Oriole Park at Camden Yards, to give it its full name, replaced Memorial Stadium, a towering suburban venue. But that certainly was the case with Camden Yards.” Baseball integrates beautifully into cities Paul Goldberger

But they generally evolve in fits and starts and steps, not in one single project after which everything else is completely different. “Airports, hospitals, houses, schools and so on. “All types of buildings evolve,” he says. The modern ageīaltimore plays a key part in Goldberger’s book, its ballpark, built in 1992, showing how the game returned to the cities. Then came the mid-20th century when the game went national, the stakes were raised and what Goldberger calls “concrete doughnuts”, multi-use stadiums that sacrificed character to the car in seas of suburban parking, were the decidedly soulless result. Rooftop seats across the street from Wrigley Field, Chicago. Both are gone but in Chicago and Boston, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park continue to pull in the fans. In the early 20th century the game shifted gears, building beloved city ballparks like Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. It was rackety and contradictory and competing groups fought to exert control. The familiar story that baseball was devised by Abner Doubleday and “played in the fields in Cooperstown, New York”, Goldberger says, is “a longstanding myth that has its roots in a very conscious attempt in the late 19th century to position the game as connected to a more elite and already vanished America”.Īs he shows, much early baseball was in fact suburban, played in “ elysian fields” nonetheless close to the margins of cities. Versions of the game came together over time. The beginningsĭiscussing baseball’s beginnings, Goldberger says: “It did not spring like Athena from the head of Zeus.” It’s an appropriate phrase, as he’s speaking from a Greek island where he’ll deliver a lecture.

To Goldberger, the game and the buildings dedicated to it are as essential to American society as they are symbolic products of it. It’s a work of architectural history and criticism but it can also be read as a history of baseball or of America and its cities. It is an engrossing read, starting in the teeming 19th century, soaring through baseball’s gilded age in the first half of the 20th and ending among the roofs, aircon and policed corporate spaces of the new millennium. The Pulitzer-winning critic is referring to urban and rural life, the city and the country, tensions he explores in his new book, Ballpark: Baseball and the American City.

Ballpark by paul goldberger