Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, the new book by Pulitzer Prize–winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger, is such a narrowly focused text, a seductively illustrated, seemingly well-executed architectural history of baseball stadiums—popularly known as “ballparks”—from the late 19th century to the present.2 Goldberger traces the ballpark’s evolution from humble beginnings in Brooklyn during its “first generation,” when the parks were erected in inner-city neighborhoods, to the early 20th century. This period, according to Goldberger, is the “golden age” of ballpark design. Those familiar with baseball history would not be surprised to find that Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Boston’s Fenway Park, and Chicago’s Wrigley Field figure prominently in this discussion.Next, Goldberger scurries through the “second generation” of ballparks, the so-called “concrete doughnuts” of the post–World War II era, utilitarian structures like Shea Stadium in New York, among many others, that tended to be erected in suburbanized environments. Ballpark enthusiasts like Goldberger are fond of criticizing the sterile “cookie-cutter” quality of stadiums built in this period. But the critiques often overlook the fact that such facilities were far more accessible to a broader public than those that have been constructed in recent decades. As Daniel Rosensweig has astutely observed, “Cheap tickets, wide public concourses, and a lack of segregated seating enabled an unprecedented degree of fan diversity and mixing.”3
The bulk of Goldberger’s analysis highlights the impact of the widely celebrated Oriole Park at Camden Yards, which dramatically ushered in what he calls the “third generation” of ballparks, many erected in downtown areas of cities. Goldberger ends his sweeping account with the advent of SunTrust Park in suburban Atlanta, which he sees as signaling another era. Unlike a stand-alone suburban or downtown ballpark, these “fourth generation” ballparks are themselves centerpieces of massive mixed-use real estate developments.
Goldberger correctly asserts that the ballpark is a defining feature of the civic realm that is a reflection of American attitudes toward the city. The ballpark, he insists, illustrates the tension between the rural and the urban; specifically, it’s where the “Jeffersonian impulse toward open space and rural expanse, and the Hamiltonian belief in the city and in industrial infrastructure—are joined, and cannot be torn apart.”
But rather than reflecting a transhistorical dynamic—especially one rooted in mythical visions of farsighted founding fathers—the stadium can be better understood as a reflection of the power relations that undergird US society today. The book’s inattention to these relations makes it an inadvertent invitation to explore the intricate entanglements among developers, architects, sports leagues, and public officials that might shed light on those who profit from the staggering number of stadium construction projects that have proliferated across the country.