To the critic and author of Ballpark: Baseball and the American City, the buildings dedicated to the game are as essential to American society as they are symbolic products of it

“The ballpark,” Paul Goldberger says, “is a symbolic resolution of two things that remain unresolved in American culture.”

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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.

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. 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. To Goldberger, the game and the buildings dedicated to it are as essential to American society as they are symbolic products of it.

The beginnings

Discussing 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.

Versions of the game came together over time. 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”.

As he shows, much early baseball was in fact suburban, played in “elysian fields” nonetheless close to the margins of cities. It was rackety and contradictory and competing groups fought to exert control. Like America itself.

In the early 20th century the game shifted gears, building beloved city ballparks like Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. Both are gone but in Chicago and Boston, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park continue to pull in the fans.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rooftop seats across the street from Wrigley Field, Chicago. Photograph: Joe Robbins/Getty Images

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.

The modern age

Baltimore plays a key part in Goldberger’s book, its ballpark, built in 1992, showing how the game returned to the cities.

“All types of buildings evolve,” he says. “Airports, hospitals, houses, schools and so on. But they generally evolve in fits and starts and steps, not in one single project after which everything else is completely different. But that certainly was the case with Camden Yards.”

Baseball integrates beautifully into cities Paul Goldberger

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, to give it its full name, replaced Memorial Stadium, a towering suburban venue. The new building did not have to host football too so its architects considered the best of traditional ballparks as well as the fans and their corporate masters. They took an industrial site in a post-industrial city and used it without sacrificing heritage or history.

“One cannot underestimate its importance,” Goldberger says. “[The political commentator] George Will said there were three great defining events in baseball in postwar America. There was Jackie Robinson [the first African American to play in the majors, in 1947] and the integration of major league teams with the [Brooklyn] Dodgers. There was the arrival of free agency and the change in the whole economic structure in 1975. And there was the opening of Camden Yards in 1992. I think he’s absolutely right.”

Camden Yards is on an old rail site, which leads to another key point.

“While the railroads did not need baseball,” Goldberger says, “baseball needed the railroads. At first the various teams around Brooklyn and New York all played each other and could easily organize that. But you couldn’t organize a regular league with teams in Philadelphia playing teams in Cincinnati, which in turn would play a team in St Louis and Chicago, and Boston, and so forth, without the rise of inter-city train travel. So they went hand in hand.

“In the same way, it’s no accident that the move of the Dodgers out of Brooklyn [to Los Angeles] and the [New York] Giants’ move to California came [in 1958], when transcontinental jet travel became a practicality.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Green Monster scoreboard and the city sign can be seen as JD Martinez of the Boston Red Sox bats at Fenway Park. Photograph: Adam Glanzman/Getty Images

“So you know, while [transportation] is not an important social issue in the way that racial issues, issues of immigration and class tensions are, it is just further reminder that baseball seems to connect in unexpected ways to all kinds of other things.”

The future

At the end of his book, Goldberger considers the privatisation of public space, a concern in many cities today. He casts an eye over SunTrust Park in Atlanta, an exurban setting where the Braves have built a facsimile of an urban space, ersatz, controllable and financially worth their while.

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Back in New York, there’s Hudson Yards and a ballpark that never was. The Yankees and Mets looked at the railroad site on the west side of Manhattan but nothing came together. What did open this year: a mesh of condo towers and malls with a sculpture dropped in the middle.

Goldberger contends that unlike condos, offices and malls, “baseball integrates beautifully into cities”, which is “really the essential point of the book”. In short, he wishes the Yankees or Mets had succeeded.

“I would love to have seen it,” he says. “It would have inoculated the developer very successfully against the not unreasonable claims that Hudson Yards is an enclave for the rich. It would have created a far better reason than Thomas Heatherwick’s sculpture for people to show up, to come there and walk around.

“It would’ve left plenty of room for gazillion-dollar condos. It would not have gotten in the way, it would not have presented the programme of Hudson Yards that we now see. It would’ve just been integrated a little bit more effectively, you know?

“Imagine if we had had a ballpark instead of a shopping mall, which is the last thing anybody needs or wants.”

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