99% Invisible - 262- In the Same Ballpark

Episode Date: June 14, 2017

In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the downtown harbor. The stadium was small and intimate, built with brick and iron trusses—a throwback to … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the spring of 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards. It sat right along the harbor in downtown Baltimore. The Baltimore Orioles pulled out all of the stops for opening day at brand new Camden Yards. At over time, ballpark in the heart of downtown. The stadium was small, in intimate. It was built with brick and iron trusses, a throwback to the classic ball parks

from the early 20th century. But on this day, it was the future, not the past, that was on the minds of Oriole fans, as they clocked the Camden Yards in what was the first of 67 Southuts, 59 of them in a row. Camden yards was really popular right from the start. Here's a TV reporter interviewing a bunch of Orioles fans on opening day. Outstanding, outstanding day for baseball, outstanding park, and outstanding here for the Orioles. And credible! It's just unbelievable here! Beautiful! Baseball writers from around the country

keep praise on the Orioles new park. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. Tim Kirchen wrote in Sports Illustrated, it's magnificent, and an understated baseball only real grass open air, quirky, cozy, comfortable, cool sort of a way. All the national attention took the team by surprise. We were just out to build a ballpark that worked for Baltimore, this blue collar city, home of crab cakes, netty bow and boogs, barbecues.

This is Janet Marie Smith, one of the designers of Camden Yards. You know, we weren't looking to create something that would change the paradigm of baseball parks. But that's exactly what happened. The success of Camden Yards set off a building boom in baseball, as city after city built new stadiums based on the architectural principles laid down in Baltimore. That design revolution changed the experience of going to the ballpark and the relationship between baseball and cities. But to understand what made Camden Yards feel so special in 1992, we need a little bit of history.

In the early 1900s, most baseball stadiums were relatively small and built in dense urban neighborhoods. But in the 1950s and 60s, as white populations fled downtown for the suburbs, baseball followed them. Teams built stadiums on the edge of cities where they would be more accessible to middle-class fans who drove to games in cars. They often were acres and acres of parking surrounding the stadium. And the stadiums themselves were these massive concrete cylinders designed to house more than one sport. From Pittsburgh to Atlanta to Milwaukee, everyone had this big round hulking, concrete stadium that generally housed both baseball and football. But these multipurpose stadiums, or concrete donuts, as they were sometimes called, really

weren't great for fans of either sport. The sort of joke was they became multipurpose less. They were perfectly round to fit both a football field and a baseball diamond, but that meant that the seats were often really far away from the action or angled in weird directions. So it ended up being a shape that accommodated everything but served nothing well. And the multi-purpose stadiums were just way too big for baseball. The old urban ball parks had about 25 or 30,000 seats, but these had 50,000 or more. It just didn't work, you know, except for a playoff game, you simply weren't selling

that many tickets. So the stadiums often felt empty, and critics also complained that they all looked exactly the same. They were not distinctive enough. You didn't know if you were in three rivers, stadiums, or you were in 3 rivers, stadium, or you were in Riverfront Stadium, or you were in Veteran Stadium, you really didn't know what city you were in or could be in. This is Larry Lucchino. He was the president of the Orioles in the late 80s and early 90s.

And during that time, the Orioles played in their own concrete donut, Memorial Stadium, which had once housed Baltimore's football team, the Colts. But in 1984, the Colts abandoned the city for Indianapolis. A long, agonizing, frustrating two and a half months of waiting and wondering if the Baltimore Colts would be leaving town for good. It has happened. The shock is setting in. Emotions are running. And the Colts cited the inadequacy of aging memorial stadium as a reason for leaving. So there was a concern that unless something creative was done

in Baltimore for the orios, that we might follow the example of the cults and leave town for greener ball parks, if you will. The team's owner, Edward Bennett Williams, wanted to build a nice new multi-purpose stadium so that the city could try and court another football team back to Baltimore. But Larry Lucino had a different idea. He went to Edward Williams and said to him, let's look at the most successful baseball franchises out there.

The Yankees and Yankees stadium, the Cubs in Wrigley Field, the Red Sox in Fenway Park, and what did they have in common? They all played in a baseball-only facility, a facility that was designed for baseball, and it did not compromise architecturally for other sports. Those stadiums actually had another thing in common. They were really old. Some of the last holdouts from the pre-war era of urban ballpark baseball.

And unlike the concrete donuts, the ballpark's built back then had all these architectural quirks, Fenway's green monster, or Rigglyfield's iconic brick walls covered in ivy. They were all a little bit of a different flavor of ice cream. We thought that something was lost when baseball moved from those kinds of facilities to generic multipurpose stadiums in the 60s and 70s.

Duquino wanted to break out of the multipurpose paradigm and build a new kind of baseball-only stadium, one that felt old. An old fashioned traditional baseball park with modern amenities if we use that phrase once we used it to 10,000 times. In fact, Lucchino became so zealous in his commitment to building an old fashioned ballpark that he banned Orioles employees from even using the word stadium. Indeed, we find people five dollars

if they use the S-word stadium instead of referring to our project as a ballpark. A stadium canode something very different in terms of size and monumentality. Did you ever collect on those fines? Yeah, we did collect. We had a little party. I don't remember how much we got, but it wasn't in substantial. The Orioles struck a deal with the Maryland S-word Authority to build a new baseball only ballpark in Baltimore, using mostly public money.

The city and state government saw it as part of an effort to revitalize downtown. The stadium authority hired the architecture firm H.O.K. and the Orioles brought in their own design director Janet Marie Smith. My assignment was really to take those words that he used over and over again of an old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities and try and make certain that we were really being true to that. It wasn't an easy task. No one else had moved into a center city and said,

we want to be a part of that tapestry. And Golly, maybe 70 years. How are we going to create something that feels like it's woven into the city of Baltimore? And like it's always belonged here. Janet Marie Smith turned to the ball parks from the early 1900s for inspiration. What made those older ball park special is that they were kind of

wedged into a very tight urban environment. And by wedged, she means that the urban environment actually dictated the shape of the field. Each ball park had different dimensions, depending on the plot of land on which it was built. Which can only really happen in baseball. with most sports, the dimensions of the playing field are totally standardized, but not baseball. Their rules about the infield, they've got to be, you know, you've got to have 90 feet between the bases, 60 feet, six inches from home plate to the pictures mound, but there's no rule about the outfield.

And so a lot of the early American ball parks were totally asymmetrical. Ebets Field, built in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Pigtown, had a wildly irregular shape. The left field foul pole was over 50 feet further from home plate than the right field foul pole. That variety means that some ball parks are better for pictures, others are better for hitters, some ball parks give up more home runs to right handed batters, others to lefties. So the the park itself really does shape the outcome of the game. Larry Lucchino wanted an irregular playing field like those old time ball parks, but he felt that the shape needed to respond to the built environment around the site. To make sure that this ballpark was integrated into its neighborhood,

it didn't feel like I'm flying saucer that descended and just landed in the neighborhood. The inner harbor site where Camden Yards would be built had one distinct architectural feature, the B&O warehouse, an extremely long brick building built at the turn of the 20th century. It was abandoned at the time, and a lot of people thought that the Orioles should just tear it down to give themselves more room to build on and to open up a view to the water. One sports editor wrote that it was an empty, rat-infested fire trap, and it should be done away with.

But Janet Marie Smith didn't want to do that. We felt strongly that tearing down the very contexts that might give form to an asymmetrical playing field and asymmetrical seating bowl was running against the grain of what Larry wanted. So they left the warehouse, which would eventually sit just beyond right field and design the shape of the playing field around it. In fact, Lucino says that the decision to preserve the warehouse really dictated nearly every other design decision that went into Camden Yards. From the shape of the stands down to the materials that they used in construction.

It gave us the sort of brick motif that we used in the ballpark and it gave us the iconic symbol of this ballpark for Baltimore and it looked a lot like Baltimore and felt a lot like Baltimore. If you go to Camden Yards today, it's almost hard to tell where the stadium ends and the warehouse begins. Larry Lukino and Janet Marie Smith were both at Camden Yards on opening day. I can tell you that we were all anxious, you know, hair standing on our back. Like, what if it, you know, what if it didn't work?

I mean, there were any number of things that ran counter to the norm in sports stadium design that could have gone wrong and any number of things that were normal that could have just gone wrong. You know, the toilet's not flushing. I don't know. Pick anything. But nothing went wrong. The ticket sold out. The toilets flushed just fine. And the Orioles did their job on the field. So, rental chains are very quick, and the Orioles are in the ring column opening day. Janet and I found each other just as the game ended and embraced each other. And I think she said, it plays, it plays. There was a big headline across the front page of the Baltimore Sun, the day after opening

day that said, it's a hit. You know, a big two and a half inch letters as if we'd won the election or something. All that year, people kept coming out to the ballpark in droves. When we opened in 1992, the attendance went from something like 2.2 or 2.3 million to 3.6 million. In the second year was 3.7 million. In their first two seasons at Camden Yards, the Orioles had the second highest attendance in the major leagues. And pretty soon, other teams started to take notice. Owners from Texas and from Cleveland and Colorado came to visit us rather extensively.

Then in 1994, another old-fashioned baseball only ballpark called Jacob's Field opened in downtown Cleveland, and that was just the beginning. It became impossible to build a new ballpark and not have it look like an old ballpark. That's Mark Lampster, architecture critic at the Dallas Morning News, and a fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. And that way I'd like to joke that baseball owners were a bit like teenagers.

What the first cool one does, then all of a sudden, everybody else does. So if one person has a retro ballpark and it's successful then the conventional wisdom becomes in order to be successful you have to have a retro ballpark. In the 25 years since Camden opened there have been 20 new stadiums built and there's not a concrete donut in the bunch. And just like Camden Yards, most of these new stadiums have been built close to city centers, and all but one of them have been paid for, at least in part, with public money.

Camden Yards really hit upon the formula, right? This is Neil Demas, a journalist who studies stadium economics. Here's something that's supposedly a win-win-win, right? It's a win for the team because they get new revenue, it's a win for the fans because they get a stadium that they love, and it's a win for the team because they get new revenue. It's a win for the fans because they get a stadium that they love. And it's a win for the city because they get to revitalize a district. But most economists agree that if you want to revitalize a neighborhood, there are plenty of better ways than building a ballpark.

Demas says that when a new stadium gets built, you'll see some sports bars pop up nearby. But most businesses can't rely on baseball crowds as a customer base. You know, the 81 games a year, that means there's what, like, you know, 280 days a year when there's nothing going on there. That's an awful lot of non-activity that you have to make up for. There's also the more fundamental question of whether the public should have to pay for privately owned buildings. Mark Lampster says it's tricky. Sports teams occupy

this strange space. They're both businesses and public amenities. Sports are really important for cities. They help create an identity. People love them. They bring cities together. So there is some justification for cities supporting even a privately owned team. But Lancaster says most cities have much more urgent spending needs than a new baseball stadium, like education. And it's hard to say what level of taxpayer contribution is fair. Especially when it's going straight into the pocket of very, very, very wealthy individuals.

But these difficult questions haven't stopped the retro ballpark building boom. Across the country, baseball teams have done everything they can to follow the Camden template, right down to hiring the same architecture firm, HOK Sport, which has since spun off into its own independent firm called Populous. It's almost a law that the new ballpark is by Populous.

And like Camden, most of the new Populous stadiums are small, baseball-only ballparks, with comfortable seats and fancy food options. And aesthetically, they're designed to look like the ballparks from the early 1900s. The palette of Camden Yard has become a cliche of ballpark design. That is, the brick, the green-painted iron, the green seats, the typography. It is all of a piece and it became widely adopted all across the country. Each of these new parks had an asymmetrical playing field. And like with Baltimore, their dimensions were often determined by the surrounding city

escape. In San Diego's Petco Park, the historic Western Metal Supply Company building dictates the length of the left field line. Instead of building a foul pole, the team just painted a yellow stripe down the corner of the warehouse. AT&T Park in San Francisco is squeezed right up against the San Francisco Bay. The right field line goes all the way to the water, giving fans a spectacular view, and creating a unique local drama, splash down home runs. When someone hits a ball into the bay, a flotilla of kayakers descend on the souvenir. But not all the new retro ball parks were so successfully integrated with

the urban landscape. Take city field, the new Met Stadium in Queens. It has an asymmetrical shape, but not because it's wedged into a tight urban lot. It's actually set out in the same place that its predecessor, Shay Stadium, was in the middle of a parking lot, and it has all these idiosyncratic dimensions, but there's really no reason for its idiosyncrasy is not driven by any particular constraint of the area around it. It's entirely artificial.

When you're at city field, Mark Lampster says you can feel how hard the architects worked to manufacture a sense of history and authenticity. He says that everyone in the league has been so focused on building these old-fashioned idiosyncratic ball parks like Camden that they've actually created a new architectural orthodoxy. They all have exactly the same DNA, They're all designed by the same firm. They all kind of look the same,

except the whole idea is that each one is idiosyncratic and individual. It's a tall tale. Despite his critiques, Mark Lampster says there's no denying that the post-Camden ball parks are better places to watch baseball than the old concrete behemoths.

Even cityfield in New York, the stadium lamps to a cues of trying a little too hard, is still way nicer than its predecessor, Shay Stadium. Can you describe Shay Stadium? Can I describe Shay Stadium? Yes, I can describe Shay Stadium. Think of a toilet. Put seats in it. That's Shay Stadium. Was it a toilet. Put seats in it. That's Shay Stadium.

Was it a nice place to watch a game? No. Is the new place a nice place to watch the game? Absolutely. It's a much, much nicer place to watch a game. It's a really great place to watch a game. And being a nice place to watch a game is important for baseball.

In recent decades, sports, television ratings have started to slide, but attendance numbers are strong. And these ball parks are part of the reason why, because they're fun places to go. People enjoy sitting there watching a game. And for me, enjoying the game has always had a bit of nostalgia to it. I don't even follow baseball that closely, but I'll go eat a hot dog and listen to the Yorgon music because it feels like a fun tradition. More than any other sport, baseball is about its own past and plays to its nostalgic history.

That obsession with history drove the retro ballpark revolution, but as an architecture critic, Mark LAMSTER is ready for some team out there to embrace the future. Why were we looking back and nostalgicly when we designed these ball parks instead of looking towards new materials and new ways of building and new architecture? And if Camden Yards has taught us anything, it's that when someone does come up with a great new way of building a ballpark, every team in the league is going to want one of their own. 99% invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald with tech production and mixed mixed by Sir Refuse of, and music by Sean Riel.

Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director and Terran Mazza is moving down south to be my chief of staff. The rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Avery Trouffleman, and me, Roman Mars. If you haven't heard, I created a new podcast called What Trump Can Teach Us About Conlaw. It's a really fun and positive reaction to all the crazy political news I released it on the feed last week. I hope that you heard it. I hope you liked it.

And I hope you subscribed. It is currently the number one podcast in the country on the Apple podcast chart. So thank you. You haven't heard yet. Check it out. I think you'll like it. In other side project news, our composer, Sean Rial,

who's music you're listening to right now, has a new album called In the Theme Monster. The songs were recorded at different house shows and in his home studio, which is also where he produces all the music for 99PI. Stay tuned to the end of the show, but here a sample from the new album. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud founding member of Radio Topia from PRX, supported by the Night Foundation and listeners, just like you.

And now here's a sample from Sean Reale's the song, Simple Machine. Sheen's on time. Trouble sleeping, that's not news, but it always feels like the first time. Melodonin, it's amazing how much work it takes just to shut down the door And I'm gonna try replacing your drug with another Traffic's been long in my, there's nothing I can do but why now? Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now, And it makes me stronger to know And it makes me proud when I deal But my brain still Oh, words me every time I smell your Tiny skin flakes blowing by

Your tiny skin flakes blowing by Your tiny skin flakes blowing Empathy Monster by Sean Rial is available at www.SeanRial.bancamp.com on tape or digital download. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars on the show at 99PI or on Instagram Tumblr and Reddit too. But we play 156 home games a year at 99PI.org. Radio TMP from PRX. From PRX.