Consider: Fenway Park
This week it really started to feel like spring was here in Toronto. Spring means a lot of things for me: crocuses, it being socially acceptable to walk around eating ice cream, and baseball season.
Kevin is much more of a SPORTS(!) fan than I am, but I still love the experience of the ballpark. Consider: The Hot Dog is one of the drafts that I turn to again and again but I have yet to find the right way in (research into Nathan’s Famous hot dogsfrom Coney Island seemed promising but did not pan out). If you are sports averse, don’t worry, stick with us this week. We take a detour into Neo-Marxism and take pot shots at some starchitects on our way to home plate.
Baseball stadiums have tracked the history of cities in North America in a way that makes them a great comparative study of the urban experience. In the late 1800s, as urban density increased, the early stadiums were some of the first public recreation spaces built alongside parks and cemeteries. With suburban flight in the 1950s and 60s, stadiums like New York’s Shea Stadium, typified the new style of venues as islands in a sea of parking lots. In 1992, like many gentrifiers, baseball returned to the American downtown with the construction of Camden Yards in Baltimore.
The architecture critic Paul Goldberg has a great quote in his book on baseball stadiums:
“The baseball stadium contains a garden at its heart, and as such it evokes a tension between the rural and the urban that has existed throughout American history. In the ballpark, the two sides of the American character—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.”
I have had the pleasure of once seeing a game at the original Yankee Stadium. We were sitting on the bench seating in the outfield. It was incredibly uncomfortable but also felt iconic at the same time. And while it is a classic venue, I refuse to write about another shopping centre with a stadium attached, so instead let's dig into Boston’s Fenway Park! Play Ball!!!
Design
The basic biography is that Fenway was built in 1912 by a 37-year-old local architect named James McLaughlin. The irregular lot size posed a complication. The diamond abutted a busy road and so the big fence that would eventually become known as the Green Monster was constructed. Over the next 20 years, seats and grandstands were added haphazardly and a rebuild was performed in 1934 that created the stadium most people know today.
John Updike in 1960 said Fenway “offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.“ Is this code for: it’s ugly?
Fenway is by no means high design. I doubt the architect Le Corbusier ever enjoyed a footlong sitting on top of the Green Monster, but HAD he, I bet he would have Considered Fenway to be a machine for playing-and-watching-baseball in. What makes it so special is its authenticity, function and integration into the city fabric. Even its height and materials blend in with the surrounding buildings. When famed pitcher Roger Clemens arrived in Boston for the first time in 1984, he took a taxi from Logan Airport and was sure the driver had gotten the directions wrong when he announced their arrival at the park. Clemens recalled telling the driver "No, Fenway Park, it's a baseball stadium ... this is a warehouse."
Later baseball stadiums are marked for how little they interact with their location. Baseball stadium owners showed so little regard for the neighbourhoods they would take over that Major League Baseball even drew up a standard stadium in the 70s that they thought about mandating, city to city.
Innovation
In a 2014 piece in The New York Times’ T Magazine, architecture critic Witold Rybczynski discussed the idea of locatecture. Architecture, he argues, is a social practice not a personal one. He meant that it is about enhancing society vs building your brand as an architect. Wherever you are reading this, there is probably some starchitecht’s monstrosity polluting your sky line. A great argument to cement Rybcynski’s point is to compare the work of starchitects in their home countries vs abroad. Local context is sometimes hard to find.
What makes a place, a place, is impossible to put your finger on. A book I keep on my bookshelf, to impress others on Zoom video calls, is called “The Production of Space” by Henri Lefebvre. I came to the book on the recommendation of a skateboarder, who was using Lefebvre’s Neo-marxist understanding of the ownership of public space to justify why they should be allowed to skate anywhere. DAMN THAT’S COOL.
The part of his book that resonates with me, and that is relevant here, is his belief that geographical space, landscape and property are cultural, and like culture, they change. We look at an amphitheatre in a different lens than a Roman would. And with a place like Fenway, that played host to so much culture, it is like it has a double meaning.
At its inception, Fenway was a place for the working class to let off steam, and get rowdy (which you could not do in parks or cemeteries, the only two other open spaces in a city). And while the place has stayed the same, the culture has shifted dramatically and so has the way the stadium is used.
Sustainability
Surprisingly, many modern baseball stadiums serve as showcases for sustainability. For example, Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta is LEED Platinum certified. In addition to solar panels and onsite battery storage, it has a 2 million gallon rainwater cistern to prevent flooding in the surrounding neighbourhoods.
Our beloved Fenway unfortunately cannot compete to the same level because of its age. There was an effort to create a “New Fenway” but locals saw it for the terrible plan that it was, and the city of Boston has committed to maintaining the useful life of Fenway until ~2060.
What Fenway does have going for it, is accessibility to transit and de-emphasis of the car. Any building without a giant parking lot wins points in my book, and Fenway has none. Parking is limited to private lots, but the majority of attendees use transit to get there! Fenway has also undertaken a number of environmental initiatives, including in 2008, becoming the first ballpark to install solar thermal panels to heat its water.
Cost
Contrary to what sports franchise owners would proclaim, a 2016 report by the Brookings Institute, summarized that “Academic studies consistently find no discernible positive relationship between sports facility construction and local economic development, income growth, or job creation.” In a 2018 article in The Atlantic, author Rick Paulas described the relationship as “Imagine a stadium as a giant drain. Money flows from the community into the stadium, where it whirls around for a bit, then funnels down some murky pipes, exiting far, far away.”
Sports teams do serve a purpose. Entertainment, shared interest, social currency, and of course a way for emotionally stunted men to avoid talking about their feelings. JOKE!? However, they can come at a cost for their host cities. Often municipal subsidies for sports teams, which may starve cities of the development they actually need, come when an owner threatens to move a team. There is a longstanding conspiracy that LA did not have a football team for so long, simply so that team owners across America would always have a place to threaten to move if they did not get their desired new stadium. When the owner of the Colts tried this move in 1978, the governor of Maryland tried to evoke eminent domain to seize the team as a public good!
Down the street from my house is Christie Pits Park, the site of a famous race riot but also home to the “other” Toronto Maple Leafs. They are a local Intercounty Baseball League team that holds more championships than their namesake Maple Leafs. Sorry hockey fans. Hopefully this year the park will be filled with the sounds of bats swinging and hipsters chatting while ignoring the game, all the while trying to balance their tallboys on the steep grass hills.
PS: Rossett Park (Marine Travel Arena) in Crosby, England is in our view an under appreciated classic sports stadium and the site of a future Considered off-site or reader meetup. With it’s 3,185 person capacity (389 seated), it is the proud home to three soccer teams including Marine A.F.C., who in 2021 reached the third round of the FA cup, which they lost 5–0 to Tottenham Hotspur F.C.. With Marine 161 places below their opponent, the gap between the two teams was the biggest in FA Cup history. But what is so great about Rossett Park, is that its fence is so close to the neighbouring houses that there are house numbers on the fences so you know where to go to look for your ball. Now that’s some sporting locatecture!
Thanks again for coming along this week… and a long week it’s been! So if you feel like a good cry, check out this clip from the locker room of Marine A.F.C. neighbours, Chorley FC, after their epic win in the third round of the FA cup. Adele never sounded so good.
