipated in 2008, estimates now suggest fortyfive thousand workers and thirty thousand residents at buildout.131 The geography of investment and development in the neighborhood seem to suggest that Nationals Park’s direct impact has been negligible. The largest development project, The Yards, was already underway before the city had secured baseball or placed the stadium in Near Southeast. Forest City Washington president Deborah Ratner Salzberg described her company’s $2 billion commitment to develop more than two million square feet of office and retail space and thirtyfour hundred residential units as being related to the presence of Metro, fortyeight acres of waterfront property, and long-term commitments from the city’s political leadership.132 As noted above, as twenty-three major projects were completed around Near Southeast from 2009 to 2016, just two occurred within the Ballpark District, which has been one of the last areas in the entire neighborhood to experience significant development. The relatively small direct impacts of Nationals Park should not be a surprise because very few mallparks have effectively anchored urban redevelopment, despite the intentions of designers. Besides their annual usage on less than 25 percent of days, many mallparks have been poorly located, with twelve built in the parking lots of previous facilities. Additionally, as discussed in chapter 4, Rosentraub observes that cities have done more hoping than planning, with development activity left to market forces—as if the mallpark’s presence alone would transform the surrounding urban landscape.133 In Washington, market forces seemed to have responded to the development of other planned elements in Near Southeast much more than to Nationals Park. Nationals Park’s most tangible impact may its acting as an “accelerant” for development (as described by Williams, Salzberg, and Stevens) by attracting attention to the area, bringing in millions of visitors annually to a part of DC they would not otherwise visit, and demonstrating the city’s commitment to the area and the broader revitalization of the Anacostia River.134 As such, Nationals Park is described by Rana Amirtahmasebi and colleagues as “perhaps the defining element of the revitalization of the Anacostia Waterfront.”135 Though the value of accelerating development or defining a project of the AWI’s scale is not negligible, it is not unreasonable to expect that Nationals Park would have much greater development impacts, as it represents 60 percent of the DC government’s investment in Near Southeast and is the AWI’s largest public expenditure.136

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While economic impacts may not justify the city’s subsidization of Nationals Park, other grounds suggest the project may have been worthy of public involvement. The stadium and team have had positive impacts on life in Washington, and a majority of Washingtonians wanted the stadium. As Williams noted, governments should have “some freedom to spend some money on entertainment, even if there’s no [economic] benefit to it. . . . It’s a quality of life issue, but there’s agency to the public. We have to consider that too. It’s not all economic.”137 The Nationals have served as a focal point for communal identity and civic cohesion, especially during their 2019 season, when they won the World Series.138 While one certainly can question whether the size of the city’s subsidy is appropriate, Williams notes that most of attendees at Nationals Park are coming from the suburbs and are paying for the stadium through their taxes (though economists would question the degree to which this spending is impacted by the substitution effect).139 Going beyond local impacts, Nationals Park could be seen as indicative of the city’s broader gentrification efforts targeting visitors and wealthier residents. Originally thought to be unrealistic, Williams’s goal of attracting 100,000 new residents has been exceeded, as DC’s population has grown by more than 125,000 people since 2003.140 Although Williams sought to bridge the city’s various divides and promised that his efforts would not be detrimental to existing residents, market conditions and new residents are responsible for significant dislocation. Washington has been rated as having the country’s third-highest rental prices, with one-bedroom apartments renting for an average of $2,223 per month (essentially requiring an income of $80,000).141 Median real estate prices for owner-occupied housing have increased from an inflation-adjusted $234,000 in 2006 to $580,000 in 2020.142 As housing has become increasingly unaffordable to anyone with an income below $75,000, 36 percent of the people moving out of DC from 2000 to 2014 claimed to have done so for housing-related reasons.143 Such gentrification-related pressures created a backlash against Williams’s mayoral successor, Adrian Fenty, who, four years after winning all of the city’s 142 voting precincts, was overwhelmingly defeated in 2010 by Vincent Gray, who promised to pursue more equitable growth.144 While life in Washington has certainly improved since the 1990s, many questions remain regarding the distribution of benefits from the city’s planning and development activities despite an approach different from those in the past. The AWI and Near Southeast redevelopment are not the “Negro removal” of 1960’s Southwest or tinged by racist assumptions underlying the NCPC’s planning during much of the twentieth century. As developers such as Salzberg acted on their commitments to affordable housing and employed local minority contractors, Williams and other planners demonstrated much greater concern for residents

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than those developing the McMillan Plan and even sought to respond to the material realities of the Anacostia riverfront rather than treating them as empty spaces awaiting planners. Despite an improved process, greater inclusion, and better intentions, the social justice goals of the AWI remain largely unrealized. The benefits from redevelopment in Near Southeast accrue to developers and middle-to-upper class visitors, workers, and residents, as the neighborhood’s previous users have largely been excluded and dispossessed. These outcomes are consistent with the market-based, entrepreneurial assumptions inherent within neoliberal urban governance approaches, which posit economic growth as the singular precursor for urban development and the provision of public services. In order to create positive market conditions and friendly business environments, cities incentivize development by offering substantial public resources and by reducing, eliminating, or waiving the mandates, regulations, and other legal requirements that could impose financial costs. However, many of these requirements originally were created to encourage the production of public goods and minimize negative social impacts because developers have little reason to pursue positive externalities and market outcomes tend toward inequality. Under neoliberalism, developers and markets have been freed from broader social obligations as cities pursue economic growth as an end to itself, regardless of its impacts on the broader community. This prioritization of profit over people is highly salient within Near Southeast as uses and users incompatible with the city’s development goals were displaced in favor of Nationals Park. The area was not an empty space awaiting planners to conceive its future and developers to build in concrete but instead a vibrant and active neighborhood that was produced through lived experience, whose inhabitants and users invested considerable time, effort, and money and derived meaningful benefits. Rather than allowing the site’s history to be buried beneath Nationals Park, this chapter concludes by remembering what existed before the baseball stadium and by recognizing the impacts of the plans for Nationals Park upon people’s lives. Before Nationals Park, there were four buildings on O Street that Paul Schwartzman described as “a kind of 24-hour mini-mall of prurience,” housing a succession of sexually oriented businesses and nightclubs serving Washington’s LGBTQ+ community since the 1970s.145 As Near Southeast was socially invisible, economically marginal, and politically ignored before the mid-1990s, planners and city officials allowed the LGBTQ+ community relative autonomy in the area.146 Within the spaces they produced, users were free to explore their sexual identities in the anonymity of the Club Washington Baths and the private video booths of Glorious Health & Amusements or more publicly in the strip clubs Secrets and Heat and the drag shows of Ziegfeld’s.147 Beyond sexual

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activity, O Street enabled marginalized people to work, find acceptance, and form communities within emotionally safe spaces as they faced social rejection and the AIDS crisis.148 Though civic leaders promised Robert Siegel that he could reconstitute such an area in another part of the city, this never occurred, and just two of the displaced businesses have reopened elsewhere. In 2008 Ziegfeld’s-Secrets reopened less than a quarter mile from its original site but was displaced again in 2020 due to further redevelopment and COVID-19.149 Siegel reopened Glorious Health & Amusements as a new space for men to meet other men for anonymous sexual liaisons, but with homonormativity disciplining sexual activity and the Internet facilitating such encounters more safely and efficiently, gay bathhouses, adult bookstores, and adult theaters seem remnants of another era. Before Nationals Park, businesswoman Patricia Ghiglino and artist Reinaldo Lopez in 2003 established the Washington Sculpture Center (WSC) at 1336 Half Street SE. Hoping to be part of the neighborhood’s redevelopment, the WSC had three objectives: to teach sculpture that used glass, metal, and stone; to promote and place sculptures in DC public spaces; and to promote cultural and artistic exchange.150 Lopez described the WSC’s dislocation as being “like reverse Robin Hood to me. They are taking from the poor and giving it to the rich.”151 Ghiglino and Lopez attempted to relocate the center by building a new facility in Anne Arundel County in Maryland but announced in January 2012 that they were behind schedule, with an unknown completion date.152 The WSC has not reopened. Before Nationals Park, US Army officer Ken Wyban purchased a pre–Civil War townhouse at 21 N Street SE in 1998. Wanting to be part of an up-andcoming neighborhood in his retirement, he planned to convert the building into a bed-and-breakfast to host tourists less than one mile from the Capitol Building. David Morton described Wyban’s best memory of the neighborhood that occurred on Independence Day in 2000.153 While Wyban was hosting a party to watch the fireworks from his rooftop, the pyrotechnics startled thousands of birds roosting on the neighboring trash-transfer site, which caused them to all fly up at the same time. After taking the city’s eminent domain offer, he left the area to care for his aging parents.154 Ultimately, the stories of all those who used the area before Nationals Park and were displaced in favor of the stadium raise the question, For whom is the city being planned? As described by Joel Achenbach, the stadium site was “an eccentric area in a city that’s not sure it wants any such thing. This town has been, from the very start, meticulously plotted, built on a grandiose scheme, every street and public square serving to call attention to the greatness of a nation. Plans rule this city. And if you’re not part of the plan, you’re out of luck.155

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In the conceptions of space that emerged from the NCPC and the DC Office of Planning, Near Southeast would become an engine for growth that would help transform Washington by attracting thousands of new residents into the city. These new Washingtonians largely would be young, upwardly mobile, and well-educated and attracted by new apartments, a vibrant waterfront, exciting nightlife, and high-quality recreational amenities. Nationals Park was an important part of the plan because it would invite millions of people into the neighborhood and promote the area through the media. However, in conceptions of a new Near Southeast, sexually oriented businesses, an arts center, and Wyban’s bed-and-breakfast were not “part of the plan” and were erased from the city. It must be recognized that no matter how magnificent the intentions of spatial designers and their conceptions of space, the transition from abstract ideas into material realities often commits violence against the spaces being transformed and their inhabitants.

8 TARGET FIELD Different in the Same Way

Taking the Metro Blue Line train from the Mall of America, I arrive at Target Field an hour before game time. This is my third visit. I went on a stadium tour while attending a 2011 conference, and there was a 2015 research trip, complete with another stadium tour and a game. The award-winning Target Field Station ties together the city’s Blue and Green light rail lines and the Northstar commuter rail. Although gate 6 is just outside the station, I want to enter by way of Target Plaza, so I walk along North Fifth Street, pass three murals celebrating baseball in Minnesota, and ignore gate 3. I walk down North Third Avenue, which passes under the center-field stands, enter the lobby of the Fifth Avenue parking garage, and climb the stairs. Target Plaza is the stadium’s main entrance and connects it to downtown. Rather than enter immediately, I take time to appreciate the plaza’s public art. The Wave is mesmerizing, with its fifty-five thousand baseball-card sized panels covering the Fifth Avenue parking garage moving with the wind.1 There are statues of Twins Hall of Fame players Rod Carew, Kirby Puckett, and Harmon Killebrew and of Carl and Eloise Pohlad, who owned the team from 1984 to 2009. I notice that Golden Glove, which celebrates the defensive excellence of Twins players and is a favorite spot for photographs, has been moved away from the gates and no longer stands 520 feet from home plate (see chapter 1). I decide to enter gate 34—not that there are thirty-four gates into Target Field, but, like the other four gates, it is numbered for a legendary Twins player (in this case, Puckett). I empty my pockets into a bin for screening and pass through a metal detector. Collecting my things, I begin to explore Target Field. 165

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The first thing I notice is the flagpole from the Met, which had stood for almost twenty years at the Richfield American Legion Post.2 A couple of ribbon boards display out-of-town scores. The State Fair stand sells local specialties, including batter-fried walleye on a stick (my daughter believes everything tastes better on a stick), Kramarczuk sausages, and Minnesota wild rice chicken soup. Along the concourse, I notice the typical local twists to things I’ve seen elsewhere: ethnic food stands named for past players, other concession stands named after nearby towns and neighborhoods, carts selling microbrews from the state, an area selling “authenticated game-used merchandise,” and a broadcast desk for the team’s pregame show. I head into Hrbek’s, a restaurant named for 1980s Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek. Photos and memorabilia from the Bloomington native’s career cover the walls. There are certainly other things around Target Field I could describe in detail: the Pentair exhibit about the stadium’s environmental items, the lounges on the club level, the 2 Gingers Pub on the top level where Target Field’s organist plays, and the Budweiser Party Deck. However, I feel that after visiting twenty-nine of thirty active MLB stadiums, twenty-two of which have been designed or renovated by Populous, I’ve pretty much seen (and already described) everything Target Field has to offer. Yes, every mallpark is unique, and no one could credibly repeat Richie Hebner’s critique of superstadiums. However, the formula is the same and becomes more evident through my repeated site visits to multiple mallparks. Hrbek’s is really no different from the restaurants named for players I’ve seen in other mallparks: the player is in the team’s hall of fame and remained in the area, there are decorations celebrating his career, the honoree occasionally appears, and the menu includes local specialties. I could easily be at Dempsey’s in Camden Yards, Edgar’s Cantina (named for Edgar Martinez) in T-Mobile Park, or the FiveSeven Grille (named for Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio) in Minute Maid Park. As, perhaps, the last mallpark, Target Field provides an interesting case study. Since its 2010 opening, each of the three MLB stadiums to open has significant differences. Atlanta’s Truist Park and Globe Life Park in Arlington, Texas, replaced 1990s mallparks and follow a more comprehensive development model (see chapter 9), while Miami’s Marlins Park is very different aesthetically. Thus, Target Field could be seen as the apex of mallpark design, with Populous architects, local officials, and team representatives learning from other experiences.3 Populous has been described as the “the 800-pound gorilla of sports design and architecture” throughout the world, with 730 employees in eighteen international offices, including major hubs in Kansas City, London, and Brisbane.4 Since 1983 Populous has designed more than three thousand projects, whose costs exceed $40 billion and include two Olympic stadiums (Sydney and London) and

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the reconstruction of London’s iconic Wembley Stadium.5 Populous architects also designed the mallparks discussed in chapter 5 (Camden Yards), chapter 7 (Nationals Park), and chapter 9 (Truist Park). Founder Ron Labinski has been called the “father of sports architecture,” as he led specialized sports facility design groups at three firms.6 By learning the sports industry in depth, Populous developed several innovations that have transformed both the business of sports and sports venue design. Populous’s domination has become self-reinforcing, as the company has become the “safe” choice of teams, sports leagues, and government entities due to its expertise in completing complex projects whose costs are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, involve a multitude of programmatic elements, and have firm deadlines. This position has led to increasing homogenization within sports architecture, with Populous essentially defining sports facility design in terms of aesthetics, amenities, and relationship to surrounding context; reproducing successful designs in subsequent projects; and diffusing practices when its architects join other architectural firms.7 While Populous is known for its retro designs of baseball stadiums and has been critiqued by many in the United States for formulaic and uninspiring designs, Pastier describes “the firm’s European and Asian work [as] more architecturally refined, structurally imaginative, and less nostalgic than its U.S. siblings.”8 Toward understanding the architectural practices shaping mallpark design, this chapter first examines baseball stadiums as a building type and discusses the isomorphic pressures within an organizational field to explain Populous’s dominance of sports facility architecture. These lead into a detail discussion of Populous’s history and its approach to sports facility design, which is followed by a detailed examination of Target Field.

Designing Baseball Stadiums As suggested by Christopher Lee, Populous’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, “the fundamentals [of stadium design] haven’t really changed since the days of Vespasian,” under whose rule the Roman Empire built the Colosseum in 70 AD.9 These fundamentals include spaces for performance and spectators (both frontstage and backstage areas) and how stadiums relate to broader social, spatial, economic, and political contexts. While most architects have the ability to design such programmatic elements, those working in the field of sports architecture have developed a niche expertise by responding to the specific requirements of the sports industry and particular challenges of stadium design.

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Compared to other sports, designers have a unique ability to shape the way baseball is played.10 Rules in most other sports stipulate uniform fields of play, but baseball’s rules only prescribe a ninety-degree arc of play and the distances between bases and from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. As rules recommend minimum outfield distances, designers can adjust field sizes to fit site dimensions and/or design fields to favor offense or defense. Designers also impact games by choosing a natural grass playing field or utilize artificial turf.11 Other frontstage performance spaces include dugouts and bullpens. Backstage areas have grown substantially over stadium generations. With players on site for ten to twelve hours on game days, clubhouses are a “home away from home,” according to Twins player Michael Cuddyer, with facilities to prepare for games, relax, treat injuries, and accommodate players’ families.12 Players use technology-filled indoor batting cages and pitching mounds to improve performance, review their play and scout opponents in video replay rooms, and increase strength and flexibility in well-appointed exercise rooms. Other backstage areas include spaces for managers, coaches, and umpires to prepare for games, administrative offices for team personnel to assess and develop talent, and groundskeeping areas to maintain equipment and store supplies to care for the field.13 The programmatic requirements for frontstage spectator areas accommodate large crowds and have evolved over time. Populous architect Joseph Spear observed, “When we started in this specialty, if you had enough spectator amenities like toilets and concession stands and the sightlines were good, that was considered to be enough.”14 This book has already discussed mallpark spatial practices of incorporating amenities and aesthetic elements to generate new revenue and enhance spectator experiences. Designs also must conform to legal requirements, facilitate movement of large crowds, and work to ensure safety and security.15 These consumption areas also have extensive backstage infrastructure. Concession stands are supported by large kitchens, centralized drink-distribution systems, and storage rooms. There are operations areas for team management, scoreboards, lights, sound systems, climate control, public safety, power, and water. Maintenance, janitorial, and storage areas help ensure public areas are kept clean and remain in good repair. Contemporary fans expect wireless connectivity to smartphones, especially as MLB and teams promote social media and expand their digital presences to enhance the in-stadium experience.16 Designers also include substantial spaces for media production: broadcast booths, the press box, interview rooms, designated camera locations, and production centers.17 Finally, designers need to consider how stadiums fit within broader spatial contexts. Weather patterns can impact gameplay and spectator comfort. Large crowds can bring traffic, noise, waste, and crime into neighborhoods, but their

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absence on nonevent days can adversely impact businesses. Cities use stadiums within broader development plans for economic growth, transit, and infrastructure.18 Stadiums are recognized as high-profile targets for terrorism and criticized for adverse environmental impacts, including poor land and water usage, generating excessive waste, and for large, impervious parking lots contributing to stormwater runoff.19 These five spaces have evolved across stadium generations as architects responded to different technical, revenue, aesthetic, and spatial issues associated with changing stakeholder needs, priorities, and intentions. Ballpark and superstadium designers tended to prioritize technical challenges related to the accommodation of larger crowds, managing ingress and egress safely and efficiently, and maximizing usage by hosting diverse events. To increase revenue generation, designers increased the number of seats, but frontstage and backstage consumption areas were relatively rudimentary.20 Aesthetics and spatial fit tended to be tertiary concerns as designs reflected the tastes and budgets of stadium owners and locations were largely determined by transportation-related considerations. The designs of Fenway Park and the Astrodome reflect the relative significance of each challenge during different stadium eras. Fenway Park is fairly typical of ballpark design (see chapter 6). Its structure is the product of its 1912 construction, its 1934 renovation, and numerous other major and minor renovations. The surrounding streetscape confines the stadium to its nine-acre site and restricts frontstage and backstage spaces. Aesthetically, Fenway Park’s brick facade extends along Brookline Avenue and Jersey Streets but not the three other streets around the stadium. During the 1990s, team president John Harrington identified problems necessitating Fenway Park’s replacement, including poor field drainage, cramped clubhouses, minimal training spaces, maximized revenue capacity, and aging infrastructure.21 While new Red Sox ownership resolved these issues, they initially expressed uncertainty regarding Fenway Park’s future. As described in chapter 3, the Astrodome was hailed as a technological marvel when it opened in 1965 as the world’s largest clear-span building, with a 645-foot-diameter dome and computers that managed its sixty-six-hundred-ton air-conditioning system and sophisticated electronic scoreboard.22 The Astrodome was innovative in generating revenue because it was designed to accommodate diverse events and uses, incorporated a ring of luxury boxes on its top level, and provided different dining options.23 Though it was recognized as an expression of the Space Age, architectural historian Stephen Fox called the Astrodome an engineering triumph but “not a tremendously refined work of architecture.”24 As an isolated destination to itself, it had a thirty-thousand-car parking lot served by fifty lanes of traffic.25

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Although sports facility design is not overly technical or beyond the capability of most architects, it has developed into a specialized field within architecture. This process has been integral to mallpark production as architects quickly and efficiently design buildings meeting the requirements of cities, team owners, and spectators; respond effectively to unanticipated construction challenges; and deliver buildings on time and in budget. However, this expertise often comes at the expense of creativity and innovation by leading to homogenization because a few firms and architects receive most commissions, by establishing and reinforcing cultural norms surrounding stadium design, and by reproducing successful aspects within subsequent projects.

Developing the Field of Sports Architecture Throughout history, famous architects have traveled broadly and worked across national boundaries.26 Celebrity culture has declared architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Santiago Calatrava to be “starchitects” due to their charisma, flair for self-promotion, and spectacular designs that challenge conventional architecture.27 Starchitects are hired by clients who want unique and iconic buildings with designs standing out from a cluttered visual landscape and symbolizing their wealth, power, and importance.28 However, most clients lack such ambitious aims and/or the budgets required to achieve them, which means most architects focus on basic practice in the design and delivery of buildings. In focusing on questions of competitive advantage in architectural practice, Graham Winch distinguishes between firms in terms of their ability to respond to project complexity and meet the quality preferences of clients. Identifying each category as being either “high” or “low” in terms of a firm’s emphasis generates four configurations: strong ambition, strong idea, strong experience, and strong delivery.29 Putting aside strong-ambition firms that Winch suggests unrealistically aim to emphasize both categories and need to evolve into a different form for long-term viability, strong-idea firms tend to be associated with starchitects because clients exhibit a high-quality preference as they seek innovative and unique designs.30 In contrast, strong-experience firms have demonstrated their ability to complete highly complex projects that require expertise in “stakeholder management, technical requirements, iconic status” or in solving other problems and tend to specialize in a particular building type.31 As most architectural work involves low complexity and most clients are not interested in prize-winning architectural designs, strong-delivery firms adapt and apply known solutions to efficiently and reliably provide architectural products to their clients.32

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The concept of competitive advantage also helps explain how competitive pressures have helped shape the field of sports architecture. According to Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, increasingly complex organizational fields of similar services and products tend toward homogenization (or isomorphism) through mimetic, normative, and coercive processes as competitors seek to minimize advantages gained by others.33 Mimetic isomorphism entails development of products and adoption of practices similar to successful competitors.34 In normative isomorphism, professionalized workers and networks diffuse dominant ideas within an industry.35 Legal requirements and cultural expectations define coercive isomorphism as organizations conform to behavioral standards.36 Mallpark designs show evidence of each process. While baseball stadium aesthetics are not subject to legal or league requirements, coercive isomorphism shapes cultural expectations. As previously described, the retro aesthetic is related to nostalgic beliefs that ballparks are the appropriate settings for baseball and superstadiums are inappropriate. Although Marieke van Rooij notes that “the retro stadium . . . has already been reduced to a cliché,” it remains the default assumption for aesthetics, as several mallparks built during the 2000s feature nostalgic designs.37 Many other mallparks, including Washington’s Nationals Park and Cincinnati’s Great American Ball Park, have been described as “retro-modern” because they largely eschew brick exteriors but use history-dense thematic décor inside.38 Only Miami’s Marlins Park has completely rejected retro elements, as team owner Jeffrey Loria, who had earned his fortune as an art dealer, recognized that “ballparks are architecture. And architecture is supposed to define the surrounding it’s in and creates new frontiers.”39 Mimetic processes show contradictory pressures on designers as mallparks adopt amenities proven successful in other stadiums. Although new stadiums can increase revenue, raise franchise values, and improve on-the-field competitiveness, high costs and tight deadlines make designers risk-averse and limit innovation. To reduce risk, designers closely inspect other stadiums “to cull their good ideas and learn from their mistakes.”40 While this doesn’t eliminate new ideas, it ensures that successful amenities will quickly be incorporated into the designs of new facilities and renovations of older ones. This can be seen in the proliferation of party decks throughout mallparks following the adaptive reuse of the Western Metal Supply Company building at San Diego’s Petco Field in 2004.41 Shortly thereafter, party decks were incorporated into new construction at Citi Field and Nationals Park and in renovations of Fenway Park, Camden Yards, and Coors Field. The limited number of large architectural firms specializing in sports facilities has produced normative isomorphism. While Populous, HNTB, AECOM, and HOK receive most commissions, their dominance has become self-reinforcing

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as designing and delivering stadiums on time and on budget demonstrate expertise and recommend designers for future projects over less proven competitors.42 Teams demonstrate a similar reliance on expertise by hiring the same in-house project managers, such as Janet Marie Smith (see chapter 6), to interact with architects and represent their interests on different projects. Such normative processes have elevated Kansas City into the global center of sports architecture, with the presence of the headquarters or sports facility design offices of each of the major firms and many smaller spinoff firms.43 Together, coercive, mimetic, and normative processes have produced highly homogenized mallparks. This homogeneity is not similar to the cookie-cutter method of superstadium design that produced generic and insular facilities. Instead, it comes from a formulaic approach in which architects mediate the relatively similar priorities of public authorities and their team tenants and provide similar solutions across multiple projects. Although mallpark designers may claim to design for the local context by using different materials and drawing inspiration from surrounding communities, each contains the same types of amenities, draws from a common thematic template, and is designed to be integrated into surrounding neighborhoods to produce ancillary economic activity (see chapter 4).

Populous: From Kauffman Stadium to Target Field While Populous created the specialization of sports facility architecture and dominates mallpark design, it is not the first company to develop niche expertise in baseball stadium design. Between 1909 and 1970, Osborn Engineering worked on fifteen ballparks and superstadiums, including designs of Cleveland’s League Park, Washington’s Griffith Stadium, New York’s Polo Grounds, Boston’s Braves Field, Tiger Stadium, and Yankee Stadium and renovations of Comiskey Park in 1920 and Fenway Park in 1934.44 While the design of Yankee Stadium was intentionally monumental, Goldberger characterized Osborn’s work as being “solid, functional, and generally handsome, if understated.”45 As superstadiums replaced ballparks after World War II, Osborn designed Milwaukee County Stadium, Metropolitan Stadium, and RFK Stadium in Washington and served as structural engineering firm for Three Rivers Stadium.46 However, Osborn’s stadium business declined following the 1971 death of Al Papish, the firm’s lead designer of sports facilities. According to Gene Baxendale of Osborn, “we were the HOK of the sports industry. We were on the cutting edge of design. But we didn’t react to Al’s death as well as we should have, and we let it slip away from us.”47

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Beyond Osborn, the field of baseball stadium architecture exhibited further normative isomorphism, with a few individuals and firms involved in multiple projects. Emil Praeger’s firm designed Dodger Stadium and Shea Stadium, worked on Yankee Stadium’s modernization in 1974, was involved the Kingdome’s design, and consulted on the Astrodome and RFK Stadium.48 Osborn’s project manager for RFK Stadium, Noble Herzog, also designed Anaheim Stadium, while multipurpose stadiums in Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Buffalo were designed by an association of Atlanta firms: Finch, Alexander, Barnes, Rothschild & Pascal and Heery & Heery. According to Lisle, “with such cross-pollination, it is no wonder that stadiums increasingly resembled one another.”49 Populous’s lineage starts with Kansas City’s Kivett & Myers, which designed the Truman Sports Complex (TSC) that included stadiums for Kansas City’s MLB and NFL teams. Ellerbe Becket architect David Murphy stated, “Arrowhead Stadium and Kauffman represent the benchmark for new facilities today. . . . There were unobstructed sight lines, suites, club seating. And they were designed to evolve.”50 Although the TSC has a suburban location, large parking lot, and highway access, its two single-use facilities diverged from superstadium design.51 Baseball-only Kauffman Stadium diverges in other ways, with fewer seats placed mostly between the two foul poles and distinctive aesthetics, including its unique scoreboard and fountains.52 As Kivett & Myers’s project manager for the TSC, Labinski had two insights that would shape the field of sports architecture.53 First, he created a list of stadium leases that suggested a new wave of facility construction could begin during the 1980s. Second, he intuited that a firm could gain an advantage to secure commissions by mastering the particular requirements of stadium design and so developed an in-depth knowledge of the sports industry and cultivated personal relationships with team owners.54 After consulting on Buffalo’s Rich Stadium and working as lead designer for Giant Stadium, Labinski left Kivett & Myers in 1973 to establish Devine James Labinski and Meyers (DJLM), where he continued his focus on stadium projects.55 In contrast to most architectural firms, DJLM had a freewheeling workhard, play-hard culture.56 However, the office of twenty, which included Spear, Chris Carver, Rick deFlon, and Dennis Wellner, could not compete against much larger architectural firms for sports facility commissions.57 In 1980, after losing to HNTB to design Indianapolis’s Hoosierdome, Labinski, Spear, Carter, deFlon, and Wellner moved to HNTB to form the core of its sports facilities group.58 Founded in Kansas City in 1914, HNTB is a leading international engineering and design firm that specializes in major infrastructure projects. Despite little previous experience, HNTB dominated sports facility design during the late 1970s and early 1980s following its 1975 acquisition of Kivett & Myers and

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the subsequent arrival of Labinski and his DJLM associates.59 Labinski’s group quickly sought more autonomy as “it soon became obvious that the conventional engineering-based culture wasn’t compatible with their liberated style.”60 To illustrate this culture clash, Patrick Bingham-Hall’s book celebrating HOK Sport’s first twenty years cites HNTB’s requirement that architects wear neckties.61 However, HNTB’s industry-typical partnership practices were much more problematic because Labinski’s group would secure commissions on the basis of its expertise, but other regional offices would claim and complete the work.62 According to Spear, “things would not go well because the people [in other offices] would make the mistakes that we had all made three or four years ago, and then the clients would be irritated and upset with us.”63 HNTB’s practices thus contradicted Labinski’s approach that relied on personal relationships and deep knowledge of the sports industry. In 1983 Labinski received permission to contact other firms and, having heard that St. Louis-based HOK would be opening a Kansas City office, met with the firm’s Jerry Rader.64 Showing his list of leases and explaining the coming wave of sports facility construction, Labinski outlined a plan for a sport-specific practice that would be based in Kansas City but work nationally. Although skeptical that such specialization could provide enough work for an office to be self-sufficient, HOK offered six months of funding and asked the group to be prepared to pursue other projects.65 Accepting these terms, Labinski, Spear, Carter, deFlon, and Wellner left HNTB and opened HOK Sport in December 1983. In the transition, HNTB did not require a noncompete clause and allowed the sports facilities group’s fourteen clients to choose whether to remain or go to the new firm (though the architects could not use any of the work they had completed while at HNTB).66 Thirteen clients went to HOK Sport, which soon earned commissions for major projects in Miami, St. Petersburg, and Buffalo.67 Miami’s Joe Robbie Stadium is particularly important in HOK Sport’s early success. Labinski’s proposal included a separate club level, a concept that he first developed as part of a failed 1977 DJLM bid to design a stadium for the Canadian Football League’s Edmonton Eskimos. Dolphins owner Joe Robbie recognized the concept’s value as revenue from 234 luxury boxes and ten thousand club seats could help finance the privately funded project.68 Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards was another significant commission for HOK Sport and provides insight into its design practices and management of client relationships (see chapter 5). In 1984 the Mayor’s Task Force hired Labinski to identify Baltimore’s options for retaining the Orioles and attracting the NFL’s return. While Labinski’s report impressed the MSA, Orioles president Larry Lucchino was skeptical that HOK Sport, with its reputation for building utilitarian and aesthetically generic facilities, could produce a design that would

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meet the team’s quality preference, especially since its report included an image of a generic multiuse stadium. Yet HOK Sport earned the commission when it responded to the request for an “old-fashioned park” in the MSA’s RFP with a retro design based on its work on Buffalo’s Pilot Field. With Orioles ownership establishing broad expectations, Smith focusing on specific details, and the MSA expecting the stadium to have a positive impact on its surrounding community, HOK Sport deepened Camden Yards’ retro elements and its relationship to the Inner Harbor. As Camden Yards earned favorable coverage in architectural magazines and prestigious architectural awards, HOK Sport showed it could do more than effectively manage complex projects, which increased its “credibility as designers.”69 While HOK Sport was not perceived as a strong-idea firm, Camden Yards proved it could produce aesthetically satisfying buildings. This merging of experience and service excellence with aesthetic quality has helped provide HOK Sport with sustainable competitive advantage in earning new commissions. As HOK Sport grew quickly during the 1990s, the company established nineteen subspecialties within which architects designing football stadiums, baseball stadiums, arenas, and college sports projects continued working on those buildings. Spear, who leads Populous’s MLB stadium design group with Earl Santee, explained, “We didn’t define roles for ourselves. It just happened. We realized it was a good thing for each of us to have specific expertise in a building type.”70 HOK Sport also grew internationally following its commission for Sheffield Arena in Britain and as it acquired LOBB Sports Architecture in 1998.71 Continued growth and growing insistence of other HOK offices demanding a greater role in sports facility design led to a managers’ buyout in 2009 as HOK Sport became Populous.72 Although Populous is a global firm, it remains headquartered in Kansas City, where its presence has helped the city achieve its status as the global center for sports architecture.73 Despite the 1983 departure of Labinski and his associates, HNTB continued pursuing sports facility projects. In 1988 another group of HNTB architects left the firm as they convinced Minneapolis-based Ellerbe Becket to open a sports design office in Kansas City.74 In 2004 360 Architecture became Kansas City’s fourth major sports design firm, led by former HOK Sport architect Brad Schrock.75 As HOK architect Tom Waggoner observed, “in every city and firm, with the exception of Heery [in Atlanta], those firms have a senior leader or series of senior leaders who came from one of the (original) four firms.”76

The Populous Advantage Winch explicitly identifies Populous as a strong-experience firm by contrasting the objectives of the organizers of the 2008 Beijing Olympics with those of the

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2012 London Olympics.77 As organizers in Beijing sought to express China’s rising status by hosting the Olympic Games, they hired a strong-idea firm (2001 Pritzker Prize winner Herzog & de Meuron) to design the main stadium. Because the London organizers were “more confident of its position as a leading global city,” they hired HOK Sport to produce a “much more functional design that could be downsized following the games” and contribute to urban redevelopment.78 Populous has established its dominance in sports architecture by developing deep knowledge about the sports industry, aggressively marketing diverse services, and delivering projects on time and within budget.79 Because highly complex sports facility projects often require seven to ten years from initial concept to delivery, Populous acts as a one-stop shop by providing services at every step. It consults with public entities and teams on sites, designs facilities, and supervises construction. Once venues are open, Populous offers clients expertise from its groups focused on urban development, venue management, and event design.80 Populous’s dominance provides a sustainable competitive advantage as each project deepens its capacity and recommends the company for subsequent projects.81 According to Labinski, Populous has “built a better mousetrap” and has “really created a marketplace.”82 Populous’s success begins with its understanding of what teams, cities, and consumers want in a sports facility and technical expertise that allows its architects to design facilities quickly and effectively respond to construction problems. Over nearly forty years, its architects have worked closely with public authorities and sports organizations to produce facilities meeting their diverse and often contradictory needs and learned what works, what doesn’t, and why.83 As described by Bingham-Hall, “continuous application of the same skill encourages expertise,” which means Populous architects rarely “encounter unknown territory” and do acquire familiarity, enabling them to “generate new ideas” and develop “greater efficiencies.”84 In particular, HOK Sport spokeswoman Carrie Plummer explained in 2004 that its architects understand the financial dimensions of stadiums, as they design facilities able to generate revenue and that are “easy and efficient and as inexpensive as possible to run.”85 Populous creatively and aggressively markets its services by attending owners’ meetings, city manager conventions, and auditorium trade shows.86 Its approach follows from Labinski’s efforts to develop personal relationships with stadium decision makers such as New York Giants owner Tim Mara, which led to Kivett & Myers’s commission to design Giant Stadium.87 Populous also markets itself more subtly, as senior principal Rod Sheard has cowritten a series of stadium design guides and other books celebrating stadium architecture. Reviewing Sheard’s The Stadium: Architecture for the New Global Culture, John Pastier noted, “This is deft marketing: Rather than selling the firm itself, the book sells the building type that

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constitutes the firm’s practice. As the industry’s market-share leader, HOK can benefit from this approach while not seeming to toot its own horn.”88 Populous’s record of delivering projects on time and within budget has established the company as the safe choice for stadium design. Facing a twenty-threemonth deadline to build Nationals Park, sports commission chief executive Allen Lew explained the selection of HOK Sport by stating, “They have a proven track record, and they earned it. We do not have time for trial and error here.”89 This track record includes effectively responding to the numerous problems and issues that inevitably arise during construction and require immediate solutions. Although Populous remains headquartered in Kansas City, it maintains a handson, on-site presence through frequent travel, satellite offices, and frequent partnerships with local architects.90 Critics suggest that Populous’s dominance works against innovative designs because cities and teams are reluctant to hire less experienced firms that could be more creative.91 Labinski responded to this critique by suggesting “designs that are based strictly on art and not on functionality can bite you in the ass. . . . A lot of projects overseas simply can’t get done and, if they are, they have huge cost overruns. A stadium has to work architecturally, but it also has to work economically to be successful.”92 Limited budgets and risk-averse clients also constrain innovation by asking to replicate elements already proven successful in other facilities. However, Spear argues that the company is “not repeating the same thing over and over again,” as its architects learn about local neighborhoods, architecture, and cultures to design stadiums appropriate for local contexts and settings.93 Nonetheless, in San Diego, where the city had higher aspirations for the design of Petco Park, HOK Sport entered into an “arranged marriage” with award-winning architect Antoine Predock, in which Predock served as design architect while HOK Sport was responsible for the stadium’s programmatic elements.94 Populous’s design of Target Field embodies its approach to stadium development and exemplifies its status as a strong-experience firm. Long before the state approved public funds in 2006, HOK Sport had established itself as the Twins’ architect and worked with other relevant stakeholders. Requesting a green stadium that embodied Minnesota, the Twins and the Minnesota Baseball Authority (MBA) trusted HOK Sport architects to deliver a facility that could generate the revenue demanded the team, project a positive image of Minneapolis, and fit into a very challenging site.95 Although architectural critics have disparaged Populous’s commercially oriented designs as part of an “architecture of distraction” with an “aura of currency” and products of “superficial theme-park thinking, come-hither marketing and an unwillingness to invest intellectually and visually in the future,” Populous has become successful because its architects

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effectively manage complex projects by designing and delivering facilities desired by its clients—public authorities that own mallparks and their team tenants—on time and within budget.96 While such competence may not win over architectural critics, it certainly is appreciated by clients.

Designing Target Field The forty-five-minute trip from the Mall of America to Target Field with which this book opened is actually part of a half-century journey that brought major league baseball to the Twin Cities in 1961 before moving to downtown Minneapolis in 1982 and arriving at Target Field in 2010. Each of the Twins’ three Minnesota homes embodied the broader dynamics of stadium construction when they were built. Metropolitan Stadium (the Met) represents the area’s efforts to attain major league status, while its Bloomington site responded to suburbanization.97 The Metrodome was intended to reinforce the importance of the urban centers against the rise of regional suburban competitors.98 Beyond keeping the Twins in the area, Target Field was designed to anchor redevelopment in downtown Minneapolis. The “Twin Cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul have a long rivalry and both sought an MLB team during the 1950s.99 However, the Met was built in Bloomington, equidistant to the two downtowns, on a 164-acre farm that could accommodate a stadium, an arena, and large parking lots with convenient highway access. However, unlike other superstadiums, the Met was privately funded and “grew like Topsy during its lifetime,” starting with just a triple-decked grandstand extending between first base and third base.100 Additional sections were built only after the arrival of MLB’s Washington Senators and the granting of an NFL expansion team (the Vikings) in 1961.101 By the early 1970s both the Twins and Vikings were dissatisfied with the Met, as they considered it antiquated despite its recent construction. With civic leaders scared the teams would relocate and leave the area as a “cold Omaha,” Governor Rudy Perpich signed a 1977 bill authorizing $55 million for a multiuse indoor stadium.102 However, no previous domed stadium had been built so inexpensively, and that was evident in the Metrodome’s spartan design. In his 1988 stadium guide, Bob Wood characterized the six-year-old Metrodome as “No Frills—No Thrills” and ranked the youngest MLB stadium as twentieth out of twenty-six.103 Its most notable features were an air pressure-supported, Teflon-covered nylon roof and the twenty-three-foot-high “Hefty bag” right-field wall covering moveable football stands. After its final baseball game, Adam Platt wrote, “The Dome represents more than a poor baseball and a mediocre football venue. It represents

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our community’s inclination to default to cheap and characterless in ventures of public infrastructure.”104 Although the Twins won two World Series during the Metrodome’s first decade, due in part to the home-field advantage provided by its roof obscuring fly balls and intense fan noise, Twins owner Carl Pohlad recognized its limitations against the success of Camden Yards.105 Citing a poor lease giving the Twins no suite or parking revenue and just 25 percent of concessions, in July 1994 Pohlad declared the Metrodome to be economically obsolete and that the Twins needed a new stadium.106 This began a twelve-year saga that included several stadium proposals, a potential sale and move to Greensboro, North Carolina, a failed 1999 referendum in St. Paul, and potential elimination as MLB threatened contraction in 2002.107 Finally, in 2006 Governor Tim Pawlenty signed a bill to fund a $545 million stadium in downtown Minneapolis, to which Pohlad would contribute $195 million. After playing in two inexpensively built stadiums over forty-five years, the Twins could finally look forward to a home that would not be underfunded.

To the Drawing Board The new ballpark for Minnesota will be a cosmopolitan expression of vibrant people and the great natural beauty of their state. It will honor baseball’s great traditions and reflect Minnesota’s dynamic blend of urban sophistication and rugged outdoor vitality. The ballpark design will showcase the urban skyline with materials drawn from the state’s granite and limestone cliffs shaped by ice age glaciers. It will celebrate the beauty of sunny days and starlit nights. And as required, it will shelter the game and fans from unseasonable weather. —Minnesota Baseball Authority, news release, October 2007

Beyond explaining what the new stadium would accomplish for the city and state, the MBA’s October 2007 media kit identified the eight guiding principles of the Santee-led HOK Sport design team: “nature” to celebrate Minnesota’s beauty, “outside-in” to respond to the city’s development, “inside-out” as form followed function in the architectural design, “regional inspiration” by using natural stone, “entry beacons” to reflect the city, “special moments” by providing “knotholes” through which people on the street could see inside the stadium, “meeting the ground” by offering pedestrian experiences, and “meeting the sky” with the stadium’s “glorious canopy.”108 These principles were shaped by the goals of the MBA, Hennepin County leaders, and the Twins. The public entities sought to

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redevelop an 8.5-acre site in a historic area lagging behind the rest of downtown, integrate the stadium with downtown, and produce an environmentally sustainable facility. With new revenue averaging $40 million to $50 million annually over their thirty-year lease, the Twins wanted a “Minnesota ballpark.”109 Because the stadium bill gave the Twins their choice of architect, HOK Sport was the clear favorite, despite Minneapolis-based Ellerbe Becket’s status as a leading sports architectural firm. HOK Sport had earned its position by cultivating relationships with the Twins and public entities during the team’s twelve-year quest for a new facility and designing major sports venues in both St. Paul and Minneapolis.110 In 2006 HOK Sport led a six-city tour for Twins officials and contractors to “study every inch of a half-dozen new open air ballparks, analyzing success and failures and imagining the feel and function they want” in the new stadium, and convened team executives, community leaders, builders, and local architects in a three-day design charette in New York City to “find the magic” for the stadium.111 Given the firm had been already acting as the stadium’s de facto architect, MBA chairman Steve Cramer called the Twins’ selection of HOK Sport the “worst kept secret in town.”112 The seventy-eight HOK Sport employees designing Target Field faced multiple challenges. First, its site was smaller than all other MLB stadiums and was, in the words of Twins president David St. Peter, “the most challenging canvas anyone has ever faced,” as it was bordered by a freeway ramp, active railroad and light rail tracks, the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC), and a major city street.113 Second, because the Metrodome offered protection from cold Minnesota weather at the start and end of each season, designers had to consider a retractable roof. Third, although public entities requested an environmentally responsible stadium, a sustainable design could not substantially increase cost or add time to construction. Fourth, both the Twins and the MBA wanted a signature design that would showcase Minneapolis and be firmly integrated into the city, while also being appropriate within expectations established for baseball without being derivative.114 Finally, while public entities hoped the new venue would be inclusive with affordable tickets, the Twins expected substantial new revenue.

Target Field as a Technical Challenge Mallpark construction has generally consisted of two sets of technical challenges. First, designers need to manage the evermore complex engineering tasks arising from improving technologies, evolving consumer expectations, and new discourses surrounding sustainability. Second, designers need to oversee the process of moving designs from conceptions in blueprints into material realities.

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Populous’s expertise in mastering both challenges has been central to its dominance within mallpark architecture and led directly to its selection to design Target Field. Teaming with construction manager M. A. Mortenson Company, which has built more than two hundred sports projects during the past thirty years, Target Field was finished more than three months ahead of its scheduled opening, despite the project’s complexity.115 The small site, aesthetic aspirations, and budget limitations led to the decision not to build a retractable roof, which would require large external support columns and cause the stadium to loom over the Warehouse District “like a brooding airplane hangar.”116 Moreover, the Twins could not justify its $130 million cost, as they estimated that only three or four games per season would be canceled due to rain and as Minneapolis’ spring and fall weather was similar to that of Boston, Chicago, and Detroit, all of which had open-air stadiums.117 To mitigate effects of cold weather, designers incorporated underground piping to warm the field and provided radiant heat on the concourses.118 For some, the discomfort of cold weather was a small price for outdoor baseball, as, according to Star Tribune reporter Jim Souhan, Target Field “embraces the elements and city, like all great ballparks.”119 Beyond providing heat to warm the field and concourses, the HERC helped Target Field earn Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. As noted earlier, sports facilities historically have negative environmental impacts. Architects generally have responded to contemporary priorities by incorporating sustainable technologies into designs in several ways: using stormwater capture-and-retention systems to maintain playing fields, installing wastewater controls to limit water usage in bathrooms, utilizing existing infrastructure to eliminate the need to build new impervious surfaces, and designing “green roofs” to capture stormwater and produce energy from solar panels.120 Nationals Park, also designed by HOK Sport, was the first MLB facility to achieve LEED certification for new construction, earning silver status in 2008.121 MBA executive director Dan Kenney stated that HOK Sport architects were expected “to share experiences” regarding sustainable design, which helped Target Field become the second stadium to earn LEED certification.122 Green building standards were required by the stadium’s 2007 development agreement as long as they didn’t increase costs or slow down the design and construction process.123 Designers achieved this in several ways. Working in partnership with Minneapolis-based water treatment company Pentair, Target Field has reduced water usage by more than 50 percent (4.2 million gallons of water per year) through water-efficient bathroom fixtures and a custom system that captures, filters, and recycles stormwater to care for the field and clean the stadium.124 Target Field conveys its waste to HERC for recycling and energy production and

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receives heat in return.125 Encasing Target Field with locally quarried limestone reduced emissions from the transportation of building materials.126 The site is also transit accessible, with light rail and commuter rail routes adjacent to the stadium and the presence of a bike path. In total, sustainable design may have added almost $2 million to the project’s price despite initial estimates of a 10 percent increase in the overall cost.127 In 2017 Target Field became the first professional sports facility to attain LEED gold certification for operations and maintenance.

Target Field as a Revenue Generator As described in this book, mallparks have been shaped by the design principles of shopping malls and theme parks as designers work to maximize consumption activity and economic impact. As such, mallparks have become entertainment centers providing diverse forms of price-differentiated consumption. Populous has helped drive this transformation, as its architects have responded to changing patterns of consumption. Estimating that as many as eight thousand fans during a sellout game would be roaming Target Field at any given moment, Santee explained his approach by stating, “I like to think of ballpark design in threeinning segments: Where can you walk, what can you do and see.”128 In the design of Target Field, the Twins prioritized revenue generation. Concourses are twice as large as the Metrodome’s, which enabled Target Field to include many more concession stands, bars, restaurants, souvenir stores, restrooms, and places to watch the game, especially as the main concourse provides an uninterrupted view of the field.129 While the Twins received no revenue from luxury seats at the Metrodome, Target Field offers premium experiences on its seven-thousand-seat club level, in the fifty-four suites on the suite level, and in the Champions Club behind home plate.130 Site limitations reduced capacity from initial plans of 42,000 to 39,504, which made Target Field the sixth smallest MLB stadium when it opened, but its seats are much closer to the field than those at the Metrodome and provide a better viewing experience.131 Twins special assistant Paul Molitor, a native of St. Paul and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, describes Target Field’s diversity of experiences: “This place kind of runs the gamut. You can fulfill your idea of what you think a major league game should be. You can simplify it; you can complicate it. You can make it more party-oriented; you can make it family-oriented.”132 The exclusive Champions Club offers gourmet dining and bar service, valet service, a private entrance, and views into the Twins’ indoor batting cage.133 Patrons in the Delta Sky360 Club enjoy exclusive lounges with dedicated food and beverage service named for and decorated with memorabilia from Carew, Killebrew, and Puckett. Three fullservice restaurants, Hrbek’s, Bat & Barrel, and the Town Ball Tavern, are available

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to all attendees, while the 2 Gingers Pub, Barrio, Minnie & Paul’s and the Budweiser Roof Deck offer more social ways to enjoy games. The Twins have achieved their financial goals in Target Field as, during the 2010 season, the team had sold fifty-two of fifty-four suites, doubled the number of season tickets sold, posted forty sellouts before the season began, and broke the franchise’s attendance record.134 Over the Twins’ thirty-year lease, the team estimated new revenue ranging from $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion from parking, concessions, suites, nonbaseball events, and naming rights.135 Moreover, the franchise’s value also increased by 33 percent from 2006 to 2008, a full two seasons before Target Field opened, and rose to $1.3 billion in 2020, with $224 million attributed to its stadium.136 The team dedicated a portion of new revenue to payroll, which increased by 45 percent from 2009 to 2010 from $67 million to $97 million—a level surpassed seven times from 2011 to 2020.

The Aestheticization of Target Field Although aesthetics cannot be directly commodified, they are an essential element of mallpark design as they create the “right” environment for consuming baseball in the experience economy and enable stadiums to become civic monuments.137 Following the principles of theme park design, Populous has elevated baseball stadium aesthetics by incorporating the four thematic elements described in chapter 4: baseball history, baseball architecture, baseball culture, and local architecture and culture. In Target Field’s retro-modern design, HOK Sport architects eschewed brick, despite it being a prominent material of Warehouse District buildings. Lead architect Bruce Miller explained, “The design will be about our time. We’re not thinking about brick arches.”138 Instead, Target Field’s exterior is Minnesota limestone and features extensive glass that, according to Star Tribune architectural critic Linda Mack, brings “a more contemporary punch to the heavy walls of the Warehouse District.”139 Target Field is also topped by a distinctive canopy incorporating the stadium’s lights, that, when lit, “looks like a halo above the stadium.”140 Internally Target Field incorporates the multitude of thematic elements similar to those decorating other mallparks. As the 2007 media kit explained, the “new ballpark will celebrate the heritage and history of the game across the Upper Midwest . . . [and] will include tributes to the great Twins teams and players from years gone by as well as other Minnesota baseball icons.”141 This has been done in several ways, beginning with the forty-six-foot sign in center field featuring the Twins original 1961 logo showing the state’s outline and cartoon characters of “Paul” and “Minnie” shaking hands across the Mississippi River,

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as well as the twenty-three-foot right-field wall, which is the same height as the Metrodome’s distinctive Hefty bag wall.142 Several concessions stands are named for popular players from Twins history, including Frank Viola, Juan Berenguer, and Tony Oliva. The Town Ball Tavern celebrates Minnesota’s amateur baseball history and features the floor from the Minneapolis Armory’s basketball court, where the Minneapolis Lakers played before moving to Los Angeles in 1961.143 Besides the statues and baseball-themed art identified at the start of the chapter, Target Plaza incorporates a Tradition Wall listing every player from each Twins team since 1961 and the Minnesota Ballpark History Monument recognizing each of the Twin Cities professional baseball stadiums since the nineteenth century.144 As discussed below, Target Field reinforces its local identity through several aesthetic references to Minnesota.

Building Target Field for Its Spatial Context In its promotional materials, Populous celebrates how its architects integrate facilities into their communities.145 In contrast to superstadiums that were physically isolated and symbolically detached from their locales, Populous architects design mallparks to be part of their neighborhoods and broader urban contexts by learning about local cultures and studying local architecture. Additionally, Populous employs urban designers to work with local economic development agencies to encourage the growth of retail, commercial, and residential uses around stadiums.146 In Target Field, designers effected this connection in both physical and symbolic ways. As described earlier, Target Field’s site was particularly challenging in both its compact size and the complexity of surrounding infrastructure. Santee, who had developed a list of twelve fatal flaws while selecting sites on eighteen previous projects, was initially daunted by the site and wondered how it could work. Yet he also recognized the site’s opportunities by seeing “all the urban connections to the city and transit and skyways and how the ballpark could connect to the city,” such as the extensive infrastructure that reduced project costs and helped Target Field achieve LEED certification.147 To make the site work, the railroad tracks were moved sixty feet, and the HERC’s loading docks were relocated to reduce odor.148 The site’s size also impacted construction as the stadium needed to be built from the inside with materials stored and cranes stationed on the field. This required “extraordinary coordination among architects, construction crews, and the computer model” and was facilitated by the extensive experience of HOK Sport as architect and Mortenson as contractor.149 Although the stadium’s footprint is eight and a half acres, Target Field covers thirteen acres, as like “a muffin it comes up and expands out” according to

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Twins president Dave St. Peter.150 This was mainly accomplished by building Target Plaza over I-394, which also connected the stadium with the city and the city with the Warehouse District.151 With many pieces of public art celebrating the Twins, local baseball history, and baseball culture more generally, Target Plaza functions as the stadium’s front door with two major gates and serves as a meeting place before games.152 HOK Sport designers also worked to symbolically situate Target Field within both the city and state. A large part of this was the choice to clad the stadium in Mankato limestone and to display downtown buildings beyond the open outfield. Designers sought to evoke “a cosmopolitan expression of Minnesota’s natural beauty” through landscaping with native flowers, trees, and shrubs (including the batter’s eye of fourteen black spruces from northern Minnesota).153 Target Field also celebrates the state in other ways, including naming each suite for a Minnesota lake, using food choices to provide “a Minnesota experience,” offering a selection of Minnesota beers and wines at concession stands, and through the Twins’ choice of “Let’s Go Crazy” by Minneapolis native Prince as home run music.154

The Last Mallpark? Target Field opened to widespread praise and earned numerous accolades. Santee was named Minneapolis Star Tribune’s 2010 Sportsperson of the Year, Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal named Target Field as its Facility of the Year, ESPN: The Magazine ranked it in 2010 as the best experience in any North American sports venue, and Ballpark Digest recognized it as the 2010 Ballpark of the Year.155 Yet, at the same time, Target Field represents the culmination of a twenty-year cycle of mallpark development, with Populous’s most recent baseball stadiums having significant aesthetic (Marlins Park) and spatial (Truist Park) differences. When asked whether an architect needed to be a baseball fan to be good at designing a baseball stadium, Santee responded, “I wish I could say anybody could design a ballpark, but I think it takes something special. It takes an understanding and an appreciation of why this game is so important to American culture to be truly successful at what we do.”156 While Santee may be overstating the necessity to appreciate or understand baseball as a cultural form, a large part of Populous’s success in the field of sports facility design comes from its architects’ understanding of the sports industry. The company’s commitment to acquiring this knowledge has enabled Populous to establish the field of sports architecture, create innovations that have been incorporated into sports facilities around the world, and develop strong experience that allows Populous architects to manage

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complex projects by designing facilities quickly, responding to construction challenges effectively, and opening facilities on time and within budget. Perhaps the fundamentals of stadium design have not changed in two millennia, but Populous has defined expectations for sports facilities in the twenty-first century. However, in assessing Populous’s design practices, it is essential to recognize that architects operate under many constraints, particularly as they are directed by clients. It really does not matter whether a baseball stadium’s design is innovative or derivative unless it meets the intentions, tastes, requirements, and budgets of the public authorities that own them and their team tenants. If not for the insistence of Orioles management, Camden Yards would not have incorporated the Warehouse and distinctive retro elements. In Boston, Red Sox ownership under John Harrington had commissioned HOK Sport to design a Fenway Park–replica mallpark, but new ownership under John Henry rejected this design in favor of renovating the original. In Washington, public authorities wanted a stadium that could help revitalize its Near Southeast neighborhood. Similarly, Target Field would not be a “Minnesota ballpark” if not for the stated intentions of the MBA, Hennepin County, and the Twins. In each case, Populous delivered the designs requested by its clients and, when projects moved forward, was able to translate its clients’ abstract intentions into material realities. Although this fact does not absolve Populous and other stadium architects of blame for the exclusionary and inequitable impacts of their work, it does somewhat insulate them from responsibility for the ideologies guiding it. As described over these past four chapters, sports teams and public entities conceive mallpark spaces to maximize consumption activity by attracting and serving the wealthiest consumers and displaying that activity in conspicuous ways. Paying for their privileges, the wealthy receive the best and most comfortable seats, improved service, upgraded food and drinks, and access to private amenities and special experiences. Outside mallparks, cities are seeking economic growth above all else and use stadiums to attract consumers into urban entertainment districts that have transformed downtowns into exclusionary consumption spaces. While Populous has been effective in designing baseball stadiums meeting the requirements of its clients operating in the late capitalist economy, there is little reason to doubt that its architects have the technical competence to design stadiums that would meet different specifications based in different ideological contexts. However, in noting this, it is also difficult to ignore the McDonaldized processes that underlie Populous’s success in designing spaces of and for consumption and enable stadiums to open on time and within budget. As seen at Target Field, Populous’s experience managing complex projects allows construction to begin before the completion of all design documents, as its architects have designed similar spaces elsewhere and already understand programmatic

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requirements and details. For clients, such expertise is comforting because they know what they will get when they commission Populous to design their sports facility. While Populous provides numerous services to clients, it is limited as an ideas firm, with its main contribution to baseball stadium aesthetics being its nostalgia-driven reinterpretation of early twentieth-century ballpark architecture. While some mallparks may be more artfully executed than others, each is ultimately, per Mike Davis, a standardized space gift-wrapped to the client’s taste rather than a building that challenges what a stadium could or should be.157

Part IV

THE FUTURE OF BASEBALL STADIUM DESIGN

9 TRUIST PARK Supercharging the Mallpark

On November 11, 2013, the Atlanta Braves announced their relocation to Cobb County and became the first MLB team since 1972 to move away from a downtown.1 In so doing, the Braves abandoned the eighteen-year-old Turner Field, which was originally built for the 1996 Summer Olympics. The agreement for the $672 million Truist Park provided $320 million of public subsidies.2 In return the Braves agreed to invest $400 million in a mixed-use project, The Battery Atlanta, that would open alongside the stadium and include high-end retail stores, chefdriven restaurants, a live music venue, a sixteen-floor hotel, 550 residential units, and a nine-story office building.3 As the mallpark expands beyond its gates, this deal could shift the paradigm for baseball stadium development and serve as the model for future agreements. This final section of the book begins by examining this development model, as it has the potential to replace mallparks in much the same way mallparks replaced superstadiums. As mallparks seemingly have commodified the entire stadium experience and helped boost team values to an average exceeding $1.6 billion, sports teams are now challenged to identify new revenue sources. For local governments, mallparks provided media exposure and helped attract millions of people into downtown areas, but a market-based approach relying on private development decisions has inconsistently produced tangible economic benefits.4 The “mallpark village” approach could offer answers to both problems as teams receive new revenue and cities receive development guarantees. Emerging within the past twenty years, mallpark villages integrate three linked elements: a plan incorporating both stadium and ancillary development; multiuse 191

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development mixing entertainment, residential, retail, commercial, and/or recreational elements; and a commitment by team owners to act as lead developer. Rather than “hoping” markets respond to the stadium’s presence, 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.5 Anchored by the stadium and including other spectacularized spaces, mallpark villages seek to create consumption-focused communities capable of attracting residents, visitors, and office workers on a year-round basis. Seemingly aligning the interests of teams and local governments, mallpark villages already have begun to transform stadium development. As part their mallpark deals during the 2000s, team owners in San Diego and St. Louis agreed to develop surrounding real estate. Over the past decade, mallpark villages have replaced mallparks in Atlanta and Arlington, Texas, and been proposed to replace superstadiums in Oakland and St. Petersburg. In San Francisco and Anaheim, team owners are transforming mallpark parking lots into mixed-use neighborhoods. As mallpark leases begin to expire over the next decade, teams and local governments will grapple with continued revenue and development imperatives (intensified by the substantial financial losses in the 2020 and 2021 seasons due to COVID-19) that could result in tens of billions in spending for new facilities, large investments in mixed-use development with all of its attendant risks, and the possible abandonment of structurally sound, lucrative, and aesthetically pleasing mallparks simply because they do not generate enough revenue. First, this chapter will contextualize the emergence of mallpark villages, the central principles of their design, and the first baseball manifestations in San Diego and St. Louis. Following this, the chapter will turn to the conceived and perceived spaces of the Braves’ development of Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta as an archetypal mallpark village. We examine the particular political, economic, social, and racial dynamics of development in Atlanta, particularly as they relate to sports-centered development since the 1960s, Truist Park, and The Battery Atlanta. The chapter concludes by examining both the promises and potential pitfalls of mallpark villages.

The Mallpark Village Approach As described in part III, stadium designers use mallparks within efforts to transform cities into spaces of and for consumption. As millions of people attend games, designers assume crowds will entice businesses to open nearby. In turn, the surrounding neighborhood would become more attractive for non-game-day consumption, additional businesses, and even as a place to live. As this occurs,

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increases in property values and economic activity would produce new tax revenue that could be used to improve public services and generally make the city a more attractive place to live. This anticipated virtuous cycle helps civic leaders justify the direction of hundreds of millions in public resources, subsidies, and tax incentives to mallpark projects. Yet, as described in chapter 7, the record of mallpark-led redevelopment has been uneven at best, due to mallparks’ use on fewer than one hundred days annually and policies that essentially hope that developers will invest in the area. As this neoliberal “if you build it, they will come” strategy with its faith in free-market actors has proven unreliable, mallpark villages seemingly guarantee that investment and development will occur.6 This has led Mark S. Rosentraub, a longtime critic of public subsidies for stadium projects, to reassess his opposition and recommend nine principles for sports facility–centered economic development: • First, cities need to recognize the potential value of advertising around the stadium by selling or leasing attractive locations to offset stadium-related costs. • Second, stadiums should be part of a broader development strategy, located among concentrated amenities, and use existing infrastructure in order to reduce costs and generate a critical mass of consumers. • Third, stadiums should be designed to fit within the context of emerging neighborhoods or help improve an area’s image used for reimaging purposes through an innovative and unique design. • Fourth, private-sector investments must be linked to the commitment of public resources. • Fifth, cities should aggressively pursue investment through coordinated activity from public, private, and nonprofit entities if guaranteed investments are not available. • Sixth, cities should take prudent risks to build confidence among potential private-sector partners. • Seventh, cities should jump-start redevelopment efforts by affecting an “instant transformation” with large-scale infusions of public and private capital. • Eighth, cities should constructively involve business leaders with substantial downtown financial interests to create a broader constituency with deeper commitment for redevelopment. • Finally, cities can level inequities in negotiating strength relative to sports leagues by incorporating additional interests into a broader redevelopment plan.

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Within this model, Rosentraub distinguishes between “subsidies” and “strategic investments.”7 Unlike subsidies, in which cities provide public resources, bear operating expenses, and allow team owners to receive most revenues, strategic investments actively leverage public resources to secure private financial commitments. Economist Roger Noll has noticed this shift over the past decade as subsidies have become more indirect through tax incremental financing, land grants, and tax abatements.8 Rosentraub developed this list of best practices by examining sports-oriented redevelopment strategies in Indianapolis, San Diego, Columbus, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Reading, Pennsylvania. For example, L.A. Live in Los Angeles helped revitalize the area around the failing Los Angeles Convention Center through an integrated program featuring the Staples Center, the Microsoft Theater, upscale restaurants, shops, hotels, apartments, the Grammy Museum, and a fourteen-screen movie theater.9 The Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, served as lead developer and paid for 80 percent of the Staples Center’s costs. Beyond baseball, other sports team–led development projects include Patriot Place in Foxborough, Massachusetts (New England Patriots, NFL), the Titletown District attached to Green Bay’s Lambeau Field (Green Bay Packers, NFL), and the Detroit Events Center project (Detroit Red Wings, NHL). The two examples of team-led development in baseball, Petco Park in San Diego and Busch Stadium in St. Louis, are the most relevant to this book.

Petco Park Petco Park, which opened in 2004, can be seen as the first mallpark village project in the United States. In 1998 San Diego voters approved a $296 million stadium subsidy in return for Padres owner John Moores’s commitment to invest $450 million in the surrounding neighborhood.10 Petco Park would anchor the East Village’s transformation from an unattractive but functional downtown area into a destination neighborhood that could entice middle- and upper-class residents to move back into the city.11 Given the political context and the team’s history, Moores’s investment was essential to build public support for a stadium deal. The franchise has had little success, financially or on the field, with no World Series victories and just six postseason berths in fifty-two seasons. With a tightly bound market, San Diego’s small corporate community, and an unfavorable lease in Qualcomm Stadium, the Padres historically have been among the least valuable MLB franchises.12 Adding to the Padres’ difficulties was the deep antipathy held by Southern Californians toward taxation in general and subsidizing sports facilities, especially as Los Angeles allowed two NFL teams to leave in 1995 and San Diego repeatedly

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refused the Chargers’ demands for a new stadium.13 While vague promises and optimistic economic impact projections may have been sufficient to build popular support for stadium deals in other cities, such a strategy was unlikely to work in San Diego.14 The 1998 agreement envisioned the new Padres stadium anchoring a comprehensive development plan for the East Village, as Moores committed to building three hotels, 1.3 million square feet of office space, and 180,000 square feet of retail.15 Adjacent to the Gaslamp Quarter, Horton Plaza, and the San Diego Convention Center, which were the key elements of the city’s downtown redevelopment strategy since the 1970s, the East Village sat at the development frontier, with a few individual efforts to create arts and cultural spaces contrasted against growing transient populations and increases in residents needing social services.16 Civic leaders hoped Moores’s investments and the new stadium would catalyze the East Village’s transformation into an attractive mixed-use area with retail, commercial, entertainment, and residential options.17 However, as the deal was subject to referendum, many people questioned whether it could pass. In response, Padres president Larry Lucchino promised the new stadium would be “more than a ballpark” because it would anchor redevelopment in the East Village and have a distinctive design that “looked and felt and reflected San Diego.”18 With a professional campaign promoting the deal and the Padres setting records for wins and attendance and earning the franchise’s second World Series appearance, the referendum passed with 59.5 percent support.19 By many metrics, the deal has been successful for both sides. Having employed award-winning architect Antoine Predock as design architect, Petco Park is one of the most attractive MLB stadiums, and the Padres have welcomed more than two million fans in fifteen of sixteen seasons. For the city, Petco Park has helped attract more than $2.87 billion in private investment into the East Village, which has produced twelve hundred hotel rooms, thirty-six hundred residential units, 550,000 square feet of commercial space, and 19,200 jobs.20 The neighborhood’s population increased by 52 percent from 2004 to 2010, which made it the fastestgrowing area in the city of San Diego and the third-fastest within the entire San Diego MSA.21 However, Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie criticize the deal for ceding public control of redevelopment to private enterprises, insufficient oversight, and utilizing substantial public resources for primarily private gain.22 In particular, they identify renegotiations that shifted costs and risks onto the public and reduced potential public benefits, while allowing developers to capture the bulk of the benefits as civic officials feared Moores’s threats to slow development activities. As a result, “though these redevelopment efforts have generated tremendous private wealth downtown, the millions invested by [the

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governmental Centre City Development Corporation] have yielded few public benefits.”23

Busch Stadium While the Padres’ presence in San Diego was tenuous, the Cardinals are deeply embedded within St. Louis, with a history beginning in 1882 and including eleven World Series titles. After playing in Sportsman’s Park from 1920 to 1965,24 the Cardinals moved to Busch Stadium II, a typical superstadium with its round, multiuse design. It was intended to be a focal point in transforming downtown St. Louis, but the stadium’s effectiveness was muted by surrounding parking lots that offered easy highway access.25 After it was purchased by the Cardinals in 1981 and renovated into a baseball-only facility in 1995, the team began seeking a new stadium in 1997. In 2000 the Cardinals proposed a new stadium that would be built across the street from Busch Stadium II. To attract $250 million in public subsidies, the team promised investments of $380 million to develop a “fresh urban neighborhood.”26 Their plan included an aquarium, a baseball museum, 410 apartments and condominiums, 400,000 square feet of office space, and 225,000 square feet of retail, restaurants, community services, and entertainment spaces.27 However, skeptics noted that many other plans proposed for downtown St. Louis since the 1960s had little impact and expressed doubt that Ballpark Village would be built.28 While a 2001 deal including $250 million in public subsidies required specific performance from the Cardinals to complete the first phase of Ballpark Village by 2010 and the entire project by 2014, it failed to gain support from the Missouri State Legislature. A 2002 deal between the Cardinals and St. Louis County funded the $400 million project, mostly through private equity and a private bond sale but included $87.7 million in public loans, tax credits, and infrastructure spending.29 This deal did not require ancillary development, and, as the new stadium opened in 2006, the Cardinals lacked a development partner and a schedule for Ballpark Village. In October 2006 the Cardinals signed a partnership agreement with The Cordish Companies, which had begun developing UED amenities in 1999 with the opening in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor of Power Plant Live!, featuring restaurants, bars, and live entertainment.30 Success in Baltimore led Cordish to develop several Live!-branded entertainment districts across the county,31 and in 2005 it began a sports-anchored districts division that would develop Live! projects next to sports facilities.32 As mentioned in chapter 4, in 2012 Cordish opened its first sports-anchored district, Xfinity Live!, in the parking lot of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex. The $600 million plan for Ballpark Village would first develop office, entertainment, and retail spaces and would be followed by a second phase building

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additional commercial space and up to 250 residential units. However, construction of Ballpark Village did not begin until 2013 because a potential office anchor-tenant withdrew and the 2008 financial crisis stalled efforts to find a replacement.33 When the project finally broke ground, its significantly reduced $100 million first phase included only the retail, dining, and entertainment options providing the greatest benefit to the team. The second phase, which was completed in 2020, included another $260 million of development. Public subsidies include $17 million for the first phase but could reach $183.5 million if the total project meets benchmarks for retail, office, and residential development.34 While $360 million of investment and 850,000 square feet of new mixed-use space are substantial in a city that has seen little development over the past fifty years, the delays in developing Ballpark Village have substantially reduced the impacts of Busch Stadium III on St. Louis. By not securing upfront performance commitments, 40 percent of the team’s thirty-five-year lease passed between the stadium’s opening and the completion of its most attractive and impactful development elements from the public’s perspective. With twenty-eight of thirty teams playing in facilities built or substantially renovated over the previous twenty-five years, by 2012 the wave of mallpark construction had virtually ended. As the 2008 economic crisis highlighted the risks of lightly regulated markets and increased skepticism about purely marketcentered solutions to public problems, just one stadium project had received public approval since 2007, partly due to the fact that stadiums had inconsistently generated tangible economic and redevelopment impacts. Yet as the Braves were beginning negotiations in 2011 with Atlanta for a new lease at Turner Field, team officials recognized the value of JMI Realty’s investment in the East Village for the Padres and the economic potential of Ballpark Village for the Cardinals.35 When Atlanta would not satisfy the Braves’ request for development rights around Turner Field, the team found an eager partner in Cobb County.36 The resulting 2013 deal, in which the Braves and Cobb County have partnered to guarantee neighborhood development rather than hoping for it to occur, has the potential to open a new era of stadium construction.

Atlanta: Sports in the Development of a World-Class City Describing negotiations with Kansas City Athletics owner Charlie Finley in 1963, former Atlanta mayor Ivan Allen Jr. explained, “We offered him a stadium not yet designed, to be built with money we didn’t yet have, on land we didn’t yet

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own.”37 Allen’s statement is apropos of the aspirational attitude defining the city’s development since its 1837 founding, such that Charles Rutheiser has called Atlanta a “city of dreams.”38 As civic boosters produced and promoted images unreflective of its lived reality, the city’s claims to national and world-class status seemed laughable at first but sometimes were followed by greater successes.39 Negotiations with the Athletics failed, but they directly led to the construction of Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium (AFCS) and the 1966 arrivals of the Braves and the NFL’s Falcons. Similarly, in the late 1980s, few people took Billy Payne’s efforts to attract the 1996 Olympics seriously.40 While Allen’s bravado has been reproduced in Atlanta’s successful efforts to raise the city’s international profile and attract global investment, Atlanta’s long history of racial division and residential segregation have been much more difficult to resolve and are implicated in the city’s relationship with sports organizations, perhaps most notably the Braves. After World War II, civic leaders claimed Atlanta was a “city too busy to hate.” Boasting comparatively liberal policies within the Jim Crow South, Atlanta claimed to be a model city for the “new” New South, in which racial divisions were set aside to achieve prosperity.41 With six historically Black colleges and universities creating a Black middle class, Atlanta was “the Black Mecca” and, through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church, became the center of the civil rights movement.42 Yet Atlanta’s racial realities have been much more complex. Despite the city having more liberal policies compared to other Southern cities, segregation was still strictly enforced and manifested within racially divided residential patterns and racially unequal impacts from development.43 Material differences were often expressed in symbolic ways, as when, for example, street names changed in downtown to prevent perceptions that whites residing on the city’s north side lived on the same streets as Blacks, who were concentrated in the city’s south side.44 Atlanta also was central in the rehabilitation of the Confederacy’s image through cultural products, such as Gone with the Wind and Stone Mountain. Sports also has been an important element in the city’s pursuit of status.45 Through the first half of the twentieth century, Atlanta was home to the Crackers of the mid-level minor league Southern Association and teams in the lowerlevel Negro Southern League. Once Atlanta acquired MLB and NFL teams in the 1960s, civic leaders quickly turned toward attracting other teams, as the NBA’s Hawks relocated from St. Louis in 1968 and the Flames joined the NHL as an expansion team in 1972. Within a span of six years, Atlanta became the seventh American city to have teams in each of the top four major leagues.46 As Atlanta sought to achieve international status during the 1990s, civic boosters secured the 1996 Olympics.

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In these efforts, Atlanta frequently has offered generous terms and new facilities. For baseball, which Allen promised to pursue in his successful 1961 mayoral campaign against the segregationist Lester Maddox, Atlanta proposed highly favorable lease terms, lucrative sponsorship by Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, and a $2.5 million television broadcast contract.47 After the Athletics’ move to Atlanta was rejected, the city’s efforts turned to the Milwaukee Braves, who had moved from Boston in 1953. In Milwaukee the Braves enjoyed large crowds and instant success in the publicly financed Milwaukee County Stadium. Led by MLB greats Hank Aaron and Warren Spahn, the Braves won NL titles in 1957 and 1958, the 1957 World Series, and set NL attendance records by averaging more than two million fans per season from 1953 to 1959.48 However, after the team was sold for a record amount and a 1963 public offering of shares failed to attract local interest, the Braves’ new owners began negotiations to move the franchise to Atlanta for the 1965 season. However, because Milwaukee County Stadium did not allow the Braves to break their lease, the team did not arrive in Atlanta until 1966.49 The Braves’ new home, AFCS, was completed in less than one year and hosted its first professional game on April 9, 1965—the hundredth anniversary of Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House, which effectively ended the Civil War.50 Yet, beyond the symbolic significance of its opening date, there was little to distinguish AFCS from other superstadiums. Designed by an association between Atlanta architectural firms Finch, Alexander, Barnes, Rothschild & Pascal and Heery & Heery, which would later complete design work for more than one hundred major sports facilities, AFCS was a round, structural-concrete, multiuse facility. With capacities of fifty-two thousand for baseball and sixty thousand for football, AFCS cost $18 million to build and was located south of downtown near the intersection of I-20 and I-85. Yet the AFCS site embodies Atlanta’s history of racially problematic redevelopment and set the stage for the Braves’ eventual move to Cobb County. Larry Keating explains that civic leaders used highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate low-income Black neighborhoods near downtown, create a reserve area for future downtown growth, and build a buffer between downtown and other historic Black neighborhoods.51 The mostly Black neighborhood of Summerhill was targeted for aggressive redevelopment, with plans for white middleclass residents to replace existing residents. However, after the neighborhood was razed, private-sector investors showed no interest in the city’s plans. Alternative plans to build public housing for whites were opposed by Black leaders, who sought development or public housing directly benefiting their community.52 Seeking to avoid confrontation with his Black constituents and maintain support from the business community, Mayor Allen decided to build AFCS on the site.

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Although Allen had commissioned a stadium feasibility study, it did not examine the stadium’s potential impacts on the surrounding communities of Summerhill and Peoplestown.53 AFCS’s parking issues were particularly problematic because its design provided just sixty-six hundred spaces when more than twelve thousand were needed.54 This devastated Summerhill, as landowners realized they could earn more from selling parking spaces on empty lots to AFCS patrons than from renting out homes. Traffic also created major inconveniences for residents as streets became one-way toward the stadium before games and away afterward.55 While connection to Atlanta’s light rail system could have eased traffic and parking problems, the AFCS site was bypassed as skeptics suggested the city did not want competition to reduce on-site parking revenue. Overall, AFCS resulted in the displacement of more than 10,000 of Summerhill’s 12,500 residents and the demise of Peoplestown’s shopping district and led to Peoplestown’s population declining by 25 percent by 1970.56 More broadly, it is important to recognize that superstadium and highway construction were used in many cities as part of slum clearance and urban redevelopment initiatives that disproportionately impacted Black communities (see chapter 3). In Atlanta, AFCS was part of broader post–World War II redevelopment projects that destroyed one-third of Atlanta’s housing stock in favor of sports facilities, highways, the civic center, and other amenities that were perceived as being necessary for recognition as a nationally prominent city.57 As local activists characterized development policies as “Negro removal,”58 Keating found their critique to be correct, as 95 percent of the sixty-eight thousand residents displaced by redevelopment were Black.59

An Olympic City and the Construction of Turner Field Although the arrival of the Braves contributed little to Atlanta’s economic development, it signified the city’s rising status, as rapid growth enabled it to become one of the country’s twenty largest MSAs. Atlanta’s emergence was fueled by the growth of Hartsfield International Airport, international investment attracted by aggressive marketing, a favorable business environment featuring low costs and large government incentives, and being home to major corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Delta Airlines, and UPS.60 Atlanta also benefited from the widespread adoption of cable television during the 1980s, being the home of Ted Turner’s growing media empire. Sports facilitated Turner’s ability to capitalize on the growth of cable television. Having purchased the Braves in 1976 and the Hawks in 1977, Turner broadcasted his teams on TBS, which was carried as a basic channel on cable systems throughout the country. As the Braves provided TBS with programming, the

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team gained a national following despite poor play that defined the franchise for the first sixteen seasons of Turner’s ownership. With the Braves achieving only one postseason appearance from 1975 to 1990, Turner was criticized for profligate free-agent spending and meddling in team operations, including a onegame stint as manager in 1977.61 However, in 1991 the Braves’ fortunes turned, as the team followed a 1990 lastplace performance by winning the pennant and began a fifteen-season stretch in which the team won fourteen division titles, five NL championships, and the 1995 World Series. While Turner’s early tenure was marked by repeated management changes, the team’s leadership was stabilized when Stan Kasten became team president in 1986 and John Schuerholz was hired as general manager and Bobby Cox as manager in 1990. On the field, the Braves were led by four firstballot Hall of Fame players: pitchers Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Greg Maddux and third baseman Chipper Jones. As the Braves’ dynasty emerged, AFCS’s future was in doubt. By the late 1980s, people were complaining that it was dirty, had narrow concourses with few modern concessions, had a poor-quality playing field, and was difficult to reach during rush hour.62 With the team’s lease ending in 1990, the Braves were exploring multiple suburban sites for a new stadium that would move the team closer to its fan base, as Kasten estimated that 70 percent of Braves customers lived north of the city.63 Once the Falcons reached an agreement to build the $210 million Georgia Dome in downtown, the Braves’ stadium efforts acquired additional urgency. While the AFCS signified Atlanta’s emergence as a major American city, its global aspirations solved the Braves’ dilemma. In the late 1980s, a group of Atlantans organized a bid for the 1996 Summer Olympics.64 Overcoming initial skepticism from local leaders, the US Olympic Committee, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Atlanta earned the Games with a lucrative offer.65 Estimating revenue of $1.62 billion and a profit of $156 million, the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) offered the IOC the majority of its profits, a significant percentage of the event’s $600 million in global television rights, and a “hefty cut” of merchandising revenue.66 While Flowers notes the IOC has been criticized for the lack of legacy planning for Olympic venues, Atlanta’s bid proposed building the main stadium in the AFCS parking lot and transforming it into a baseball stadium for the Braves after the Games.67 As Atlanta already owned the site, Janet Marie Smith suggested that expediency, pragmatism, and fiscal responsibility helped determine the stadium’s location, as an alternative site would have injected significant uncertainty into a project with fixed time and cost constraints.68 The design of the eighty-fivethousand-seat stadium featured two seamlessly connected parts—one designed for long-term baseball use and the other with temporary grandstands that would

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be removed after the Games.69 As Turner Field required relatively little financial contribution from the Braves and would be ready for the 1997 season, the team signed a twenty-year lease. Turner Field, whose design team included Ellerbe Becket and Heery International, was the fourth mallpark to open after the construction of Camden Yards.70 In 1994 the Braves hired Smith, who had consulted with the organization for eighteen months, to be the team’s liaison with the design team.71 As in Baltimore (see chapter 5) and afterward in Boston and Los Angeles (see chapter 6), Smith’s job was to “translate the look and feel the Braves want into specifics” by converting Kasten’s conceptions of what Turner Field should be into a material reality.72 In particular, Kasten wanted a “fan’s park” that included “an unsurpassed view of the ballgame” and included multiple amenities that would encourage fans to come early, stay late, and spend money.73 The stadium’s design reflected the slogan of its initial marketing campaign, “Turner Field: Not just baseball. A baseball theme park.”74 The main plaza, which opened three hours before games, included bars, restaurants, the team store, live entertainment, and interactive children’s games.75 The concourse featured the Braves Museum and Hall of Fame, which displayed the Braves’ 1995 World Series Trophy and the ball Aaron hit for his 715th home run in 1974 that broke Babe Ruth’s record. Designed with a retro aesthetic, Turner Field opened with a capacity of 50,005, which was 3,000 less than AFCS but included 5,546 club-level seats and sixty-two suites.76 While the Braves contributed just $35.5 million to the mallpark’s $209 million cost, AFCS’ fundamental locational problem had become Turner Field’s. Despite local activists hoping to use the Olympics and Turner Field for long-term community development, no resources were allotted to fund plans in Summerhill and four other nearby neighborhoods.77 Moreover, as traffic and parking issues remained and the site lacked connection to public transportation, Turner Field’s access issues only worsened as the population of the Atlanta MSA grew from 2.9 million in 1990 to 5.3 million in 2010. Although the stadium’s name highlighted the team’s connection to Ted Turner, his ownership was becoming attenuated by the time Turner Field opened. In 1996 Turner’s sports holdings were included the $7.5 billion merger of his media empire with Time Warner. In 2004 Time Warner sold the Hawks, and in 2007 Braves’ ownership was transferred to Liberty Media in a complex $1 billion transaction that included other media properties.78 With the Braves’ lease ending in 2017, the team and the city of Atlanta started negotiating a new one in fall 2011. In addition to requesting $150 million in capital improvements, the Braves sought total control of development rights within the fifty-five-acre parking lot. Not only could the Braves improve the Turner Field

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experience with restaurants, bars, and other attractions—the team also estimated that such development could produce as much as $20 million per year.79 However, Atlanta officials informed the team that the city could not simply transfer such a valuable asset outside of an open bidding process without breaking Georgia’s conflict-of-interest laws.80 Recognizing that they were making little progress toward a new deal, in July 2013 the Braves began secretly negotiating with Cobb County leaders to relocate to a site in Cumberland, which bordered Atlanta.

The Cobb County Braves In his 1992 book, Joel Garreau described Cumberland, Georgia, as a “classic of the Edge City genre,” with its location just ten miles to the northwest of downtown Atlanta at the junction of I-75 and the I-285 perimeter highway.81 Centered on two major shopping malls, hotels, and commercial buildings, Cumberland features ten million square feet of retail space, twenty-four million square feet of office space, a convention center, and the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre. With a residential population around 100,000 and employment exceeding 120,000, Cumberland would be Cobb County’s largest city if it were incorporated. It is also the fifth-largest business district within the Atlanta MSA, possesses the headquarters of Home Depot and the Weather Channel, and is home to the Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Ballet—amenities that are typically downtown in other cities. Although Atlanta claimed to be a city too busy to hate, Cobb County’s post– World War II growth was fueled by white flight. Despite the MSA’s population more than doubling from 1960 to 1990, Atlanta’s population declined from 487,000 to 394,000 as the city became majority-Black. With Cobb being described as “serious Klan country”82 and as the “preferred destination of white Atlantans fleeing school desegregation,”83 the county’s population increased from 114,000 to 447,000 from 1960 to 1990. This growth was anchored by employment at defense contractor Lockheed and at Dobbins Air Force Base and in insurance, electronics, computers, and trade.84 Cobb’s conservatism (or “Cobbservatism”) manifested itself in many ways.85 In the 1960s Cobb (along with Gwinnett County) refused to be included in the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) system out of concern that it would facilitate the movement of Blacks into the county.86 Politically Cobb was represented in the US Congress by Republican Newt Gingrich, starting in 1978. In 1993, despite warnings from ACOG, a county commission resolution condemned “the homosexual life style,” which resulted in Cobb being bypassed for an Olympic venue and avoided during the Olympic torch relay.87 Their

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county considered a center of Tea Party activism in the early 2010s, Cobb residents rejected by a margin of 69 percent to 31 percent a 2012 sales tax referendum that would have funded needed transportation infrastructure.88 By 2010 Cobb was the fourth-largest county in the Atlanta MSA, with a population of 688,078, and possessed a large concentration of Braves’ ticket buyers. With Atlanta traffic often forcing fans living in the city’s northern suburbs to travel more than two hours to attend evening games, Braves executive vice president for business operations Mike Plant identified it as “the number one reason why our fans don’t come to more games.”89 As Atlanta’s population continued to grow, Braves officials believed traffic would only become more “problematic.”90 Once the Braves and Cobb County began negotiations, the deal came together quickly—taking five months, as compared to most stadium deals usually requiring a minimum of two years.91 The $672 million stadium deal divided costs, with Cobb spending $392 million and the Braves agreeing to make up-front payments of $280 million, to cover cost overruns, and to make annual rental payments of $6.1 million.92 While these terms were similar to many other mallpark deals, the Braves also committed to investing another $400 million to create a mixed-use community around the stadium within an undeveloped seventy-five-acre parcel in Cumberland that was bisected by a major gas pipeline.93 While the Braves’ payments would guarantee payment on one-quarter of the county’s bond issue, the remainder would require $17.2 million in annual debt service.94 Repayment was assured through repurposing existing tourism tax revenue and increasing visitor taxes, extending a soon-to-expire parks tax, reallocating existing property taxes, and issuing a special tax on businesses within the Cumberland Community Improvement District.95 Additionally, Cobb officials estimated the entire project would generate $12.6 million in new property and sales tax revenue for the county in 2018.96

Conceiving The Battery Atlanta Cobb officials believed the deal would jump-start lagging economic development and provide significant symbolic benefits. Despite the aggressive use of financial incentives to create a probusiness environment, development activity in Cobb had slowed significantly by 2013, with no major office or high-rise buildings built in almost a decade.97 With Cobb falling behind the center city and competing jurisdictions within the Atlanta MSA, Cobb County Commission chairman Tim Lee explained the project would “bring back and yield a significant growth in our digest, in our sales tax, in our economic viability.”98 Beyond the project’s direct economic and tax implications, a study commissioned by county business leaders estimated it would create 13,625 new jobs.99

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In addition to economic benefits, the project would be symbolically significant. Similarly to many other suburban counties, Cobb lacked a traditional downtown area. Edge city development often followed the precepts of modernist architecture and urban design that assigned commercial, retail, recreational, and residential uses to distinct areas (see chapter 2).100 Many critics consider the resultant suburban landscape to be placeless, with its large office parks containing indistinguishable commercial buildings, sizable shopping malls filled with similar stores, and expansive neighborhoods featuring nearly identical homes on rational street grids. With Jeff Fuqua of the Braves’ retail leasing partner Fuqua Development describing the project as “Downtown Cobb County,” The Battery Atlanta would create a unique mixed-use hub promising the street life and vibrancy of urban areas with multiple events, a live performance venue, first-tomarket and flagship retailers, and unique restaurants.101 As described by Braves executive vice president of sales and marketing Derek Schiller, “it is not our intent to have chain restaurants or retailers that you can find on any corner.”102 While anchored by the stadium, the mixed-used development would make The Battery Atlanta a year-round leisure and entertainment destination. Beyond helping Cobb County develop a better sense of place, the new stadium and The Battery Atlanta would help increase the county’s prominence and better enable it to challenge central city for regional supremacy. According to Galloway, “Cobb is a suburban county with long-held central city ambitions, a bedroom community in search of living-room clout.”103 As Cobb was already home to the Atlanta Opera and Atlanta Ballet, the Braves would further add to the county’s status. While a new stadium would certainly increase revenue, sports economist Andrew Zimbalist describes the deal as “a real estate play by the Braves.”104 With Liberty Media involved in real estate development and its chairman John Malone the largest individual landowner in the United States with more than two million acres of property, the Braves recognized the synergies between mixed-use development and stadium would strengthen both and provide the team with greater revenue than either could as standalone projects.105 Braves CEO Terry McGuirk expected The Battery Atlanta to provide the Braves with the “economic horsepower” that could be used to improve the team.106 The Braves’ plan featured many different elements. As described by Santee, “[the Braves] understood that their brand is powerful . . . and that, through their leadership, they could develop a project that would feel homogeneous, that felt like it belonged together, in synergy with it—with the ballpark.”107 The bars and restaurants would give the 2.5 million people attending eighty-one Braves games something to do before and after games. Live performances at the Roxy Theater and multiple other events, such as a seasonal farmers market, weekly

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free yoga, and holiday celebrations, would attract visitors on nonbaseball days. Views toward the field enhanced the value of many rooms in the Omni Hotel and would attract baseball fans throughout the year. The stadium added prestige to The Battery Atlanta’s 630,000 square feet Class A office building, which became the regional headquarters for Comcast, a major team sponsor and operator of The Battery Atlanta’s high-speed communications network.108 The area’s vibrancy would attract young professionals looking for recreational opportunities to move into apartments, while office workers would have convenient places to eat. As described by Schiller, “the central differentiating factor compared to Turner Field or any stadium is that we are building an overall experience—a community—connected to our ballpark.”109 Although the Braves’ concept for The Battery Atlanta looked good on paper, it was both ambitious and risky. In addition to having a tight timeline for building a stadium by April 2017, the Braves intended to simultaneously open most elements of The Battery Atlanta. Although baseball’s third mallpark village, it would be the first to attempt to open both the stadium and mixed-use areas at the same time, as development had lagged significantly in both San Diego and St. Louis. Beyond this, there were the considerable financial risks associated with any large-scale commercial development project because unanticipated events such as the 2008 economic crisis or the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic could impact credit markets, depress consumer demand, change retail behaviors, and influence demands for commercial office space. Given the Braves’ ambitions “to take our depth and experience in creating engaging fan environments and build an equally engaging atmosphere outside of the ballpark,” Schiller recognized “to accomplish that, we needed partnerships with experienced, industry leaders who could bring that same level of expertise to the project, especially the retail, residential, office and restaurants.”110 While the Braves chose experienced developers for each market segment, they also selected the Jerde Partnership to serve as master land planner due to its “tremendous depth of experience” designing mixed-use projects.111 As described in chapters 1 and 2, the Jerde Partnership’s founder, Jon Jerde, designed the Mall of America, and his company has worked worldwide to design attractive retail environments through its commitment to “placemaking” by creating “experiential environments” that blend architectural, landscape, and graphic features and incorporate programmatic elements.112 The Jerde Partnership claims that more than one billion people visit its more than one hundred projects around the world each year and that they are extremely effective retail sites, with average sales per square foot considerably higher than the industry’s average. While not a development partner of the Braves, The Cordish Companies leased thirty thousand square feet to create Live! at The Battery Atlanta, with

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three bars and restaurants: Sports & Social, PBR Atlanta, and Todd English Tavern. Sports & Social and PBR are both Cordish-developed concepts present within multiple Live! entertainment districts.113 Described by Cordish principal Reed Cordish as offering a “complete dining, sports viewing and entertainment experience,” Sports & Social features a two-level LED screen and various social games.114 Sponsored by the Professional Bull Riders Association, PBR Atlanta is a country bar complete with “line dancing, cold beer, hard drinks, and a little bull ridin.’ ”115 Celebrity chef and Atlanta native Todd English developed the final restaurant, Todd English Tavern, as a “neo-tavern” featuring “southern dishes with an international influence.”116

Conceiving Truist Park Beyond anchoring The Battery Atlanta, Braves president John Schuerholz stated the new stadium would be “the most modern, the most unique, the most fantastic Major League ballpark ever to be designed and built.”117 As the county’s contribution to the project was fixed and the Braves were responsible for cost overruns, the team had the responsibility for selecting the stadium’s architect. Although HKS was the early favorite to be the Braves’ stadium consultant, on January 28, 2014, the team selected Populous. Schuerholz, who first was involved with Populous founder Ron Labinski in the 1970s during the design of Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium, said, “We examined others—other companies, other architects. But we just had a comfort level with Joe [Spear] and Earl [Santee]. . . . They spoke the same language, they understood what we were asking for and they understood the challenges they would face.”118 In this regard, Georgia Tech architecture professor Benjamin Flowers described Populous as “a very understandable and not surprising choice.”119 However, unlike Populous’s previous projects, which were led by either Spear or Santee, the two would work together for the first time. Populous sought the commission because Spear and Santee recognized that Atlanta had the potential to be a transformative project, given the ways in which the new stadium would be integrated into its surrounding neighborhood. “We have been telling our clients for 20 years, probably, you ought to be able to control the neighborhood around your ballpark,” said Spear. “And other major league baseball teams have been able to do that, but these guys (at the Braves) didn’t just control it—they designed it.”120 Santee saw the project as “leading to a future of other projects happening the same way,”121 Populous would gain experience in developing a mallpark village, which would further its advantage in securing commissions for other projects of all types. As Populous was designing Truist Park, they also recognized the changing expectations of baseball attendees. As described in chapter 8, since Turner Field

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opened in 1997, mallparks were being built with fewer seats overall but with more premium seats and upgraded experiences. Truist Park’s design reflected these shifts, with 8,500 fewer seats and one-third fewer luxury suites than Turner Field. However, it also included a tenfold increase of premium seats to four thousand and as many as three more exclusive clubs. The different uses of space were most evident within the Braves Chop House, one of Turner Field’s most popular spots to watch games and socialize, which would be two and a half times larger in the new stadium.122 Beyond seats, the new stadium would facilitate consumption with ten restaurants and more than twenty-eight thousand square feet of concession spaces that include 295 points of sale.123 As Populous sought to “entice fans to leave their couches for the ballpark,” the game experience was designed to become more intimate, through improved cantilevering that moved many middle and upperdeck seats thirty to fifty feet closer to the field.124 An eighty-foot-wide sunshade would make fans more comfortable by protecting 60 percent of seats.125 As Santee stated Populous wanted the new stadium “be completely authentic to the Braves, Georgia, Cobb County, Atlanta and the Southeast,” Truist Park would be “unlike anything we have seen or done.”126 Part of this came from the site’s topography, which was a natural bowl.127 Yet when early renderings showed red brick to be its dominant material, Flowers described the new stadium as possessing “a retro, nostalgic kind of quality” prominent in other Populous baseball stadiums.128 As noted by Tucker, the design was mostly complete by November 2014, although the Braves and Populous continued to work on interior finishes, how best to represent the team’s brand, and, according to Schiller, how to “pay homage to our history.”129 Given its centrality to The Battery Atlanta and the Braves’ development interests, Populous was tasked with connecting Truist Park to The Battery Atlanta. According to Spear, “from the start they made it clear they wanted the ballpark to really harmonize and work well with all this other development activity.”130 Populous did this in many ways: with entry plazas providing access to The Battery Atlanta businesses and the stadium; with the water feature beyond center field, which provides a target for hitters; by offering views of The Battery Atlanta and the field from the Xfinity Rooftop; and with an outdoor television studio in The Battery for pregame and postgame shows.131

Perceiving Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta The experience of the development team worked to the Braves’ advantage as Truist Park opened on time in April 2017 with a dozen establishments already open in The Battery Atlanta, including Live! at The Battery Atlanta, restaurants

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Antico Pizza and Wahlburgers (a burger restaurant co-owned by actors Donnie and Mark Wahlberg and their chef brother Paul), destination retail stores from sporting equipment manufacturer Mizuno and Harley-Davidson, and two apartment communities.132 Additionally, The Battery Atlanta featured the CocaCola Roxy Theatre, which was managed by Liberty Media subsidiary Live Nation. With another dozen establishments opening during the baseball season, 30 percent of The Battery’s square footage was occupied by October 2017.133 Before the start of the 2018 season, Comcast would move into its building, and the Omni Hotel would open.134 Goldberger describes Truist Park’s design “as neither assertively modern nor traditional, which is to say that its style leans toward retro, but in an understated way. It is a well-mannered ballpark that is designed to be comfortable.”135 Allowing fans “to experience the game in a unique ways” within different neighborhoods, Truist Park features several nontraditional places to gather and watch the game, including the three-level Chop House, the Xfinity Rooftop, the Hank Aaron Terrace, the Home Depot Clubhouse, and the State Farm Deck below the scoreboard.136 In addition to the terrace named in his honor, Truist Park celebrates Aaron and his achievement of 755 home runs, which stood as MLB’s home

FIGURE 18.  The Battery Atlanta plaza outside the right-field gate at Truist Park, Cumberland, Georgia.

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run record from 1974 to 2007, in many ways—most prominently in the stadium’s address of 755 Battery Avenue and with an Aaron statue standing in front of a sculpture using 755 bats to form the number 755.137 While Spear described Truist Park as “unique,” he did recognize that “you can see some of the same kind of things here as in other ballparks we have done . . . but that’s just because that’s what the fans want to buy. They vote with their feet.”138 Similarly, McGuirk recognized “there are so many pieces of this stadium which are taken directly out of other stadiums’ success factors.”139 The first three years of Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta were extremely lucrative for the Braves. Having formed the subsidiary “Braves Group” in 2016 to raise $200 million in a public offering, Liberty Media regularly reports the financial performance of the team and The Battery Atlanta.140 In the first three months of Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta, revenue increased by 34 percent, from $131 million to $176 million, and earnings before depreciation and amortization rose from $12 million to $27 million compared to the same period in 2016.141 Yearly revenue grew from $262 million in the team’s last year at Turner Field to $386 million in 2017, $442 million in 2018, and $476 million in 2019, with The Battery Atlanta earning $91 million over three years.142 Before losing $49 million in 2020 due to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Braves Group averaged $52 million in annual profits before depreciation and amortization, as franchise value increased from $1.18 billion in 2016 to $1.875 billion in 2021.143 On-field performance has improved as well, as after a last place finish in 2016 (their first since 1990), the Braves won four consecutive division titles from 2018 to 2021 and the 2021 World Series. Development within The Battery Atlanta has continued apace. In 2018 a $60 million second phase began, with the 140-room Aloft hotel, an upscale Silverspot movie theater, and a gourmet supermarket.144 A second major office building now contains ThyssenKrupp’s North American headquarters and the global headquarters of Papa John’s Pizza.145 ThyssenKrupp also has built a 420foot elevator qualification and test tower that is Cobb County’s tallest building.146 Residential units sold out quickly as millennials thought it was “the most happening place to be.”147 Among commercial tenants, bars and restaurants have done very well, with Antico Pizza owner Giovanni di Palma estimating overall sales running 30 to 40 percent above projections and beating expectations on nongame weekends. However, experience has also shown the area, according to di Palma, not to be “a retail-friendly environment,” as sales have lagged at The Battery Atlanta’s retailers.148 Results for Cobb County have been less clear-cut. Proponents claim that The Battery Atlanta is responsible for $1.1 billion of additional private investment, twenty-three thousand new jobs, the construction of five Class A office buildings

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in Cumberland, forty-two corporations moving into the Cumberland community improvement district (CID), and a population increase from seventeen thousand to thirty thousand in just four years.149 One study funded by the Cobb Chamber of Commerce attributed 13 percent of the 46 percent increase in Cumberland CID property values 2013 to 2017 to the stadium project.150 However, Kennesaw State University sports economist J. C. Bradbury has a very different perspective.151 Assessing proponents’ claims of an economic “home run,” Bradbury examined retail sales, tax collections, and property values.152 Rather than seeing evidence that the stadium was fueling property value growth, Bradbury found property values within the Cumberland CID to be 1 percent lower than otherwise expected because “Truist Park may have crowded out existing businesses that did not complement the stadium and associated development’s function, and new establishments were not sufficient to offset the losses.”153 Moreover, Bradbury argues that the data suggest that the new office buildings, jobs, and investment would have occurred regardless of the stadium’s presence.154 Bradbury’s investigation of retail sales and tax collections suggests that the substitution effect accounts for one-third of Braves-related sales tax income and that total Braves contributions and associated tax revenues cover just 40 percent of Cobb County’s nearly $25 million annual cost.155 Countywide, the stadium deal has had other political and economic consequences. County Commission chair Lee lost his reelection bid in 2016, while Lisa Cupid, the only commissioner to vote against the deal in 2013, is now chair. As the Braves’ revenues and team value increased substantially, in 2017 Cobb County spent nearly $30 million from its general fund and water fund to build infrastructure for Truist Park, while “revenues directly generated by the project didn’t come close to covering the county’s expenses.”156 These expenses were a strain on county finances, which, despite record tax assessments in 2017, necessitated significant reductions for public parks, nonprofits, and public libraries due to a $55 million deficit in its 2018 budget.157

The Battery Atlanta, Truist Park, and the Future of Baseball Stadium Design Assessing the Braves’ 2017 financial performance, Schuerholz seemingly suggested an emerging wave of stadium development, explaining “what Camden Yards was to baseball (then), [Truist] Park and The Battery have become.”158 While still too early to assess the prescience of Schuerholz’s observation, the proliferation of mallpark villages suggest he may be right. In 2016 the Texas Rangers announced they would be leaving Globe Life Park, which opened in 1994, to move across

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the street into the $1.1 billion Globe Life Field, which is attached to the Cordish-developed Texas Live!, a $250 million development project that includes two hundred thousand square feet of restaurant, retail, and entertainment venues, a three-hundred-room convention hotel with thirty-five-thousand square feet of meeting space, and an outdoor event pavilion with a five-thousand-person capacity.159 In 2018 the Oakland Athletics proposed a thirty-four-thousand-seat stadium, designed by the starchitect Bjarke Ingels Group, that would anchor redevelopment of the fifty-five-acre Howard Terminal on the Oakland waterfront with “3.3 million square feet of housing, 1.5 million square feet of commercial and office space, a hotel and a performance center.”160 In San Francisco, the Giants are “enhancing the ballpark & neighborhood experience” around Oracle Park by developing twenty-eight acres south of a stadium parking lot into two residential buildings, two commercial offices, and a waterfront park.161 In Anaheim, team owner Arte Moreno has an extensive development plan that includes more than five thousand residential units, seven million square feet of office, and one million square feet of retail, restaurants, and hotels on Angel Stadium’s 153-acre site.162 This only seems to be the beginning, as Santee explained, “Even most of our existing clubs that don’t have development rights are trying to get development rights, and they’re trying to develop projects. And it doesn’t really matter what era they were designed or constructed.”163 This new mode of stadium development has several positive and negative aspects. Unlike mallparks, mallpark villages ensure that economic development occurs outside the stadium as teams invest in the surrounding neighborhood. As such, they align the financial interests of team owners with the economic development priorities of the city. While mallparks would compete for visitor spending with other businesses in UEDs, mallpark villages seemingly reduce this problem. This can be seen in Cobb County, as The Battery Atlanta and Truist Park were central elements in the 81 percent growth in Braves’ revenue and the 59 percent increase in the team’s value over three years. While some of the $518 million in new revenue is attributable to an improved media contract, the Braves earned $91 million from The Battery Atlanta. Although property and tax revenues fall well short of Cobb County’s service on stadium debt, The Battery Atlanta has become a major year-round destination for recreation and entertainment in the MSA and is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in direct investment by Liberty Media. Whether Truist Park is responsible for additional development certainly can be debated, but it is a fact that ThyssenKrupp and Papa John’s Pizza have located major offices within The Battery Atlanta. Unlike AFCS and Turner Field, where development activity never materialized despite four decades of promises, Liberty Media’s commitments guaranteed that Cobb County’s investment would produce more than a baseball stadium as The Battery

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Atlanta has become one of the region’s most attractive new neighborhoods for businesses, residences, and recreation. While results in San Diego, St. Louis, and Atlanta show the promise of mallpark villages for the public, their experiences also raise several issues. First, firm commitments and timelines need to be incorporated into initial contracts. Lagging development in San Diego and St. Louis delayed construction of the commercial, retail, and residential elements having the most benefit for the public. The Battery Atlanta’s simultaneous opening not only has enabled Cobb to immediately receive new tax revenues but also could have been a factor in the decisions of ThyssenKrupp and Papa John’s Pizza to move to Cobb County and possibly impacted other development decisions. Second, questions surround the extent of the public’s financial exposure. Many public-private partnerships have been structured to provide the benefits of development to private actors, while the public bears the costs for projects that fail.164 In Cobb County, an accelerated approval process gave county commissioners little time to deeply examine a highly complex agreement and may have led to many questions being unasked. Additionally, while Liberty Media and John Malone may have large real estate holdings, most team owners have little experience in developing commercial real estate—a field notorious for high-profile and expensive failures. The public’s exposure to these financial risks is often masked by opaque agreements in which developers and lenders have received public guarantees and exacerbated by moral hazard as civic leaders may lack the financial restraint and political courage to allow one of these projects to fail. Longtime stadium critic Neil deMause worries that the Braves deal with Cobb County “could easily end up one of those rare lose-lose-lose situations [as the] County ends up taking a bath, the Braves end up investing a lot of money and not getting significantly more revenue out of it, and the fans have a worse experience.”165 Third, there are major questions related to the opportunity costs of these sizeable public investments. Cobb County’s deep conservatism and antipathy to taxation and government have resulted in chronically underfunded public services. Although Cobb raised property taxes by 16 percent in 2011, budgets remained tight, with annual deficits nearing $30 million.166 In 2013 such financial challenges led the county to lay off 182 teachers, furlough many others, and reduce the school calendar, and it placed the police department on the verge of “crisis” due to high turnover and low morale.167 While approving $5 million in additional public-safety spending was controversial, Cobb eagerly committed to $24.3 million annually to the Braves’ project despite recognizing that the most optimistic projections suggested no more than three-quarters would be covered by the Braves’ rent payments and incremental sales and property tax revenue

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from activity in Truist Park and The Battery Atlanta. The balance would be raised through tax increases that otherwise could have gone into the general fund to support other public needs such as parks and libraries that have recently suffered budget reductions. Fourth, as with many stadium deals, there are significant financial costs beyond construction. As game days can attract more than forty thousand people, Cobb has additional public safety expenses related to traffic control, fire and ambulance protection, and policing. During Truist Park’s construction, the county spent more than $6 million to build a new firehouse to service The Battery Atlanta, purchase enhanced emergency communications equipment to respond to potential stadium disasters, and acquire new patrol cars for the area.168 While ongoing expenses clearly include the additional costs to provide sufficient resources to protect public safety on game days, Cobb also needed to hire new police officers to ensure that events could be sufficiently staffed, without reducing resources in other parts of the county or having existing officers work overtime.169 Fifth, there are broader political issues and concerns related to civil liberties. As noted earlier, Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie criticize San Diego’s agreement for ceding public control of redevelopment to private enterprises, insufficient oversight, and utilizing substantial public resources for primarily private gain.170 Similar critiques could be made in Cobb, as the deal was described by local activist Rich Pellegrino as “a prime example of crony capitalism and back-room dealing”171 and, according to Common Cause Georgia’s executive director, William Perry, “this deal was signed, sealed and delivered before commissioners other than Tim Lee knew about it.”172 The process involved many problematic actions, including briefing commissioners about the deal in a manner that skirted Georgia’s Open Meeting Act, commissioners having just fifteen days to review deal before first approval, releasing the agreement at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday before a holiday weekend and giving commissioners one business day to study it before voting on it, and having deal supporters line up early to monopolize all twelve public speaking slots at a key meeting in May 2014.173 This process led to three ethics complaints being filed against commission chair Lee.174 Beyond cities making themselves vulnerable to threats from team owners, mallpark villages “re-envision the city as a privately controlled series of spaces that mimic the traditional public space of the city.”175 As discussed throughout this book, mallparks have produced price-stratified experiences for consumers and excluded many traditional fans. Mallpark villages impose this consumption orientation on the surrounding landscape as visitors are required to engage in some form of economic behavior to legitimate their presence. The Battery Atlanta has a twelve-item code of conduct (see below) “expressly” prohibiting loitering and solicitation (including the driving of vehicles with advertising wraps,

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logos, and decals), as well as tobacco and drug use, abusive language, loud music, the use of drones and remote-controlled vehicles, “inappropriate” clothing, distributing materials, conducting interviews, and demonstrating without approval. As The Battery Atlanta reserves the right to refuse entry to and remove anyone who “is being unruly or disruptive or violates this Code of Conduct,” guests are “encouraged” to report violators to The Battery Atlanta security. Sixth, there are social concerns, as class-based exclusion within mallpark villages can be further complicated by cultural and racial politics, especially in light

FIGURE 19.  The Battery Atlanta code of conduct, Cumberland, Georgia.

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of Atlanta’s long history of disproportionate negative development impacts on its Black community. This can be seen in the team’s move from Turner Field, where its construction and that of AFCS resulted in the displacement of historically black residents, to a suburban site twelve miles away from downtown that lacks sufficient service by public transportation. As Jay Bookman notes, this resulted from Cobb residents resisting the extension of MARTA “out of the belief that by doing so they would keep the city’s black majority at a safe distance.”176 With public transportation considered essential to ease Truist Park’s anticipated traffic problems, the head of the Cobb Taxpayers Association worried that the stadium would be a “Trojan horse” for MARTA and the racialized “crime” it would presumably bring.177 Seventh, even as the Braves are moving to the suburbs, this case raises significant questions regarding the symbolic reconstruction of urban space. As described by Goldberger, a generation after Baltimore reconnected baseball to the energy of the city, ballparks have begun to move in yet another direction, blurring the distinction between the real city and the artifice of the ballpark. The private realm of the ballpark has pushed its way into the public realm of the surrounding city, competing with it in places like St. Louis’s Ballpark Village . . . ; in Atlanta, it has obliterated all traces of the real city in favor of the artificial neighborhood of the Battery, which is, for all intents and purposes, a theme park version of a city.178 While this book already has already discussed the problematic aspects of UEDs and mallparks in creating theme-park versions of cities, the implications of The Battery Atlanta are of a much greater magnitude. Although The Battery Atlanta’s site was undeveloped, the ambitions of its designers seem similar to those of the urban planners who produced the raze-and-rebuild urban renewal schemes of mid-twentieth century and the Disney “imagineers” producing hermetically sealed theme parks and wholly formed, corporately governed towns (see chapter 2). In creating an “artificial neighborhood,” The Battery Atlanta designers attempt to foreclose alternatives and reduce urban life to a highly regulated set of consumption experiences. It would not be surprising that as teams receive development control over the neighborhoods surrounding stadiums, they also attempt to impose a similarly ordered ersatz urban environment. This would be in marked contrast to the construction of Camden Yards and other urban mallparks whose designers attempted to integrate stadiums into spaces whose features had accumulated over time. Finally, as the Braves are the first MLB team since 1972 to move into a stadium farther outside of the urban core than its predecessor, mallpark villages

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may revitalize intraurban competition for teams between suburbs and downtowns. As research showed sports venues failed to generate ancillary development, few suburban governments bid against center cities for teams during the entrepreneurial period, with rising facility costs difficult to manage within their comparatively smaller capital budgets and lower debt limits. With mallpark villages promising hundreds of millions in additional investments toward total development commitments approaching $1 billion, these projects are seemingly more viable, despite having much higher costs and risks. With mallpark villages offering teams new revenues and possibly rendering postmodern stadiums economically obsolete, team owners are more likely to demand mixed-use development rights from a wider pool of possible governmental bidders, both within and outside their markets. However, without careful planning and negotiations, the public’s benefits may be illusory.

10 MAKING BASEBALL GREAT AGAIN

In the “golden age of sports” of the 1920s, baseball, boxing, and horse racing were America’s dominant spectator sports as they anchored the sports media and possessed an important position within American culture. A century later, boxing and horse racing sit at the margins, receiving attention only for their biggest events and highest-profile tragedies. Of the three, only baseball seems to have maintained some cultural salience and economic vibrancy as a $10 billion industry at the major league level, with successful franchises in the country’s biggest cities, 120 smaller cities hosting affiliated minor league teams, and dozens more with teams in unaffiliated and independent professional leagues and an expanding international presence. However, with many lurking dangers, baseball’s status as a leading spectator sport is not guaranteed to continue. Football at both the professional and collegiate levels receive higher television ratings. Basketball is a much more popular participatory sport, especially among youth. The baseball industry also faces internal challenges: increasingly contentious relations between players and owners after a quarter century of labor peace; many franchises not fielding competitive teams, as they minimize payrolls to earn high profits while they supposedly build for the future; high prices making it difficult for the next generation of fans to afford attendance; and a slow pace and statistically driven strategies detracting from enjoyment of the game. This is not the first time that baseball’s status as America’s national pastime has been challenged. Doomsayers have been predicting baseball’s demise for generations. The last time baseball was under similar threat was during the mid1990s, following labor troubles that ended the season in 1994 and delayed the 218

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season in 1995. Beyond achieving labor peace and various economic reforms that reduced revenue disparities between large- and small-market teams, baseball was saved through appeals to nostalgia: the (juiced) long balls of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds harking back to those of legendary sluggers Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays; the work ethic embodied by Cal Ripken Jr.’s iron man streak that passed Lou Gehrig’s supposedly unbreakable record of 2,130 consecutive games played; and the mallparks that presented games in the “right” settings—theme parks designed as faux early twentiethcentury buildings, complete with rides, characters, spectacular displays, and countless ways to spend money on food, souvenirs, and entertaining experiences. In its nostalgic appeals, baseball attempts to present the sport in the “appropriate” manner that recalls a very different America—one captured in blackand-white film and photographs. In this America, native-born, Protestant, heterosexual white males were dominant in business and politics and defined the culture. Cities were ethnic rather than racial, where (European) immigrants were working hard at their jobs during the day and working hard at night to learn English and American social norms to assimilate into the larger culture. As elite men occupied athletic fields, university classrooms, corner offices, and the halls of political power, working-class men built America on factory floors and through grand infrastructure projects, while also defending freedom, first on the battlefields of World War I and World War II and then during the Cold War. Meanwhile, women raised children and made sure dinner was on the table when their husbands returned from work. There was the centrality of a genteel Protestant ethos in which the country’s Christian faith was generally assumed, since economic and social advancement required embracing the Protestant work ethic at the core of the American Dream. Everyone accepted their roles within the nuclear family and knew their places within society. However, the appeal to this mythic America celebrates a time when the country only worked for wealthy white, heterosexual, Christian males, whose control was assumed to be natural and beneficial. It ignores the exploitation and various forms of violence committed against other groups that were necessary to establish and maintain this social order. White males of other religions and non– Northern European ethnicities had to conform to the standards set by the AngloSaxon Protestants. Refugees fleeing religious oppression were denied entry and returned to suffer under tyrannical and genocidal regimes. Homosexuals had to hide and deny their sexual desires, lest they be deemed social deviants and cast out from their families, jobs, and communities. Women and people of color were marginalized, forced into subservience, policed, and silenced through laws, cultural norms, and social customs. Blacks suffered Jim Crow segregation and violence in the South and de facto segregation elsewhere, while predatory and

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discriminatory practices denied them opportunities for meaningful political participation, to build wealth, and to attain social advancement. Women were burdened in a patriarchal system that expected them to care for men and nurture children, where they had limited control over their bodies, because birth control was difficult to get and abortion illegal, while they faced barriers that prevented most from entering professions and managerial suites. They could not even acquire credit cards without their husband’s permission. The ballparks of early twentieth-century America celebrated within mallparks were spaces that produced, reproduced, and celebrated these inequities. These were spaces designed for men, in which women often had insufficient restroom facilities and were welcomed reluctantly with promotions such as “Ladies’ Day.” Owners exploited the labor of players through the reserve clause, which essentially bound them for life to their teams and kept salaries low. Baseball fans may have celebrated first-generation Americans such as Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg, and Lou Gehrig as avatars of assimilation, but teams and the sport instituted formal and informal codes of conduct to control their behavior on and off the field. Ballparks remained segregated spaces where owners and executives excluded Black players from MLB rosters, collected ticket and concession revenues from Black fans (often limiting them to segregated sections), and profited from the rent charged to Negro leagues tenants. Nostalgic memories of baseball’s past seek to obscure these forms of domination and violence. Constructed on marginal land in working-class, ethnic communities and abandoned during the 1950s and 1960s as part of white flight to the suburbs, ballparks are now remembered as neighborhood anchors in which all gathered and were treated as equals. Jackie Robinson Day commemorations transform highly segregated playing fields into spaces that helped lead American society to broader social equality. Tributes to great players who played their entire careers with one franchise, such as Stan Musial, Walter Johnson, Brooks Robinson, and Ted Williams, reframe the reality of their contractual servitude and economic exploitation into celebrations of their loyalty to city and team (as if they ever had a choice). Whether such spatial practices were intentional or happenstance, they resonated in a neoliberal America whose author’s rise was predicated upon nostalgic appeals to a better past. After the challenges of the 1960s and 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s America once again reinforced the dominant position of white males within culture, business, and politics. Reaganite entertainment in movies such as Top Gun, Rambo, Rocky IV, and Die Hard celebrated violence, strength, patriotism, and patriarchy. Market-focused public policies of tax cuts, deregulation, and antiunionism ensured that the already rich and powerful would receive a disproportionate share of the wealth produced by economic growth, while cultural

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shifts lauded celebrity CEOs such as Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, and Donald Trump as titans of American industry to be celebrated and emulated. Politics forestalled progress on social justice and equality as America built up its military while cutting programs offering financial support, opportunities, and services to the poor, the working class, and people of color. Just as Reaganite politics sought to reinscribe white male hegemony, it blamed the country’s problems on those who fought for justice and equality in the 1960s and 1970s: the Blacks of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminists seeking to escape domestic roles and pass the Equal Rights Amendment, members of the LGBTQ+ community demanding recognition, Latinx Americans and immigrants insisting upon acceptance as they sought better lives and economic opportunities, Native Americans challenging their marginalization to reservations and presentations within popular culture, and unions that fought for higher wages and safer workplaces. In the zero-sum conservative politics dominant since the 1980s, programs that were antiracist, antimisogynist, antihomophobic, and promised progress for marginalized groups always were perceived to come at the expense of hardworking white males, who did not create or benefit from their so-called white privilege. In this regard, Trump’s political rise should not be seen as aberration but as the latest iteration of the neoliberal conservative politics dominant in the United States since the 1970s.1 As argued throughout this book, mallpark design has concretized this neoliberal economic order in much the same way that cathedrals and skyscrapers expressed the dominant economic, political, social, and cultural orders and served as spaces for capital accumulation for medieval Europe and mid-twentieth century America and Europe. Following the principles directing shopping mall and theme park design, baseball stadiums have changed from spaces of mass consumption, in which superstadiums provided almost all attendees ostensibly with the same experience, to mallparks designed to facilitate elite consumption of differentiated experiences. Mallparks eliminated thousands of seats in distant locations with low-priced tickets that were accessible to working-class fans, as they emphasized consumption activities for upper-class patrons and corporate executives with upgraded amenities and experiences in exclusive suites and club sections. Previously, these individuals may have interacted with their employees or the working poor while waiting in lines to enter the stadium, concession stands, or restrooms, but mallparks provide these wealthiest patrons with exclusive parking lots, dedicated entry gates, special elevators and escalators, and entry-controlled areas. Just as wealth gaps have expanded to their widest levels in the United States since the 1920s, mallpark designers produce markedly different experiences determined by an attendee’s ability and willingness to pay higher prices.

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The neoliberal economic and Reaganite political frames that have dominated American society since the 1980s are in the process of collapse. The financial crisis of 2008 showed the perils of unfettered capitalism as irresponsible bankers, investors, and financial markets produced an economic collapse that caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes while those causing the crash received bailouts and went unpunished. Growing financial inequality emerged as an issue as income remained flat and economic insecurity rose for most people, while the richest 1 percent claimed most of wealth created in America. While populist backlash to growing inequality and cultural changes contributed to Trump’s election in 2016 as he promised to “Make America Great Again,” populist rhetoric was used to mask the Trump administration’s much deeper commitment to neoliberal economic policies.2 In its revanchist politics, Trump’s presidency replaced the dog-whistle political communications of the conservative movement since the 1960s with bullhorn appeals to racism, nationalism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia. Fortunately, the ability of Trump to translate his authoritarian impulses into durable policy was limited by his administration’s general incompetence, which tragically worsened the twin public health and economic crises associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. When a record 158 million people voted in the 2020 presidential election, the American people overwhelmingly demanded change, as Trump was defeated by more than seven million votes. However, the legacies of Trumpism will take many years to become fully appreciated. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who are eager to lead a conservative revolution in American jurisprudence, encouraged legislators write laws to disenfranchise millions, and emboldened an authoritarian movement that had previously been marginalized within American political discourse. All of this calls into question the commitment to democracy of American conservatives, who only seem to accept legal decisions, laws, government policies, and election outcomes conforming to their values, beliefs, and preferences, while denying the legitimacy of alternatives. Yet Trumpism has also inspired a mass mobilization of progressive groups to protect democracy, promote social and economic justice, and fight against racism, nationalism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia. As described in this book, whatever political order emerges from this clash will shape the production of space within the next generation of baseball stadiums, which may soon emerge as mallparks age and leases expire.

Demanding a Right to the Stadium While examining the contemporary moment and the contexts and conditions of its production may cause people to become discouraged about the present and

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worry about the future, Lefebvre’s oeuvre and cultural studies practice offer hope by demanding that people imagine and work toward a better future. As part of his vision for an equitable society, Lefebvre discussed the “total man” who would be dealienated and could create the conditions of his existence without being subjected to exploitative relationships.3 The highly gendered language of midtwentieth-century French philosophy put aside, such a society would empower all people to realize their potential and live meaningful lives in conditions they help to generate.4 With people determining the conditions of their existence “by the action of will and desire,” they would live and govern themselves within a free community in which they could not be excluded or exploited.5 This society of the total man may be an unobtainable utopian ideal, but efforts to create a better society begin by asking “what could be” rather than simply accepting what is. As such, this book concludes by suggesting alternative considerations to underlie conceptions of space and spatial practices within the spatial production of baseball stadiums. Currently sports franchises are run as for-profit enterprises, with owners and leagues possessing almost complete control over where teams play and leveraging this power toward securing large subsidies for stadium construction, control over stadium designs, authority in stadium operations, and development rights in surrounding neighborhoods. As an alternative, teams could be owned by their communities in a manner similar to that of the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. As a nonprofit corporation, the Packers do not pay dividends to its 361,311 shareholders, who derive intangible benefits of enjoyment and civic pride from the team’s presence and performance rather than receiving a financial return.6 Under this structure, the Packers organization does not operate to maximize its revenue and cannot blackmail the city into subsidizing its operations or its facility. This is not to suggest that the organization has kept ticket prices inexpensive or has not been aggressively seeking ways to increase revenue. The Packers are developing Titletown—a shopping and entertainment destination outside Lambeau Field that, when completed, will feature many restaurants, a hotel, nearly 250 residences, and office space.7 A structure in which all franchises are nonprofit entities owned by their communities would represent a radical departure from the status quo because leagues and teams would operate in the public’s interests rather than toward the financial and ego-driven goals of team owners within the present system. Although entrepreneurialism that elevates capital concerns above all else currently defines urban governance, an alternative mode of governance based on Lefebvre’s “right to the city” would create a much more inclusive city. According to Lefebvre, the right to the city would allow people to fully participate in urban life, enjoy full use and appropriation of urban space, and would elevate

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use value over exchange value.8 The right to the city suggests a radical restructuring of urban life with different forms of political, economic, and social relations in space, as people would have the right to creatively live, work, play, represent, characterize, and occupy the city.9 In contrast to neoliberal, entrepreneurial governance, such a city would elevate the inhabitant over the visitor by directly investing in public infrastructure and services, rather than hoping private developers will act, or by offering those developers significant financial incentives and political control. Governance guided by a right to the city could still seek partnerships with private industry, but agreements would have to be more equitable in terms of control and the allocations of risks and benefits. A derivative “right to the stadium” would demand more inclusive stadium spaces. Such a right would transform both stadium design and operations as stadiums prioritize attendee experiences over revenue generation. The stadium design process should be opened to include users to a much greater extent. Currently, as team representatives, public officials, and architects pursue their particular interests in stadium design, fans have been generally excluded from such discussions, beyond focus groups intended to determine how to get them to spend more money. The power of a more collaborative approach could be seen in the renovation of Fenway Park (see chapter 6), as a late 1990s replacement plan was resisted by the SFP group of fans that developed alternatives to address the ballpark’s perceived limitations. After the team’s sale to owners who announced they first wanted to determine whether Fenway Park could be saved before pursuing a new facility, Janet Marie Smith met with SFP leaders, carefully considered their recommendations, and adopted many in the ballpark’s renovation. A right to the stadium would go beyond this kind of consultation as users would be included in all aspects of the design process and possess power equivalent to that of team and government officials. Beyond informing design decisions, the new conceptions of space related to a right to the stadium would be concretized within the built environment and shape new spatial practices in which baseball stadiums once again become sites for mass consumption. As described by Zimbalist, “it’s one of the great ironies of these publicly financed stadiums—people are paying for stadiums that some of them can’t afford to enter.”10 Rather than pricing out fans like Wild Bill Hagy (see chapter 5) or Irving Zeiger (see chapter 6), spatial practices would recognize the value of commitment, exuberance, and loyalty and provide maximum access to the “best” fans, who would most appreciate such experiences rather than just the people who can pay for such privileges. Beyond expanding access for fans, local governments should require meaningful efforts from teams in providing more free tickets to lower-income communities and expanding general access to the sport by supporting youth leagues and communal recreation facilities.

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During the later innings of games, rigid enforcement of ticket locations should ease to allow people to move to unoccupied seats in prime locations, where they can develop a deeper appreciation for the sport. Teams could broadcast more games on free media platforms, while stadiums could offer more opportunities to attend games at reasonable costs. Each of these different spatial practices are based on reconceiving the relationships between teams and their supporters, local governments and the broader community. As new spatial practices work to make baseball stadiums more inclusive, the stories told within stadiums should include more voices and reckon with baseball history rather than uncritically celebrating it. Although MLB has been reluctant to acknowledge the active roles played by the sport’s leaders in the propagation of baseball’s sixty-two-year color bar, this process has begun as MLB has removed the names of baseball segregationists Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis and Sporting News publisher A. G. Spink from the sport’s awards. Individual teams have begun this process as well, with the Cleveland franchise changing its name from Indians to Guardians, the Red Sox asking the city of Boston to remove long-term owner Tom Yawkey’s name from the street bordering Fenway Park (see chapter 6), and the Twins removing the statue of Calvin Griffith, who explained that the team’s move from Washington to Minnesota was racially motivated (see chapter 7), during the social justice protests of 2020. As part of this reckoning with baseball’s racist practices, stadium narratives should do more to celebrate the great Negro leagues players denied access to MLB’s fields. This process is underway throughout the sport. Since the 1970s, the Baseball Hall of Fame has admitted thirty-four players and executives primarily associated with the Negro leagues. In 2020 MLB officially recognized the seven Negro leagues as having “major” league status for the purposes of official records. Many mallparks do include Negro leagues photos, memorabilia, and artifacts within their museums, interpretive historical displays, and art packages but leave them underrepresented by their highest honor: a statue. As mallparks honor baseball greats in steel and bronze, just two celebrate players who starred in the Negro leagues, Josh Gibson in Washington’s Nationals Park, and James “Cool Papa” Bell at St. Louis’s Busch Stadium. In fact, there are fewer statues honoring Negro leagues players today than a decade ago, as Pittsburgh’s PNC Park removed seven such statues from its Legacy Square after the 2014 season (see chapter 4). Although most mallpark statues honor individuals closely associated with the home team, Negro leaguers such as Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston, and Rube Foster were very important in the baseball histories of Kansas City, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, respectively, and should receive greater recognition. (In fact, Paige and Charleston statues had been in PNC Park’s Legacy Square but were sold in a 2015 auction.)

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New spatial practice would also incorporate a broader range of public uses as stadiums, which have received public subsidies valued into the hundreds of millions of dollars, are utilized as public infrastructure. As argued by Washington Post columnist Kevin Blackistone, “they don’t have to be just sandboxes for billionaire sports team owners, millionaire athletic laborers and the fans who can afford the entertainment they put on.”11 Because baseball stadiums are used for baseball on fewer than one-quarter of the days in a year, the public could utilize these large facilities in many ways that were not intended by designers. Large kitchens designed to cook food for nearly fifty-thousand attendees easily can be repurposed to feed the hungry and homeless. As large venues designed to be easily reached through mass transit and private transportation, stadiums can facilitate civic engagement as sites for voting and political rallies. During public health crises, stadiums can be used as sites for mass testing and vaccinations, while during natural disasters large parking lots can become gathering places and transit hubs for evacuation and staging areas for relief efforts, with the stadiums themselves serving as shelters of last resort. More prosaically, stadiums can help improve the urban environment by being used as public parks in built-up neighborhoods, utilizing unused spaces and rooftops as urban farms, or incorporating large solar panel arrays to produce energy for their neighborhoods.12 Such uses are not fantastical, as many sports venues have been used in these ways during extraordinary circumstances over the past two decades: chef José Andrés has fed the homeless from numerous stadiums and arenas, Atlanta’s State Farm Arena was an early voting site during the 2020 presidential election, stadiums and arenas responded to the COVID-19 crisis by offering large-scale testing and hosting vaccination clinics, and the New Orleans Superdome and Houston Astrodome provided tens of thousands with shelter during Hurricane Katrina. In many such cases, sports organizations have been praised for demonstrating their civic mindedness, as if opening a facility built and owned by the public represents a tremendous public service rather than an expected obligation. Such a perspective would require fundamental realignments of the relationships between cities and teams, teams and their fans, and cities and their inhabitants and result in reconceiving what baseball stadiums are and what they can be. While it may be difficult to change the broader economic, political, cultural, and social relations that shape how people think about, design, and use baseball stadiums, Lefebvre refused to accept the status quo as inevitable or unchangeable. Despite the exploitation, alienation, and problems of the status quo, optimism infused Lefebvre’s oeuvre as he believed that people had the power to transform their conditions and create a better future, often telling others to “demander

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l’impossible pour avoir tout le possible”—“demand the impossible to get all that is possible.”13 In this regard, local governance guided by the right to the city and facility design and operation guided by a right to the stadium may both be impossible today, but progress toward such goals would result in cities and stadiums becoming much more inclusive and equitable and represent a substantial improvement over the status quo.

Notes

1. LEADING OFF

  1. “Mall of America,” Bloomington Convention and Visitors Bureau, 2021, https:// www.bloomingtonmn.org/things-to-do/mallofamerica.   2. Jon Goss, “Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 89, no. 1 (1999): 50.   3. “Target Field by the Numbers,” Twins Magazine (Opening Day 2010: Special Commemorative Issue), 2010, 1.   4. In 2018 Golden Glove was moved to ease entry into Target Field. “Target Field by the Numbers,” 1.   5. In 2019 the Metropolitan Club was closed and redecorated. It reopened as the Truly on Deck restaurant and was opened to all attendees.   6. George S. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of Consumption, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2010), 7.   7. Marieke Van Rooij, “Stadium Fever,” in The Stadium: The Architecture of Mass Sport, ed. Michelle Provoost (Rotterdam: NAI, 2000), 124–29.   8. Bill Shannon and George Kalinsky, The Ballparks (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975), 12; Paul Goldberger, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 319–20.   9. Michael T. Friedman and Cathy van Ingen, “Bodies in Space: Spatializing Physical Cultural Studies,” Sociology of Sport Journal 28, no. 1 (2011): 89. 10. Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9; Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (London: Continuum, 2004), 8–9. 11. George S. Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society, 6th ed. (Los Angeles: Pine Forge, 2011), 14–16. 12. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 95–96. 13. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 49–50. 14. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 299–301. 15. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 24–45. 16. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xviii–xix; David L. Andrews, “Sport, Culture, and Late Capitalism,” in Marxism, Cultural Studies and Sport, ed. Ian McDonald and Ben Carrington (London: Routledge, 2009), 228; David L. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again: The Uber-Sport Assemblage, Neoliberalism, and the Trump Conjuncture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 32–39. 17. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1998), 76–77; B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, rev. ed. (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2011), 1–3. 18. Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 77. 19. Pine and Gilmore, Experience Economy, 33–36. 20. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 6–9. 21. Pine and Gilmore, Experience Economy, 1–2. 229

230       NOTES TO PAGES 8–12

22. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 218–22. 23. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005), 90–93. 24. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 5–9. 25. David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” in Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography, ed. David Harvey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 346–49; Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (2002): 394–95. 26. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 24. 27. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity. 28. Leslie Sklair, “Iconic Architecture and Capitalist Globalization,” City 10, no. 1 (2006): 148; Donald McNeill, The Global Architect: Firms, Fame and Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2009), 133–35. 29. Timothy A. Gibson, “Selling City Living: Urban Branding Campaigns, Class Power and the Civic Good,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 260. 30. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 14–16. 31. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 6. 32. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 98, 103, 120, 129. 33. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 7. 34. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 151–55. 35. Susan S. Fainstein and David Gladstone, “Evaluating Urban Tourism,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 22; Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” in Judd and Fainstein, Tourist City, 36–39. 36. Michael Sorkin, “Introduction: Variations on a Theme Park,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), xi–xv; John. Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis (London: Routledge, 1998), 3–4; Dennis R. Judd, ed., The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 3. 37. William S. Kowinski, The Malling of America: Travels in the United States of Shopping (New York: Xlibris, 2002), 90–91. 38. James J. Farrell, One Nation under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 31. 39. Scott A. Lukas, “The Themed Space,” in The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, ed. Scott A. Lukas (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 2. 40. Philip Bess, “Mallpark: New Comiskey Park and the State of the Art,” in Inland Architecture: Subterranean Essays on Moral Order and Formal Order in Chicago (Oxford, OH: Interalia Design Books, 2000), 84. 41. Two of the twenty-two mallparks that opened after Camden Yards already have been replaced. 42. Cooperstown is the site of the Baseball Hall of Fame due to the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball there. Dyersville was the location for the 1988 film Field of Dreams. John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1994), 151–52; Charles F. Springwood, Cooperstown to Dyersville: A Geography of Baseball Nostalgia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 2–3. 43. Philip Kennicott, “This Diamond Isn’t a Gem: Nationals Park Gives Fans Plenty, but Its Bland Face Is a Muffed Chance,” Washington Post, March 31, 2008. 44. Michael Gershman, Diamonds: The Evolution of the Ballpark from Elysian Fields to Camden Yards (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 12; John Bale, “The Spatial Development of the Modern Stadium,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 28, no. 2/3 (1993): 124–25.

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45. George S. Ritzer and Todd Stillman, “The Postmodern Ballpark as a Leisure Setting: Enchantment and Simulated De-McDonaldization,” Leisure Sciences 23, no. 2 (2001): 99–100. 46. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark,” 110. 47. Gershman, Diamonds, 87. Due to the proximity of homes that provided excellent views of the field, several homeowners bordering Shibe Park’s outfield had set up wildcat bleachers on their rooftops. As the Athletics struggled financially during the Great Depression, the team had to compete with these neighbors for ticket sales. During the winter following the 1934 season, the Athletics extended the outfield wall’s height to fully block the view from the rooftops. 48. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark,” 101. 49. John Horne, “Architects, Stadia and Sport Spectacles: Notes on the Role of Architects in the Building of Sport Stadia and Making of World-Class Cities,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 46, no. 2 (2010): 213. 50. Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 195. 51. Benjamin D. Lisle, Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 64–65. 52. Benjamin S. Flowers, Sport and Architecture (New York: Routledge, 2017), 16; Mark S. Rosentraub, Major League Winners: Using Sports and Cultural Centers as Tools for Economic Development (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2010), 34; Charles C. Euchner, “Tourism and Sports: The Serious Competition for Play,” in Judd and Fainstein, Tourist City, 215–16. 53. Robert A. Baade and Richard F. Dye, “An Analysis of the Economic Rationale for Public Subsidization of Sports Stadiums,” Annals of Regional Science 22, no. 2 (1988): 37; Robert A. Baade and Allen R. Sanderson, “The Employment Effect of Teams and Sports Facilities,” in Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, ed. Roger G. Noll and Andrew Zimbalist (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 93; Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys, “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion for Sports Franchises, Stadiums, and Mega-events?,” Econ Journal Watch 5, no. 3 (2008): 301; Xia Feng and Brad R. Humphreys, “Assessing the Economic Impact of Sport Facilities on Residential Property Values: A Spatial Hedonic Approach,” Journal of Sport Economics 19, no. 2 (2018): 189. 54. Timothy S. Chapin, “Sports Facilities as Urban Redevelopment Catalysts: Baltimore’s Camden Yards and Cleveland’s Gateway,” Journal of the American Planning Association 70, no. 2 (2004): 207; Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 35–44; John L. Crompton, “Economic Impact Analysis of Sports Facilities and Events: Eleven Sources of Misapplication,” Journal of Sport Management 9, no. 1 (1995): 26–29. 55. Michael N. Danielson, Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 110–12; Bruce K. Johnson, Peter A. Groothuis, and John C. Whitehead, “The Value of Public Goods Generated by a Major League Sports Team: The CVM Approach,” Journal of Sports Economics 2, no. 1 (2001): 15. 56. John Bale, Sport, Space, and the City (Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn, 2001), 94–132; John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist, “The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 3 (2000): 109. 57. Peter Eisinger, “The Politics of Bread and Circuses,” Urban Affairs Review 35, no. 3 (2000): 329; Veronica Z. Kalich, “A Public Choice Perspective on the Subsidization of Private Industry: A Case Study of Three Cities,” Journal of Urban Affairs 20, no. 2 (1998): 217. 58. Michael T. Friedman and Daniel S. Mason, “A Stakeholder Approach to Understanding Economic Development Decision Making: Public Subsidies for Professional Sport Facilities,” Economic Development Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2004): 244–45. 59. Daniel S. Mason and Ernest A. N. Buist, “ ‘Domed’ to Fail? Diverging Stakeholder Interests in a Stadium Referendum,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 6 (2013): 11–15.

232       NOTES TO PAGES 13–16

60. Robert C. Trumpbour, The New Cathedrals: Politics and Media in the History of Stadium Construction, Sports and Entertainment (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 59–69; Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein, Public Dollars, Private Stadiums: The Battle over Building Sports Stadiums (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 12. 61. Clyde Brown and David M. Paul, “The Campaign by Cincinnati Business Interests for Strong Mayors and Sports Stadia,” Social Science Journal 37, no. 2 (2000): 170; Friedman and Mason, “Stakeholder Approach,” 247. 62. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 8. 63. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport; Bale, Sport, Space, and the City; John Bale, Sports Geography, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003); John Bale and Olof Moen, eds., The Stadium and the City (Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1995); John Bale and Patricia Vertinsky, eds., Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience (London: Routledge, 2004). 64. Christopher T. Gaffney, Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Natalie Koch, Critical Geographies of Sport: Space, Power and Sport in Global Perspective, Routledge Critical Studies in Sport (London: Routledge, 2017), 4–6; Sybille Frank and Silke Steets, Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment (Milton Park, UK: Routledge, 2010), 6–8; Anouk Belanger, “Sports Venues and the Spectacularization of Urban Spaces in North America: The Case of the Molson Centre in Montreal,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 35, no. 3 (2000): 378. 65. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Part II: Paradigm and Perspectives in Contention,” in The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005), 187. 66. Lawrence Grossberg, “Cultural Studies: What’s in a Name? (One More Time),” in Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 255. 67. Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 53; Jennifer Daryl Slack, “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 113. 68. Grossberg, “Cultural Studies,” 254. 69. Friedman and van Ingen, “Bodies in Space,” 89; Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 160. 70. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, xxiv–xxvi; Cathy van Ingen, “Geographies of Gender, Sexuality and Race,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 38, no. 2 (2003): 202. 71. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 72. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 26, 417. 73. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 417. 74. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 24. 75. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 116, emphasis in original. 76. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 109. 77. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 104–5. 78. Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1999), 167. 79. Van Ingen, “Geographies of Gender, Sexuality and Race,” 202–3. 80. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 358. 81. Shields, Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle, 167. 82. Ricky Lee Allen, “The Socio-Spatial Making and Marking of ‘Us’: Toward a Critical Postmodern Spatial Theory of Difference and Community,” Social Identities 5, no. 3 (1999): 259.

NOTES TO PAGES 16–26      233

  83. Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.   84. Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?,” Social Text 16 (1986): 47.   85. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 35–36.   86. Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre, 109–10; Stuart Elden, “Politics, Philosophy, Geography: Henri Lefebvre in Recent Anglo-American Scholarship,” Antipode 33, no. 5 (2001): 815.   87. Lefebvre, Production of Space; Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 189.   88. Henri Lefebvre, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” in Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman (London: Continuum, 2003), 113.   89. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 38.   90. Lefebvre, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” 117.   91. Lefebvre, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” 117.   92. Lefebvre, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” 117.   93. Lefebvre, “Perspectives on Rural Sociology,” 117.   94. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 65.   95. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, vol. 2 (London: Verso, 2002), 129; David L. Andrews, “Toward a Physical Cultural Studies” (paper, Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 2006).   96. Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre, 6–7.   97. In 2009 the sport facility design group of Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, HOK Sport, participated in a managers’ buyout and named its new firm Populous. Though it remained essentially the same company with most of the same individuals, it will be identified as “HOK Sport” in relation to events occurring before the managers’ buyout and “Populous” in relation to events occurring afterward.   98. In the interest of full disclosure, Washington Nationals owner Ted Lerner was one of my grandfather’s business partners in the construction of Wheaton Plaza and Tysons Corner Center, and Lerner continues to credit my grandfather as being his mentor in commercial real estate. Although the Lerner family owns the Nationals and Lerner Enterprises has made significant investments near Nationals Park, chapter 7 does not examine the team’s or the Lerners’ role in the redevelopment of Near Southeast.   99. Goldberger, Ballpark, x. 100. Goldberger, Ballpark, x. 2. PRODUCING CONSUMPTION SPACE

  1. Henry Kraus, Gold Was the Mortar: The Economics of Cathedral Building (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 1; Lefebvre, Production of Space, 220.   2. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 256.   3. Kraus, Gold Was the Mortar, 33.   4. Shields, Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle, 160.   5. Van Ingen, “Geographies of Gender,” 202–3.   6. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 358.   7. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38.   8. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 77; Jameson, Postmodernism, 4.   9. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 39.   10. Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness, Research in Planning and Design (London: Pion, 1976), 35; Sklair, “Iconic Architecture,”148; Edward C. Relph, The Modern Urban Landscape: 1880 to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 171.

234       NOTES TO PAGES 26–29

11. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 120–21; Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 17. 12. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 145–46; Relph, Place and Placelessness, 17. 13. Karl B. Raitz, “Perception of Sport Landscapes and Gratification in the Sport Experience,” Sport Place 1, no. 1 (1987): 7–8; Tuan, Topophilia, 4; Relph, Place and Placelessness, 67. 14. Ada Louise Huxtable, The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (New York: New Press, 1997), 128; Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 98–104. 15. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 71–74. 16. Huxtable, Unreal America, 129. 17. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 99. 18. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 98. 19. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape. 20. Reyner Banham, Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 17. 21. Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, trans. Robert Bononno, ed. Lukasz Stanek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 54; Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 109. 22. Banham, Age of the Masters, 18–22. 23. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 158. 24. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), 104–5; Huxtable, Unreal America, 118. 25. Marc Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), 85–86; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 89–92. 26. Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 8–9. 27. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 71; Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 149. 28. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 148; Relph, Place and Placelessness, 143; Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), 73–75. 29. Huxtable, Unreal America, 159; Jameson, Postmodernism, 39–44. 30. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 95. 31. Mike Davis, “Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism,” New Left Review 151 (May/June 1985): 109. 32. Huxtable, Unreal America, 118. 33. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 111. 34. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 14–16. 35. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 9–20; Pine and Gilmore, Experience Economy, 17. 36. Lisa Penaloza, “Just Doing It: A Visual Ethnographic Study of Spectacular Consumption Behavior at Nike Town,” Consumption, Markets and Culture 2, no. 4 (1998): 338. 37. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 57; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 17. 38. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 81; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 14. 39. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 99; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 17. 40. Ritzer, McDonaldization of Society, 118; Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (London: SAGE, 2004), 2. 41. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 89. 42. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 143. 43. Auge, Non-places, 94. 44. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 80–82.

NOTES TO PAGES 29–32      235

45. George S. Ritzer, The Globalization of Nothing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2004), 85–89. 46. Pine and Gilmore, Experience Economy, 34. 47. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 87–88. 48. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 98; Mark Gottdiener, Claudia C. Collins, and David R. Dickens, Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 84–85. 49. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 103. 50. Penaloza, “Just Doing It,” 337; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 124. 51. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 52. Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 2. 53. Lukas, “Themed Space,” 2. 54. Gottdiener, Theming of America, 102; Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 17–19. 55. Lukas, “Themed Space,” 3–4; Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 17; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 111. 56. Hannigan, Fantasy City, 154–55; Gottdiener, Collins, and Dickens, Las Vegas, 87. 57. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 93. 58. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 95. 59. Huxtable, Unreal America, 8. 60. Michael T. Friedman and Michael L. Silk, “Expressing Fenway: Managing and Marketing Heritage within the Global Sports Marketplace,” International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing 1, no. 1/2 (2005): 50. 61. J. Freedom du Lac, “Slavery Is a Tough Role, Hard Sell at Colonial Williamsburg,” Washington Post, March 8, 2013. 62. Farrell, One Nation under Goods, 4. 63. Rob Shields, “Spaces for the Subject of Consumption,” in Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption, ed. Rob Shields (London: Routledge, 1992), 3. 64. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002); Gottdiener, Theming of America, 34. 65. Shields, “Spaces for the Subject of Consumption,” 7–9; Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). 66. Nancy Backes, “Reading the Shopping Mall City,” Journal of Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (1997): 2. 67. Oliver Herwig and Florian Holzherr, Dream Worlds: Architecture and Entertainment (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 130. 68. Kowinski, Malling of America, 88–94; Backes, “Reading the Shopping Mall City,” 5; Steven Flusty, “The Banality of Interdiction: Surveillance, Control and the Displacement of Diversity,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 3 (2001): 662. 69. Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Soren Askegaard, “Malls and the Orchestration of the Shopping Experience in a Historical Perspective,” Advances in Consumer Research 26 (1999): 35. 70. Victor Gruen, Anette Baldauf, and Michael Stephen Gruen, Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 125. 71. Farrell, One Nation under Goods; Herwig and Holzherr, Dream Worlds, 131. 72. Sze Tsung Leong, “. . . And Then There Was Shopping: The Last Remaining Form of Public Life,” in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, ed. Chuihua Judy Chung et al. (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 133; Daniel Herman, “Mall: Requiem for a Type,” in Chung et al., Harvard Design School Guide, 463–66.

236       NOTES TO PAGES 32–36

  73. Farrell, One Nation under Goods.   74. Farrell, One Nation under Goods, 184; Jon Goss, “The ‘Magic of the Mall’: An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 83, no. 1 (1993): 21; Daniel Herman, “Separated at Birth: Frank Gehry vs. Jon Jerde,” in Chung et al., Harvard Design School, 709–12.   75. “About,” The Jerde Partnership, accessed June 21, 2016, http://www.jerde.com/ about.html; Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), 13; Herwig and Holzherr, Dream Worlds, 34–35.   76. Goss, “Once-upon-a-Time,” 45.   77. Goss, “Once-upon-a-Time,” 45; Jerry Gerlach and James Janke, “The Mall of America as a Tourist Attraction,” Focus on Geography 46, no. 3 (2001): 32.   78. “Mall of America.”   79. “About.”   80. Gerlach and Janke, “ Mall of America,” 34; Goss, “Once-upon-a-Time,” 50.   81. Scott A. Lukas, Theme Park (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 1; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 2–3.   82. Shields, Lefebvre, Love, and Struggle.   83. Lukas, Theme Park, 23.   84. Maurice Roche, Mega-events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 41–44; Lukas, Theme Park, 27–30.   85. Lukas, Theme Park, 37; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 3.   86. Lukas, Theme Park, 122–26.   87. Lukas, Theme Park, 149–51; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 3.   88. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 3; Lukas, Theme Park, 74.   89. Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 19–21.   90. Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 4.   91. Anne Petersen, “ ‘You Believe in Pirates, of Course . . .’: Disney’s Commodification and ‘Closure’ vs. Johnny Depp’s Aesthetic Piracy of Pirates of the Caribbean,” Studies in Popular Culture 29, no. 2 (2007): 67.   92. Petersen, “ ‘You Believe in Pirates,’ ” 67; Ethel S. Goodstein, “Southern Outposts in the Magic Kingdom: The South as a Regional Sub-text in Disney’s American Spectacle,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 14, no. 3 (1999): 314.   93. Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 30–31.   94. Hugh Bartling, “Disney’s Celebration, the Promise of New Urbanism, and the Portents of Homogeneity,” Florida Historical Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2002): 45–46.   95. Bryman, Disneyization of Society, 24–51; Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 9–21.   96. Hannigan, Fantasy City, 2–3; Gordon Waitt, “The City as Tourist Spectacle,” in Virtual Globalization, ed. David Holmes (London: Routledge, 2001), 220.   97. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 37.   98. Michael T. Friedman and Adam S. Beissel, “Beyond ‘Who Pays?’: Stadium Development and Urban Governance,” International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship 22, no. 1 (2020): 110–11.   99. Relph, Modern Urban Landscape, 52–55; Howard Gillette Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006), 88. 100. Alan A. Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 11–12; Friedman and Beissel, “Beyond ‘Who Pays?,’ ” 110–16.

NOTES TO PAGES 36–39      237

101. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 12–16; Jacob J. Bustad, “Right to the Active City: Public Recreation and Urban Governance in Baltimore” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2014), 21; Peck and Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” 388. 102. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 347–48. 103. Michael T. Friedman, Jacob Bustad, and David L. Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster: (Re)developing Baltimore’s ‘Tourist Bubble,’ ” City, Culture and Society 3, no. 3 (2012): 210. 104. David Harvey, “A View from Federal Hill,” in Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography, ed. David Harvey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 134–35. 105. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 137–39. 106. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 348. 107. Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 210. 108. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 354–57. 109. Sharon Zukin, “Cultural Strategies and Urban Identities: Remaking Public Space in New York,” in Cities in Transformation—Transformation in Cities: Social and Symbolic Change of Urban Space, ed. Ove Kèalltorp et al. (Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1997), 207–12. 110. B. Holcomb, “Marketing Cities for Tourism,” in Judd and Fainstein, Tourist City, 55–56; Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” 36–39. 111. Gibson, “Selling City Living,” 261. 112. Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 211; David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 141. 113. Margaret Kohn, “Toronto’s Distillery District: Consumption and Nostalgia in a Post-industrial Landscape,” Globalizations 7, no. 3 (2010): 361; Waitt, “City as Tourist Spectacle,” 232–35. 114. Andrew Smith, “Sporting a New Image? Sport-Based Regeneration Strategies as a Means of Enhancing the Image of the City Tourist Destination,” in Sport in the City: The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration, ed. Chris Gratton and Ian P. Henry (London: Routledge, 2001), 128; Holcomb, “Marketing Cities for Tourism,” 61. 115. Michael T. Friedman, David L. Andrews, and Michael L. Silk, “Sport and the Facade of Redevelopment in the Postindustrial City,” Sociology of Sport Journal 21, no. 2 (2004): 122–23. 116. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill”; Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster”; Marc V. Levine, “Tourism, Urban Redevelopment, and the “WorldClass” City: The Cases of Baltimore and Montreal,” in World- Class Cities: Can Canada Play?, ed. C. Andrew, P. Armstrong, and A. Lapierre (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1999); Donald F. Norris, “If We Build It, They Will Come! Tourism-Based Economic Development in Baltimore,” in The Infrastructure of Play: Building the Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). 117. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 134–36. 118. Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 124. 119. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 139. 120. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 140. 121. Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 211. 122. United States Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: Baltimore City, Maryland,” 2022, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecitymaryland/ INC110220. 123. Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 131; Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 210. 124. Ron Underwood, dir., City Slickers (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1991).

238       NOTES TO PAGES 39–46

125. Paul Goldberger, “Backtalk: At Home in the City, Baseball’s Newest Parks Succeed,” New York Times, April 17, 1994. 126. Rick Lyman, “In the Bronx with: Billy Crystal; Facing 50 with Memories of the Mick,” New York Times, March 13, 1998. 127. Kennicott, “This Diamond Isn’t a Gem.” 128. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 110. 3. GROUNDS, BALLPARKS, AND SUPERSTADIUMS

  1. Gary Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks: The Complete Illustrated History (New York: Metro Books, 2009), 58–60.   2. Gershman, Diamonds, 88–92.   3. Michael Benson, Ballparks of North America: A Comprehensive Historical Reference to Baseball Grounds, Yards, and Stadiums, 1845 to present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989), 308–11.   4. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 17.   5. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 56.   6. Shannon and Kalinsky, Ballparks, 195–200.   7. David Rocchi, “Forbes (More Than Just a Baseball) Field,” in Forbes Field: Essays and Memories of the Pirates’ Historic Ballpark, 1909–1971, ed. David Cicotello and Angelo J. Louisa (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007), 67–91.   8. Goldberger, Ballpark, 2019), 66.   9. Gershman, Diamonds, 92.   10. Burrell Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium: Pittsburgh Goes Big League,” Three Rivers Stadium Souvenir Book (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Pirates, 1970), 5.   11. Gershman, Diamonds, 202.   12. Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium.”   13. Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium.”   14. Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium.”   15. Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium.”   16. Lawrence S. Ritter, Lost Ballparks: A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields (New York: Viking Studio Books, 1992), 4.   17. James T. Reese, Mark S. Nagel, and Richard M. Southall, “National Football League Ticket Transfer Policies: Legal and Policy Issues,” Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport 14, no. 2 (2004): 166; Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 316.   18. Christopher K. Hepp, “Steely Resolve: Stadium Deal Was Primarily Forged in Pittsburgh,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 12 1999; PNC Park: Taking It to the Riverbank (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2001), 3–6.   19. Gershman, Diamonds, 12.   20. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 12.   21. Gershman, Diamonds, 12.   22. Robert Fredrick Burk, Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 71–77.   23. Robert B. Ross, The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 91–92.   24. Burk, Never Just a Game, 116–22.   25. Gershman, Diamonds, 35–37.   26. Ross, Great Baseball Revolt, 126–27; Steven A. Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, rev. ed., Sport and Society, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 78.

NOTES TO PAGES 46–50      239

27. Michael Betzold, “A Century on Common Ground I: Bennett Park and Navin Field,” in Tiger Stadium: Essays and Memories of Detroit’s Historic Ballpark, 1912–2009, ed. Michael Betzold et al. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 8. 28. Gershman, Diamonds, 101–4. 29. Gershman, Diamonds, 30, 70–74. 30. Benson, Ballparks of North America 347. 31. Gershman, Diamonds, 52–53. 32. Goldberger, Ballpark, 41. 33. Brian J. Neilson, “Baseball,” in The Theater of Sport, ed. Karl B. Raitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 34. 34. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 20. 35. Gershman, Diamonds, 71. 36. Neilson, “Baseball,” 34. 37. All National League (NL) contracts contained a reserve clause that provided the team exclusive negotiating rights. Despite enforcement that banned players and expelled teams from organized baseball, the American League (AL) refused to respect the reserve clause in its first two seasons by signing many NL players to contracts with much higher salaries. When the 1903 National Agreement was signed, both leagues agreed to respect the reserve clause in player contracts and salaries declined. Burk, Never Just a Game, 148–54. 38. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks. 39. Benson, Ballparks of North America, 94; Gershman, Diamonds, 52. 40. Gershman, Diamonds, 88; Goldberger, Ballpark, 65. 41. Rich Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 104. 42. Callie E. Batts, “City Jewel Boxes: The History and Preservation of Two Chicago Ballparks, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park” (master’s thesis, Cornell University, 2000); Michael Betzold and Ethan Casey, Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story, 2nd ed. (West Bloomfield, MI: Altwerger & Mandel Publishing, 1997). 43. Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks, 165–66. 44. Gershman, Diamonds, 175. 45. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 38. 46. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks. 47. Gerald W. Scully, The Business of Major League Baseball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 101–2. 48. Gershman, Diamonds, 129. 49. Ritter, Lost Ballparks, 86. 50. Gershman, Diamonds, 118. 51. Seth S. Tannenbaum, “Food Concessions and Middle-Class Identification at Baseball Games, 1900–1950,” in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, ed. W. M. Simons (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 79–80. 52. Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks, 165. 53. Bill Veeck and Edward Linn, Veeck as in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 104. 54. Veeck and Linn, Veeck as in Wreck, 118–22. 55. Scully, Business of Major League Baseball, 117. 56. Neilson, “Baseball,” 39. 57. Gershman, Diamonds, 85. 58. Karl B. Raitz, “The Theater of Sport: A Landscape Perspective,” in The Theater of Sport, ed. Karl B. Raitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 21–27. 59. Gershman, Diamonds, 89.

240       NOTES TO PAGES 50–54

60. Neilson, “Baseball,” 47. 61. Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks; Gershman, Diamonds, 110. 62. Raitz, “Theater of Sport,” 14. 63. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 157. 64. Gershman, Diamonds, 96. 65. James Buckley Jr., America’s Classic Ballparks: A Collection of Images and Memorabilia (San Diego: Thunder Bay, 2013), 87. 66. Neilson, “Baseball,” 41. 67. John Pastier and John Davids, “Longevity and Adaptability,” in Tiger Stadium: Essays and Memories of Detroit’s Historic Ballpark, 1912–2009, ed. Michael Betzold et al. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018), 95. 68. Gershman, Diamonds, 224. 69. Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), xiii–xiv. 70. Gershman, Diamonds, 110; Neilson, “Baseball,” 45–47; Buckley, America’s Classic Ballparks, 95–97. 71. Benson, Ballparks of North America, 63. 72. Goldberger, Ballpark. 73. Gershman, Diamonds, 110. 74. Benson, Ballparks of North America, 65–67. 75. Goldberger, Ballpark, 97. 76. Gershman, Diamonds, 111; Goldberger, Ballpark, 98. 77. Shannon and Kalinsky, Ballparks, 57; Peter Golenbach, Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1984). 78. Ritter, Lost Ballparks, 57. 79. Gershman, Diamonds, 112. 80. Gershman, Diamonds, 175. 81. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 76. 82. Neil J. Sullivan, The Dodgers Move West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43. 83. Goldberger, Ballpark, 159. 84. Ironically, when the NBA Nets returned major league sports to Brooklyn in 2012, they built the Barclay Center near Atlantic Yards, across the street from O’Malley’s proposed site. 85. Frederick L. Olmsted helped establish the field of landscape architecture by designing many public parks throughout the United States from the 1850s through his retirement in 1895. His sons, Frederick L. Olmsted Jr. and John Olmsted, inherited their father’s landscape architectural firm and renamed it Olmsted Brothers. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 51–53; Goldberger, Ballpark, 20–21. 86. While Yankee Stadium was not completely demolished, it was gutted and remodeled from 1973 to 1976 to the point that it was essentially a superstadium by the time it reopened. 87. Gershman, Diamonds, 198. 88. Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks, 189–90. 89. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 7; Glen Gendzel, “Competitive Boosterism: How Milwaukee Lost the Braves,” Business History Review 69, no. 4 (1995): 553. 90. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 56–57; Friedman and Beissel, “Beyond ‘Who Pays?,’ ” 112–14. 91. Phillip Suchma, “The Selling of Cleveland Municipal Stadium: The Linking of Progressive Era Ideals with the Emerging Consumer Culture,” Sport History Review 31, no. 2 (2000): 101; Goldberger, Ballpark, 132–36.

NOTES TO PAGES 54–59      241

  92. John Wong, “FDR and the New Deal on Sport and Recreation,” Sport History Review 29, no. 2 (1998): 181–82; Friedman and Beissel, “Beyond ‘Who Pays?,’ ” 112.   93. Trumpbour, New Cathedrals, 23–25.   94. Gendzel, “Competitive Boosterism,” 551; George Lipsitz, “Sports Stadia and Urban Development: A Tale of Three Cities,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 8, no. 2 (1984): 1.   95. Riess, City Games, 240–41; Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 67.   96. Jay Weiner, Stadium Games: Ffifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11–15.   97. Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium Opening Souvenir Magazine (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Reds, 1970).   98. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 204–5.   99. Janet Marie Smith (executive vice president for planning and development, Los Angeles Dodgers), in discussion with the author, April 2021. 100. Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, Comparative American Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 100–102. 101. John Byczkowski and Howard Wilkinson, “Stadium Helped Transform City: It May Be Ugly, Sterile and Isolated, but Riverfront Achieved Its Initial Goals,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 16, 2002. 102. Tommy West, “Fans Wax Ecstatic over New Stadium,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 1, 1970; Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium”; Inside the Astrodome: Eighth Wonder of the World (Houston: Houston Sports Association, 1965). 103. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark,” 101. 104. Roger Angell, “The Sporting Scene: The Cool Bubble,” New Yorker, May 14, 1966. 105. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 248–49. 106. Bob Wood, Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks: The Ultimate Guide to America’s Top Baseball Parks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 10–11. 107. Angell, “Sporting Scene”; Cohen, “Three Rivers Stadium.” 108. Shannon and Kalinsky, Ballparks, 12. 109. Wood, Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks, 10. 110. Shannon and Kalinsky, Ballparks, 12. 111. Neilson, “Baseball,” 61. 112. Neilson, “Baseball,” 55. 113. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 284. 114. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 304. 115. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 290, 328. 116. Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, is the third baseball-only facility. 117. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 236. 118. Shannon and Kalinsky, Ballparks, 111–14; Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 340. 119. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 148–51; James Gast, The Astrodome: Building an American Spectacle (Boston: Aspinwall, 2014), 23–24. 120. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 157; Gast, Astrodome, 95–97. 121. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 162; Gast, Astrodome, 50–53; Inside the Astrodome. 122. Inside the Astrodome. 123. Inside the Astrodome. 124. Inside the Astrodome. 125. Inside the Astrodome. 126. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 275. 127. Inside the Astrodome; Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 148–49. 128. Inside the Astrodome. 129. Angell, “Sporting Scene.”

242       NOTES TO PAGES 59–69

130. Angell, “Sporting Scene.” 131. Jim Yardley, “Last Innings at a Can-do cathedral,” New York Times, October 3, 1999. 132. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 275. 133. Roger Angell, The Summer Game (New York: Viking, 1972), 243. 134. Angell, “Sporting Scene”; Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 101–2. 135. Christopher Hawthorne, “Now Taking the Field: Bold Stadium Designs,” New York Times, July 27, 2003. 136. Goldberger, Ballpark, 20. 137. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 101–2. 138. Bob DiCesare, “Making a Pitch for Major League Baseball,” Buffalo News, April 14, 1988. 139. Richard Justice, “Buffalo Makes Major League Effort,” Washington Post, September 5, 1988. 140. Neilson, “Baseball,” 68–69. 141. Justice, “Buffalo Makes Major League Effort.” 142. Peter Richmond, Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 124. 4. THE SPATIAL PRACTICES OF THE MALLPARK

  1. Interestingly, I was asked this very question by Joe Spear and Earl Santee, the global directors of Populous, when interviewing them together for this book in April 2021. Put on the spot by the architects who designed these buildings, I listed Camden Yards, PNC Park and Petco Park, which, in their words, put the score at Spear 2, Santee 1.   2. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 174–76.   3. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 174; Bruce Kidd, “Toronto’s SkyDome: The World’s Greatest Entertainment Centre,” in The Stadium and the City, ed. John Bale and Olof Moen (Keele, UK: Keele University Press, 1995), 182–84.   4. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 174.   5. Philip Bess, City Baseball Magic: Plain Talk and Uncommon Sense about Cities and Baseball Parks (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Review of Baseball, 1989), 2.   6. Bess, “Mallpark, 89–91.   7. Bess, “Mallpark,” 84.   8. Bess, “Mallpark,” 85.   9. Bess, “Mallpark,” 90.   10. Paul Goldberger, “A Radical Idea: Baseball as It Used to Be,” New York Times, November 12, 1989.   11. Goldberger, “Backtalk.”   12. Chapin, “Sports Facilities,” 194; Daniel Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks: Instant History, Baseball, and the New American City (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 13.   13. Goldberger, Ballpark, ix; Smith, “Sporting a New Image?,” 134–36.   14. Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 210; Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 3.   15. Riess, City Games, 3, 6.   16. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 354–57; Sharon Zukin, “Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardisation in Spaces of Consumption,” Urban Studies 35, no. 5/6 (1998): 832–35.   17. Holcomb, “Marketing Cities for Tourism,” 55–56; Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” 36–39.

NOTES TO PAGES 69–79      243

18. Gibson, “Selling City Living,” 261. 19. As described in chapter 9, Atlanta’s Truist Park does not fit either category. 20. Friedman, Bustad, and Andrews, “Feeding the Downtown Monster,” 210. 21. Euchner, “Tourism and Sports,” 216; Susan S. Fainstein and Dennis R. Judd, “Global Forces, Local Strategies, and Urban Tourism,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 12–17. 22. Smith, “Sporting a New Image?,” 136. 23. Chapin, “Sports Facilities,” 207. 24. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 7. 25. Stephen Buckman and Elizabeth A. Mack, “The Impact of Urban Form on Downtown Stadium Redevelopment Projects: A Comparative Analysis of Phoenix and Denver,” Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability 5, no. 1 (2012): 2; Lynn W. Bachelor, “Stadiums as Solution Sets: Baseball, Football and the Revival of Downtown Detroit,” Policy Studies Review 15, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 91; Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks, 13–16. 26. Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks, 10. 27. Hannigan, Fantasy City, 56. 28. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 7. 29. Buckman and Mack, “Impact of Urban Form,” 19–20; Bachelor, “Stadiums as Solution Sets,” 100; Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks, 170. 30. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 252. 31. Baltimore Orioles 1980 Information Guide (Baltimore: Baltimore Orioles, 1980), 7. 32. Colleen Kane, “Most Expensive Luxury Suites,” CNBC, updated May 3, 2012, http://www.cnbc.com/id/47285181. 33. Gary Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1997), 82. 34. “New York Yankees Legends Suite,” New York Yankees, 2015, https://www.mlb.com/ yankees/tickets/premium/suites/legends. 35. Busch Stadium Commemorative Yearbook (St. Louis: St. Louis Cardinals, 2006). 36. Cecilia Johnson, “New to Target Field: 2 Gingers Pubs,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 4, 2012. 37. “Art of the Game: About,” accessed January 11, 2017, http://theartofthegame.com/ about-us/. 38. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 68–72. 39. Kevin Gray, “Fish Tanks and Palm Trees: Miami’s New Baseball Stadium,” Reuters, March 31, 2012, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-baseball-marlins-stadium-idUSBRE 82U0AO20120331. 40. Seattle Mariners, Art in the Park (Seattle: Author, 2014). 41. Tim Newcomb, “Ballpark Quirks: Hitting with the Fishes in Miami’s Marlins Park,” Sports Illustrated, June 20, 2014, http://www.si.com/mlb/2014/06/20/ ballpark-quirks-marlins-park-fish-tanks-miami-marlins. 42. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 4. 43. The Clevelander ended its relationship with the Marlins after the 2019 season. The pool was removed and the area repurposed. “Clevelander Marlins Park,” Official Miami Marlins website, MLB.com, accessed February 6, 2017, http://miami.marlins.mlb.com/ mia/ballpark/clevelander.jsp (site discontinued). 44. Don Walker, “Miller Park to Get Bigger, Better Scoreboard: Would Be Leap in Size, Video,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 6, 2010, http://archive.jsonline.com/sports/ brewers/97990759.html. 45. “Baseball Everywhere: The #1 Source for Live Baseball on Your Apple and Android Devices Is the Official App of Major League Baseball,” MLB.com, accessed September 24, 2022, https://www.mlb.com/apps/mlb-app.

244       NOTES TO PAGES 79–89

46. Teena Maddox. “Stadiums Race to Digitize: How Sports Teams Are Scrambling to Keep Millennials Coming to Games,”TechRepublic,April 12, 2014, http://www.techrepublic. com/article/how-sports-teams-are-scrambling-to-keep-millennials-coming-to-games/. 47. “Event Services,” New York Mets, accessed May 28, 2021, https://www.mlb.com/ mets/ballpark/hospitality/services. 48. Bill Veeck and Edward Linn, The Hustler’s Handbook (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 11–33. 49. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 101. 50. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 137–39. 51. Murray G. Phillips, “Introduction: Historians in Sport Museums,” in Representing the Sporting Past in Museums and Halls of Fame, ed. Murray G. Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2012), 11. 52. Despite Berenguer being Panamanian, the Señor Smoke concessions stand sold “South of the Border” foods when Target Field opened in 2010. 53. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 169–71; Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 400–401. 54. David L. Andrews, “Dead and Alive? Sports History in the Late Capitalist Moment,” Sporting Traditions 16, no. 1 (1999): 78, 82. 55. Some teams may have preferred dimensions based on roster composition or organizational philosophies. For example, teams whose rosters featured better pitching may have wanted larger outfields. Yet recognizing that the functional life of a facility will see continual roster turnover and frequent management changes, such short-term gameplay and competitiveness issues should be considered tertiary concerns within stadium design. 56. Gershman, Diamonds, 149; “This Scoreboard Does Everything!,” Three Rivers Stadium Souvenir Book (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Pirates, 1970), 17. 57. Guaranteed Rate Field’s Bullpen Sports Bar displays two of the original pinwheels from Comiskey Park’s exploding scoreboard along with the fireplace that had been in the office of team owner Bill Veeck. 58. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 416. 59. Michael L. Butterworth, Baseball and Rhetorics of Purity: The National Pastime and American Identity during the War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 13–15. 60. Springwood, Cooperstown to Dyersville, 36. 61. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 51–53; Goldberger, Ballpark, 38. 62. Jesse Hamlin, “Gloved Wonder: Giant Sculpture at Pac Bell Park Inspired by the Real Thing,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 11 2000. 63. Seattle Mariners, Art in the Park. 64. Relph, Place and Placelessness, 95. 65. Michael T. Friedman, “ ‘The Transparency of Democracy’: The Production of Washington’s Nationals Park as a Late Capitalist Space,” Sociology of Sport Journal 27, no. 4 (2010): 334. 66. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 410. 67. Bennett Jacobstein, The Joy of Ballpark Food: From Hot Dogs to Haute Cuisine (San Jose, CA: Ballpark Food Publications, 2015), 30–31. 68. In 2021 Miller Park was renamed American Family Field. In 1953 Anheuser-Busch CEO August Busch purchased the St. Louis Cardinals and then Sportsman’s Park. He originally wanted to rename it Budweiser Park, but MLB rejected the name as being too commercial. Busch then renamed the ballpark after himself, and Anheuser-Busch introduced Busch Bavarian Beer in 1955. Both of St. Louis’s subsequent stadiums have been named Busch Stadium. Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 56. 69. Wood, Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks, 11.

NOTES TO PAGES 89–98      245

70. Christian Red, “Yankees COO Says Full Price Fans ‘Frustrated’ by Discounters,” New York Daily News, February 19, 2016, http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/ yankees/yankees-full-price-fans-frustrated-discounters-article-1.2536858. 71. Rick Chandler, “The ‘Priceless’ MasterCard Campaign Started at a Baseball Game 17 Years Ago,” SportsGrid, December 26, 2015, https://www.sportsgrid.com/real-sports/ mlb/the-priceless-mastercard-campaign-started-at-a-baseball-game-17-years-ago/. 72. Phillips, “Introduction,” 11. 73. Pittsburgh Pirates, “Pirates Unveil Highmark Legacy Square at PNC Park,” news release, June 26, 2006, http://pittsburgh.pirates.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_ release.jsp?ymd=20060626&content_id=1523995&vkey=pr_pit&fext=.jsp&c_id=pit. 74. Josh Howard, “Disappointment in Pittsburgh: How the Pirates Ditched Pittsburgh’s Negro Leagues Past,” Sport in American History, October 12, 2015, https://ussporthistory.com/2015/10/12/2902/. 75. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” 36. 76. The Fan Cost Index includes the cost of four average-price tickets, parking, two small beers, four small sodas, four hot dogs, and two adjustable caps. “1991–2001 Ticket Prices and Fan Cost Index,” Doug Pappas Business of Baseball Pages, Society for American Baseball Research, 2001, http://roadsidephotos.sabr.org/baseball/1991-2001tickets.htm. 77. “2015 MLB Fan Cost Index,” Team Marketing Report, 2015, https://www.team marketing.com/public/uploadedPDFs/2015%20mlb%20fci%20(1).pdf. 78. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Consumer Expenditures: 2013,” news release, 2014, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm. 79. Earl Santee (global director, Populous), in discussion with the author, April 2021. 80. Dan Klepal and Tim Tucker, “Skyrocketing Stadium Costs,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, February 22, 2015. 5. CAMDEN YARDS

  1. For the interest of clarity, “Camden Yards” will refer to the baseball stadium, while the area will be identified as the “Camden Station Railyards.” Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 101.   2. Kennicott, “This Diamond Isn’t a Gem,” March 31, 2008; Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 128.   3. Rosensweig, Retro Ball Parks, 10.   4. George F. Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (New York: Crown Archetype, 2014), 167.   5. Will, Nice Little Place, 167.   6. Mike Dodd, “Marlins See Future in Modern, Artistic Park,” USA Today, April 3, 2012.   7. Friedman and van Ingen, “Bodies in Space: 96; Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39.   8. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39.   9. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38–39. 10. Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 45. 11. McNeill, Global Architect, 3. 12. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 308, emphasis in original. 13. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 143–44. 14. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 338. See also Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 66. 15. Till, Architecture Depends, 123. 16. Till, Architecture Depends, 123. 17. Ballantyne, Architecture, 21; Horne, “Architects, Stadia and Sport Spectacles,” 210. 18. McNeill, Global Architect, 133–35. 19. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 43–44.

246       NOTES TO PAGES 98–103

20. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 355–57. 21. Bernard J. Frieden and Lynee B. Sagalyn, Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1989), 287–89. 22. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” 8–9. 23. Bruce Ehrlich and Peter Dreier, “The New Boston Discovers the Old: Tourism and the Struggle for a Livable City,” in The Tourist City, ed. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 173–74. 24. Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World, 195–97; Zukin, “Urban Lifestyles,” 830; Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 141. 25. David Harvey, “Reinventing Geography: An Interview with the Editors of New Left Review,” in Spaces of Capital: Toward a Critical Geography, ed. David Harvey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 7. 26. Michael Demarest, Peter Stoler, and Robert T. Grieves, “He Digs Downtown,” Time, August 24, 1981. 27. Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 124. 28. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 140; Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 123. 29. Friedman, Andrews, and Silk, “Sport and Facade of Redevelopment,” 123. 30. Lee Lowenfish, “Orange and Black Forever: How a New Yorker Fell in Love with Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles,” in Baltimore Sports: Stories from Charm City, ed. Daniel A. Nathan (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2016), 207–9; Michael Olesker, “ ‘The Best Ambassador Baltimore Ever Had’: Art Donovan and the Colts,” in Nathan, Baltimore Sports, 141–42. 31. The Orioles also won the World Series in 1983 under the ownership of Edward Bennett Williams 32. The Maryland Sports Complex Authority was established by the state of Maryland in 1972 and decommissioned in 1975. It is not to be confused with the Maryland Stadium Authority. James Edward Miller, The Baseball Business: Pursuing Pennants and Profits in Baltimore (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 204. 33. Richard Hardesty, “A Missed Opportunity: Baltimore’s Failed Stadium Project, 1969–1974,” in Nathan, Baltimore Sports, 225. 34. Hardesty, “Missed Opportunity,” 225–26. 35. Richmond, Ballpark, 64–65. 36. Mark Hyman and Sandy Banisky, “Williams’ Lease Puts to Rest Almost a Decade of Doubts,” Baltimore Sun, May 8, 1988. 37. Miller, Baseball Business, 268–71. 38. Richmond, Ballpark, 60. 39. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority to Final Competitors for the Design and Planning Contract for the State of Maryland’s Twin Stadium Project (Baltimore: Author, 1987), 3. 40. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority, 6. 41. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority, 15. 42. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority, 10. 43. Thom Loverro, Home of the Game: The Story of Camden Yards (Dallas: Taylor, 1999), 89. 44. Robert Brehl, “It’s Back to the Future in Baltimore,” Toronto Sun, September 3, 1989. 45. Ronald J. Labinski and Richard L. deFlon, Baltimore Stadium Study (Kansas City, MO: Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, 1985), 1.1. 46. Richard H. P. Sia, “New Sports Panel Seeks State Aid, Consultant,” Baltimore Sun, December 13, 1984; Maryland Special Advisory Commission on Professional Sports and

NOTES TO PAGES 103–106      247

the Economy, HNTB, and Touche Ross, New Stadium Site Evaluation (Kansas City, MO: HNTB, 1986). 47. The MSA’s mandate was later expanded to included stadium financing and operations. Anne LoLordo, “Sports Authority Bill Approved by Senate after Amendments,” Baltimore Sun, April 3, 1986. 48. C. Fraser Smith, “Stadium Issue Returns to Political Spotlight,” Baltimore Sun, January 30, 1986; Richmond, Ballpark, 89. 49. Smith, “Stadium Issue Returns”; Stephen H. Sachs, “A Pro Sports Strategy for Maryland,” Baltimore Sun, September 6, 1984. 50. Sandy Banisky, “State Panel Expected to Recommend Camden Yards as New Stadium Site,” Baltimore Sun, December 4, 1986. 51. Richmond, Ballpark, 87. 52. St. Louis’s MLB and NFL teams were both known as the Cardinals. The NFL team moved to Phoenix in 1988. Richmond, Ballpark, 89, 145–47. 53. James P. Quirk and Rodney D. Fort, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 485. 54. Labinski and deFlon, Baltimore Stadium Study, 1.4. 55. Mark Hyman, “The Worst-Case Scenario,” Baltimore Sun, March, 6 1988. 56. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide (Baltimore: Author, 1992), 4. 57. Loverro, Home of the Game, 93. 58. Richard Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina of Past to Thoroughly Modern Camden,” Washington Post, April 7, 1992. 59. Sandy Banisky, “Orioles Get Guarantee on Tickets,” Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1988; Susan Relmer, “The Orioles Lease at a Glance,” Baltimore Sun, May 6, 1988. 60. Mark Potts, “It’s Built, the People Will Come—but Questions Linger,” Washington Post, March 8, 1992. 61. Richmond, Ballpark, 175. 62. John W. Frece, “Jacobs Says He Has No Intention of Moving Orioles,” Baltimore Sun, December 9, 1988. 63. Goldberger, “Radical Idea”; Richmond, Ballpark, 152–55; Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina.” 64. Edward Gunts, “An ‘Old-Fashioned Park’ on Authority’s Wish List,” Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1987. 65. Edward Gunts, “Monuments of the Age,” Baltimore Sun, January 10, 1988. 66. Bill King, “Ron Labinski,” Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, March 22, 2010, https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2010/03/22/Champions-Of-SportsBusiness/Ron-Labinski.aspx. 67. King, “Ron Labinski.” 68. Tim Newcomb, “Kansas City: The Story of the Sports Architecture Capital of the World,” Forbes, October 29, 2019. 69. Patrick Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event: 20 Years of Great Architecture (Sydney, Australia: Pesaro, 2003), 8–9. 70. Richmond, Ballpark, 114–15. 71. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.” 72. Joseph Spear (global director of Populous), in discussion with the author, April 2021; Richmond, Ballpark, 92, 123. 73. Edward Gunts, “Stadium Authority Approves Designer for Complex,” Baltimore Sun, January 26, 1988. 74. Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina.” 75. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.” 76. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.”

248       NOTES TO PAGES 106–110

  77. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.”   78. Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals, 1st ed. (Cooperstown, NY: Society for American Baseball Research, 1986), 9.   79. Banisky, “State Panel Expected to Recommend.”   80. Richmond, Ballpark, 92.   81. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report: November 8, 1988, Janet Marie Smith Ballpark Development Collection, Giamatti Research Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY, 3.20–3.30; Benjamin Forgey, “Cityscape: Baltimore’s Dream of a Field,” Washington Post, July 12, 1990.   82. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 3.20–3.21.   83. Forgey, “Cityscape”; RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 3.26.   84. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 1.8.   85. Peat Marwick Mitchell and Regional Science Research Institute, Report on the Economic and Tax Impacts of the Camden Yards Stadium Development (New York: Peat Marwick Mitchell, 1987), 8.   86. Richard Sandomir, “The Inside Story of an Outsized Job,” Sports Inc., October 24, 1988.   87. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 3.40.   88. Lori Weisberg, “Oriole Park at Camden Yards: New Ballpark’s Design Evokes a Nostalgic Feel,” San Diego Union-Tribune, October 4, 1992.   89. Edward Gunts, “This Diamond Is a Cut Above,” Baltimore Sun, March 22, 1992; “Oriole Baseball Park: Camden Yards,” in The Stadium: The Architecture of Mass Sport, ed. Michele Provoost (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2000), 110.   90. Brehl, “It’s Back to the Future”; Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina.”   91. Gunts, “This Diamond Is a Cut Above.”   92. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.”   93. Miller, Baseball Business, 294.   94. Hellmuth Obata + Kassabaum and Peat Marwick Mitchell, Preparation and Evaluation of Stadium Concept Alternatives and Cost Estimates for Stadium Development on the Camden Yards Site and for Renovation of Memorial Stadium (Kansas City, MO: Hellmuth Obata + Kassabaum, 1987), 2.1–2.3.   95. Vito Stellino, “New Yard a Hit: Baltimore’s Park an Architectural Wonder,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 24, 1991.   96. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.”   97. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 78.   98. Maryland Stadium Authority and Peat Marwick Mitchell, Report on Phase 1: Evaluation of Stadium Site and Design Alternatives (New York: Peat Marwick Mitchell, 1986), 1.4.   99. Spear, discussion. 100. Labinski and deFlon, Baltimore Stadium Study, 4.2. 101. Loverro, Home of the Game, 51. 102. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide, 26. 103. Robert Fachet, “Orioles’ Ballpark Takes Shape,” Washington Post, December 29, 1989. 104. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide, 22; Mark Hyman, “Orioles Heading for an All-Star Financial Performance in 1992,” Baltimore Sun, June 28, 1992. 105. Lisa Farbstein, “If You Feed Them They Will Return,” Carroll County (MD) Times, April 2, 1992. 106. These averages were calculated from the information in the Baltimore Orioles media guides from 1991 and 1992. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide, 22; Baltimore Orioles, 1991 Media Guide (Baltimore: Author, 1991), 14, 16.

NOTES TO PAGES 110–114      249

107. Farbstein, “If You Feed Them.” 108. Farbstein, “If You Feed Them.” 109. Lisa Farbstein, “By the Numbers, New Park Adds Up to Being Ready,” Carroll County (MD) Times, April 2, 1992. 110. Fachet, “Orioles’ Ballpark Takes Shape.” 111. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide, 22; Baltimore Orioles, 1991 Media Guide, 16. 112. Kevin Cowherd, “Does He Have to Spell It Out for You? Wild Bill Hagy, Too Long AWOL, Rekindles Love Affair with O’s,” Baltimore Sun, May 4, 1994. 113. Cowherd, “Does He Have to Spell It Out for You?” 114. Lawrence Rocca, “Where Have You Gone, Wild Bill? A City Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You: A Tale of Baseball, Beer and Blind Faith,” Washington Post, October 24, 1993. 115. Rocca, “Where Have You Gone, Wild Bill?” 116. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority, 10. 117. Maryland Stadium Authority, Request of the Maryland Stadium Authority, 10. 118. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.” 119. Bess, City Baseball Magic, 26–28; Michael Betzold and Ethan Casey, Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story, 2nd ed. (West Bloomfield, MI: Altwerger & Mandel, 1997), 152–54; Gregg Twietmeyer, “ ‘Ivy-Coloured Glasses’: The Myth of Wrigley Field,” International Journal of the History of Sport 25 (2008): 144, doi:10.1080/09523360802299252; Marshall G. Most and Robert Rudd, Stars, Stripes and Diamonds: American Culture and the Baseball Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 179–80; Springwood, Cooperstown to Dyersville, 55–56. 120. Janet Marie Smith, untitled memorandum, Janet Marie Smith Ballpark Development Collection, Giamatti Research Center, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY. 121. Patricia L. Brown, “Field of Dreams Comes True in Baltimore,” New York Times, March 5, 1992. 122. Stuart Elliott, “Retro Look Thrives at the Old Ball Game,” New York Times, May 28, 1992. 123. Roy Furchgott, “Ads in New Oriole Stadium Must Match Design,” Adweek, April 6, 1992. 124. Brehl, “It’s Back to the Future in Baltimore.” 125. Tom Maloney, “Take Me Out to the Mallpark,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 8, 1991. 126. Mark Hyman, “Orioles’ New Ballpark Combines the Charm of the Old with the Luxury of the New,” Baltimore Sun, August 20, 1989; Fachet, “Orioles’ Ballpark Takes Shape.” 127. Stellino, “New Yard a Hit”; Hyman, “Orioles’ New Ballpark.” 128. Sandy Banisky, “Price Tag for Orioles Ballpark Jumps to $105 Million,” Baltimore Sun, June 22, 1989. 129. Potts, “It’s Built, the People Will Come.” 130. LoLordo, “Sports Authority Bill.” 131. Richmond, Ballpark, 171. 132. Loverro, Home of the Game, 28. 133. Richmond, Ballpark, 173. 134. Fachet, “Orioles’ Ballpark Takes Shape.” 135. Richmond, Ballpark, 173–74; Brehl, “It’s Back to the Future.” 136. Hyman, “Orioles’ New Ballpark.” 137. Fachet, “Orioles’ Ballpark Takes Shape.” 138. Brehl, “It’s Back to the Future.” 139. Forgey, “Cityscape.”

250       NOTES TO PAGES 114–123

140. Janet Marie Smith, in discussion with the author, April 2021. 141. Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina.” 142. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 3.41. 143. Goldberger, “Radical Idea.” 144. Baltimore Orioles, 1992 Media Guide, 28. 145. RTKL Associates, Master Plan Progress Report, 3.42. 146. Smith, discussion; “Oriole Baseball Park,” 110. 147. Maryland Stadium Authority, Maryland Stadium Authority 2018 Annual Report (Baltimore: Author, 2018), 9. 148. Justice, “Hundred Hands Add Patina.” 149. Jon Eric Moss, “Baseball Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1987). 150. Edward Gunts, “A Nest for the Orioles?,” Baltimore Sun, November 1, 1987. 151. Gunts, “Nest for the Orioles?” 152. Gunts, “Monuments of the Age.” 153. Mark Hyman, “Landmark B&O Warehouse to Be Part of New Baseball Stadium,” Baltimore Sun, February 3, 1989. 154. “Oriole Baseball Park,” 110. 155. Mark Hyman, “Making a Ballpark the Old-Fashioned Way,” Baltimore Sun, March 29, 1992. 156. Maryland Stadium Authority, Maryland Stadium Authority 1993 Annual Report (Baltimore: Author, 1993), 5. 157. Potts, “It’s Built, the People Will Come.” 158. Mark Hyman, “Orioles’ New Park Is Ticket to Increased Revenues: Club’s Take at Gate May Rise $7 million,” Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1991. 159. Hyman, “All-Star Financial Performance.” 160. Loverro, Home of the Game, 228. 161. Matthijs Bouw and Michelle Provoost, “Introduction,” in Provoost, The Stadium, 10. 162. “Interview with Ellerbe Becket,” in Provoost, The Stadium, 82. 6. FENWAY PARK AND DODGER STADIUM

  1. Friedman and “Expressing Fenway,” 47.   2. Chicago’s Wrigley Field, San Francisco’s Oracle Park, and St. Louis’s Busch Stadium are the other privately owned facilities. Wrigley Field has been “Camdenized” through $575 million of renovations since 2014 and presents a very interesting case study. However, it will not be discussed due to spatial constraints and the fact that Janet Marie Smith was not directly involved in its renovation.   3. Steve Buckley, “Baseball: New Course at Fens,” Boston Herald, August 19, 2003.   4. Huxtable, Unreal America, 31.   5. Huxtable, Unreal America, 15–17.   6. Eric Gable and Richard Handler, “Public History, Private Memory: Notes from Ethnography of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, USA,” Ethnos 65, no. 2 (2000): 242.   7. Huxtable, Unreal America, 17–19.   8. Mark S. Nagel et al., “Major League Baseball Antitrust Immunity: Examining the Legal and Financial Implications of Relocation Rules,” Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 4, no. 3 (2007): 1–2.   9. Andrew S. Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 48.   10. Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions, 48; Robert V. Bellamy and James R. Walker, “Baseball and Television Origins: The Case of the Cubs,” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 10, no. 1 (2001): 32–33.

NOTES TO PAGES 123–129      251

11. Mike Ozanian and Kurt Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown, MLB Teams Gain Value in 2020,” Forbes, April 9, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2020/04/09/ despite-lockdown-mlb-teams-gain-value-in-2020/#55c3f1e72010. 12. Ozanian and Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown.” 13. Mike Ozanian, “The Stadium Revenue at Risk for Every MLB Team if Games Are Played without Fans,” Forbes, April 17, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeoza nian/2020/04/17/the-mlb-stadium-revenue-at-risk-for-every-team-if-games-are-playedwithout-fans/#6eb839b47a35. 14. Ozanian and Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown.” 15. Dennis R. Howard and John L. Crompton, “An Empirical Review of the Stadium Novelty Effect,” Sport Marketing Quarterly 12, no. 2 (2003): 115–16. 16. Zimbalist, Baseball and Billions, 58; Scully, Business of Major League Baseball, 117. 17. Michael J. Haupert, “The Economic History of Major League Baseball,” EH.Net Encyclopedia, 2007, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-major-leaguebaseball/. 18. Quirk and Pay Dirt, 25–28. 19. Richard C. Levin et al., The Report of the Independent Members of the Commissioner’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Baseball Economics, July 2000 (New York: Major League Baseball, 2000), 15; Haupert, “Economic History of Major League Baseball.” 20. Dan Shaughnessy and Steve Grossfeld, Fenway: A Biography in Words and Pictures (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 31. 21. Bill King, “Janet Marie Smith’s Passion, Personality and Artistic Eye Helped Redefine Sports Architecture,” L.A. Biz, March 26, 2017, https://www.bizjournals.com/losang eles/news/2017/03/26/janet-marie-smith-redefined-sports-architecture.html. 22. Ken Belson, “Touching Up Camden Yards, Not Touching Its Character,” New York Times, April 30, 2010. 23. Janet Marie Smith, “Ballpark or Stadium: Does It Natter?,” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 23, no. 1 (2014): 111. 24. King, “Janet Marie Smith’s Passion.” 25. King, “Janet Marie Smith’s Passion.” 26. King, “Janet Marie Smith’s Passion.” 27. Janet Marie Smith, in discussion with the author, April 2021; King, “Janet Marie Smith’s Passion.” 28. Richmond, Ballpark, 158. 29. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 27. 30. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 27. 31. Smith, discussion. 32. Smith, discussion. 33. Smith, discussion. 34. Save Fenway Park!, Our Field of Dreams: An Economic and Planning Analysis (Boston: Author, 1998), 1. 35. Michael Ian Borer, Faithful to Fenway: Believing in Boston, Baseball and America’s Most Beloved Ballpark (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 43. 36. Dan Shaughnessy, At Fenway: Dispatches from Red Sox Nation (New York: Three Rivers, 1996), 27. 37. Shaughnessy and Grossfeld, Fenway, 102. 38. Shaughnessy, At Fenway, 31–33. 39. Shaughnessy and Grossfeld, Fenway, 102. 40. John Harrington, “Why Red Sox Need a New Park,” Boston Globe, May 15, 1999. 41. Friedman and Silk, “Expressing Fenway,” 44. 42. Cosmo Macero and Jakobi Myers, “Fenway Charm Intact in New Park: Plan Preserves Look, Adds 10,000 Seats,” Boston Herald, May 15, 1999.

252       NOTES TO PAGES 129–133

43. Tom Farrey, “Historic Fenway Faces Uncertain Future,” ESPN.com, December 12, 2000, http://espn.go.com/mlb/s/2000/1031/849361.html. 44. Smith, discussion; Scott Greenberger, “New Fenway Push by Former Owners Called into Question,” Boston Globe, July 1, 2002. 45. Christopher Condon and Michael McDonald, “Fenway Bringing in More Money,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 22, 2012. 46. Sean McAdam, “ ‘Saving’ Fenway Park May Spell Doom for the Red Sox,” Providence Journal-Bulletin, June 16, 2002. 47. McAdam, “ ‘Saving’ Fenway Park May Spell Doom.” 48. Eric McHugh, “Our Heroes Return: Fenway Does Its Best to Spruce Up for Champs’ Home Opener,” Patriot Ledger, April 9, 2005. 49. Tyler Kepner, “280 to Have a View from the Green Monster,” New York Times, January 29, 2003. 50. Seth Livingstone, “Neighborhood Gem Nears 100: Revenue Streams, History, Fan Devotion Drove Effort to Save Classic Fenway Park,” USA Today, April 25, 2011. 51. Howard Ulman, “World Champions Will Have New Playing Surface,” Associated Press, November 23, 2004. 52. Shaughnessy and Grossfeld, Fenway, 38. 53. Ulman, “World Champions.” 54. Smith, discussion. 55. “Fenway Park Timeline,” MLB.com, 2012, https://www.mlb.com/redsox/ballpark/ museum/timeline. 56. Ulman, “World Champions.” 57. McHugh, “Our Heroes Return.” 58. “Fenway Park Timeline.” 59. Chris Hartweg,“2020 MLB Fan Cost Index® (Pre-pandemic),” Team Marketing Report, July 22, 2020, https://teammarketing.com/fci/2020-mlb-fan-cost-index-pre-pandemic/. 60. Condon and McDonald, “Fenway Bringing in More Money.” 61. Art Martone, “Red Sox Decide Their Fenway Home Is Past-Perfect,” Providence Journal, March 24, 2005. 62. “Dell Technologies Club at Fenway Park,” Boston Red Sox, accessed May 30, 2021, https://www.mlb.com/redsox/tickets/season-tickets/premium/members/dell-tech nologies-club. 63. “Dugout Club at Fenway Park,” Boston Red Sox, accessed May 30, 2021, https:// www.mlb.com/redsox/tickets/season-tickets/premium/members/dugout; “Fenway Park Timeline.” 64. From 1977 to 2018, Jersey Street was known as Yawkey Way. Red Sox owner John Henry requested the name change due to allegations of racism surrounding Tom Yawkey and the Red Sox being the last team to integrate. Milton Valencia, “City Panel Votes Unanimously to Rename Yawkey Way: The Strip Will Revert to Jersey Street,” Boston Globe, April 26, 2018. 65. Shaughnessy and Grossfeld, Fenway, 50. 66. Friedman and Silk, “Expressing Fenway,” 42. 67. “Fenway Park Timeline.” 68. Friedman and Silk, “Expressing Fenway,” 46. 69. Janet Marie Smith, “Foreword,” in Fenway Park 2002–2012, ed. Ashton Design (Baltimore: Ashton Design, 2012), 2–3. 70. Smith, “Foreword,” 2. 71. Friedman and Silk, “Expressing Fenway,” 47. 72. Ashton Design, Fenway Park 2002–2012. 73. Jonathan Finer, “Fans of Fenway Are Still Safe at Home: Red Sox to Renovate, Not Abandon, the Old Stadium,” Washington Post, March 24, 2005.

NOTES TO PAGES 133–137      253

  74. Boston Red Sox, Boston Red Sox 2018 Media Guide (Boston: Author, 2018), 3.   75. Ozanian and Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown.”   76. See Dan Shaughnessy, The Curse of the Bambino, 4th ed. (New York: Penguin, 2004).   77. Bill Shaikin, “Dodgers Just Can’t Commit: Owners’ $100 Million in Stadium Upgrades Doesn’t Duy Assurances of Long-Term Stay,” Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2013; Smith, “Ballpark or Btadium,” 117.   78. Andy McCue, “Barrio, Bulldozers, and Baseball: The Destruction of Chavez Ravine,” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 21, no. 1 (2012): 51; John H. M. Laslett, Shameful Victory: The Los Angeles Dodgers, the Red Scare, and the Hidden History of Chavez Ravine (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 3–4; Jerald Podair, City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), xv–xvi.   79. Laslett, Shameful Victory, 63–65.   80. McCue, “Barrio, Bulldozers, and Baseball,” 50.   81. Laslett, Shameful Victory, 118–20.   82. Podair, City of Dreams, 15; Sullivan, Dodgers Move West, 98–99.   83. Podair, City of Dreams, 238.   84. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 95–97.   85. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 97.   86. Christopher Hawthorne, “If They Revamp It, Will Dodger Fans Stay Longer?,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2008; Goldberger, Ballpark, 166.   87. Laslett, Shameful Victory, 123.   88. Gershman, Diamonds, 186.   89. “Los Angeles Dodgers Attendance, Stadiums, and Park Factors,” Baseball Reference, accessed May 30, 2021, https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/LAD/attend.shtml.   90. Goldberger, Ballpark, 167–69.   91. Goldberger, Ballpark, 169.   92. Andy McCue, “Los Angeles / Brooklyn Dodgers Team Ownership History,” Society for American Baseball Research, September 24, 2017, https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/ los-angeles-brooklyn-dodgers-team-ownership-history/#sdendnote149anc; Gary Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 238–39.   93. David L. Andrews, “Sport and the Transnationalizing Media Corporation,” Journal of Media Economics 16, no. 4 (2003): 246.   94. Neil J. Sullivan, The Diamond in the Bronx: Yankee Stadium and the Politics of New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 145.   95. Bellamy and Walker, “Baseball and Television Origins,” 33.   96. Bill Cizek, “Questions Surround Murdoch and His Plans for the Team’s Future,” Copley News Service, September 5, 1997.   97. Richard Sandomir, “Bankrupt Dodgers Will Benefit from Robust TV Marketplace,” New York Times, December 3, 2011.   98. “1996 MLB Fan Cost Index,” Team Marketing Report, 1996, https://teammarketing.com/fci/1996-mlb-fan-cost-index/.   99. “Dodger Stadium to Have Facelift,” Tampa Tribune, September 18, 1999. 100. “Fox Considers Tearing Down Dodger Stadium,” Philadelphia Daily News, August 25, 1998; “Dodgers to Stay in Stadium for Now,” Associated Press, April 13, 1999. 101. “Dodger Stadium to Have Facelift.” 102. John Nadel, “Dodger Stadium Undergoes $50 Million Facelift,” Associated Press, April 3, 2000; Jacqueline Fox, “New Suites, Dugout Seats Bolster Dodger Stadium,” Amusement Business, April 10, 2000. 103. “Dodger Stadium to Have Facelift.” 104. McCue, “Los Angeles / Brooklyn Dodgers.”

254       NOTES TO PAGES 137–141

105. Steve Herbert, “Dodger Stadium Upgrades Unveiled Tonight,” City News Service, March 28, 2008. 106. Steve Herbert, “Renovated Dodger Stadium to Make Debut Tonight,” City News Service, March 31, 2006. 107. Herbert, “Dodger Stadium Upgrades”; “Dodgers Ready Second Phase of Renovation,” Associated Press, October 19, 2005. 108. Bill Shaikin and David Zahniser, “Dodgers to Add Shops, a Museum and Garages,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2008. 109. “Los Angeles Dodgers Announce Stadium Improvement Plan to Enhance the Fan Experience and Position Iconic Stadium for Next 50 Years,” Business Wire, April 24, 2008. 110. Hawthorne, “If They Revamp It.” 111. McCue, “Los Angeles / Brooklyn Dodgers.” 112. McCue, “Los Angeles / Brooklyn Dodgers.” 113. Mike Ozanian, “Baseball Team Values 2014 Led by New York Yankees at $2.5 Billion,” Forbes, March 26, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2014/03/26/ baseball-team-values-2014-led-by-new-york-yankees-at-2–5-billion/?sh=277093b870de. 114. Dylan Hernandez, “Stadium Renovations to Begin in Winter,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2012. 115. Hernandez, “Stadium Renovations.” 116.  “Curbed Inside: Come Tour Dodger Stadium’s $100 Million Makeover,” Curbed LA, April 1, 2013, https://la.curbed.com/2013/4/1/10258018/come-tour-dodgerstadiums-100-million-makeover. 117. Shaikin, “Dodgers Just Can’t Commit” 118. Smith, discussion. 119. Smith, “Ballpark or Stadium,” 112. 120. Smith, discussion. 121. Smith, discussion. 122. Shaikin, “Dodgers Just Can’t Commit” 123. Smith, discussion; Christopher Hawthorne, “A Hit or Error: Dodger Stadium’s $100-Million Revamp Is a Cautious Step in the Right Direction, but a Bigger, Bolder Plan Could Be a Home Run,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2013. 124. Arash Markazi, “It’s a Ballpark Figure: Dodger Stadium to Undergo $100-Million Renovation,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2019. 125. Billy Witz, “In This World Series, the Ballparks Play a Starring Role,” New York Times, October 26, 2018. 126. “Diamond Vision,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 2013; Bill Shaikin, “Eye on the Pitchers, Drink in Hand,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2014. 127. Markazi, “It’s a Ballpark Figure.” 128. Hawthorne, “Hit or Error.” 129. Ryan Vaillancourt, “Janet Marie Smith and the Changes to Dodger Stadium,” DT News, February 12, 2013, http://www.ladowntownnews.com/news/janet-marie-smithand-the-changes-to-dodger-stadium/article_41c5419e-7245-11e2–9350–0019bb2963f4. html. 130. “Diamond Vision.” 131. Although Robinson only played for the Dodgers in Brooklyn, his ties to the Los Angeles area included growing up in Pasadena and attending college at UCLA. Markazi, “It’s a Ballpark Figure.” 132. Hawthorne, “Hit or Error.” 133. Hawthorne, “Hit or Error.” 134. Ozanian and Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown.” 135. Condon and McDonald, “Fenway Bringing in More Money.”

NOTES TO PAGES 141–147      255

136. “#2 Los Angele Dodgers,” Forbes, April 2020, https://www.forbes.com/teams/ los-angeles-dodgers/#ea669e723aef. 137. Scott Greenberger, “Sox Offer New Lure under the Stands,” Boston Globe, August 19, 2003. 138. Huxtable, Unreal America, 4. 139. Podair, City of Dreams, 295. 140. Borer, Faithful to Fenway, 188. 141. “Dodger Renovations Don’t Quite Add Up,” LAist, January 9, 2013, https://laist. com/news/entertainment/dodger-renovations-dont-quite-add-u. 142. Bill Plaschke, “Put in His Place,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2005. 143. Plaschke, “Put in His Place.” 144. “Los Angeles Dodgers Attendance”; “Boston Red Sox Attendance, Stadiums, and Park Factors,” Baseball Reference, accessed May 30, 2021, https://www.baseball-reference. com/teams/BOS/attend.shtml. 145. Bill Shaikin, “Real Cost of High Prices,” Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2019. 146. Borer, Faithful to Fenway, 62–65. 147. Goldberger, Ballpark, 169. 148. Goldberger, Ballpark, 169. 7. NATIONALS PARK

  1. National Capital Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital: District Elements (Washington, DC: Author 2006), 2.15.   2. District of Columbia Office of Planning, The Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan (Washington, DC: Author, 2003), 8.11.   3. National Capital Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan, 2.104.   4. Spencer S. Hsu, “Envisioning SoHo at the Southeast Waterfront: Government Partners with Developer on $1 Billion Project,” Washington Post, July 21, 2005.   5. ROMA Design Group, 360 Architects, and Chan Krieger & Associates, “Ballpark District Urban Development Strategy: Draft Summary, September 23, 2005,” 9–13, http:// www.anacostiawaterfront.net/pdfs/Summary%20Final.pdf.   6. National Capital Planning Commission, Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Author, 1997), 19.   7. The South Capitol Street urban design study states that “the Champs Elysees in Paris, Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, and Unter den Linden in Berlin all demonstrate how cohesive and dynamic streets define and animate the life of their cities. South Capitol Street can be such a place.” National Capital Planning Commission, South Capitol Street: Urban Design Study” (Washington, DC: Author, 2003), https://www.ncpc.gov/docs/ South_Capitol_Street_Urban_Design_Study.pdf.   8. United States Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: District of Columbia,” 2020, https:// www.census.gov/quickfacts/DC.   9. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Resurgence of the Anacostia Waterfront: 15 Years of Progress along the Anacostia River, 2003–2018 (Washington, DC: Author, 2018), 32.   10. Luz Lazo, “New Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge Is Midway to Completion,” Washington Post, May 20, 2019.   11. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman & Hall, 1842), 84.   12. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, ix–x.   13. Friedman, “ ‘Transparency of Democracy,’ ” 336.   14. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, x.

256       NOTES TO PAGES 147–150

15. Michael T. Friedman and David L. Andrews, “The Built Sport Spectacle and the Opacity of Democracy,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 46, no. 2 (2011): 181–82. 16. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 211. 17. Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 7; Sam Smith, Captive Capital: Colonial Life in Modern Washington (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), ix–x. 18. Michael T. Friedman, “The Transparency of Democracy: A Lefebvrean Analysis of Washington’s Nationals Park” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2008,) 307. 19. Nufar Avni and Raphaël Fischler, “Social and Environmental Justice in Waterfront Redevelopment: The Anacostia River, Washington, D.C.,” Urban Affairs Review 56, no. 6 (2019): 9. 20. Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia in 1847 along with the District’s other land on the Virginia shore, reducing its land territory to approximately sixty-one square miles. 21. Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington DC from L’Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 13. 22. Smith, Captive Capital, 44; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 64. 23. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty. 24. Tanya Y. Price, “White Public Spaces in Black Places: The Social Reconstruction of Whiteness in Washington, D.C,” Urban Anthropology 27, no. 3/4 (1998): 325–29; Steven J. Diner, “From Jim Crow to Home Rule,” Wilson Quarterly 13, no. 1 (1989): 92. 25. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 141–46. 26. Smith, Captive Capital, 142. 27. Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 123–26. 28. Patrick T. Reardon, “Burnham Quote: Well, It May Be,” Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1992. 29. Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 126. 30. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 97–99. 31. Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 143. 32. Alan A. Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 9–21. 33. Goldberger, Ballpark, 156–59. 34. National Capital Planning Commission, Extending the Legacy, 10; “History of Planning in Washington,” National Capital Planning Commission, accessed July 2, 2007, http://www.ncpc.gov/about/history. 35. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 160–63; Gutheim and Lee, Worthy of the Nation, 302–3. 36. Price, “White Public Spaces,” 328; Smith, Captive Capital, 216–19; Francesca Russello Ammon, “Commemoration amid Criticism: The Mixed Legacy of Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington, D.C.,” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 3 (2009): 185. 37. Charlotte Allen, “A Wreck of a Plan: Look at How Renewal Ruined SW,” Washington Post, July 17, 2005. 38. Ammon, “Commemoration amid Criticism,” 189, 202. 39. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 170–75. 40. Friedman and Andrews, “Built Sport Spectacle,” 182. 41. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 90–91; Muriel E. Bowser, “The Protests Show Why D.C. Statehood Matters,” Washington Post, June 14, 2020. 42. General Accounting Office, District of Columbia: Structural Imbalance and Management Issues; May 2003 (GAO-03–666) (Washington, DC: Author, 2003), 8–14. 43. General Accounting Office, District of Columbia, 48.

NOTES TO PAGES 150–153      257

44. General Accounting Office, District of Columbia, 12–13. 45. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 331–32. 46. General Accounting Office, District of Columbia, 4. 47. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 394–95. 48. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 355–57; Peck and Tickell, “Neoliberalizing Space,” 385. 49. Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” 346–49; Stefan Kipfer and Roger Keil, “Toronto Inc? Planning the Competitive City in the New Toronto,” Antipode 34, no. 2 (2002): 229. 50. Dennis E. Gale, Washington, D.C.: Inner-City Revitalization and Minority Suburbanization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 21. 51. Carol O’Cleireacain and Alice M. Rivlin, Envisioning a Future Washington (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2001), 9, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/DCfuture.pdf. 52. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 395–98; Derek Hyra, Race, Class and Politics in the Cappuccino City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 41. 53. General Accounting Office, District of Columbia, 20. 54. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 396. 55. Hyra, Race, Class and Politics, 38–39; Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 396. 56. Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 398–400. 57. Anthony Williams (former mayor, Washington, DC), in discussion with the author, April 2021. 58. Kevin Clinton (chief operating officer, Federal City Council), in discussion with the author, January 2019. In 2012 Williams became CEO and executive director of the Federal City Council. 59. Yolanda Woodlee, “Williams Mmuses on Life after Office,” Washington Post, September 12, 2007. 60. National Capital Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital, 1.1. 61. Williams, discussion. 62. Timothy A. Gibson, “The Rise and Fall of Adrian Fenty, Mayor-Triathlete: Cycling, Gentrification and Class Politics in Washington DC,” Leisure Studies 34, no. 2 (2015): 8. 63. Gibson, “Selling City Living: Urban Branding Campaigns, Class Power and the Civic Good,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2005): 265. 64. Gibson, “Rise and Fall of Adrian Fenty,” 8–9. 65. Capital One Arena had two previous names: MCI Center (1997–2006) and Verizon Center (2006–17). For more information about redevelopment in Penn Quarter, see Hyra, Race, Class and Politics, 59–64. 66. Hyra, Race, Class and Politics, 63. 67. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Resurgence of the Anacostia Waterfront, 6. 68. Avni and Fischler, “Social and Environmental Justice,” 9–10; National Capital Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital, 1.1. 69. Arthur Santana, “Time to Change Course: Anacostia Waterfront Holds Big Hopes for City’s Future,” Washington Post, April 3, 2003. 70. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Resurgence of the Anacostia Waterfront, 32. 71. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan, 21. 72. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan, 21. 73. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan, 21. 74. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan, 21.

258       NOTES TO PAGES 153–156

  75. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Anacostia Waterfront Framework Plan, 21.   76. “Lasting Expectations: The Accomplishments of Anthony Williams and Linda Cropp,” Washington Post, December 26, 2006.   77. James C. Roberts, The Nationals Past Times: The History and New Beginning of Baseball in Washington, D.C. (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2005), 17.   78. Roberts, Nationals Past Times, 23; Brad Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2003), 67.   79. Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, 108, 47.   80. Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, 288.   81. Snyder, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, 289.   82. Frederic J. Frommer, “Why Washington Baseball Always Struck Out,” Washington Post, May 21, 2006.   83. Roberts, Nationals Past Times, ix.   84. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 317; Roberts, Nationals Past Times, ix–xi.   85. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 116.   86. David Morton, “Virginia Is for Sluggers,” Washington City Paper, May 2, 2003, https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/254132/virginia-is-for-sluggers/.   87. Harry S. Jaffe, “Anatomy of the Deal,” Washingtonian (April 2005).   88. Jaffe, “Anatomy of the Deal.”   89. Jaffe, “Anatomy of the Deal.”   90. Friedman and Andrews, “Built Sport Spectacle,” 189.   91. Peter Whoriskey, “Lucrative Deal on Stadium Won Baseball Over,” Washington Post, September 30, 2004.   92. Jaffe, “Anatomy of the Deal.”   93. Whoriskey, “Lucrative Deal on Stadium”; RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Riverfront Recaptured: How Public Vision and Investment Catalyzed Long-Term Value in the Capitol Riverfront (Washington, DC: Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District, 2019), 16, https://ctycms.com/dc-capitol-riverfront/docs/riverfrontrecaptured2018.pdf.   94. Ed Lazere, “The Mayor’s Proposed Stadium Deal: Many Financial Risks, Few Benefits for the District,” DC Fiscal Policy Institute, October 26, 2004, https://www.dcfpi.org/all/ the-mayors-proposed-stadium-deal-many-financial-risks-few-benefits-for-the-district/.   95. Steven M. Green, Baseball Reference Materials (Washington, DC: Government of the District of Columbia, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, 2004).   96. Robert J. Terry, “Baltimore Orioles Get Compensation for D.C. team,” Washington Business Journal, March 31, 2005.   97. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 120.   98. Craig Timberg and Mark Asher, “Williams Rejects Mount Vernon Square for Stadium: Four Sites, Costing $100 million Less, Remain under Consideration for City’s Baseball Proposal,” Washington Post, January 31, 2003.   99. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 121. 100. Serge F. Kovaleski, “Cooke Took a Pass on Site near RFK: Soil Cleanup, Residents’ Worries Still at Issue,” Washington Post, November 6, 2004. 101. Lori Montgomery and Debbi Wilgoren, “Legislation Would Secure Ballpark Land: Evans Says Moving Ahead on L’Enfant Plaza Site Could Show D.C.’s Commitment,” Washington Post, May 30, 2004. 102. D’vera Cohn, “Final Out for an Industrial Zone? Baseball Will Alter SE Section That Has Two Centuries of Working-Class Heritage,” Washington Post, October 14, 2004. 103. Eugene L. Meyer, “Down by the River,” Washingtonian, June 2005. 104. Bob Arnebeck, “Green Acres: Major Land Schemes on South Capitol Street Have a Shady History,” Washington City Paper, October 22, 2004, https://www.washingtoncity paper.com/news/article/13029904/the-big-whiff.

NOTES TO PAGES 156–160      259

105. Debbi Wilgoren, “On the Brink of a Major League Makeover: Baseball Stadium Helps Spur Plans to Transform Blighted S. Capitol St. Corridor,” Washington Post, March 24, 2005. 106. National Capital Planning Commission, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital, 2.102. 107. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 147. 108. While classification is not a formal process for office buildings, “Class A” generally refers to the highest-quality, most recently built buildings that provide extensive services and amenities and can charge the highest rental rates. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 148–49. 109. Hsu, “Envisioning SoHo.” 110. Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 148. 111. As a point of reference, the downtowns of midsized US cities such as Memphis, St. Louis, and San Antonio possess between six and eight million square feet of office space. “Neighborhood Dynamic,” Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District, accessed June 7, 2008, www.capitolriverfront.org/neighborhood. 112. National Capital Planning Commission, South Capitol Street, 11. 113. Williams, discussion. 114. Friedman and Andrews, “Built Sport Spectacle,” 194. 115. ROMA Design Group, 360 Architects, and Chan Krieger & Associates, “Ballpark District Urban Development Strategy,” 1; Wilgoren, “On the Brink.” 116. David Nakamura, “D.C. Ballpark Architect Has Towering Test,” Washington Post, August 8, 2005. 117. ROMA Design Group, 360 Architects, and Chan Krieger & Associates, “Ballpark District Urban Development Strategy,” 11. 118. ROMA Design Group, 360 Architects, and Chan Krieger & Associates, “Ballpark District Urban Development Strategy,” 11. 119. ROMA Design Group, 360 Architects, and Chan Krieger & Associates, “Ballpark District Urban Development Strategy,” 11. Interestingly, in September 2022 the DC Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs temporarily withheld reissuing Nationals Park’s temporary certificate of occupancy. The delay was an attempt to force stadium owner Events DC to live up to its 2006 commitment to build forty-six thousand square feet of commercial and retail space. Washington Post, “D.C. Backs Off Threat to Close Nationals Park,” September 20, 2022. 120. Tim Lemke, “Companies Picked to Develop Stadium Area: Building at RFK Site Could Save District $60 Million,” Washington Times, December 13, 2005. 121. Jonathan O’Connell, “The Saga behind Washington’s Most Infamous Hole in the Ground Nears a Close,” Washington Post, October 2, 2014. 122. O’Connell, “Saga behind Hole in the Ground.” 123. Fritz Hahn, “Finding Restaurants and Bars Near Nationals Park,” Washington Post, April 10, 2009. 124. Michael Stevens (executive director, Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District), in discussion with the author, January 2019. 125. Ann Abel, “The 12 Coolest Neighborhoods around the World,” Forbes, June 22, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabel/2018/06/22/the-12-coolest-neighborhoodsaround-the-world/#5c74e4486eb1. 126. Thomas Boswell, “Nationals Park Has Become an Urban Development Triumph: Who Knew?,” Washington Post, September 14, 2016. 127. RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Riverfront Recaptured, 7. 128. RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Riverfront Recaptured, 13. 129. RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Riverfront Recaptured, 3. 130. Stevens, discussion.

260       NOTES TO PAGES 160–163

131. Michael Stevens, in discussion with the author, March 2008; Stevens, discussion, 2019. 132. Deborah Ratner Salzberg (former president, Forest City Washington), in discussion with the author, April 2021. 133. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 2–3. 134. Salzberg, discussion; Stevens, discussion, 2019; Williams, discussion. 135. Rana Amirtahmasebi et al., Regenerating Urban Land: A Practitioner’s Guide to Leveraging Private Investment (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016), 327. 136. RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, Riverfront Recaptured, 6. 137. Williams, discussion. 138. Amirtahmasebi et al., Regenerating Urban Land, 327. 139. Williams, discussion; Crompton, “Economic Impact Analysis, 26–27. 140. District of Columbia Office of Planning, Resurgence of the Anacostia Waterfront, 8. 141. Justin Chaplin and Rob Warnock, “Average Rent in Washington DC and Rent Price Trends,” Apartment List, accessed June 2, 2021, https://www.apartmentlist.com/ renter-life/average-rent-in-washington-dc. 142. Inflation adjusted to 2020. United States Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: District of Columbia,” 2008, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/11000. html; United States Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: District of Columbia.” 143. Yesim Yayin Taylor, “Residents Move into the City for Jobs, Move Out for Housing,” District, Measured, June 8, 2015, https://districtmeasured.com/2015/06/08/ residents-move-into-the-city-for-jobs-move-out-for-housing-2/. 144. Gibson, “Rise and Fall of Adrian Fenty,” 1; Hyra, Race, Class and Politics, 39–40. 145. Paul Schwartzman, “D.C. Gay Clubs’ Vanishing Turf: City Earmarks Block of O Street SE for Stadium,” Washington Post, June 8, 2005. 146. Craig Seymour, All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. (New York: Atria, 2008), 1; Friedman, Transparency of Democracy, 222–23. 147. Mark Meinke, Marty Crowetz, and Carl Rizzi, “Before the Ballpark” (panel discussion, Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC, February 28, 2008). 148. Lou Chibbaro Jr, “Stadium Would Displace Gay Clubs,” Washington Blade, October 1, 2004; Meinke, Crowetz, and Rizzi, “Before the Ballpark.” 149. Lou Chibbaro Jr, “Ziegfeld’s-Secrets ‘Closed for Good’ at Current Site: Iconic Drag, Gay Strip Club Considering Move to New Location,” Washington Blade, May 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonblade.com/2020/05/01/ziegfelds-secrets-closed-for-good/. 150. “Mission Statement,” Washington Sculpture Center, January 2012, http://www. dcsculpture.org/mission.html. 151. Tom Knott, “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Dream,” Washington Times, October 1, 2004. 152. “Sculpture Center Washington,” Washington Sculpture Center, January 2012, http://www.dcsculpture.org/; David Nakamura, “To Host a World Series Again, It Took a Team of the Evicted,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019. 153. David Morton, “No ‘Doze: Proponents of Baseball by the Anacostia Must Answer One Question: What about the Garden of Love?,” The Big Whiff, Washington City Paper, October 22, 2004, https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/247105/the-big-whiff/. 154. Jason Cherkis, “Inside Baseball: The Stadium’s Winners and Losers,” Washington City Paper, February 27, 2008, https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/235828/insidebaseball/; Nakamura, “To Host a World Series Again.” 155. Joel Achenbach, “No Joy in Stadiumville: An Unbuilt Ballpark Casts Its Shadow on Southeast,” Washington Post, October 31, 2004.

NOTES TO PAGES 165–170      261

8. TARGET FIELD

  1. “Target Field by the Numbers.”   2. Steve Berg, Target Field: The New Home of the Minnesota Twins (Minneapolis: MVP Books, 2010), 189.   3. Populous is the successor organization to HOK Sport + Venue + Event (HOK Sport). It was renamed following a manager’s buyout in 2009.   4. Newcomb, “Kansas City”; Ed Derse, “Stadiums Share Architects,” Marketplace, Minnesota Public Radio, June 16, 2005.   5. “About Us: Drawing People Together,” Populous, accessed December 22, 2020, https://populous.com/our-global-studio; “Our Projects,” Populous, accessed December 22, 2020, https://populous.com/our-projects.   6. King, “Ron Labinski.”   7. Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 2 (1983): 147–49.   8. John Pastier, “Reviews of Railway Stations: From the Gare de l’Est to Penn Station and The Stadium: Architecture for the New Global Culture,” Architectural Record, July 2006, 68.   9. Jonathan Morrison, “Garden Roofs, Drone Waiters and a Bed Right Next to the Pitch: Stadium Construction Is in the Middle of a Global Boom,” The Times (London), July 20, 2017. 10. Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, 78. 11. Geraint John, Rod Sheard, and Ben Vickery, Stadia: The Populous Design and Development Guide, 5th ed. (London: Routledge, 2013), 77. 12. Berg, Target Field, 211. 13. John, Sheard, and Vickery, Stadia, 30. 14. Joseph Spear, in discussion with the author, April 2021. 15. John, Sheard, and Vickery, Stadia, 32–34. 16. Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 27. 17. John, Sheard, and Vickery, Stadia, 207–14. 18. John, Sheard, and Vickery, Stadia, 34–36. 19. Alex B. Porteshawver, “Green Sports Facilities: Why Adopting New Green-Building Policies Will Improve the Environment and the Community,” Marquette Sports Law Review 20, no. 1 (2009): 248–49; Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 101–2. 20. Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 14–16. 21. Harrington, “Why Red Sox Need a New Park.” 22. Gast, Astrodome, 130; “The Brain,” Inside the Astrodome: 8th Wonder of the World, (Houston Sports Association, Houston, 1965). 23. “Dine in the Dome: Steaks to Hot Dogs,” Inside the Astrodome: 8th Wonder of the World, (Houston Sports Association, Houston, 1965). 24. Yardley, “Last Innings at a Can-do Cathedral”; Angell, “Sporting Scene.” 25. “Nation’s Easiest Stadium to Reach,” Inside the Astrodome: 8th Wonder of the World, (Houston Sports Association, Houston, 1965). 26. McNeill, Global Architect, 1. 27. Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 61–71; McNeill, Global Architect, 7–8. 28. Horne, “Architects, Stadia and Sport Spectacles,” 206–7; Sklair, “Iconic Archi­ tecture,”144. 29. Graham Winch, “Strategic Management of Professional Practice: The Case of Architecture,” in Managing the Professional Practice: In the Built Environment, ed. Hedley Smyth (London: Blackwell, 2011), 48–49.

262       NOTES TO PAGES 170–174

30. Winch, “Strategic Management,” 50–51; Weld Coxe et al., “Charting Your Course: Master Strategies for Organizing and Managing Architecture Firms,” Architectural Technology (1986): 2–3, https://davidmaister.com/wp-content/themes/davidmaister/pdf/ ChartingYourcourse750.pdf. 31. Winch, “Strategic Management,” 48. 32. Coxe et al., “Charting Your Course,” 2; Winch, “Strategic Sanagement,” 49–50. 33. DiMaggio and Powell, “Iron Cage Revisited,” 150. 34. DiMaggio and Powell, “Iron Cage Revisited,” 151–52. 35. DiMaggio and Powell, “Iron Cage Revisited,” 152–53. 36. DiMaggio and Powell, “Iron Cage Revisited,” 150–51. 37. Van Rooij, “Stadium Fever,” 131. 38. Cole Shoemaker, “Three Movements in New Retro Ballpark Construction,” Ballpark Ratings, 2011, https://www.ballparkratings.com/article/three-movements-in-newretro-ballpark-construction/. 39. Dodd, “Marlins See Future.” 40. Jon Schmitz, “Blueprints for Pirates Stadium Unrolled,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 5, 1997. 41. Jennifer Moores and Jim Forni, The Sweet Spot: The Story of the San Diego Padres Petco Park, ed. Carol Monk (Solana Beach, CA: Canum Entertainment, 2004), 120–29. 42. Newcomb, “Kansas City”; Horne, “Architects, Stadia and Sport Spectacles,” 211–14. 43. Newcomb, “Kansas City.” 44. Osborn Engineering, A Century of Progress: Meeting the Challenges of the Times; A History of the Osborn Engineering Company, 1892–1992 (Cleveland: Author, 1992), 16–19. 45. Goldberger, Ballpark, 118. 46. Osborn Engineering, Century of Progress, 19. 47. Andrew Cohen, “Architects Making Strides in Stadium Construction,” Athletic Business, June 2002, https://www.athleticbusiness.com/stadium-arena/a-crowded-field. html. 48. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 235. 49. Lisle, Modern Coliseum, 235. 50. Frank Ahrens, “Ballpark Figures: Two Kansas City Architecture Firms Are Reshaping the Stadium Game,” Washington Post, September 10, 1997. 51. Ahrens, “Ballpark Figures.” 52. Goldberger, Ballpark, 181. 53. King, “Ron Labinski”; Jon Morgan, “On Ground Floor in Stadium Game,” Baltimore Sun, July 12, 1998. 54. King, “Ron Labinski.” 55. Morgan, “On Ground Floor.” 56. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 7. 57. “Urban Revivalists,” Architecture, 81 no. 7 (July 1992): 88. 58. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 7. 59. Cohen, “Architects Making Strides.” 60. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 7. 61. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 7; King, “Ron Labinski.” 62. Rob McManamy, “Only in America,” Building Design and Construction, 2002; Newcomb, “Kansas City.” 63. Spear, discussion. 64. McManamy, “Only in America.” 65. McManamy, “Only in America”; Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 8. 66. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 8; Spear, discussion.

NOTES TO PAGES 174–178      263

  67. Newcomb, “Kansas City.”   68. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 8–9; King, “Ron Labinski.”   69. McManamy, “Only in America”; Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 11–12; Spear, discussion.   70. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 10.   71. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 13.   72. Newcomb, “Kansas City” Spear, discussion.   73. Newcomb, “Kansas City.”   74. In 2009 Ellerbe Becket was acquired by the global architecture, planning, and engineering firm AECOM. See also Cohen, “Architects Making Strides.”   75. After its five-year noncompete agreement with Populous expired in 2014, HOK acquired 360 Architecture to reenter the sport facility design field. Newcomb, “Kansas City.”   76. Newcomb, “Kansas City.”   77. Winch, “Strategic Management,” 49.   78. Winch, “Strategic Management,” 49; Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 41–42.   79. Ken Zapinski, “HOK: Spinner of Designs for Fields of Dreams; Kansas City Firm May Be Retained for Stadiums Here,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 2, 1997.   80. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 31, 117.   81. Winch, “Strategic Management,” 52.   82. Zapinski, “HOK.”   83. Dan Fitzpatrick, “HOK: Blueprint for Conflict? HOK Sport’s Dominant Role on Region’s High-Profile Stadiums Raises Questions of Where Consulting Work Ends and Design Work Begins,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 17, 2002.   84. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 31.   85. “. . . Everything That Brings a Large Amount of People Together for a Small Amount of Time,” Architektur Aktuell, 2004.   86. Fitzpatrick, “HOK.”   87. King, “Ron Labinski.”   88. Pastier, “Reviews.”   89. David Nakamura, “Architects Promise Visionary D.C. Ballpark: HOK Sport Considers Such Encompassing Themes as ‘Transparency of Democracy’ for Design,” Washington Post, April 1, 2005.   90. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 75, 89; Newcomb, “Kansas City.”   91. Nakamura, “Architects Promise.”   92. Mike Beamish, “Stadium Stampede: Unprecedented Boom in Sports Arena Construction Is a Worldwide Phenomenon,” Vancouver Sun, May 23, 1996.   93. “Urban Revivalists.”   94. Moores and Forni, Sweet Spot, 35.   95. Berg, Target Field, 74.   96. Kennicott, “This Diamond Isn’t a Gem,” Washington Post, March 31, 2008; Robert Duffy, “ ‘Retro’ Should Be a No Go for New Stadium,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 5, 2003.   97. Weiner, Stadium Games, 11–15.   98. Amy Klobuchar, Uncovering the Dome (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1986), xv–xvi.   99. Weiner, Stadium Games, 7–10. 100. Gershman, Diamonds, 184. 101. Target Plaza had a statue of Griffith that was removed during the racial justice protests of 2020. Brandt Williams, “Twins Remove Calvin Griffith Statue from Target Field over Racist Remarks,” MPR News, June 19, 2020, https://www.mprnews.org/

264       NOTES TO PAGES 178–181

story/2020/06/19/twins-remove-calvin-griffith-statue-from-target-field-over-racistremarks; Weiner, Stadium Games, 33. 102. Klobuchar, Uncovering the Dome, 70–72. 103. Wood, Dodger Dogs to Fenway Franks, 154. 104. Adam Platt, “Learning from Our Mistake,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 4, 2009. 105. Berg, Target Field, 47–48; Pat Borzi, “Twins’ Rebirth on Target: New Stadium to Open Despite Obstacles; 3 Million Fans Expected,” USA Today, April 7, 2010. 106. Berg, Target Field, 49; Weiner, Stadium Games, 186–88. 107. Berg, Target Field, 52, 54, 59. 108. Minnesota Baseball Authority, “Update on Design Process from October 2007 Media Kit,” news release, October 2007. 109. Jim Souhan, “2010 Sportsperson of the Year: Earl Santee, Architect of Target Field; He Built It,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 26, 2010; “Report: Twins Will Make $1.5B in New Park,” Associated Press, April 27, 2008. 110. Terry Fiedler and Neal St. Anthony, “Possible Twins Site Has New Life,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 12, 2005; Brian Johnson, “Design Firms Line Up for Univ. of MN Football Stadium Project: MN Twins Begin Search for Architect,” Finance and Commerce, May 30, 2006; Mike Kaszuba, “Camden Yards’ Architect Chosen for U Stadium: The Board of Regents Chose HOK Sport of Kansas City to Work on Its $248.7 Million Football Stadium—the First in the Big Ten since 1960,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 9, 2006. 111. Steve Berg, “Beyond the Blueprint for a New Ballpark: A Tour of Stadiums around the Country Gave Twins Officials and Architects Some Do’s and Don’ts,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 3, 2006; Berg, Target Field, 101. 112. Mike Kaszuba, “Twins Pick Firms to Lead Construction of Ballpark: The Minneapolis Company M. A. Mortenson Was Named Construction Manager; HOK Sport of Kansas City Will Be the Architect,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 18, 2006. 113. Souhan, “2010 Sportsperson of the Year.” 114. Dave Campbell, “Twins Searching for Signature Stadium Design,” Associated Press, June 27, 2006. 115. Nadine M. Post, “Minneapolis Ballpark Construction Manager Pulls Off Squeeze Play,” Engineering News-Record, February 24, 2010, 22. 116. Berg, Target Field, 101. 117. Berg, Target Field, 96–99. 118. Campbell, “Twins Searching”; Gregg Aamot, “Twins Ballpark Offers Urban Views and Bit of Rustic Minnesota,” Associated Press, April 12, 2007. 119. Jim Souhan, “Embrace the Outdoors,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 4, 2010. 120. Porteshawver, “Green Sports Facilities,” 251–54. 121. Berg, Target Field, 138–39. 122. Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, “Target Field Deemed Greenest Ballpark in Majors,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 9, 2010; Brian Johnson, “Twins, Washington Nationals Pursue Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Certification,” Finance and Commerce, January 16, 2007. 123. “Development Agreement by and among Hennepin County and Minnesota Ballpark Authority and Minnesota Twins, LLC: Dated as of April 26, 2007,” http://www.ball parkauthority.com/PDFs/legal/development_agreement_with_amendment.PDF. 124. Berg, Target Field, 138–39; Pentair, “Target Field to Spotlight New Standard for Water Use in Sports Facilities through Pentair’s Water Sponsorship,” news release, January 12 2010, https://investors.pentair.com/investor-relations/news-releases/newsrelease-details/2010/Minnesota-Twins-and-Pentair-Announce-First-of-Its-Kind-Sus tainable--Water-Solution-in-Major-League-Sports/default.aspx.

NOTES TO PAGES 182–187      265

125. Caleb Hannan, “Minneapolis Gets Trashed,” Politico, August 20, 2015, https:// www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/minneapolis-trash-incinerator-121570/. 126. Suzukamo, “Target Field Deemed Greenest”; Berg, Target Field, 156. 127. Suzukamo, “Target Field Deemed Greenest.” 128. Judd Spicer, “Earl Santee Talks about His Target Field Architecture,” City Pages, April 10, 2010, http://www.citypages.com/news/earl-santee-talks-about-his-targetfield-architecture-6546199. 129. Campbell, “Twins Searching”; Mike Kaszuba and Linda Mack, “Vision of Twins Stadium Takes the Field with Ballpark Models, Design Details,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, December 6, 2006. 130. Berg, Target Field, 194–95; Eric Stromgren, “The Fan’s Guide to Target Field,” Bemidji Pioneer, April 8, 2010. 131. Joe Christensen, “Finally, a Field of Dreams,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 4, 2010. 132. Christensen, “Finally, a Field of Dreams.” 133. “Thomson Reuters Champions Club,” Minnesota Twins, accessed December 29, 2020, https://www.mlb.com/twins/tickets/season-tickets/suites/champions-club. 134. Borzi, “Twins’ Rebirth on Target.” 135. “Report: Twins Will Make $1.5B.” 136. “#19 Minnesota Twins,” Forbes, updated April 2020, https://www.forbes.com/ teams/minnesota-twins/?sh=7fc420c3bae6; “Report: Twins Will Make $1.5B.” 137. Ritzer and Stillman, “Postmodern Ballpark as Leisure Setting,” 101. 138. Linda Mack, “Ballpark Likely to Sport Modern Look,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 11, 2007. 139. Linda Mack, “It’s a Prairie-Style Ballpark with Wings; Twins and County Deliver a Distinctively Minnesota Design,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 13, 2007. 140. Heron Marquez Estrada, “Teeny Stadium Draws Its First Crowd,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, October 31, 2007. 141. Minnesota Baseball Authority, “Update on Design Process.” 142. Aamot, “Twins Ballpark Offers”; Christensen, “Finally, a Field of Dreams.” 143. Berg, Target Field, 202. 144. Berg, Target Field, 188–89. 145. Bingham-Hall, HOK Sport + Venue + Event, 117; “Urban Design,” Populous, accessed December 22, 2020, https://populous.com/services/urban-design. 146. “. . . Everything That Brings.” 147. Spicer, “Earl Santee Talks”; Suzukamo, “Target Field Deemed Greenest.” 148. Berg, Target Field, 86, 140. 149. Berg, Target Field, 153. 150. Dennis Brackin, “Site Was Yet Another Challenge,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 4, 2010. 151. Spicer, “Earl Santee Talks.” 152. Berg, Target Field, 185–89. 153. Mack, “Prairie-Style Ballpark.” 154. Tony Melhus, “Field of Dreams: Target Field May Be One of the Most Comfortable Outdoor Ballparks in All of Major League Baseball,” Minnesota Twins Magazine: Opening Day 2010; Special Commemorative Issue, 2010; Bill Ward, “Liquid Assets: Baseball and Wine Create Great Double Play,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 8, 2010; LaVelle E. Neal III, “Visuals Big Part of Trip to Ballpark,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 9, 2010. 155. Gina Stingley, “Target Field Named Sports Facility of the Year,” Populous, 2011, https://populous.com/target-field-named-sports-facility-of-the-year. 156. Spicer, “Earl Santee Talks.” 157. Davis, “Urban Renaissance,” 85.

266       NOTES TO PAGES 191–196

9. TRUIST PARK

  1. This chapter was written with Adam Beissel, and parts of it were published in Michael T. Friedman and Adam S. Beissel, “Beyond ‘Who Pays?’: Stadium Development and Urban Governance,” International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship 22, no. 1 (2020).   2. The stadium was initially named “SunTrust Park” when it opened but was renamed in 2020 when SunTrust Bank merged with BB&T. Following the naming convention in this book for stadiums whose names have changed, it will be referred to as “Truist Park” generally, but contemporaneous quotes will not be changed.   3. In baseball terminology, “battery” refers to the catcher-pitcher combination.   4. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 2–3.   5. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 44–48.   6. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 250–65.   7. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 3–4.   8. Neil deMause, “FoS 20 Interview: Roger Noll Thinks the Stadium Subsidy Tide Just Might Be Turning,” Field of Schemes, February 6, 2018, http://www.fieldof schemes.com/2018/02/06/13414/fos-20-interview-roger-noll-thinks-the-stadium-subsidytide-just-might-be-turning/.   9. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 129–54. 10. Steven P. Erie, Vladimir Kogan, and Scott A. MacKenzie, “Redevelopment, San Diego Style: The Limits of Public-Private Partnerships,” Urban Affairs Review 45, no. 5 (2010): 657; Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 107–11. 11. Timothy S. Chapin, “Beyond the Entrepreneurial City: Municipal Capitalism in San Diego,” Journal of Urban Affairs 24, no. 5 (2002): 571. 12. In 1997 Qualcomm bought the naming rights to Jack Murphy Stadium. James P. Quirk and Rodney D. Fort, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 398–99; Nicklos Bristol, “Petco Park: A Ballpark, San Diego Style,” Journal of San Diego History 65, no. 3 (2019): 181–82. 13. Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 102–7. 14. Michael T. Friedman and Daniel S. Mason, “ ‘Horse Trading’ and Consensus Building: Nashville, Tennessee and the Relocation of the Houston Oilers,” Journal of Sport History 28 (2001): 279–83. 15. Chapin, “Beyond the Entrepreneurial City,” 574–75; Bristol, “Petco Park,” 190. 16. Brenda Kayzar, “The Perpetual Undoing of San Diego’s East Village,” Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 70 (2008): 140. 17. Chapin, “Beyond the Entrepreneurial City,” 571. 18. Bristol, “Petco Park,” 183; Lori Weisberg and Roger M. Showley, “Padres’ Field of Dreams a Reflection of Region,” San Diego Union-Tribune, June 7, 1998. 19. Bristol, “Petco Park,” 185. 20. David M. Carter, Money Games: Profiting from the Convergence of Sports and Entertainment (Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books, 2011), 188; Michael B. Cantor and Mark S. Rosentraub, “A Ballpark and Neighborhood Change: Economic Integration, a Recession, and the Altered Demography of San Diego’s Ballpark District after Eight Years,” City, Culture and Society 3, no. 3 (2012): 224; Rosentraub, Major League Winners, 112–17. 21. Cantor and Rosentraub, “Ballpark and Neighborhood Change,” 221. 22. Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie, “Redevelopment, San Diego Style,” 666–69. 23. Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie, “Redevelopment, San Diego Style,” 669. 24. In 1953 Sportsman’s Park was renamed “Busch Stadium,” the first of three St. Louis stadiums with that name. Busch Stadium II refers to the downtown superstadium used from 1966 to 2005. The current mallpark is identified as Busch Stadium III. See Gillette et al., Big League Ballparks, 56. 25. Lipsitz, “Sports Stadia and Urban Development,” 3–6.

NOTES TO PAGES 196–200      267

26. Charlene Prost, “Will It Take a Village to Build This Ballpark?,” St. Louis PostDispatch, March 18, 2001. 27. Charlene Prost and Eric Stern, “Cardinals Envision Shops, Aquarium by New Stadium,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 17, 2000; Prost, “Will It Take a Village?” 28. Prost, “Will It Take a Village?” 29. Eric Click, “One Development Project, Two Economic Tales: The St. Louis Cardinals’ Busch Stadium and Ballpark Village,” Missouri Policy Journal 1, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014): 26. 30. “Live!,” The Cordish Companies, accessed May 30, 2021, https://www.cordish.com/ live; Click, “One Development Project,” 28. 31. L.A. Live is not a project of The Cordish Companies. 32. “Sports-Anchored Districts,” The Cordish Companies, accessed May 30, 2021, https://www.cordish.com/businesses/sports-anchored-districts. 33. Click, “One Development Project,” 28. 34. Click, “One Development Project,” 25. 35. Katie Leslie, J. Scott Trubey, and Tim Tucker, “How Atlanta Lost Braves to Suburbs,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 22, 2013. 36. Leslie, Trubey, and Tucker, “How Atlanta Lost Braves.” 37. Tom Barry, “Ivan Allen Jr. Helped Build, and Heal, Atlanta,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, November 11, 2002, https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2002/11/11/ focus2.html. 38. Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (London: Verso, 1996), 13. 39. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 14–15. 40. Billy Payne is an Atlanta lawyer who founded the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 228–30. 41. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 3. 42. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 3, 29–32, 62–63. 43. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 32–46. 44. Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 153. 45. William B. Anderson, “Sports Page Boosterism Atlanta and Its Newspapers Accomplish the Unprecedented,” American Journalism 17, no. 3 (2000): 94. 46. Atlanta lost this status in 1980 when the Flames relocated to Calgary, regained it in 1999 when the NHL granted the area another expansion team (the Thrashers), and lost it again in 2011 when the Thrashers moved to Winnipeg. 47. Gendzel, “Competitive Boosterism,” 547–48. 48. Gendzel, “Competitive Boosterism,” 536–39. 49. Veeck and Linn, Hustler’s Handbook, 323–24. 50. Anderson, “Sports Page Boosterism,” 101. 51. Keating, Atlanta, 91–93. 52. Keating, Atlanta, 96. 53. Keating, Atlanta, 100. 54. Keating, Atlanta, 100–101. 55. Keating, Atlanta, 101. 56. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 154; Keating, Atlanta, 101–2. 57. Keating, Atlanta, 93. 58. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 154. 59. Keating, Atlanta, 93. 60. Steven P. French and Mike E. Disher, “Atlanta and the Olympics,” Journal of the American Planning Association 63, no. 3 (1997): 380.

268       NOTES TO PAGES 201–203

61. Tim Tucker, “The Time Ted Turner Made Himself the Braves’ Manager,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 6, 2020, https://www.ajc.com/sports/the-time-ted-turner-madehimself-the-braves-manager/x2m40WAfuLGwhNoFQN8ZDN/. 62. Robert Byrd, “The Braves and the Falcons Look to Move to the Suburbs,” Associated Press, December 17, 1988, https://apnews.com/article/7531f85784ce9b22352b32019 f8a6d90. 63. “Braves Considering Moving Team but Only out to Suburban Atlanta,” Toronto Star, September 16, 1988; “Braves ‘Seriously’ Considering Move to New Stadium,” Greenwood (SC) Index-Journal, December 4, 1988. 64. French and Disher, “Atlanta and the Olympics,” 380–82. 65. French and Disher, “Atlanta and the Olympics,” 381; Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 230. 66. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 230. 67. Flowers, Sport and Architecture, 46–49. 68. Janet Marie Smith, in discussion with the author, April 2021. 69. French and Disher, “Atlanta and the Olympics,” 383. 70. Heery & Heery was renamed Heery International during the 1980s. 71. Michelle Hiskey, “A Designing Woman for New Stadium: As She Did in Baltimore, Smith Keeps Fans in Mind,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 14, 1994. 72. Hiskey, “Designing Woman.” 73. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 27; Jill Lieber, “Turner Field: A Baseball Theme Park,” USA Today, April 3, 1997. 74. Lieber, “Turner Field.” 75. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 68–76; Dave Kindred, “Theme Parks Wrong for Baseball,” Sporting News, March 31, 1997. 76. Caruso, Rarest of Diamonds, 127. 77. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 250–52; French and Disher, “Atlanta and the Olympics,” 388. 78. Reuters Staff, “Liberty Media Completes Atlanta Braves Purchase,” Reuters, May 17, 2007, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-braves-liberty/liberty-media-completesatlanta-braves-purchase-idUSWEN819520070517. 79. Leslie, Trubey, and Tucker, “How Atlanta Lost Braves.” 80. Leslie, Trubey, and Tucker, “How Atlanta Lost Braves.” 81. Garreau, Edge City, 172. 82. Garreau, Edge City, 157. 83. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 99. 84. Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, 98–100. 85. Jim Galloway, “Why Publicly Financed Baseball Might Float in Cobb’s Tea Party,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 14, 2013. 86. Cobb County was actually liberal in comparison to Forsyth County, which sat on Fulton County’s northern border. In 1912 Forsyth was ethnically cleansed as racial riots forced its eleven hundred Black residents to leave, and county residents often committed violence against any African Americans who crossed the county line through the 1960s. Forsyth remained nearly all white until the 1980s. To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1912 riots, civil rights activists organized a small march (estimated from fifty to one hundred) that was attacked by white supremacists. This violence resulted in a second march one week later that attracted nearly twenty thousand people. “Race and Reckoning in Forsyth County,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://georgia-exhibits.galileo.usg.edu/ spotlight/forsyth-race-relations/feature/brotherhood-1987. 87. Ronald Smothers, “Olympic Torch Relay Will Skip Atlanta Suburb That Condemned Gay Life,” New York Times, April 20, 1996.

NOTES TO PAGES 204–207      269

  88. Galloway, “Why Publicly Financed Basebal.”   89. Jim Gillooly, “Cobb County: Home of the Braves,” Marietta Daily Journal, November 11, 2013, https://www.mdjonline.com/news/cobb-county-home-of-the-braves/arti cle_8b465b85-e669-524f-9e09-7ce511b03c31.html.   90. Rembert Browne, “Saying Good-Bye as the Braves Leave Atlanta for ‘Atlanta,’ ” Grantland, November 11, 2013, http://grantland.com/the-trlangle/saylng-good-bye-asthe-braves-leave-atlanta-for-atlanta/.   91. Leslie, Trubey, and Tucker, “How Atlanta Lost Braves.”   92. Dan Klepal and Brad Schrade, “No Firm Contract for Braves,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, May 27, 2014.   93. Dan Klepal, Brad Schrade, and Tim Tucker, “Braves, Cobb Close to Final Deal on Stadium,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 8, 2014.   94. Klepal and Schrade, “No Firm Contract for Braves.”   95. Jim Gillooly, “Lee Predicts ‘Unanimous’ Braves Vote,” Marietta Daily Journal, November 15 2013, https://www.mdjonline.com/sports/atlanta_braves/lee-predicts-unani mous-braves-vote/article_b5e1ba31-fe33-5cd5-a3c0-b7bb8f2b9d86.html.   96. Dan Klepal, “Cobb Leader: Stadium to Pay Off,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 16, 2014.   97. Jim Galloway, “Braves’ Move Sets Up Battle of GOP Factions,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, November 28, 2013.   98. Gillooly, “Lee Predicts ‘Unanimous’ Braves Vote.”   99. J. Scott Trubey, “Low-Pay Jobs Come with Move to Cobb,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, November 28, 2013. 100. Garreau, Edge City, 6–9. 101. J. Scott Trubey, Katie Leslie, and Dan Klepal, “Major Step for Stadium, but Challenges Remain,” Atlanta Journal-Consitution, July 31, 2014. 102. J. Scott Trubey and Dan Klepal, “Stadium Project Evolving,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, November 10, 2014. 103. Galloway, “Why Publicly Financed Baseball.” 104. Dan Klepal and Tim Tucker, “Funding Plan for Stadium Revealed,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 15, 2013. 105. J. Scott Trubey and Tim Tucker, “Developer Bows Out of Braves Complex,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 4, 2014; Jay Bookman, “Cobb Stadium Financing Needs to See Light of Day,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 13, 2013. 106. Tim Tucker, “Park Adds Financial ‘Horsepower,’ ” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 15, 2017. 107. Earl Santee, in discussion with the author, April 2021. 108. “The Battery Atlanta,” Comcast, accessed June 2, 2021, https://corporate.comcast. com/smart-cities/the-battery-atlanta. 109. Tim Tucker, “Fans Focus of New Venues,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 22, 2014. 110. Jared Burleyson, “Mixed-Use Development Plans Evolve,” MLB.com, November 13, 2014, http://atlanta.braves.mlb.com/atl/ballpark/suntrust-park/overview/media/ mixeduse-development-plans-evolve-111314/ (site discontinued). 111. Tim Tucker, “Ballpark a Unique Challenge,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 28, 2014. 112. “About,” Jerde Partnership. 113. “Restaurant and Entertainment Concepts,” The Cordish Companies, accessed May 21, 2021, https://www.cordish.com/businesses/restaurants. 114. Alex Tostado and Randall Shearin, “Sports & Social a Winning Concept: The Cordish Cos. Is Expanding Sports-Themed Gathering Place Nationwide,” Shopping Center Business, December 2019.

270       NOTES TO PAGES 207–210

115. “PBR Atlanta: A Coors Banquet Bar,” The Cordish Companies, accessed May 21, 2021, https://liveatthebatteryatlanta.com/eat-and-drink/pbr-atlanta. 116. Yvonne Zusel, “Gear Up for the Game or Wind Down after in The Battery,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 14, 2017. 117. Haisten Willis, “Schuerholz: I Will Be Braves President When Stadium Opens,” Marietta Daily Journal, June 4, 2014, https://www.mdjonline.com/news/schuerholzi-will-be-braves-president-when-stadium-opens/article_ec87f98b-f50e-57ed-a71603bb8fa19969.html. 118. Dave Skretta, “Sports Architects Spear, Santee Shape Ballpark Experience,” Associated Press, June 19, 2015. 119. Tim Tucker, “Stadium Gets Designer,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 29, 2014. 120. Tim Tucker, “Familiar Home Comforts,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 1, 2017. 121. Tucker, “Ballpark a Unique Challenge.” 122. Tim Tucker, “Our First Look Inside Braves’ New Stadium,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, May 6, 2016. 123. Klepal, Schrade, and Tucker, “Braves, Cobb Close.” 124. Tim Tucker, “Details Trickle Out on Stadium Design,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 10, 2014; Tucker, “Our First Look”; Tucker, “Fans Focus of New Venues.” 125. Tucker, “Our First Look.” 126. Tucker, “Ballpark a Unique Challenge”; Tucker, “Stadium Gets Designer.” 127. Tucker, “Stadium Gets Designer.” 128. Tucker, “Details Trickle Out.” 129. Tucker, “Details Trickle Out.” 130. Tucker, “Familiar Home Comforts.” 131. Tim Tucker, “All about SunTrust Park Gathering Places: Social Spaces Built into Ballpark Design,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 12, 2017; Tim Tucker, “Braves Execs Rate New Ballpark a Winner,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 23, 2017. 132. Tim Tucker, “Almost Ready to Play Ball,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 9, 2017. 133. Tucker, “Park Adds Financial ‘Horsepower.’ ” 134. Tim Tucker, “Rookie Year Looks like Win,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 24, 2017. 135. Goldberger, Ballpark, 314. 136. Tucker, “All about Gathering Places:.” 137. Terence Moore, “Latest Statue Hammers Home Aaron’s Legacy,” MLB.com, March 29, 2017, https://www.mlb.com/news/braves-unveil-hank-aaron-statue-at-sun trust-c221511284. 138. Tucker, “Familiar Home Comforts.” 139. Tucker, “Familiar Home Comforts.” 140. Tim Tucker, “Stock Plan Gives Peek at Finances,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 15, 2016. 141. Tim Tucker, “SunTrust: It’s Fiscally Fit,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 10, 2017. 142. Tim Tucker, “Braves’ Revenue Surges to $442M for 2018,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, February 28, 2019, https://www.ajc.com/sports/braves-revenue-surges442m-for-2018/R7IFP39ODOx68FCmIPVZFO/; Tim Tucker, “Revenue up by $124M in 2017,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 2, 2018; Tim Tucker, “Club Revenue in 2019 Rose to Franchise-Record $476M,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 27, 2020.

NOTES TO PAGES 210–214      271

143. Tucker, “Braves’ Revenue Surges”; Tucker, “Revenue up by $124M in 2017”; Tucker, “Club Revenue in 2019 Rose; Ozanian and Badenhausen, “Despite Lockdown. 144. Amy Wenk, “New Aloft Hotel to Rise at The Battery Atlanta,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, August 7, 2018, https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2018/08/07/newaloft-hotel-to-rise-at-the-battery-atlanta.html. 145. Stephen Deere, “Was Stadium Deal Worth Taxpayers’ Investment?,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, March 24, 2021; Matt Kempner, “Battery Is Thriving, with One Exception,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 15, 2018. 146. Kempner, “Battery Is Thriving.” 147. Kempner, “Battery Is Thriving.” 148. Kempner, “Battery Is Thriving.” 149. Deere, “Worth Taxpayers’ Investment?” 150. Deere, “WWorth Taxpayers’ Investment?” 151. J. C. Bradbury, “Sports Stadiums and Local Economic Activity: Evidence from Cobb County, Georgia,” SSRN, 2021, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3802875; J. C. Bradbury, “The Impact of Sports Stadiums on Localized Commercial Activity: Evidence from a Business Improvement District,” SSRN, 2021, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3647552. 152. Bradbury, “Impact of Sports Stadiums,” 2. 153. Bradbury, “Impact of Sports Stadiums,” 20. 154. Deere, “Worth Taxpayers’ Investment?” 155. Bradbury, “Stadiums and Local Economic Activity,” 21–24. 156. Meris Lutz, “As Another Season Passes, Cobb in Dark about Final Braves Stadium Ccost,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 19, 2018. 157. Meris Lutz, “Braves Stadium Hardly a Home Run for Cobb Taxpayers,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 26, 2017. 158. Tucker, “Rookie Year Looks like Win.” 159. “FAQS,” Texas Live!, accessed June 2, 2021, https://texas-live.com/faq. 160. Chris Dupin, “Calls for Oakland Ballpark Strikeout,” American Shipper, July 18, 2019, https://www.freightwaves.com/news/calls-for-oakland-ballpark-strikeout. 161. “Mission Rock,” San Francisco Giants, accessed June 2, 2021, https://mission rock.com. 162. Kevin Reichard, “Angels Unveil Ambitious Development Plan—but No Ballpark Decision,” Ballpark Digest, June 24, 2020, https://ballparkdigest.com/2020/06/24/ angels-unveil-ambitious-development-plan-but-no-ballpark-decision/. 163. Santee, discussion. 164. Harvey, “View from Federal Hill,” 140–44. 165. Trubey and Klepal, “Stadium Project Evolving.” 166. Dan Klepal, “Need to Add Cops, Cars Dire, Police Say,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, February 23, 2014. 167. Klepal, “Need to Add Cops”; Bookman, “Cobb Stadium Financing”; Tommy Tomlinson, “13 Ways to Look at the Braves’ Move to ’Burbs,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 17, 2013. 168. Dan Klepal, “Memo: Stadium Safety to Be Costly,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 26, 2014. 169. Klepal, “Need to Add Cops.” 170. Erie, Kogan, and MacKenzie, “Redevelopment, San Diego Style,” 666–69. 171. Christian Boone, “Stadium Slowdown Sought,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 14, 2013. 172. Dan Klepal, “Email to Lawyer: Lee Says You’re on Deal,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, October 5, 2014.

272       NOTES TO PAGES 214–227

173. Dan Klepal, “Braves Stadium Opponents Fighting Financing Plan,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 26, 2014; Dan Klepal, “AJC Investigation: Inside the Secret Stadium Talks (Day 2),” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 18, 2014; Dan Klepal and Brad Schrade, “Cobb Approves Major Stadium Agreements,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 28, 2014. 174. Klepal, “Braves Stadium Opponents.” 175. Goldberger, Ballpark, 319. 176. Jay Bookman, “Braves Relocation Shows Downside of ‘Atlanta Way,’ ” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 20, 2013. 177. Bookman, “Braves Relocation.” 178. Goldberger, Ballpark, x. 10. MAKING BASEBALL GREAT AGAIN

  1. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again, 1–2.   2. Andrews, Making Sport Great Again, 112.   3. Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, trans. John Sturrock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968), 136–54.   4. Friedman and Ingen, “Bodies in Space,” 89.   5. Henri Lefebvre, “Toward a Leftist Cultural Politics: Remarks Occasioned by the Centenary of Marx’s Death,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 88.   6. “Green Bay Packer Shareholders,” Green Bay Packers, accessed May 31, 2021, https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders.   7. “Titletown,” Green Bay Packers, accessed May 31, 2021, https://www.title town.com.   8. Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 147–59.   9. Henri Lefebvre, “From the Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship,” in Henri Lefebvre: Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman (London: Continuum, 2003), 250–54.   10. Klepal and Tucker, “Skyrocketing Stadium Costs.”   11. Kevin Blackistone, “José Andrés and NBA Players Have Made It Clear: Stadiums Must Serve the Public Good,” Washington Post, December 25, 2020.   12. Goldberger, Ballpark, 20.   13. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, “Lost in Transposition: Time, Space and the City,” in Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 35.

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Index

Aaron, Hank, 209 – 10 Achenbach, Joel, 163 aesthetics association of emotions and, 26 – 27, 28 of ballparks, 50 – 52, 53 of baseball grounds, ballparks, and superstadiums, 12 and Camdenization of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, 143 of Camden Yards, 11, 68, 112, 113 – 14, 117, 118, 175 and coercive isomorphism, 171 of Guaranteed Rate Field, 67 and influence of Camden Yards, 118 – 19 of mallparks, 69 – 70, 79 – 80, 83 modernist, 27 – 28 of Pilot Field, 61 – 62, 66 of superstadiums, 56 – 59 of Target Field, 183 – 84 of Truist Park, 209 of Turner Field, 202 See also Camdenization; retro aesthetic Akridge, 158 alienation, 14, 27, 226. See also disenchantment Allen, Ivan Jr., 197 – 98, 199 – 200 American Association of Professional Baseball Clubs (AA), 46, 47 American Family Field (Milwaukee), 244n68. See also Miller Park (Milwaukee) American League (AL), 47, 49, 154 Amirtahmasebi, Rana, 160 amusement parks, 34. See also theme parks Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI), 145 – 46, 152 – 53, 162. See also Nationals Park (Washington, DC) analytico-regressive analytical phase, 17 Andrés, José, 226 Andrews, David L., 17, 83 Angell, Roger, 56, 59 Angelos, Peter, 155 Angel Stadium (Anaheim), 57, 76, 85, 192, 212 Anschutz Entertainment Group, 194 arcades, 31 architecture design practices, 170 – 72

modernism, 26 – 27 postmodernism, 27 – 28 Armour Field plan, 67, 112 art collections, 77 – 78. See also baseball history, in mallparks artificial turf (AstroTurf), 59, 110 Ashton Design, 112, 132 – 33, 140 Astrodome (Houston), 56, 57 – 59, 169, 226 Atlanta, 197 – 203. See also Atlanta Braves; Battery Atlanta, The; Truist Park (Atlanta); Turner Field (Atlanta) Atlanta Braves, 191, 197, 199, 200 – 203, 204, 205 – 6, 211, 212. See also Atlanta; Truist Park (Atlanta); Turner Field (Atlanta) Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium (AFCS), 55, 198, 199 – 200, 201. See also Atlanta– Fulton County Stadium (AFCS) Avni, Nufar, 148 B&O Warehouse, 79, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 114 – 16 Bale, John, 13, 67, 81, 109 Ballantyne, Andrew, 16 Ballpark District (Washington, DC), 157 – 58 ballparks, 47 – 48 aesthetic practices in, 50 – 52, 118 construction of, 48 consumption practices in, 49 – 50 end of era, 53 inequities produced, reproduced, and celebrated in, 220 renovation of, 124 as spaces of spectacular consumption, 52 – 53 urban spatial practices in, 48 – 49, 106 Ballpark Village (St. Louis), 196 – 97, 206, 213 Baltimore, Inner Harbor, 22, 37 – 38, 99 – 101, 107 – 8 Baltimore Colts, 100 – 101 Baltimore Orioles, 72 – 73, 100 – 101, 104 – 5, 106 – 7, 117, 154. See also Camden Yards (Baltimore); Memorial Stadium (Baltimore) Barber, Red, 52 Barry, Marion, 151

301

302       INDEX

baseball business models for, 46, 60 – 61 cable television’s impact on economics of, 136, 200 – 201 Camdenization and economics of, 142 challenges facing, 218 – 19 as cultural form, 85 enduring popularity of, 218 experiential benefits of, 39, 90, 124 idealized as democratic space, 89 – 90 racist history of, 225 stadium design’s impact on, 168 symbolic power and history of, in Washington, DC, 153 – 54 See also ballparks; baseball grounds; baseball stadiums; mallpark(s); mallpark villages; superstadiums baseball grounds, 45 – 47. See also ballparks; baseball stadiums; mallpark(s); mallpark villages; superstadiums baseball history, in mallparks, 81 – 83, 142. See also nostalgia baseball stadiums architecture of, 172 – 73 broader spatial contexts of, 168 – 69 community use of, 226 designing, 167 – 70 experiential benefits of, 39, 90, 124 future of design of, 211 – 17 generations of, 11 gentrification of, 111 homogeneity of, 173 “right to,” 224 – 27 as spaces of mass consumption, 45 – 50, 221 See also ballparks; baseball grounds; mallpark(s); mallpark villages; sports stadiums; superstadiums Battery Atlanta, The, 20, 191, 204 – 7, 210 – 11, 212 – 16 Baudrillard, Jean, 8 Baxendale, Gene, 172 Belgrad, Herb, 104, 106, 115 Bell, James “Cool Papa,” 225 Bess, Philip, 11, 67 Bidwell, Bill, 104 Bingham-Hall, Patrick, 174, 176 Blackistone, Kevin, 226 Boog’s BBQ, 24, 81 – 82 Bookman, Jay, 216 Boston Red Sox, 129 – 30, 133. See also Fenway Park (Boston) Boswell, Thomas, 159 Bouw, Mattijs, 117 Bradbury, J. C., 211

Brandes, Uwe, 153 Brooklyn Dodgers, 51 – 52 Atlantic Yards stadium proposal, 52 See also Los Angeles Dodgers Bullpen, The, 158 Burnham, Daniel, 149 Busch Stadium II (St. Louis), 57, 118, 196, 244n68, 250n2, 266n24 Busch Stadium III (St. Louis), 74, 81, 196 – 97, 266n24 cable television, 136, 200 – 201. See also media revenue Camdenization challenges of, 125 defining features of, 121 of Dodger Stadium, 121, 134 – 41 effects of, of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, 141 – 44 of Fenway Park, 121, 127 – 34, 224 and market structure of MLB, 123 – 24 and preservation of historic buildings, 121 – 22 Camden Yards (Baltimore), 95 – 96 aesthetics of, 11, 68, 112, 114, 117, 118 – 19, 175 author’s visit to, 22 – 25 Boog’s BBQ, 24, 81 – 82 conception of, 102 – 16 and conception of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, 99 – 101 construction costs of, 91 designers of, 103 – 6 Goldberger on, 68 impact on MLB profitability, 124 – 25 influence of other baseball stadiums on, 83 – 84 influence on baseball stadium architecture, 96, 117 – 19, 121 nostalgia and conception of, 111 – 14 professional offices at, 79 request for proposals (RFP) for, 102, 111 – 12 revenue generation at, 117 as significant commission for HOK Sport, 174 – 75 spectacularization of space in, 11 ticketing at, 72f, 73 See also Camdenization Cammeyer, William, 6, 45 – 46 capitalism production of consumption spaces in late, 7 – 11 and Reaganite politics, 222

INDEX      303

Capitol Riverfront Business Improvement District (CRBID), 157 casinos, as themed environments, 30 cathedrals, practical and symbolic functions of, 25 cathedral(s) of consumption and critique of rationalization and spectacularization, 30 – 31 function and form of, 28 – 29 mallparks as, 6, 10, 25 CBS, 136 Chase Field (Phoenix), 78, 79, 81, 83, 85 Chavez Ravine, 52, 134 – 35, 141 children, 76 – 77 Citi Field (New York), 82, 83 City Beautiful movement, 149 City Slickers (1991), 39, 89 – 90 Clinton, Kevin, 151 – 52 clubhouses, 168 Cobb County, Georgia, 203 – 5, 210 – 11, 212 – 14, 268n86 Coca-Cola, 88 – 89, 112, 199 codes of conduct, 214 – 15 coercive isomorphism, 171 Cohen, Burrell, 44 Comerica Park (Detroit), 75f, 77, 85 Comiskey Park (Chicago), 48, 50, 67 community ownership of sports franchises, 223 – 24 complexity, horizontal and vertical, 17 conceived space, 16, 26, 97 – 99 of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, 99 – 101 of Camden Yards, 102 – 16 of consumption-based strategy, 99 of mallparks, 97 of space, 96, 98 of spaces of urban consumption, 97 – 99 of Truist Park, 207 – 8 See also representations of space concessions at ballparks, 49 – 50 at Camden Yards, 110 at Dodger Stadium, 139 – 40 and honoring past players, 81 – 82 locally produced, 88 – 89 at mallparks, 74 – 75 in superstadiums, 56 at Target Field, 182 – 83 at Truist Park, 208 Condon, Christopher, 132 consumption inequality in mallparks’ environment of, 89 practices in ballparks, 49 – 50, 221 practices in superstadiums, 55 – 56

sociological studies and theories on, 7 See also consumption spaces, production of; urban consumption, spaces of consumption spaces, production of, 28 – 31, 39 – 40 in late capitalism, 7 – 11 mallparks and, 40, 192 – 93 shopping malls, 31 – 33 theme parks, 33 – 36 urban entertainment districts, 36 – 38 See also McDonaldization; urban consumption, spaces of Cora, Alex, 120 Cordish, Reed, 207 Cordish Companies, The, 196, 206 – 7, 212 Costa, Joseph, 110 Cox, Bobby, 201 Cramer, Steve, 180 Cuddyer, Michael, 168 cultural elements, in mallparks, 85 cultural studies, 14 – 17 Cumberland, Georgia, 203 Cumberland community improvement district (CID), 211 Cupid, Lisa, 211 Davis, Mike, 187 deindustrialization, 8 – 9, 36, 98, 99 Delaporte, Chris, 108 deMause, Neil, 213 department stores, 31, 71 descriptive analytical phase, 17 Devine James Labinski and Myers (DJLM), 173 – 74. See also Populous (HOK Sport) Dickens, Charles, 146 – 47 DiMaggio, Paul J., 171 Dining. See concessions di Palma, Giovanni, 210 disenchantment, 29 Disneyland, 33, 34 Disney World, 34 – 36 Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles) Camdenization of, 121, 134 – 41 design of, 57, 120 – 21 effects of Camdenization of, 141 – 44 location in Chavez Ravine, 134 – 35 Doubleday, Abner, 85, 230n42 Dreyfuss, Barney, 43 Dryden, Charles, 154 Dupree, Jacqueline, 156 Ebbets, Charles, 51 Ebbets Field (Brooklyn, NY), 48, 51 – 52, 60, 84, 118

304       INDEX

economic development, 12 – 13, 68, 70 – 71 enchantment, 7. See also spectacularization English, Todd, 207 entertainment, at mallparks, 77 – 79. See also urban entertainment districts (UEDs) entrepreneurialism, urban governance’s shift to, 151 – 55 Erie, Steven P., 195, 214 Eutaw Street, 23 – 24, 110, 115, 132 “experience economy,” 8, 183 extravaganzas, 29 Fachet, Robert, 110 Fan Cost Index, 90 – 91, 245n76 Fenty, Adrian, 161 Fenway Park (Boston) Camdenization of, 121 – 22, 127 – 34, 224 design of, 84, 120 – 21 effects of Camdenization of, 141 – 44 Fenway Factor, 127 Green Monster, 12, 122, 127 – 29 New Fenway Park plan, 129 as typical of ballpark design, 169 Financial Control Board (FCB) (Washington, DC), 151 Finley, Charlie, 197 – 98 Fischler, Raphaël, 148 Flowers, Benjamin, 201, 207, 208 Food. See concessions Forbes Field (Pittsburgh), 43 – 44, 48, 50, 53, 60, 118 Forsyth County, Georgia, 268n86 Fox, Stephen, 169 Fox Corporation, 136 – 37 Fuqua, Jeff, 205 Galloway, Jim, 205 Garreau, Joel, 203 gentrification of baseball stadiums, 111 of Washington, DC, 161 Gershman, Michael, 47, 50, 51 Ghiglino, Patricia, 163 Gibson, Josh, 43, 65, 225 Gillette, Howard Jr., 147 Gilmore, James H., 8, 29 Globe Life Field (Arlington, TX), 73, 78, 91, 211 – 12 Globe Life Park (Arlington, TX), 88, 88f, 166, 211 – 12 Goldberger, Paul on Atlantic Yards project failure, 52 on B&O Warehouse, 115 on Baltimore and urban design, 108

on Camden Yards, 68, 105 – 6 on connection of baseball and place, 39 on HOK Sport, 105 – 6 on shared stadiums, 109 on symbolic reconstruction of urban space, 216 on Truist Park, 209 on Yankee Stadium design, 172 Golden Glove art installation, 5 Goss, Jon, 32 Gray, Freddie, 38 Gray, Vincent, 161 Graziano, Bob, 137 Great American Ball Park (Cincinnati), 70, 171 Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC), 100 Green, Stephen, 155 Green Bay Packers, 223 Griffith, Calvin, 154, 225, 263n101 Griffith, Clark, 154 Grossfeld, Steve, 131 Gruen, Victor, 32, 71 Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago), 11, 66 – 68, 78, 84f, 244n57 Guggenheim Baseball Management (GBM), 137 – 38 Gunts, Edward, 105, 108 Hagy, “Wild Bill,” 111 Harrington, John, 129, 169, 186 Harvey, David, 99, 100 Hawthorne, Christopher, 59, 137, 140 Hebner, Richie, 45 Henry, John, 129 – 30, 143, 186 Herzog, Noble, 173 historic buildings, Camdenization and preservation of, 121 – 22, 143 historico-genetic analytical phase, 17 Hoffberger, Jerold, 100 Hoffman, Bruce, 102 Hofheinz, Roy, 58 HOK Sport reentry into sport architecture, 263n75 See also Populous (HOK Sport) Homestead Grays, 49, 65, 154 horizontal complexity, 17 housing, in Washington, DC, 161 Howard, Needles, Tammen & Bergendoff (HNTB), 103, 105, 106, 173 – 74, 175. See also Populous (HOK Sport) Hughes, Harry, 103, 104 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 28, 30, 141 Hyra, Derek, 152 implosion, 29 – 30 industrial production, 8 – 9, 54

INDEX      305

International Style, 27 intimacy, and conception of Camden Yards, 111 – 13 investment, subsidies versus strategic, 193 – 94 Irsay, Robert, 101 isomorphism, 171 – 72, 173 Jack Murphy Stadium (San Diego), 57, 118, 266n12. See also Qualcomm Stadium (San Diego) Jacobs, Eli, 105, 108, 114, 117 Jacobs Field (Cleveland), 87 Jameson, Frederic, 8 Jerde, Jon, 32, 33, 206 Jerde Partnership, 32, 206 Jersey Street (Yawkey Way), 132, 252n64 Joe Robbie Stadium (Miami), 61, 110, 174 Johnson, Bill, 118 Johnson, Philip, 105 Johnson, Richard, 16 Justice, Richard, 61 Kalinsky, George, 56 – 57 Kasten, Stan, 126, 127, 134, 138, 201, 202 Kauffman Stadium (Kansas City, MO), 57, 173 Keating, Larry, 199, 200 Kenney, Dan, 181 Kennicott, Philip, 12 Keynesianism, 54, 151 King, Bill, 126 Kivett & Myers, 57, 173, 176. See also Populous (HOK Sport) Knight, Jonathan, 87 Kogan, Vladimir, 195, 214 Labinski, Ron, 103, 105, 167, 173, 174, 176, 177 L.A. Live (Los Angeles), 194 Landis, Kennesaw Mountain, 225 late capitalism, 7 – 9 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, 181 – 82 League Park (Cleveland), 50 Lee, Christopher, 167 Lee, Tim, 204, 211, 214 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 33, 223 – 24, 226 – 27 Critique of Everyday Life, 14 methodology, 17 Production of Space, The, 14 right to the city, 21, 223 on space, 9, 14 – 16, 25 – 26, 96, 97 – 98 total man, 223 trial by space, 15 See also conceived space; lived space; perceived space; spatial triad

Legacy Square, 65. See also PNC Park (Pittsburgh) Lehman Brothers, 158 L’Enfant, Charles, 146, 148, 156 Lew, Allen, 177 Lisle, Benjamin D., 13, 173 lived space, 16 – 17. See also spaces of representation local elements, in mallparks, 86 – 89 Lopez, Reinaldo, 163 Loria, Jeffrey, 171 Los Angeles Dodgers, 135 – 36, 137 – 38. See also Brooklyn Dodgers; Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles); Ebbets Field (Brooklyn, NY) Loverro, Thom, 102 Lowry, Philip J., 106 Lucchino, Larry on B&O Warehouse, 114 buys Red Sox, 129 – 30 and Camden Yards, 102, 104 – 6, 112 coins term “Camdenization,” 121 on Fenway Park, 130, 133 on HOK Sport’s design for Camden Yards, 174 – 75 and Janet Marie Smith, 125 – 26 and Petco Park, 195 Lukas, Scott A., 30 luxury boxes at Camden Yards, 110 at Dodger Stadium, 139, 142 at Fenway Park, 131 – 32, 142 in mallparks, 221 in superstadiums, 45, 56, 60 at Target Field, 182 at Truist Park, 208 M&T Bank Stadium (Baltimore), 70 Mack, Linda, 183 MacKenzie, Scott A., 195, 214 Major League Baseball (MLB) At Bat application, 79 creation of, 47 – 48 and Houston Astrodome, 58 market structure of, 123 – 24 presence of team as status symbol of cities, 55, 68, 178, 198 racism in, 90 reordering of map, 54 Washington, DC, loses and entices back teams, 154 – 55 Mall of America, 3, 4f, 6, 32 – 33 mallpark(s) architecture of, 83 – 84 as cathedrals of consumption, 6, 10, 25

306       INDEX

mallpark(s) (continued) as central elements of urban marketing efforts, 69 – 70 challenges of, 129 – 30 conception and development of, 97 construction costs of, 91 cultural studies approach to, 14 – 17 definition and description of, 11 – 14 dining at, 74 – 75 emotional connection and design of, 39 – 40 entertainment at, 77 – 79 homogeneity of, 172 honoring Negro league players in, 225 Janet Marie Smith and design of, 125 – 27 location of, 69, 70 – 71 as neoliberal spaces, 89 – 91, 221 non-sporting events at, 79 and production of consumption spaces, 7 – 11, 40, 192 – 93 and profitability of MLB franchises, 124 – 25 relationship between cities and, 68 – 71 and renovation of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, 121 revenue generation at, 110 seating in, 71 – 73, 221 as shopping mall, 71 – 80 sports architecture and production of, 170 Target Field as culmination of, development, 185 – 87 technical challenges of, 180 – 81 themed, 80 – 89 tours of, 79 – 80 transition from superstadiums to, 66 – 68 and urban redevelopment, 160 See also Camden Yards (Baltimore); Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles); Fenway Park (Boston); Nationals Park (Washington, DC) mallpark villages advantages and disadvantages of, 212 – 17 development of Busch Stadium, 196 – 97 development of Petco Park, 194 – 96 elements of, 191 – 92 and future of baseball stadium design, 212 – 17 impact on stadium development, 192 overview of approach, 192 – 94 proliferation of, 211 – 12 revenue generation of, 140 – 41 Truist Park as, 191 See also Battery Atlanta, The; Busch Stadium II (St. Louis); Busch Stadium III (St. Louis); Petco Park (San Diego); Truist Park (Atlanta) Malone, John, 205, 213

Mara, Tim, 176 Marlins Park (Miami), 77 – 78, 85, 166, 171, 185, 243n43 Marwick, Peat, 104, 109 Marx, Karl, 7 – 8 Maryland Sports Complex Authority (MSCA), 101, 246n32 Maryland Stadium Authority (MSA), 100, 101, 102, 103 – 4, 106, 107, 109, 111, 115 – 16 Mayor’s Special Sports Task Force (Mayor’s Task Force), 103, 104, 106 McAdam, Sean, 130 McCourt, Frank, 137 McCourt, Jamie, 137 McDonald, Michael, 132 McDonaldization, 7, 9 – 10, 28 – 29, 31, 35, 59, 186. See also rationalization McGuirk, Terry, 205, 210 McKim, Charles, 149 McMillan, James, 149 McMillan, John, 148 – 49 McMillan Plan, 146, 149 media revenue, 123, 124. See also cable television Memorial Stadium (Baltimore), 101, 104, 108 – 9, 110, 111 Metrodome (Minneapolis), 178 – 79 Metropolitan Stadium (Bloomington, MN), 3, 55, 178 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), 123 Miller, Bruce, 183 Miller Park (Milwaukee), 88. See also American Family Field (Milwaukee) Milwaukee County Stadium, 199 mimetic isomorphism, 171 Minnesota Twins. See Metropolitan Stadium (Bloomington, MN); Target Field (Minneapolis) modernism, 26 – 27, 143 Molitor, Paul, 182 Montreal Expos, 154 – 55 Monument Realty, 158 Moores, John, 194, 195 Moreno, Arte, 212 Morton, David, 163 Moses, Robert, 52, 55, 149 Moss, Eric, 115 Municipal Stadium (Cleveland), 54 Murdoch, Rupert, 136 Murphy, David, 173 Murray, Jim, 135 museums and museum exhibits, 77 – 78, 90, 202. See also baseball history, in mallparks Musial, Stan, 81, 220

INDEX      307

National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, 46 National Baseball Hall of Fame, 11, 17, 230n42 National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), 146, 149 – 50 National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (NL), 46, 47, 49 Nationals Park (Washington, DC), 145 – 46 design inspiration, 86 HOK Sport selected to design, 177 impacts of, 159 – 64 LEED certification of, 181 site location for, 155 – 59 style of, 171 See also Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI) Negro leagues, 49, 90, 154, 225 Neilson, Brian J., 47, 50, 51, 57, 61 neoliberalism, 8, 90, 91, 151, 162, 220 – 22 New Comiskey Park (Chicago). See Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago) New Yankee Stadium (New York), 73 New York Yankees, 136 Noll, Roger, 194 nonplaces, 29, 59 normative isomorphism, 171 – 72, 173 nostalgia baseball saved through appeals to, 219 and coercive isomorphism, 171 and conception of Camden Yards, 111 – 14 and demise of superstadiums, 60, 61 and idealization of baseball as democratic space, 89 – 90 and inequities of past, 219 – 21 and mallpark architecture, 83 – 84 See also baseball history, in mallparks O’Connell, Jonathan, 158 Olmstead, Frederick Law Jr., 53, 149, 240n85 Olympic Games (Summer, 1996), 201, 203 O’Malley, Peter, 135, 142 O’Malley, Walter, 52, 134, 135, 140, 142 Oracle Park (San Francisco), 40, 73, 81, 82f, 85, 87, 191, 212, 250n2 Oriole Park at Camden Yards. See Camden Yards (Baltimore) Osborn Engineering, 172 – 73 outfield dimensions, 50 – 51, 83 Palace of the Fans (Cincinnati), 46, 47 Papish, Al, 172 party decks, 171 Pastier, John, 62, 167, 176 – 77 Pawlenty, Tim, 179 Payne, Billy, 198

Pellegrino, Rich, 214 Penn Quarter, 152 perceived space. See spatial practice(s) Perpich, Rudy, 178 Perry, William, 214 Petco Park (San Diego), 74f, 76f, 78, 86 – 87, 87f, 177, 194 – 96 Philips Arena, 127 Phillips, Murray G., 81 Pilot Field (Buffalo), 61 – 62, 66 – 67, 112 Pine, B. Joseph, 8, 29 Pirates of the Caribbean ride (Disney World), 35 place, mallparks’ embedding in, 87 – 88, 106. See also space placelessness, 26, 30 Plant, Mike, 204 Platt, Adam, 178 – 79 Players League, 46 pleasure gardens, 33 – 34 Plummer, Carrie, 176 PNC Park (Pittsburgh), 63 – 66, 81, 90 Podair, Jerald, 142 Pohlad, Carl, 179 Pollin, Abe, 152 Polo Grounds (New York), 46, 50 Populous (HOK Sport) background of, 174 – 75 Camden Yards, 105 – 6, 109 – 10, 113, 117, 174 – 75 critique of designs, 105 – 6, 167, 174 – 75, 177 design of Nationals Park, 86, 177 design practices, 185 – 87 founding of HOK Sport, 174 and Guaranteed Rate Field, 67 as industry leader, 20, 166 – 67, 171, 175 – 78 managers buyout and renaming, 175, 233n97 New Fenway Park plan, 129 and Petco Park design, 177 and Pilot Field design, 61 – 62 spatial context in designs of, 185 as strong experience firm, 175 – 78 and sustainable design practices, 181 and Target Field, 179 – 85 and Truist Park, 207 – 8 See also Labinski, Ron; Santee, Earl; Spear, Joseph postmodernism, 27 – 28, 61 – 62 Potts, Mark, 117 Poulson, Norris, 134 Powell, Boog, 24, 81 – 82 Powell, Walter W., 171 Praeger, Emil, 57, 135, 138, 140, 173

308       INDEX

predictability, and production of consumption spaces, 28 – 29 Predock, Antoine, 177, 195 Provoost, Michelle, 117 Qualcomm Stadium (San Diego), 194, 266n12. See also Jack Murphy Stadium (San Diego) racism/racial division, 90, 198, 199, 200, 215 – 16, 220, 225 Rader, Jerry, 174 Raitz, Karl B., 50 Rangers, 212 rationalization of ballparks, 52 – 53 critique of spectacularization and, 30 – 31 mallparks as fusion of spectacularization and, 11 and production of consumption spaces, 10 – 11, 28 – 29 of shopping malls, 31 – 32 of superstadiums, 59 of theme parks, 33 of urban entertainment districts, 37 See also McDonaldization Reaganite politics, 220 – 22 reenchantment, 7, 9 – 10, 29 Reinsdorf, Jerry, 155 Relph, Edward C., 27, 28, 30, 85 representations of space, 15, 16. See also conceived space retro aesthetic of Camden Yards, 112, 113 – 14, 118, 175 of Guaranteed Rate Field, 67 nostalgia and, 171 of Pilot Field, 61 – 62, 66 of Target Field, 183 of Truist Park, 209 of Turner Field, 202 revenue generation at Camden Yards, 117 at Dodger Stadium, 138, 140 – 41 at Fenway Park, 133 – 34, 141 at mallparks, 110 at mallpark villages, 140 – 41 and market structure of MLB, 123 – 24 sources of, 6, 191 at superstadiums, 108 – 9 at Target Field, 182 – 83 at Truist Park, 210, 212 revenue sharing, 123 – 24 Richmond, Peter, 105, 113, 126 right to the city, 223 – 24. See also Lefebvre, Henri

right to the stadium, 224 – 27 Ritzer, George, 7, 9 – 10, 12, 29, 80. See also McDonaldization; rationalization; spectacularization Riverfront Stadium (Cincinnati), 55 Robbie, Joe, 174 Roberts, Dave, 120 Robinson, Jackie, 82, 140, 220, 254n131 Rogers Centre (Toronto), 66 – 67. See also SkyDome (Toronto) Rosenbloom, Carroll, 100 Rosentraub, Mark S., 70, 160, 193, 194 Rouse, James, 99 RTKL Associates, 107, 114 Rutheiser, Charles, 198 Sachs, Stephen, 103 – 4 Safeco Field (Seattle). See T-Mobile Park (Seattle) Salzberg, Deborah Ratner, 160 San Diego, East Village redevelopment, 194 – 96, 197, 206, 213, 214 San Diego Padres. See Petco Park (San Diego) Santee, Earl, 91, 96, 182, 184, 185, 205, 207, 208, 212, 242n1 Save Fenway Park! (SFP), 127, 129, 224 Schaefer, William Donald, 100, 103 – 4, 107 Schiller, Derek, 205, 206, 208 Schuerholz, John, 201, 207, 211 Schwartzman, Paul, 162 scoreboards, 44, 50, 51, 56, 57, 58, 79, 83, 135, 140 seating in ballparks, 49 in baseball grounds, 46 at Camden Yards, 110, 111 at Dodger Stadium, 137, 139, 142 at Fenway Park, 130, 131 – 32, 142 at Guaranteed Rate Field, 68 in mallparks, 71 – 73, 221 in PNC Park, 66 in superstadiums, 56, 60 – 61 at Target Field, 182 at Truist Park, 208 See also tickets and ticketing segregation, 198, 220, 225. See also racism/ racial division Seidler, Terry, 135 Selig, Bud, 124, 137, 155 Shannon, Bill, 56 – 57 Shaughnessy, Dan, 131 Shea Stadium (New York), 52, 57 Shibe Park (Philadelphia), 12, 48, 50, 51, 53, 60, 231n47

INDEX      309

Shields, Rob, 15, 25, 31 shopping, at mallparks, 71 – 80 shopping malls, 10 mallparks as, 71 – 80 production of, 31 – 33 Siegel, Robert, 163 simulations, 29 SkyDome (Toronto), 61. See also Rogers Centre (Toronto) smartphone apps, 79 Smith, Janet Marie on B&O Warehouse, 114, 115 and Camdenization of Dodger Stadium, 120, 121, 134, 138 – 40 and Camdenization of Fenway Park, 120, 121, 130, 131, 141, 224 and Camden Yards renovation, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113 involvement in mallpark design, 125 – 27 and Turner Field, 201, 202 on urban renewal programs, 55 Souhan, Jim, 181 Southdale Mall, 31 – 32 space conception of, 96, 98 production of, 14 – 17, 25 – 28 trial by, 15 See also place, mallparks’ embedding in spaces of representation, 15, 16. See also lived space spatial practice(s), 15 – 16, 25 – 26, 63 – 66 and ballparks, 47 – 52 and baseball grounds, 45 – 47 changing, in Pittsburgh’s baseball stadiums, 44 – 46 evolution of spatial conceptions and, 31 and mallpark as neoliberal space, 89 – 91 and mallpark as shopping mall, 71 – 80 and relationship between mallpark and city, 68 – 71 and transition from superstadiums to mallparks, 66 – 68 See also perceived space spatial production, 16 – 17, 223 spatial triad, 15 – 17. See also representations of space; spaces of representation; spatial practice(s) Spear, Joseph, 106, 109, 112 – 13, 117, 168, 174, 175, 177, 207, 210, 242n1 spectacularization, 9 – 10 of ballparks, 52 – 53 critique of rationalization and, 30 – 31 Disney World as example of, 35 mallparks as fusion of rationalization and, 11

and production of consumption spaces in late capitalism, 10 – 11 of shopping malls, 32 – 33 of superstadiums, 59 – 60 through theming, 30, 80 of urban entertainment districts, 37 – 38 See also enchantment Spink, A. G., 225 sports architecture development of, 170 – 72 niche expertise in, 172 – 78 sports franchises, ownership of, 223 – 24 Sportsman’s Park (St. Louis), 266n24 sports stadiums community use of, 226 design of, 177 emotional connections to, 39 mallpark villages’ impact on development of, 192 principles for economic development centered on, 193 “right to,” 224 – 27 scholarship on, 13 See also ballparks; baseball grounds; baseball stadiums; mallpark(s); mallpark villages; superstadiums Starbucks, 8 starchitects, 170 Steinbrenner, George, 136 Stevens, Michael, 159 Stillman, Todd, 12, 80 St. Louis Cardinals, 125, 196 – 97. See also Busch Stadium II (St. Louis); Busch Stadium III (St. Louis) St. Peter, David, 180, 184 – 85 strategic investment, subsidies versus, 193 – 94 subsidies, versus strategic investments, 193 – 94 suburbanization, 36, 38, 98, 99 Summer Olympics (1996), 198, 201 SunTrust Park (Atlanta), 266n2. See also Truist Park (Atlanta) superstadiums, 12 – 13, 54 aesthetic practices in, 56 – 59, 118 consumption practices in, 55 – 56 end of, 60 – 61 as increasingly sophisticated revenue generators, 108 – 9 as spaces of spectacular consumption, 59 – 60 transition to mallparks from, 66 – 68 urban spatial practices in, 54 – 55, 106 Target Field (Minneapolis), 4 – 6, 81, 84, 165 – 66, 178 – 87 TBS, 136, 200 – 201, 202

310       INDEX

Texas Live!, 212 themed mallparks, 80 – 89 theme parks, 10, 33 – 36. See also Disneyland; Disney World theming, spectacularization through, 30, 80 Three Rivers Stadium (Pittsburgh), 44 – 45, 59 Tiant, Luis, 133 tickets and ticketing at Camden Yards, 110, 111 in mallparks, 71 – 73 rising costs of, 90 – 91 separation and exclusivity through, 89, 111 See also luxury boxes; seating Tiger Stadium (Detroit), 46, 50, 51 Till, Jeremy, 97, 98 Titletown (Green Bay, WI), 223 T-Mobile Park (Seattle), 73, 75, 78, 85 topophilia, 26, 60 topophobia, 26, 53 total man, society of, 223 trial by space, 15 Tropicana Field (St. Petersburg, FL), 61, 75, 77, 78 Trost, Lonn, 89 Truist Park (Atlanta), 20 conception of, 166, 207 – 8 design of, 208 – 10 and future of baseball stadium design, 211 – 17 impact on surrounding areas, 211 as mallpark village, 191 revenue generation at, 210, 212 Truman Sports Complex (Kansas City, MO), 173 Trump, Donald, 221, 222 Trumpism, 222 Tuan, Yi-fu, 26 Tucker, Tim, 208 Turner, Ted, 200, 202 Turner Field (Atlanta), 73, 77, 78, 126 – 27, 191, 201 – 3, 208 Union Association of Professional Baseball Clubs (UA), 46 Union Grounds (Brooklyn), 6, 45 – 46 Unitas, Johnny, 100 urban consumption, spaces of, 97 – 99 urban entertainment districts (UEDs), 10 – 11 and conception of consumption-based strategy, 99 as exclusionary, 90 – 91, 186, 214 – 16 as location of mallparks, 68, 69 production of, 36 – 38

urban governance and Camdenization of Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium, 143 entrepreneurialism, 36, 37, 98, 162, 163, 213, 217, 224 history of Washington, DC’s planning and, 147 – 51 Keynesianism, 36, 54 by right to the city, 223 – 24 and urban entertainment districts, 36 – 37 of Washington, DC, under Williams, 151 – 55 urban marketing, 37, 69 – 70, 87 urban planning, 36, 149 – 50 urban renewal, 37 – 38, 55, 99 – 101, 149 – 50, 199, 200, 216 van Rooij, Marieke, 171 Veeck, Bill, 50, 78, 80, 244n57 Venturi, Robert, 27 vertical complexity, 17 Veterans Stadium (Philadelphia), 57 Waggoner, Tom, 175 Washington, DC, 256n20 future plans for, 145 – 47 history of governance and planning, 147 – 51 Nationals Park’s impact on, 159 – 64 site location for Nationals Park, 155 – 59 under Williams, 151 – 55 See also Anacostia Waterfront Initiative (AWI); Nationals Park (Washington, DC) Washington Sculpture Center (WSC), 163 Washington Senators, 154 weather, as consideration in mallpark design, 181 Weeghman, Charles, 49 Werner, Tom, 129 – 30 Wilgoren, Debbi, 156 Will, George, 95 Williams, Anthony, 147, 151 – 55, 161 Williams, Edward Bennett, 101, 104, 154 Williams, Ted, 81, 82, 133 Wilson, Dan, 129 Winch, Graham, 170, 175 – 76 Wind Veil, The, art installation, 5 wireless connectivity, 79, 168 Wood, Bob, 178 wooden baseball grounds, 46 – 47 World Series (2018), 120 world’s fairs, 34 Wrigley Field (Chicago), 48, 49, 50, 83, 250n2 Wyban, Ken, 163

INDEX      311

Xfinity Live!, 70, 196 Yankee Stadium (New York), 49, 50, 51, 53, 172, 240n86 Yardley, Jim, 59 Yards, The, 146, 157, 160

Yawkey, Tom, 127 Yawkey Trust, 129 Yawkey Way (Jersey Street), 132, 252n64 Zeiger, Irving, 142 Zimbalist, Andrew, 205, 224