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A review by brandonpytel
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger
5.0
What will undoubtedly make my top 10 list by year’s end, Ballpark is a perfect balance of lyricism and information, all complemented by a topic that I really enjoy. It is a book about “how the histories of baseball and the American city have been intertwined for more than a century and a half, and about how the architecture of the baseball park expresses their interdependence.”
How we have designed ballparks — which to Goldberger is a metaphorical symbol of the tension between the rural and the urban — are not simply houses for teams, but a reflection of our “attitudes toward cities and community, our notions of public space, and our charging views about the nature of place.”
Goldberger starts with baseball’s chaotic beginnings around New York, where most ballparks popped up in Brooklyn, shaped with eccentricities by their surroundings, including streetcars and public transit. We get off-centered fields, with imbalanced outfields, and hastily put together bleachers and grandstands, often separating classes and genders. We get the showmanship of the early ballparks, with gambling and beer gardens, and how those types of parks were at odds with the more buttoned-up leagues.
These things essentially just popped up where they could, usually near factories or industrial parts of town with the space for a ballpark, growing haphazardly with the cities they were built in. Eventually these wooden structures were replaced by steel and brick ones that wouldn’t burn down. There was a certain monumentality to some of these parts, while serving the business purpose of attracting fans and accommodating them.
All throughout the book, Goldberger seamlessly weaves in the history of teams and leagues, as well as the expanding and dynamic nature of those leagues, with teams moving from town to town and building ballparks along the way. And we get close-ups of pretty much every current ballpark, as well as the older parks in the same cities.
Goldberger divides the history of ballparks in clean eras — from the Golden era with Comiskey and Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets to the monumentality of Yankees Stadium to the concrete donuts planted firmly in the suburbs or surrounded by parking lots to the return to the city, with the building of Camden Yards, and eventually the ballpark as a themepark, like the Battery in Atlanta.
Along the way, we see the different shapes and sizes of each park, each fit with unique features, whether they’re bland concrete structures, or eccentric and sleek and swooping designs, or domed engineering marvels with retractable roofs. In each case, the ballpark reflects the city in some way, while serving as a practical home to baseball.
The book is beautifully summed up on its final page: “The greatest joy [the ballpark] can bring us is when it is embedded in the real city, with all the energy, diversity, and dynamism a city can display at its best, and the exhilaration the baseball park offers becomes not only a celebration of sport, but of the whole urban life.”
How we have designed ballparks — which to Goldberger is a metaphorical symbol of the tension between the rural and the urban — are not simply houses for teams, but a reflection of our “attitudes toward cities and community, our notions of public space, and our charging views about the nature of place.”
Goldberger starts with baseball’s chaotic beginnings around New York, where most ballparks popped up in Brooklyn, shaped with eccentricities by their surroundings, including streetcars and public transit. We get off-centered fields, with imbalanced outfields, and hastily put together bleachers and grandstands, often separating classes and genders. We get the showmanship of the early ballparks, with gambling and beer gardens, and how those types of parks were at odds with the more buttoned-up leagues.
These things essentially just popped up where they could, usually near factories or industrial parts of town with the space for a ballpark, growing haphazardly with the cities they were built in. Eventually these wooden structures were replaced by steel and brick ones that wouldn’t burn down. There was a certain monumentality to some of these parts, while serving the business purpose of attracting fans and accommodating them.
All throughout the book, Goldberger seamlessly weaves in the history of teams and leagues, as well as the expanding and dynamic nature of those leagues, with teams moving from town to town and building ballparks along the way. And we get close-ups of pretty much every current ballpark, as well as the older parks in the same cities.
Goldberger divides the history of ballparks in clean eras — from the Golden era with Comiskey and Fenway and Wrigley and Ebbets to the monumentality of Yankees Stadium to the concrete donuts planted firmly in the suburbs or surrounded by parking lots to the return to the city, with the building of Camden Yards, and eventually the ballpark as a themepark, like the Battery in Atlanta.
Along the way, we see the different shapes and sizes of each park, each fit with unique features, whether they’re bland concrete structures, or eccentric and sleek and swooping designs, or domed engineering marvels with retractable roofs. In each case, the ballpark reflects the city in some way, while serving as a practical home to baseball.
The book is beautifully summed up on its final page: “The greatest joy [the ballpark] can bring us is when it is embedded in the real city, with all the energy, diversity, and dynamism a city can display at its best, and the exhilaration the baseball park offers becomes not only a celebration of sport, but of the whole urban life.”