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Summary
Summary
An exhilarating, splendidly illustrated, entirely new look at the history of baseball- told through the stories of the vibrant and ever-changing ballparks where the game was and is staged, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic.
From the earliest corrals of the mid-1800s (Union Grounds in Brooklyn was a "saloon in the open air"), to the much mourned parks of the early 1900s (Detroit's Tiger Stadium, Cincinnati's Palace of the Fans), to the stadiums we fill today, Paul Goldberger makes clear the inextricable bond between the American city and America's favorite pastime. In the changing locations and architecture of our ballparks, Goldberger reveals the manifestations of a changing society- the earliest ballparks evoked the Victorian age in their accommodations--bleachers for the riffraff, grandstands for the middle-class; the "concrete donuts" of the 1950s and '60s made plain television's grip on the public's attention; and more recent ballparks, like Baltimore's Camden Yards, signal a new way forward for stadium design and for baseball's role in urban development. Throughout, Goldberger shows us the way in which baseball's history is concurrent with our cultural history- the rise of urban parks and public transportation; the development of new building materials and engineering and design skills. And how the site details and the requirements of the game--the diamond, the outfields, the walls, the grandstands--shaped our most beloved ballparks.
A fascinating, exuberant ode to the Edens at the heart of our cities--where dreams are as limitless as the outfields.
Author Notes
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger is the architectural critic and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Kirkus Review
Vanity Fair contributing editor and renowned architecture critic Goldberger (Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, 2015, etc.) sets his gaze on the design of Major League Baseball stadiums.The detail of the research, both its breadth and depth, is remarkable, and the author doesn't limit himself to current stadiums; he also looks at some dating back to the 19th century. The volume also includes more than 150 illuminating photos scattered throughout the text. Though the narrative is not always cohesiveGoldberger jumps from one ballpark and city to anothereach chapter carries a theme and subthemes as the author demonstrates trends in stadium design. He discusses the evolving designs in terms of the quality of the viewing experience for fans, and he evaluates how each stadium shapes the city around itand is simultaneously shaped by the characteristics of that particular city. Goldberger's touchstone is Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles that opened in 1992. It's clear that the author considers Camden Yards the most exciting stadium ever constructed, and in his opinion, since it was built, it has not been surpassed. In addition to discussing inanimate qualities such as the wood, steel, stone, and concrete of the edifices, Goldberger provides miniportraits of hundreds of men (and a few women) who have owned the baseball teams, influenced the politics of the cities where the stadiums sit, and designed the stadiums in both derivative and original ways. Goldberger is aware that he could have also included ballparks from the minor leagues across the United States, from the now defunct Negro League, and from baseball cultures outside North America. He explains that such inclusivity would have yielded an encyclopedia rather than a smooth narrative, so he set limits on the scope of the book, which is quite impressive in its current form.A tour de force that will appeal to devoted baseball fans, architecture devotees, and even casual readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
As a boy, former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti knew that Fenway Park was on the level of Mount Olympus . . . except . . . better. For Goldberger, Boston's reverence-inspiring park together with Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and Chicago's Wrigley Field will forever define a golden era in the construction of American ballparks. But that era shines as just one luminous chapter in this amply illustrated history, stretching from the nineteenth-century Union Grounds, on what had been a Brooklyn skating pond, to twenty-first-century Oakland Ballpark, with plans for a landscaped roof when completed in 2023. Forceful personalities make a difference: acquisitive tavern-keeper Chris von der Ahe puts the nineteenth-century St. Louis Browns into a carnivalesque Sportsman's Park, with a beer garden in the outfield; sophisticated art dealer Jeffrey Loria gives the twenty-first-century Miami Marlins a municipal home boasting sculptures and ceramic displays. In the best episodes of this chronicle, Goldberger recognizes the baseball park's singular power to harmonize the nostalgic rural symbolism of green outfields with the urban dynamism of the surrounding modern city. But Goldberger concludes with a warning that Atlanta's SunTrust Park augers a new era, as the baseball stadium simply displaces the surrounding city, converting entire neighborhoods into a preplanned theme park. Attractive as a coffee-table book; probing as a sociological analysis.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The baseball park is a peculiar space. As Paul Goldberger allows in BALLPARK: Baseball in the American City (Knopf, $35), "most of the best ballparks have not, in fact, been particularly memorable pieces of architecture by any formal standard." In 1911, when the 37-year-old James McLaughlin was commissioned to design one, he had never worked on such a structure before, and never would again. "If he knew of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernist architects who were beginning to challenge traditional ways of designing buildings," Goldberger writes, "he probably did not agree with them." The project this unadventurous soul undertook would be known as Fenway Park. Martin F. Nolan, a reporter at The Boston Globe, later described the home of the Red Sox as "a crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles" and "an irregular pile of architecture." These were meant as compliments. What McLaughlin's design lacked in formal grandeur, it made up for in what Goldberger describes as its "benign quirkiness" : the ad hoc arrangement of its grandstands, its famously shallow left field. Fenway hails from a golden era of ballpark construction, when America's pastoral sport was squeezed into the grids of its growing cities. (Fenway's idiosyncrasies are largely the product of the trapezoidal lot McLaughlin was forced to work within.) The great ballparks built in this moment - Brooklyn's Ebbets Field, Chicago's Wrigley Field - realized the ideal of rus in urbe, or the rural in the urban. "The ballpark was the one place where the dialectic between city and country could be experienced within a single intense and lively piece of architecture," Goldberger writes, "the one place where the energy of the city and the easy, relaxed pace of the country were not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent." Goldberger's book offers a concise history of majorleague ballparks, from the earliest wooden structures (a predecessor to Fenway, the ornate South End Grounds, succumbed to fire - in the middle of a game) to the present. The book is lushly illustrated and can be enjoyed in a coffee-table capacity: Flip to the sections on your favorite parks and you'll find surprising tidbits on nearly every page. The original design for Dodger Stadium, for instance, would have allowed V.I.Rs to drive their cars directly up to their luxury boxes. How Los Angeles is that? But the book also mounts a sustained argument across its pages, which makes reading it end to end equally rewarding. The history of the ballpark, the former New York Times and New Yorker architecture critic asserts, tracks closely with America's attitudes toward its cities. The great parks of the early 20th century may have conjured the rus in urbe, but by midcentury the automobile and the interstate were ushering in the age of the suburb, and ball clubs, too, beat a retreat from the city. Thus began what Goldberger describes as the "concrete doughnut" era, a regrettable period in which teams relocated to venues optimized for parking but detached, spatially and spiritually, from the city. The advent of the domed stadium, around the same time, allowed teams to keep the elements at bay but sacrificed any illusion of pastoral expanse. Of his inaugural visit to the Astrodome in Houston, Mickey Mantle is said to have remarked: "It reminds me of what my first ride would be like in a flying saucer." Thankfully, as American cities began to enjoy a renaissance at the end of the 20 th century, ballparks returned as well, though the retro movement that has given us contemporary gems like Pittsburgh's PNC Park and San Francisco's Oracle Park was far from inevitable. It required the Orioles - owned at the time by an architecture buff and a devoted follower of the urbanist Jane Jacobs - daring to replace the aging hulk of Memorial Stadium with a more intimate downtown park to revive a lost ideal. Architecture critics can be wary of nostalgia, but in the case of Baltimore's Camden Yards, Goldberger writes, "looking toward the past actually was the future." The subject of Kevin Cowherd's when the crowd didn't ROAR: How Baseball's Strangest Game Ever Gave a Broken City Hope (University of Nebraska, $27.95) IS Surely the most peculiar game ever played at Camden Yards. In April 2015, the black Baltimore resident Freddie Gray died from injuries sustained while in the custody of the city's Police Department. Gray's death - the medical examiner would eventually class it as a homicide - prompted widespread protest in the city. In the midst of the civic unrest, the Orioles were due to host a three-game homestand against the Chicago White Sox. Fearing that it could not guarantee the safety of players or fans, the team called off the first two games. Then the front office made a surprise announcement: Baltimore would host Chicago for the final game of the set - but, in a first for Major League Baseball, no spectators would be permitted to enter the ballpark. The game would be broadcast on television and radio, but the gates to the stadium would be locked. No vendors would stalk the aisles selling peanuts. Balls hit out of play would careen off empty seats. Cowherd, a longtime columnist at The Baltimore Sun, attempts to answer the koan-like question posed by this singular event: If you play a baseball game and no fans are there to witness it, have you played a baseball game? Yes and no. The players do their best to stay loose and not be spooked by the strange hush. Caleb Joseph, the Orioles catcher, emerges from the dugout, walks over to the stands, pantomimes the signing of autographs and doffs his cap to the empty stands. In the visiting clubhouse, the Chicago center fielder Adam Eaton takes to Twitter. "We are gonna do our best to take the crowd out of it early," he writes. "Wish us luck." Despite these efforts at levity, a shadow hangs over the proceedings. Some players, including Eaton, portray the game as a worthy attempt to return to "normalcy." Adam Jones, the Orioles' all-star center fielder and one of the league's top black players, isn't so sure. "It's this very 'normalcy' - at least when it comes to the unchanging conditions in the poorest black neighborhoods - that caused Baltimore to erupt in the first place," Cowherd writes. Jones is placed in the impossible, if familiar, position of being a spokesman for his franchise as well as his race. "We need this game to be played," he tells the media that day. "But we need this city to be healed first." It's a hopeful message, but the healing was not to be. The Orioles went on to win the game handily, 8-2. None of the six police officers charged in connection with Gray's death were convicted in criminal court, or faced departmental sanction. If Cowherd's book elucidates a chilling collision of race and sport from recent history, the world's fastest man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero (Scribner, $30), by the Washington Post politics reporter Michael Kranish, restores the memory of one of the first black athletes to overcome the drag of racism and achieve national renown. Major Taylor was a champion cyclist at a time when being black limited his ability to compete - and imperiled him on the track. Taylor would ultimately take on, and defeat, the fastest men in what was a wildly popular sport in Gilded Age America. (Teddy Roosevelt was a Major Taylor fan.) But he faced discrimination, or worse, at every turn. Organizing bodies, like the League of American Wheelmen, voted to exclude black racers. Attempting to register for a race in Brooklyn, Taylor was told it would be more appro priate if he were to go "shine the Fifth Avenue gentlemen's shoes." When Taylor did manage to enter a race, Kranish writes, "his competitors made him a marked man, cutting him off, trying to knock over his bike, hoping to make him crash at full speed." When he won, ceremonial bands taunted him by playing "Dixie." Taylor's commitment to his sport - he adhered to a strict training regimen and a careful diet - was outstripped only by his determination not to let such nastiness circumscribe his accomplishments. When, in 1900, his rival Eddie "Cannon" Bald hid behind the color line rather than face a challenge from Taylor, the black racer pasted a newspaper article about the controversy in his scrapbook. Beside it, he wrote: "Yield not to discouragement. Zealously labor for the right, and success is certain." As Kranish's exhaustive account makes plain, success was far from certain. Taylor's remarkable perseverance, in and out of the velodrome, made it possible. This spring, ESPN announced that it would no longer publish ESPN the Magazine in print. If you're familiar with the work of Wright Thompson, you'll mourn the loss. Thompson has written some of the most important pieces of contemporary sports journalism for the magazine, demonstrating unparalleled insight into the lives of the most compelling figures in sport. Thankfully, much of Thompson's best work is now collected in THE COST OF THESE DREAMS: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business (Penguin, paper, $18). Chrestomathies of this sort can feel like a grab bag, or a halfhearted attempt to make a second buck on old work. This volume elevates reporting and writing that was already operating above the rim. Thompson's intricate stories reward a second (and third) reading. And when they are read back to back, themes emerge that permit a view not just of the subject at hand - Urban Meyer, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods - but of something larger: the price these men have paid for greatness. That's the "cost" in the book's title, and it's in evidence throughout its pages. Thompson follows Meyer, at the time the wildly successful Ohio State football coach, as he tries to square his relentless drive to win with a gnawing fear that he's sacrificing his health and his relationship with his family in the process. "This is the difficult calculus of Meyer's future, of any Type A extremist who longs for balance," Thompson writes. "They want the old results without paying the old costs, and while they'll feel guilty about not changing, they'll feel empty without the success. He wants peace and wins, which is a short walk from thinking they are the same." Jordan, too, seeks peace, having realized - mostly - that at 50, he's never returning to the basketball court. He is "dealing, finally, with the cost of his own competitive urges, asking himself difficult questions. To what must he say goodbye?" To the ghost of his former self, first and foremost. In this, Jordan has made some progress: The man Thompson observes is no longer the aggrieved Jordan of his notorious Hall of Fame induction speech, settling scores and threatening (another) comeback. But like Meyer, he can't merely switch off the will to win. On a trip to the Bahamas, Jordan sends a staffer to the hotel gift shop to buy word-search puzzles, then challenges his assistant and lawyer to complete them, defeating both. "1 can't help myself," he says. "You ask for this special power to achieve these heights, and now you got it and you want to give it back, but you can't. If 1 could, then 1 could breathe." A worthy companion to Thompson's rich magazine portraiture IS THE GREAT AMERICAN SPORTS PAGE: A Century of Classic Columns From Ring Lardner to Sally Jenkins (Library of America, $29.95), a compendium of a very different style of sportswriting. The editor, John Schulian, has collected a century's worth of newspaper columns, coverage punched out on deadline. To read the book is to be astonished, again and again, by the ingenuity and flair of the writers who thrived in this medium. Stories written in two hours for the next day's newspaper shouldn't hold up decades later, but the best work here is indelible, even when it describes the heroism of long-forgotten racehorses and prizefighters. All the greats are here - Damon Runyon, Red Smith, Bob Ryan, Jane Leavy - but Schulian also revives some lesser-known scribes, like the great stylist Wells Twombly. If there were a Hall of Fame for lede-writing, Twombly would be a first-ballot selection. His obit of Casey Stengel begins: "On casual inspection, the old man looked like a woodcarver's first attempt at a gargoyle. The face was crude and drooping, even when it was new. The eyes were watery and mournful, like a human basset hound. The ears were large and foolish. The hands were hopelessly gnarled. The legs looked like two Christmas stockings stuffed with oranges." The Old Perfesser, himself a sly stylist, surely would have loved that. In April, as the clock wound down on a Western Conference playoff game, Damian billard launched a 37-foot shot over the outstretched hands of Paul George. The shot found its mark, winning the contest, and the openinground series, for Lillard's Portland Trail Blazers. During a postgame interview, George was asked to offer his review of the remarkable heave. "That's a bad, bad shot," he said. "1 don't care what anybody says. That's a bad shot." ft was an uncharitable description of an exhilarating moment. Also, George was wrong, ft wasn't a bad shot - not for Damian billard. As the ESPN staff writer Kirk Goldsberry noted, Lillard made 39.2 percent of his attempts from 30 to 40 feet this past season. A cartographer by training, Goldsberry had a map to prove it. Goldsberry is the premier student of long-range shooting in the N.B.A., and now, with SPRAWLBALL: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), its premier chronicler as well. Three-point shots may once have been a niche beat, but today N.B.A. teams are attempting them at unprecedented rates. And they're making them. In the first decade after the three-point line was introduced, in 1979, N.B.A. players connected on 23,871 threes. In the 2017-18 season alone, Goldsberry tells us, they made 25,807. In a way, it's surprising that the long-ball revolution didn't happen sooner. The three-point shot is, after all, worth 50 percent more than the two-point shot. But a perception had lingered that the drop-off in accuracy, as a player moves further from the hoop, made three-pointers a good bet only for old-school specialists like Craig Hodges or Steve Kerr. Next-generation statistics, however, have allowed teams to chart and analyze every make and miss over the course of an N.B.A. season. Distance from the rim, it turns out, has a fairly negligible effect on many of today's shooters. The likelihood that a player like Lillard will make a shot from 24 feet isn't significantly lower than the likelihood that he'll make one from 17 feet. The implication, Goldsberry writes, is clear: "With the exception of layups and dunks, two-point shots are simply dumb choices." Few basketball writers have done more to document the three-point revolution than Goldsberry. Just because he's charted the change doesn't mean he has to like it, though. While much of his book is descriptive - recounting in punchy prose and startling graphics the rise of long-range shooting - the book has a prescriptive element as well. As more teams embrace the three, the game threatens to become monotonous. In place of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's elegant sky hook, we have the three ball. In place of Jordan's balletic fadeaways, we have the three ball. A future in which teams chuck ever more threes may seem inevitable, but as Goldsberry notes, the N.B.A. has historically been very willing to alter the rules to prevent any one style of play from achieving dominance. It twice widened the lane to limit the power of big men like George Mikan and Wilt Chamberlain. How might the league clip the wings of jump-shooters? Move the three-point line, for starters. The current line (23.75 feet along the arc, 22 feet in the corners) was first drawn, arbitrarily, in 1961 by Abe Saperstein, the man best remembered as the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters. (The gimmick was inspired by all the long balls Roger Maris was hitting that year.) Using today's spray charts, the N.B.A. could move the line back to a place where it would actually lead to a meaningful decrease in shot accuracy. In fact, Goldsberry's already done the math: The optimal three-point line should be 25.773 feet from the goal. That's his conservative idea, but there's a wackier, yet appealing, twist on it: Allow each team to set its home three-point line wherever it likes. "When you walk into Fenway Park for the first time, you are greeted by the famed Green Monster, the left-field wall that is one of the most iconic images in baseball," Goldsberry writes. "Now imagine the same thing in basketball." JOHN swansburg is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
Library Journal Review
Goldberger (Why Architecture Matters) skillfully illustrates the history of the ballpark, its architectural beauty, and even the importance of the city where games are played. Beautifully interwoven throughout are stories about the fruition of the ballpark along with accounts of their owners. The diamond-shaped infield, the outfield, the dugout, the walls, and the overall ambience of the stadium is truly a work of art and one of the many reasons baseball games are so special. The author covers stadiums such as Baltimore's Camden Yards, San Francisco's Oracle Park, Detroit's Tiger Stadium, and Brooklyn's legendary Ebbets Field, demonstrating their uniqueness and giving readers a new appreciation for their existence. VERDICT This carefully researched, captivating look at the history of the ballpark and the American city will be thoroughly enjoyed by fans of baseball and architecture.-Gus Palas, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Brooklyn Beginnings The first baseball games were played in open fields, but the first baseball park--the first place constructed specifically for the game, with places for paying spectators and surrounded by walls to keep non-payers out--was constructed in Brooklyn, New York, by a politically well-connected entrepreneur named William Cammeyer, who built it on land he owned, called Union Grounds, on Rutledge Street in the southern portion of Williamsburg. The year was 1862, a year after the start of the Civil War and more than half a century before another politically well-connected entrepreneur, Charles Ebbets, would open a far more famous baseball park in Brooklyn. Ebbets Field would last for forty-seven years and become the stuff of legend; Union Grounds survived for barely more than two decades, but its short life belied its influence: from Cammeyer's enclosure the baseball park was born. Union Grounds marked the beginning of the idea that baseball, the game of infinite space, should be played in an urban structure of very finite space, fitted and sometimes contorted into the urban grid. Union Grounds, constructed on a site bordered by Marcy and Harrison Avenues and Rutland and Lynch Streets, was a green field of play, a thing apart from the city and at the same time intimately connected to it. Cammeyer, whose resources came from a family-owned leather company, did not build his baseball park out of a love of the sport. He was a businessman, and known to travel in the social circle of William Magear Tweed, the notorious boss of Tammany Hall. Like Tweed he endeavored to present a respectable face to the world even as he was trying as hard as he could to fill his pockets. Cammeyer preferred to use Union Grounds for the more genteel activities of horseback riding in the summer and ice skating in the winter--the problem was that those activities weren't making him enough money, and he could not afford to maintain Union Grounds as a losing investment. Williamsburg, a prosperous and tranquil enclave early in the nineteenth century, was, like many parts of Brooklyn and New York, already giving way to the dense, gritty city of the industrial age, and its population was increasingly made up of immigrants whose notions of summer recreation did not include horses. Cammeyer saw that baseball, which in the middle of the nineteenth century was a game played mainly by a collection of clubs that operated more like fraternal associations than professional teams, was becoming increasingly popular as a source of working-class entertainment, and was beginning to be an economic entity as well as a recreational one. It was moving toward professionalism in awkward fits and starts that included, among other things, players paid under the table and, in the case of a team that Tweed sponsored, players who were given no-show jobs on the city payroll. When the Fashion Race Course, a racetrack on Long Island, sponsored an all-star game in 1858 pitting players from various Brooklyn teams against their counterparts from New York, then a separate city, the track owners charged an admission fee of ten cents, probably the first time people were required to pay for the privilege of watching other people play baseball. There was potential in this, Cammeyer realized, especially if the game could be played in a place designed specifically for it rather than on a racetrack taken over for the occasion. Instead of charging the teams rent for the use of his field, he would charge the spectators. Cammeyer caught the wave of baseball's steady progress toward professionalism, and pushed it forward. In the years before the Civil War, the game, which had been played in various forms in the United States for several generations, was codified into something roughly like modern baseball, as differing sets of rules gave way to relatively consistent practices. For all that some historians of the game would embrace a mythology of its rural origins, baseball's ultimate form would be established more on the streets of New York than in the meadows of New England. It was in the metropolitan sprawl of New York and neighboring Brooklyn that the greatest number of teams was located--according to historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows, there were nearly one hundred of them by 1858--and it was through their mutual negotiations that the rules were established. The sport was largely self-governing. In the spring of 1854 the New York Knickerbockers, one of the earliest and most established teams--it was set up with a constitution, bylaws, and a set of playing rules in 1845--convened a meeting at Smith's Hotel on Howard Street with the two other best-known teams in the city, the Gothams and the Eagles, to try and sort out inconsistencies in the manner of play, most particularly the standard distance between the bases. The meeting at Smith's set the distance between the bases as "forty-two paces," and from home to the pitcher as "not less than fifteen paces," according to John Thorn, the baseball historian. The first team to score twenty-one "aces"-- runs in today's parlance--was the winner. Three years later, the Knickerbockers organized another gathering at Smith's, which by then had moved to new quarters on Broome Street. At this second meeting the teams agreed to dispense with the rule of twenty-one aces and instead limit games to nine innings, with each team having three outs per inning. More relevant to the form of the ballpark, the teams agreed to establish the idea of foul territory, demarcating a line that extended from first base toward right field and third base toward left field to determine precisely where a batted ball had to go to remain in play. New York had players, it had a clear set of rules, and it had fans. (It also had the major national sports journals, which by giving extensive coverage to the city's baseball teams further institutionalized New York's version of baseball's rules as the standard.) What New York lacked was wide-open playing fields, since the years of baseball's development coincided with the city's own explosive growth, as blocks of tenements and brownstones and factories, not to mention railroad tracks, spread out over the grid of streets. They made most of New York a city in which the man-made all but squeezed out any presence of nature. It was not just Williamsburg that was changing; New Yorkers from all neighborhoods who wanted to play baseball had trouble finding flat, open space large enough to accommodate the game. Early games were often played in Madison Square, but games were technically illegal in city-owned open space, and while that law may have been enforced only sporadically, the pressures of urbanization, including the presence of nearby streetcars, brought an end to active baseball play at Madison Square by the mid-1840s. The favored locale of many of the region's baseball teams, including Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers, shifted to the other side of the Hudson River to one of the area's most popular pleasure grounds, the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. Its owner, John Cox Stevens, began hosting organized baseball games in the 1840s, attracting New Yorkers not only with the allure of his pastoral setting but with the claim that Hoboken was free of the yellow fever that afflicted New York. Stevens's site was definitely free of the encroachments of the industrializing city. And, as A. Bartlett Giamatti would observe many years later, the very name Elysian Fields evoked classical aspirations to paradise, a metaphor that Giamatti would use frequently to describe baseball. Hoboken would have a decent run as the baseball capital. But it would not remain pastoral for long. Stevens, scion of an aristocratic family with a riverfront estate in Hoboken and a mansion in Manhattan, owned the ferries that transported visitors across the Hudson, and he wanted a larger crowd than baseball could provide. He positioned the Elysian Fields as an amusement park offering people of every stripe an escape from the pressures of the hectic city, and he gave them a merry-go-round, a racetrack, a bowling alley, and events staged by P. T. Barnum. Bars and hotels were built near the ball grounds, and Stevens was so convinced that he was providing New York with a necessary public amenity that he asked the city for a subsidy, even though Hoboken was outside the borders of New York City and, indeed, of New York State. With Stevens's success at turning Elysian Fields into a proto-Coney Island, whatever wholesome appeal Hoboken's natural setting might have had soon evaporated. It was a place that attracted the less respectable crowds, not to mention respectable folk hoping to pursue less respectable activities. George Templeton Strong, the lawyer and diarist, visited Hoboken from his home in Gramercy Park and reported, "I saw scarce anyone there but snobs and their strumpets." It was, Strong observed in his diary, a "pity it's haunted by such a gang as frequent it." Baseball was hardly the sport of the elite, but neither did the players nor their growing base of fans want to see the game played in the shadow of a raffish amusement park. With more and more teams in Brooklyn, Cammeyer saw that he could provide at Union Grounds a field both closer to home and free of competition from other forms of amusement. Brooklyn by the end of the 1850s had so many teams that "games [were] being played on every available plot within a ten-mile radius of the city," according to Porter's Spirit of the Times, which called Brooklyn "the city of base ball clubs." Many of the clubs were intimately connected to neighborhoods, sometimes even taking their names from local streets like Putnam Avenue and Atlantic Avenue, or local businesses like the Eckford and Webb shipyard. Brooklyn's rapidly growing, heavily immigrant population--the borough had gone from a population of twenty-five thousand in 1835 to two hundred thousand in 1855, nearly half of whom were immigrants--sorted itself naturally into localized fan groups for each team. "More than any other American game, baseball was built on a geographical and psychological sense of localism--if we take localism to be simultaneously an attachment to one place and fear, antipathy or competitiveness toward other places," Warren Goldstein has written. And Cammeyer realized that however bitter their neighborhood rivalries might be, the loyalists who rooted for the various clubs had one thing in common besides Brooklyn addresses: they could all become his customers. The six-and-a-half-foot-high wooden fence that Cammeyer erected around Union Grounds was intended to keep non-paying customers out, not to create a dividing line between fly balls that could be caught and those that were out of play, the critical role that ballpark fences would come to play soon thereafter. Cammeyer saw his fence--which was more than five hundred feet away from home plate at the far point of center field, a distance no batted ball could reach--as a matter of capitalism, not ground rules. His motivations for presenting baseball inside a fenced enclosure were to attract a large crowd, make money, and yet retain some degree of decorum. The Union Grounds had a covered viewing section set aside for women and their gentlemen companions, a further statement of gentility intended to encourage the attendance of women, whose presence was thought to dampen the raucousness of men. "Wherever [the ladies'] presence enlivens the scene, there gentlemanly conduct will follow. Indecorous proceedings will cause the offenders to be instantly expelled from the grounds," reported the Brooklyn Eagle , in praise of Cammeyer's decision to market the Union Grounds as a place of modesty and good manners, "where ladies can witness the game without being annoyed by the indecorous behavior of the rowdies who attend some of the first-class matches." Cammeyer knew better than to make the entire place into a demonstration of Victorian gentility. He saw, as Warren Goldstein wrote, that "the game appealed simultaneously to the culture of urban streets . . . and to the respectable and newly vigorous culture of middle class Victorian men." And so there was another viewing section, distinctly separate from the one for ladies and couples, that was set aside for gambling. There, men could smoke, drink, and make bets on the game. Cammeyer had given them the equivalent of a saloon in the open air. He was prescient enough to realize that to market baseball to a broad audience he needed some degree of propriety, but not too much. He sought to position the Union Grounds as a place of mass entertainment, more respectable than the honky-tonk of Hoboken and yet lively enough to assure that no one would mistake it for a church. Not only was gambling encouraged, Cammeyer had a band playing throughout the ball game, keeping the crowds entertained. When Cammeyer drained the skating pond and filled it in to create the playing field, he left intact a small, peaked-roof structure, something like a pagoda, that had stood at the far end of the pond. It was in what became the outfield, somewhat to the right of center field, about 350 feet from home plate, very much within the field of play. The outfield pagoda gave the Union Grounds the beginning of an architectural identity, and its very quirkiness, and the way in which its intrusive form made playing baseball on Cammeyer's field different from playing anywhere else, established another pattern for early baseball parks: they were designed, as often as not, around obstacles, which made for certain eccentricities. There was no expectation that any field would look like any other, and if that meant that play was slightly different from one ballpark to another, that was all considered part of the nature of the game. Excerpted from Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.