MORE PEOPLE CROWDED INTO EBBETS FIELD IN 1947 than in any other year in its existence. The Dodgers won the National League pennant, then lost to the pinstriped Yankees—the Bums’ crosstown foil—in a seven-game World Series. Jackie Robinson broke the major league color line, becoming a hero to many and a symbol of racial progress and social possibility. Ebbets Field hosted arguably one of the most diverse stadium scenes and urban publics in American history, a collection of men, women, and children of different economic classes and ethnic and racial identities. And yet, not even three months after this remarkable season had concluded, Walter O’Malley was scouting locations for a new ballpark.
“It had always been recognized that baseball was a business,” sportswriter Red Smith noted, “but if you enjoyed the game you could also tell yourself that it was also a sport . . . O’Malley was the first to say out loud that it was all business—a business that he owned and could operate as he chose, and the community the team had pretended to represent for almost seventy years had no voice in the matter at all.”1 Indeed, Walter O’Malley’s interest in the sport was largely, if not solely, financial.2 The passage of the Dodgers’ presidency from Branch Rickey to O’Malley in 1950 signified a broader change in the business and culture of baseball. As Rickey’s biographer Murray Polner put it, “To Rickey, baseball remained a civil religion which acted out public functions organized religion was unable to perform. O’Malley’s faith rested on balance sheets and dividends.”3 Even something as socially significant as baseball’s desegregation was a matter of dollars and cents for O’Malley; he petulantly told Roger Kahn that Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to boost attendance because a clause in Rickey’s contract gave him a percentage of gate receipts.4 Though this claim partly reflected O’Malley’s well-chronicled animosity toward Rickey, it also suggests his tendency to view most things through the lens of profitability—even something as socially consequential as desegregation. Kahn saw O’Malley as a master manipulator who could make money at will. Angry about the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles in 1958, Kahn would later reflect, “It amazes me to this day that once I stood in the ranks of journalists who, in the most furious words they could summon, indicted a capitalist for being motivated by a passion for greater profits.”5
O’Malley was a businessman and people were profits. Embracing the logic of capitalism, O’Malley believed that the Dodgers could only finish first or last—he would say, “The history of the Brooklyn club is that fiscally you’re either first or bankrupt. There is no second place.”6 To finish first the Dodgers had to invest in the team, but finishing first was a means, not an end, for O’Malley. Finishing first had to be profitable to O’Malley to make it worth his while. As he would write in the Brooklyn Eagle, “My business is baseball.”7 O’Malley saw people as abstractions, wallets with legs who would either come to the stadium or not. He was not concerned with the role of the club in the history of the borough. He was concerned with locating a stadium at its most profitable location and using stadium space as profitably as possible.
For a decade after that monumental and profitable season in 1947, Walter O’Malley looked to reinvent the stadium in Brooklyn for a new audience in a new age. Famed theater and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes first bent the ears of the Dodgers in 1948, attempting to sell them on a stadium-as-community-center design that anticipated both the emergent shopping centers of the later 1950s and the “mallparks” of the twenty-first century. Intrigued by the idea, but increasingly weary of Geddes’s self-promotion and pricey plans, O’Malley turned to another celebrity designer, Buckminster Fuller, to build him a more affordable version of a domed sports center. Across the country, politicians and hucksters hawked extravagant new stadium proposals to grab public attention—projects that shared the brash confidence and sense of excitement expressed by Geddes’s designs. None of them would be built, though the stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s would unevenly and incompletely embody Geddes’s proposed solutions to the problems of the prewar stadium in the postwar city. These designs exhibited new ways of thinking about stadium space and stadium culture—visions characterized by modernist aesthetics and visual order, the expansion of stadium consumption and entertainment, extensive automation and technological display, acquiescence to the demands of the automobile, and the cultivation of a more orderly and affluent audience.
But Walter O’Malley wasn’t the only agent in the shifting national geography of professional sport. Outside of Brooklyn, new stadiums were conceived, pitched, and even built in the fifteen years after World War II. Some of those stadiums were quite radical propositions but existed merely in paper form. Many of the ones that materialized—in places like Milwaukee and Baltimore—were more notable for where in the city they were built rather than how they were designed. As Geddes and Fuller sketched possibilities, O’Malley watched these cities build new stadiums to attract major league baseball and football clubs—stadiums that were, in his mind, rather ordinary. He struggled to find a site for a new stadium in Brooklyn—one easily accessible to suburbanites and Manhattan’s business class. He wrestled with New York politicians and the powerful Robert Moses, who had visions of his own for a new stadium in Queens. By the end of the 1950s, a decade after Geddes had started his scheming for the Dodgers, O’Malley figured the ultimate solution to the problems of Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field and the changing character of urban space and life: a new Dodger Stadium three thousand miles west in sunny, eager, politically compliant Los Angeles. With its opening in 1962, in the wake of new stadiums in San Francisco and the District of Columbia, a new era of stadium design and culture had taken a recognizable form.
The winter after Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers, O’Malley targeted a site for a new stadium in downtown Brooklyn near Borough Hall, at Jay and Tillary streets, adjacent McLaughlin Park. The area was ideal for baseball in O’Malley’s estimation, for a variety of reasons. It had great access to a range of different types of transportation: subway, bus, trolley, and private automobiles via tunnel, bridge, and highway. Traffic problems would be minimized by use patterns. In a memorandum he noted that the area was “dead as a door nail” on Saturdays, when many people weren’t working. Baseball traffic during the workweek was different than downtown traffic, concentrated in the midafternoon for day games and at night, after area workers had gone home. O’Malley noted that a stadium in downtown Brooklyn would be closer to Columbus Circle than the Polo Grounds on the northern edge of Harlem or Yankee Stadium in the South Bronx. The new stadium would also be near a large population of affluent men, he exclaimed, “in the shadow of Wall Street!” At that time, the site was slated for a housing development; O’Malley hoped that the development site could be swapped with the Ebbets Field lot. If that was untenable, he thought the club could build just south at Jay Street and Myrtle Avenue or directly west at Cadman Plaza. He called the war memorial at Cadman Plaza “a flop,” proposing that they “call [the] new ball park Memorial Stadium or Park or What[ever],” flippantly adding, “Put up all the bronze tablets the walls will hold” to memorialize the soldiers. The architect for his new stadium would be “a man by the name of Norman Bel Geddes—who is reputed to be terrific.”8
The reputation of Norman Bel Geddes—though perhaps unfamiliar to Walter O’Malley—was well established by the late 1940s, thanks particularly to the wildly popular Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Visitors were given buttons that read “I have seen the future” as they exited the exhibit housed in the General Motors Building. Over twenty-seven thousand saw the future each day, if the buttons were to be believed, queuing up in lines five- to fifteen-thousand-people long to get a glimpse of Geddes’s vision of a 1960 American landscape in miniature and “the motorways of the world of tomorrow.” Geddes boasted in 1940, “There have been hit shows and sporting events in the past which had waiting lines for a few days, but never before had there been a line as long as this, renewing itself continuously, month after month, as there was every day at the Fair.”9
FIGURE 16. Walter O’Malley hoped to build in downtown Brooklyn in the late 1940s, targeting the area just east of Cadman Plaza, pictured here. Brooklyn Bridge and lower Manhattan are visible beyond the plaza. BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY—BROOKLYN COLLECTION.
Visitors entered the GM Building through a notch in its massive streamlined façade. Descending switchback ramps in a dark auditorium, they finally arrived at a row of plush, high-backed seats on a rubber-tired conveyor and were taken on a simulated airplane ride over a model of the American landscape of 1960. Geddes’s massive dioramas stretched over a three-level, thirty-six-thousand-square-foot area and contained a million trees, half a million buildings, and fifty thousand streamlined cars (ten thousand of them animated). Visitors wowed at a landscape of dams and hydroelectric plants, farms and glass-domed orchards, towns and suburbs, and a modern metropolis of spectacular glass towers spaced across a rationalized cityscape, its grid defined by its means of transportation. Movement by automobile appeared to be the future’s defining feature. Pedestrian ways were perched above the street level, protecting walkers from streamlined cars speeding to and from their destinations—while simultaneously enabling the automobile to express itself unimpeded. Geddes and General Motors, whose eight-million-dollar investment funded the exhibit, hoped for such a future of seemingly frictionless movement pivoting on the private automobile.10
Through Futurama, Geddes seemingly solved the problem of the automobile in a world that wasn’t designed for it. Collisions, traffic, confusion, irritation: people were “eager to find a sensible way out of this planless, suicidal mess.” However, Geddes argued, “masses of people can never find a solution to a problem until they are shown the way. Each unit of the mass may have a knowledge of the problem, and each may have his own solution, but until mass opinion is crystallized, brought into focus and made articulate, it amounts to nothing but vague grumbling. One of the best ways to make a solution understandable to everybody is to make it visual, to dramatize it.”11 In Futurama, he dramatized not only how to integrate the automobile into the canvas of the American landscape but also what the new city might look like. It wouldn’t look like Central Brooklyn, home of Ebbets Field. And just as he “dramatized” how to reshape the nation to accommodate the automobile—rescripting the city in the process—Geddes would dramatize solutions to the old urban ballpark in his stadium proposals for the Dodgers.
Geddes initially approached the Brooklyn Dodgers by writing to co-owner Branch Rickey in December 1947, proposing a “new stadium principle” that would increase capacity, provide better visibility, and allow expansion at the Ebbets Field site in Crown Heights. Geddes was cryptic about the solution but claimed it could be installed section by section so as to not interfere with baseball play during the season.12 He then met with O’Malley in January 1948 to discuss his plans; he hoped to gain an audience with the Dodgers’ board to present his proposals more fully and formally.13
Geddes got the chance in March 1948, when he presented a series of proposals to the Dodgers—most of which addressed the deteriorating Ebbets Field. The park would require an estimated six hundred fifty thousand dollars in repairs over the following three years, much of it committed to correcting the structural problems born of water seepage and corrosion. Geddes outlined some possible approaches to the Ebbets Field conditions, including proposals that would rebuild the park on site and one plan for an entirely new stadium at a new location—a plan characteristic of the designer of Futurama.
FIGURE 17. Spectators take a simulated airplane ride of the city of 1960 at Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “General Motors - Futurama - Visitors in moving chairs viewing exhibit,” NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS.
Most of Geddes’s plans, or “schemes,” as he called them, would reconstruct Ebbets Field at Bedford Avenue, one section of seating at a time, converting the park from a crooked box to an egg-shaped oval. The playing field would be shifted slightly to the east, moving the western boundary westward, from McKeever Place to Franklin Avenue; the club owned the narrow strip of property between the streets. Doing this would allow Geddes to install stands encircling the entire playing field. This seemed a rational and balanced correction to the park’s then lopsided shape, whereby it was squeezed up against Bedford Avenue, separated from the street not by stands of seats but only a wall.
FIGURE 18. Workers set up an urban scene in Futurama, where massive towers sprang out of a grid defined by superhighways—a new American landscape bent to the will of the automobile. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. “General Motors - Futurama - Artists standing among models of buildings” NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS.
The reconstruction schemes were differentiated solely by the amount of seating capacity they would allow in the new, on-site stadium—ranging from 60,000 to 80,400. Geddes would break up the old park’s single upper deck, which hung over the lower deck and was supported by columns, into a series of smaller stacked and cantilevered decks; the support posts would be moved toward the back of the stands, not completely eliminating obstructing views but minimizing them. The scheme for maximum seating would create a stadium of four levels—a thirty-row lower level, a twenty-two-row second level, and thirteen-row third and fourth levels. Geddes claimed that three shallow tiers, instead of a single, deep upper deck, would provide 52 percent more capacity in the same area. He also promised that the vertical stacking of shallow tiers would retain “the intimacy of Ebbets Field,” in spite of its greatly increased capacity—a sensitive nod to one of the existing park’s signature features. Another noteworthy element of his new seating design was the elimination of the tunnels through seating decks that spectators used to get to and from their seats. Ramps in his new schemes would be buried within the sections of seats, running paral lel to the rows of seating, sloping upward from a channel between the sections. All told, Geddes’s reconstruction of Ebbets Field would yield higher seating capacities, larger and more comfortable seats, more row spacing, wider aisles, fewer columns in sight lines, half the average walking distance for customers, and reduced maintenance, making Brooklyn “the world’s most progressive baseball club.” Comfort, spaciousness, convenience, mobility, clear sight lines: these were signal qualities of the emerging modernist stadium, contrasting it with existing urban ballparks.
Geddes emphasized that the club had to move forward, past the old ballpark forms. He told the Dodgers’ board, “Whether the present property is improved—or new property is developed—it is evident that the Brooklyn baseball club should have a modern plant.”14 Whereas a “conventional design” would be an improvement, the designer was clearly angling for “something entirely new in concept and utility”—a new stadium at a different, less restrictive location. A new modern stadium for the Dodgers could be designed to be more than just a baseball park, drawing new revenue streams from improved concessions, the rental of space as fireproof record storage, the staging of winter sports in the off-season (skating, tobogganing, and skiing on artificial ice and snow), boxing, and midget auto racing.15 Geddes’s new modern stadium would cost an estimated $3,320,000 or $55.32 per seat (at 60,000-seat capacity). This was a bare-bones structural estimate that didn’t include items like lighting, toilets, concessions, offices, escalators, clubhouses, and field drainage. Geddes hoped to rationalize service by developing mechanical vendors “to improve service” and eliminate “low grade concessionaire labor.” He envisioned a “mechanical ticket selling and admission system” to further eliminate human labor from the space. He wanted to create more sophisticated color schemes for the stadium, as well as design “an intelligent uniform” for the players more attentive to temperature, absorption, color, cleaning, comfort, style, and “popular appeal”—a plan reflecting Geddes’s background in theatrical costume design and his characteristic attention to design at all scales.16
Finally, Geddes believed that the club should put an “emphasis on developing ideas to attract women.”17 Of course, the Dodgers had been cultivating a female audience since the club’s introduction of Ladies’ Days in the late 1930s, and baseball club owners had long tried to attract a certain class of women—and the respectability they signified—as a way of “civilizing” male audiences and elevating the game’s cultural status (while also conveniently boosting attendance). Geddes’s phrasing, however, suggests that he imagined appeals to women who weren’t drawn by baseball itself—after all, new ideas would have to be developed. Geddes would have a stadium attract more casual consumers of the game in addition to the die-hards; in the process, he would further feminize a traditionally masculine space.18
As a salesman, Geddes seemed to have a two-pronged strategy in his dealings with the Dodgers. He got his foot in the door with more modest promises of a redesigned stadium at the Ebbets Field site, but then used this opening to pitch his more radical ideas about a new stadium altogether. He promised the club that he would implement a “public relations program” that would pique the interest of those who didn’t just read the sports pages, grabbing feature space in general-interest magazines like Life and securing a presence in syndicated newspaper feature stories, newsreels, radio, and television. He would reach “a new public,” and the attention the extravagant plans attracted would enhance the club’s “top prestige.”19
Geddes’s appetite for self-promotion pulled against O’Malley’s need, as a buyer of real estate, to keep plans quiet. In late February, O’Malley was busy trying to restrain his partner, Branch Rickey, from publicizing plans after an article in the New York Journal American scooped the Dodgers’ plans for a new stadium.20 The best strategy, O’Malley told Rickey, was to plant the seeds for a new stadium in the minds of influential figures like Robert Moses and Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore, allowing them to be “the father of the idea.” Otherwise, these powerful men might resist a plan if “they thought it was being shoved down their individual or respective throats.” Ironically, O’Malley cited a conversation he had with Geddes regarding this strategy, perhaps not yet appreciating what a self-promotional animal his prospective designer was; O’Malley wrote, “Mr. Geddes, with the modesty that goes with one so talented, is more interested in the consummation of something practicable along the lines we have considered than he is a publicity release that might defeat the idea.”21
News of stadium plans were published by the press in mid-March, though details of the stadium were various and confused. The New York Post reported on March 15 that Geddes was working on a stadium covering ten acres in the Borough Hall area, constructed of concrete and stainless steel, with foam rubber seats, and with an eighty-thousand-seat capacity. The following day the New York Times reported that Geddes had submitted plans for “a streamlined Ebbets Field” to be built on the Ebbets Field site, quoting O’Malley; he denied that the club was intending to build in downtown Brooklyn. The estimated cost for the reconstructed stadium exceeded six million dollars. O’Malley told the reporter, “We appreciate that the Brooklyn fans are entitled to more seats and in a modern stadium but it just does not seem possible in the near future.” The Brooklyn Eagle reported yet another version of the story, claiming that plans would be executed, according to Geddes, within three years. The stadium would be located either at the Ebbets Field site or in the Greenpoint neighborhood on the northern boundary of Brooklyn, adjacent the East River and Queens.22 Geddes told the paper that the new concrete and stainless steel stadium would retain “the intimacy which is the chief attraction of Ebbets Field.” It would boast “all modern improvements,” including automated ticket collection. The paper reported that owners of small parcels around Ebbets Field had refused to sell to the Dodgers, undermining the possibility of expansion there. In response to this wave of attention, O’Malley made it clear that Geddes was no spokesman for the club. Calling him an “an eminent theater designer,” O’Malley told the paper that Geddes had volunteered to study the expansion of Ebbets Field and had “completed his assignment.” His plans would be too costly for the Dodgers. Furthermore, O’Malley clarified, “any statement that Mr. Bel Geddes has made to the press is on his own behalf. Of course, he is not talking for the Brooklyn Baseball Club.”23
O’Malley’s denials certainly didn’t stop the designer’s lips. Geddes called reporters into his Park Avenue office to present them with the stadium schemes he had laid out for the Dodgers. The New York Herald Tribune reported that Geddes “articulated on his latest enthusiasm, with presumably the same amount of zeal that produced the Futurama.” The designer discussed his plans for a reconstructed Ebbets Field on the current site, oval and made of steel and aluminum (not “cement,” the reporter noted explicitly). The outside would be “sheathed with gigantic venetian blinds with three-foot slats” that could be opened and closed to modulate the temperature and wind currents inside the stadium.24
Lester Rodney, sports editor for New York’s communist paper, the Daily Worker, was also impressed by Geddes’s vision—though he considered it a bit more critically than did the mainstream press. He recalled the “entrancingly logical slumless world” of Futurama, echoed in the new stadium plans. He made a distinction between Geddes as a “modernistic” designer, as he referred to himself, and a “futuristic” one, as Rodney branded him. Geddes’s work was futuristic because “this free enterprise system of ours seems to have all kinds of trouble providing mediocre apartments for its veterans, let alone beautiful planned large communities of homes.” The stadium was, by Rodney’s accurate estimation, a thing of the future rather than the modern present. But Rodney also walked through, in enhanced detail, the stadium’s features. He pointed out plans for elevators and escalators, wider aisles, wider seats with cushions built in, no obstructing posts, lighting incorporated into the structure (rather than perched on trussed frames above it), a sunken field to make for less climbing, lots of restrooms, and the climate-manipulating venetian blinds. He mentioned the possibility of a roof atop the whole thing—a rather significant detail that was oddly left out of other reports.25
Stories of Geddes’s futuristic stadium plans for the Dodgers spread well beyond the boundaries of New York, as they were eagerly picked up by news syndicates. Such stories called Geddes a “futuristic designer who sees weird but wonderful things through his saucer-sized eyeglasses.” He was cast as a versatile eccentric; his designs had “run the futuristic scale from streamlined yachts to a study that determined milady’s kitchen should be painted white to soothe the nerves.” People across the country read of the new aluminum stadium in Brooklyn that “could be painted just like an automobile.” A reporter seemed skeptical that such a radical reinvention of the stadium would be realized, offering, “Chances are maybe your grandchildren will see a park like it.”26
Geddes’s well-publicized plans seemed to suggest his intentions: if the Dodgers weren’t going to employ him to build a futuristic new structure, others could. His penchant for promotion pushed his stadium visions into newspapers across the country. He unveiled to sports fans, accustomed to plank bleachers and simple grandstands, what a reporter called “his handbook for the emancipation of America’s baseball fans.”27 Geddes’s handbook would rationalize the iconic urban space of the ballpark, making it larger, mechanized, and more comfortable, with better sight lines and lighting. It would order space logically, efficiently, and profitably. More than just a stadium, it would express and produce a new modern city—a radiant and slumless world—that planners and designers like Le Corbusier, Geddes, and Robert Moses envisioned.
The Dodgers backed away from Geddes and his stadium schemes for a few years. Attendance sagged to 1,185,896 in 1950 (down nearly 30 percent from the previous season) and recovered just marginally in 1951, to 1,282,628—and this in spite of having one of the best teams in baseball both seasons.28 Rumors of a new stadium exploded again in 1952. In late February O’Malley announced plans for Emil Praeger and Geddes to visit the Dodgers’ Vero Beach spring training complex to brainstorm a new 5,000-seat stadium there.29 Praeger was a civil engineer who had developed a concrete breakwater used in the invasion of Normandy during World War II; he had also designed and collaborated on airports, city highways and parkways, bridges, and the United Nations complex.30 After they arrived in Florida in early March, Geddes outlandishly suggested a “portable stadium made out of inflated rubber,” which could be constructed more cheaply than one of wood and steel.31O’Malley didn’t pursue that design.
Geddes’s trip to Florida rejuvenated rumors of a new stadium in Brooklyn as well—a rearticulation of Geddes’s schemes from 1948 that promised to reinvent the American stadium. When the club’s deliberations leaked in late February, O’Malley told a reporter for the Long Island Press, “This will be a modern plant in every sense of the word. It is no longer good business to build a ball park just as a ball park. My idea is to build a park so that it can be used for many other things when it isn’t being utilized for the primary reason—a baseball stadium.” While baseball parks had long been used in multiple ways—most frequently as a theater for political speeches, religious revivals, and football games—O’Malley and Geddes imagined a stadium engineered precisely to convert to other uses on its central stage and host other functions under its roof.32 More uses meant more revenue for a costly structure occupying a central location in the city. But more than just a shift in uses, O’Malley also promised a shift in the relationship between the stadium operator and the visitor; he alleged, “The prime consideration will be the fan.” He thus signaled a new attention to, and promotional rhetoric of, customer service at the stadium. In the expanding and increasingly crowded postwar entertainment landscape, the stadium visitor was no longer a fan but a consumer of a product: sports-themed entertainment.
A rash of stories followed in New York newspapers and via syndication across the country in March—as well as a Geddes visit to NBC’s Today television show—followed by a four-page article in Collier’s in September.33 Syndicated reports cast the new stadium, to be built on a site outside of Crown Heights, as a much-needed corrective to the ballparks of the early 1950s. One reporter called for a new paradigm: “Outdoor stadiums haven’t changed much in the last 2,000 years—same general layout, same uncomfortable seats, same susceptibility to the inhospitable elements. . . . It’s time we had a change.”34 Another told readers across the country that Geddes “envisions an ultramodern baseball park which would put to shame the shabby, strictly functional parks of the present.” The ultramodern would be pricey, however, costing an estimated eight million dollars.35
The stadium, which the New York Times called “grandiose” and suggested was “probably far in the future” and the Newark Star-Ledger branded the “ball park of the future,” was highlighted by a retractable roof (an “aluminum umbrella,” according to one reporter).36A syndicated report told readers: “There is an aluminum roof which slides out from the top of a garage next door which houses 7,000 cars. If the weather begins to rain or blow or thunder, the stadium manager simply presses a button, the roof creeps over like a hood, lights come on, and whatever is going on goes right on.”37 Other highlights of the new stadium, which distinguished it from any park in existence, were foam rubber seats that could be heated in cold weather, armrest drink holders, automatic hot dog vending machines placed throughout the grounds, a new lighting system integrated into the stadium structure, and synthetic grass that could be painted any color.38
Geddes explained his new structure, which represented a radical reconfiguration of the stadium and its social function:
You have to start with an entirely different concept of a stadium’s place in the community. The ballparks today are far behind the times. Now we have to think not only of today, but of what we’ll want 30 years from now as we plan for a really modern stadium. It won’t be just a ballpark, of course. It will have to be more of a community center, with shopping facilities, playgrounds for children, possibly a couple of small movie houses—all kinds of things. A mother will be able to go to the ball game, leave her children at the playgrounds or at the dentist’s or doctor’s office, leave a list of foodstuffs to be gathered and wrapped for her, and find everything ready for her when the game’s over.39
This new stadium-as-community-center echoed other new proposals merging consumption and community spaces. Victor Gruen and Elsie Krummeck had sketched out plans for a postwar shopping center in Architectural Forum in 1943; it would include not only a range of retail stores but also a cafeteria, a bar, a movie theater, a service station, a nursery, a post office, a library, and an auditorium. It would be both a center for shopping and “the center of cultural activities and recreation . . . the one important meeting place of the community.”40 Geddes’s plan to reinvent the stadium for women, consumption, and auxiliary entertainments channeled the vision of Gruen and Krummeck that would be materialized in postwar shopping centers. It would also be expressed, in different ways, in many of the stadiums of the 1960s. This vision for a consumption- and entertainment-oriented civic space was novel indeed, preceding the opening of the first fully enclosed shopping mall—Gruen’s Southdale in suburban Edina, Minnesota—by four years and Gruen’s downtown version of consumerist civic space at Midtown Plaza in Rochester, New York, by a decade. The project reflected the then unrealized visions of planners like Gruen, who would wed together consumption and community as they rewrote the postwar city and its suburbs. The Geddes proposal was different through its ideological fusion of male and female spaces—the combination of sports and shopping. Other sports entertainers, O’Malley among them, would also attempt to attract female audiences in the coming years by building non-sporting amenities—restaurants, luxury lounges, shops, and conspicuous displays of service—into new stadiums.
The stadium that Geddes planned would have fit right into his Futurama city. The entire structure was rectangular, consisting of two separate but linked squares—one a parking garage, the other the “all weather–all purpose” stadium. The flat shell of the roof split in two, one portion sliding across elevated rails onto the adjacent garage. The streamlined roof looked like the hood of an automobile; it was supported by (and decorated with) girders that stretched across the top like chrome accents. Below the displaced roof, the parking garage was boxy and horizontal, with broad openings for automobile traffic on each side, anticipating the modern blockhouse design of enclosed suburban shopping centers of the later 1950s. Its smooth symmetry, expansive scale, and technological futurism marked a striking departure from old Ebbets Field.
Through March 1952, only Geddes, his draftsmen, the Dodgers, and some reporters had seen what the futuristic stadium might look like. The general public had been forced to rely on descriptions in the press, refracted through their imaginations. Geddes preferred to “dramatize” solutions by making them visual, and he would make the modern stadium visible to a national public in the September 1952 edition of Collier’s.41 The Collier’s illustration crystallized the futuristic stadium being conceived in Brooklyn for a nation of viewers, stitching together fragments of reportage and materializing the incipient modern stadium into a more coherent form for a national audience.
The stadium design published in Collier’s was framed as a collaboration between O’Malley, Geddes, and Praeger. The illustration of the new park did not come from Geddes’s office but was a rendering by Rolf Klep drawn from Geddes’s blueprints. Klep was an illustrator whose art appeared in magazines like Fortune, Collier’s, and Life, often depicting space-age or maritime scenes; this experience was evident in the illustration. Klep’s illustration seemed part space station and part ocean liner, and its smooth, gleaming, curvilinear white surfaces and ribbon windows contrasted magnificently with the anonymous, boxy, brown and gray buildings of old Brooklyn around its perimeter. The base of the stadium was a two-story square, consuming the entirety of a large city block. A third level with rounded corners, receding from the square base, supported a domed roof. Four covered pedestrian walkways protruded from the stadium’s second level like huge gangplanks, elevating the city sidewalk and privatizing it, shielding the stadium from the everyday foot traffic of the streets. Traffic lanes surrounded the stadium like a moat, each lane divided by a median that separated private cars, taxis, and buses. At each corner of the base, atop the curved third level, were two American flags—the only splash of color on what was otherwise a pristinely bleached exterior.
FIGURE 19. This perspective drawing of Norman Bel Geddes’s sliding-roof stadium for Brooklyn (1949) was likely seen by the Dodgers and reporters but not published alongside stories describing the new stadium in March 1952. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. IMAGE COURTESY OF THE EDITH LUTYENS AND NORMAN BEL GEDDES FOUNDATION.
More remarkable than this exterior were the curiosities the cutaway revealed inside—a dollhouse of miniature activity. At the center was, of course, a baseball diamond with a symmetrical outfield surrounded by three decks of cantilevered stadium seating. Behind these seating decks were retail stores, a movie theater, storage, and a supermarket. Below the seats were decks of parking and service stations, concealed beneath the stadium and underground, reachable by seamlessly integrated ramps off the street. All of these features were marked with labels and arrows. In this miniature scene, diners and shoppers milled about wide concourses even as the stadium was full of baseball fans. Cars rested in tidy rows in the stadium’s bowels; other vehicles whizzed around the outside of the structure in its meticulously managed traffic patterns.
The article explained the philosophy of the design and what O’Malley, Geddes, and Praeger hoped to achieve through it. There were a number of problems the new stadium was intended to address—problems that were already impacting business at ballparks in the early 1950s and that were certain, it seemed to baseball executives like O’Malley, to be exacerbated in the coming years. Fans were increasingly arriving at ballparks via private automobile, many of those fans having moved to the suburbs; they were faced with uncompromising traffic jams and parking problems as they tried to negotiate a dense urban landscape ill-equipped for the car. Once they arrived at the park, fans had to climb flights of stairs and travel narrow, dim, often moldy concourses to get to their seats. Seats in old parks were narrow and hard, and many of them had obstructed views due to pillars supporting upper decks. Fans watching baseball on television, of course, confronted none of this.
The article’s title, “Baseball’s Answer to TV,” foregrounded this challenge. Baseball owners were terrified of the impact that television and the comfort of the living room would have on their attendance and income in the coming years, as television ownership rates soared with more and more people moving to the suburbs.42 Television granted Americans who were new to a suburban neighborhood, and recently disjointed from their old social networks, instant access to a virtual community of families that were sharing the same pleasures and challenges of suburban life. Not only did television help smooth the transition to the suburbs, but it could also provide its residents with a version of urban culture without the hassle of urban living.43 Television executives like Pat Weaver of NBC saw television as an adaptation of more traditional community experience and a mechanism for spatially transporting people from their living rooms to the world beyond. He theorized in 1951 that television didn’t bring shows to people but took people “from their living rooms to other places—theaters, arenas, ball parks, movie houses, skating rinks, and so forth.”44 Not only could it broadcast baseball games, but it offered competing shows and was just one of many postwar leisure options—bowling, fishing, softball, and do-it-yourself projects around the house among them—that were much closer to home for the suburbanite than was the urban ballpark. For suburbanites, a trip to the stadium from their sofa was far more convenient than one in their car. Because baseball owners had historically received the great majority of their income from gate receipts—and had unevenly monetized the power of television through broadcast rights—this was threatening indeed. New stadiums—in the eyes of forward-thinkers like Geddes and O’Malley—would have to be easier to get to, feature some of the comforts of home, and be stocked with their own attractions that the living room couldn’t match.
O’Malley was ahead of most other owners in trying to confront the challenges facing the sports business. His task for Geddes and Praeger was, according to Collier’s writer Tom Meany, “the creation of a stadium in Brooklyn embodying the refinements of modern engineering” motivated by “the rather novel theory that baseball fans are people.” It would deploy cutting-edge technical know-how in the service of convenience and comfort. The Collier’s plan amplified all the features Geddes had been pitching in previous versions of his stadium: a weatherproofing roof that made the arena functional for events besides baseball; organized transportation in and out of the stadium in a way that exemplified Geddes’s infatuation with a totally designed and coordinated “vehicular ecosystem”; padded theater seats that could be adjusted at different viewing angles for different events; wide aisles and rows; automated ticket sales and vending machines; synthetic turf that was more predictable and cost-efficient; standardized outfield dimensions, for the sake of fairness and order; and the diversified use of the building as a whole—from the events held inside to the range of commercial enterprises housed along the stadium concourses.45
O’Malley presented the stadium directly to Brooklynites through a column in the Brooklyn Eagle a month after the Collier’s article ran. The article was part of a series titled “10-Point Program for Brooklyn,” in which prominent local figures proposed ways of reviving the borough. O’Malley boldly stated in his opening line that his part of the plan was “to make baseball Brooklyn’s business.” Noting Brooklyn’s “international reputation” for being a baseball town, he hoped the borough might “capitalize on the fact and encourage the erection of the first all-purpose, all-weather sports and convention arena.” The new six-million-dollar stadium was, he assured readers, “beyond the ‘pipe-dream’ stage, and past the drawing-board phase, for that matter.” Geddes and Praeger had blueprints at the ready, and the club had “definite ideas” about locations that would put it closer to Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, and the Long Island Rail Road station than was either the Polo Grounds or Yankee Stadium. In unpacking the details, O’Malley prioritized transportation—and particularly the driver of the car, claiming that the new stadium would be “strategically located to give maximum convenience for rapid transit patrons, but most important—it will offer the maximum accessibility to the motorist.” Another major point of emphasis, “the most revolutionary feature of the new Dodger park,” would be the six-hundred-foot roof that would eliminate the rain check and allow all sorts of events, including conventions, exhibitions, and sporting events during the winter. A third significant point, highlighted in bold type, was the multifunctional use of the arena’s perimeter, which would house supermarkets, shops, and storage—“making the park an intimate part of the surrounding community.” O’Malley concluded by arguing that the facility would allow such a range of events that “Brooklyn datelines would appear almost daily throughout the world,” a first step toward the borough’s secession from New York City, second fiddle to Manhattan no more.46
FIGURE 20. Norman Bel Geddes’s Brooklyn stadium, as rendered by Rolf Klep in Collier’s, September 1952. Rolf Klep, “Baseball’s Answer to TV,” ink on paper, 1987:222. JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OREGON.
Five months later, O’Malley tried to get Roger Kahn to write a story for the New York Herald Tribune publicizing the new stadium plans. O’Malley laid out his vision:
Did you ever ask yourself why in an electronic age we play our games in a horse-and-buggy park? . . . The aisles are too narrow. The stairs are too steep. Poles obstruct the views. We can’t park enough cars. We need twice as many seats. The bathrooms smell. The girders holding up the whole thing are rusting away. . . . Imagine a new park. Seventy thousand seats just like the Yankees have. No poles. You can cantilever construction now. Escalators take the fans to their seats. Plenty of parking. Restaurants and train stations right in the park. Then, to end worries about rain, we put a dome over everything.47
Spaciousness. Mobility. Cleanliness. Size. Automation. Amenities. Climate control. This was the modern dream—the changes that would move sport and society from a horse-and-buggy era to an electronic one. It would be a stadium that commanded metropolitan space by sitting at the nexus of rail routes and modern freeways, eliminated working human bodies, dismissed the natural and social environments beyond its walls as if they weren’t even there, and filled its spaces with an affluent and well-behaved audience. Kahn wrote a piece outlining O’Malley’s vision, but the paper’s sports editor rejected it, telling him, “You’re supposed to be writing baseball, not Walter’s fantasies.”48
For the time being, O’Malley could merely fantasize, inspired by the illustration of Geddes’s domed stadium on his office wall.49 In 1952, Ebbets Field drew just over one million fans, down 40 percent from the 1947 high, in spite of a pennant-winning team. As O’Malley struggled to find a new location in Brooklyn and justify a new stadium outlay, more and more Brooklynites moved to newer areas of the borough or out to the new suburbs of Long Island. The dense urban terrain about the park, difficult to manipulate by automobile, served as a deterrent for these migrant Dodgers supporters to return, as did the comforts and demands of their new suburban homes. But while the Dodgers faced a certain set of business challenges, increasingly evident by the end of 1952, their National League rivals, the Boston Braves, were on the brink of existential failure. Fewer than three hundred thousand came to Braves Field to see the team play in 1952. While O’Malley, Bel Geddes, and Emil Praeger theorized the new modern stadium, the Braves would have simply been happy for customers, whatever the stadium.
Braves owner Lou Perini, upon relocating the team from Boston to Milwaukee for the 1953 season, told reporters, “There were many reasons for my decision.” The most immediate factor—and the reason that the move came so abruptly, just weeks before the opener as the unsuspecting players were in Florida for spring training—was pressure from Bill Veeck, owner of the American League’s St. Louis Browns. The Browns were struggling horribly for attendance in St. Louis and, like the Braves, were the second most popular team in a two-team city. Veeck hoped to move the club to Milwaukee, where a publicly financed stadium was being completed, and Milwaukee’s civic leaders welcomed Veeck’s overtures. Perini, because he owned the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, held the rights to the city by agreement with the other major league owners. But by refusing to sell those rights to Veeck, effectively blocking his move there, he risked alienating Milwaukee, becoming the man who barred it from major league status. Perini was interested in potentially moving his own club there, though not that season. But Veeck’s interest in Milwaukee, coupled with poor preseason ticket sales in Boston, pushed Boston native Perini toward making a quick decision.50
Other National League owners unanimously supported the move, in spite of the inconvenient timing, as their share of the gate at Boston’s Braves Field had been collapsing over the previous seasons. The Braves’ attendance peaked in their pennant-winning 1948 season, when 1,455,439 came to Braves Field. That figure would drop precipitously in the following seasons, to 1,081,795 (1949), 944,391 (1950), 487,475 (1951), and then a measly 281,278 (1952) in what would be the club’s final season in Boston.51 Through the late 1940s, the Braves had recorded modest profits of between $150,000 and $300,000 per season. The club reportedly lost over $200,000 in 1951 and $600,000 to $700,000 in the disastrous season of 1952.52
Lester Smith of the Sporting News reasoned, “There is room for only one major league team in the Hub [Boston].”53 Perini agreed with this assessment, concluding, “Since the advent of television Boston has become a one-team city.”54 That “one team” was the Red Sox of the American League. Even when the Braves were at their best, they were the second favorite in Boston. They made it to the World Series in 1948 but were outdrawn that season by the Sox. In 1952, the Sox finished nineteen games out of first place but still drew 1,115,750 (compared to the 281,278 who visited Braves Field).55 Many agreed with Smith and Perini’s assessment: Boston was a one-team city. By 1950, Boston was the tenth largest urban area in the United States, with a population of 801,444; there were 637,392 people in the Milwaukee area.56 Cities like New York, with nearly 8 million residents, and Chicago, with over 3.5 million, were able to sustain more than one baseball club at a time when competing games and other entertainments were increasingly televised into people’s living rooms; Boston could not. Neither could Philadelphia and St. Louis, both of which lost one of their two clubs over the following two years. An expanding leisure market that included televised baseball dragged down attendance at ballparks from its postwar highs in the late 1940s. When some clubs like the Braves sold their rights fees to local stations, the payback was a pittance compared to what they received through gate receipts and concessions at the game, which amounted to as much as 90 percent of a club’s income. Perini had sold the Braves’ TV rights in Boston for the 1951 and 1952 seasons for a paltry $40,000. This was a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $600,000–700,000 he lost in 1952.
FIGURE 21. Boston’s Braves Field in 1933. Commonwealth Avenue runs diagonally across the top of the image; the Boston & Albany Railroad tracks are in the foreground, between the ballpark and the Charles River. COURTESY OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, LESLIE JONES COLLECTION.
Braves Field did little to encourage attendance. Opened in 1915, the stadium was tout ed as “the world’s largest ballpark ever” by owner James Gaffney. A single-deck covered grandstand, seating eighteen thousand, stretched around the diamond infield. The roof towered above the flatly pitched bank of seats, supported by long beams and trusses; the high roof made the stands seem like a barn to some commentators. Uncovered pavilions for ten thousand spectators each flanked the baselines. A small stand of bleachers seating two thousand sat in right-center field; it became known as the “Jury Box” after a reporter once noted that only twelve fans were sitting there during a game. Trees were added beyond the outfield fence in the 1940s in an unsuccessful attempt to shield the sight of smoke from the adjacent rail yard.57
Braves Field was located little more than a mile away from Fenway Park, but the character of each was vastly different. The stands at Braves Field were expansive, sloping, and open; Fenway Park was tight, condensed, and enclosed. Lester Smith claimed, “Chummy Fenway Park is ideal for baseball and without question that is one reason why many people preferred to see games there instead of barnlike Braves Field.”58 Baseball writer Al Hirshberg thought the park was the number one reason the Braves failed in Boston. Braves Field was shoehorned between railroad tracks and industrial buildings. It was just a block away from Commonwealth Avenue, one of Boston’s major streets, but only one streetcar line served the park. The main entrance was on a dead-end street shared by trucks servicing the armory on the other side of that street. Hirshberg argued, “Except for people who lived in the vicinity, Braves Field was one of the hardest public places in Boston to reach.” But location wasn’t the only problem, Hirshberg wrote: “The plant itself was antiquated and barny. There was so much room on the field that fans in some sections of the stands needed field glasses to see what was going on. There was no feeling of intimacy there—no chance for kinship between players and public.”59
The absence of intimacy in the park was counterbalanced with an excess of intimacy outside it: there simply wasn’t much parking space for a population that was increasingly using automobiles. Perini owned a club in Boston that fewer and fewer people were coming to see, at a park that was difficult to get in and out of and wasn’t a particularly pleasant place to watch a game. An alternative, as a reporter for the Boston Herald pointed out, was “the glowing prospects in Milwaukee with a stadium that will accommodate 31,000 and which can be increased to 37,000, and which has parking space for 10,000 automobiles.”60
The Braves were urged to stay in Boston by a resolution from the Massachusetts Senate and pleas from Governor Christian Herter, Mayor John Hynes, the president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and “the man on the street,” according to Smith.61But many people on the street—including women—didn’t care all that much. In a Boston Herald article headlined “Man in Street Sorry, But Most Don’t Blame Owner of Braves,” Daisy Clarke, a resident of nearby Back Bay, ventured, “They’re gone? I think that’s wonderful. I never did like the National League. This is definitely an American League town. The park at Braves Field was no good, and the parking problem was even worse. I’ll get along without them.”62
The Braves were astonishingly successful in Milwaukee, exceeding the expectations of nearly everyone in baseball. The team attracted 1,826,397 fans in their first season there. They beat that number in 1954 (2,131,388) and topped two million fans every season through 1957.63 In their first six years, they sold nearly twelve million tickets and won two pennants and a World Series. Milwaukee was fertile soil for Perini and made him the envy of many baseball owners.
While Perini claimed to have been beaten out of Boston by many sticks, there was one primary carrot in Milwaukee: a new stadium at the attractive cost of practically nothing. Milwaukee County Stadium, a thirty-five-thousand-seat, county-owned baseball park two miles west of downtown, was on the brink of completion when the Braves announced their move. The Milwaukee County Board had approved the construction of a new baseball park in the Story Quarry section of Milwaukee on February 24, 1947. After rejecting a 1948 bond issue, voters approved a revised version in 1950 and ground was broken on a new stadium that October. The new stadium replaced Borchert Field, an old baseball park located in a residential neighborhood about two miles north of downtown. The new stadium had no major league tenant but was intended to be a magnet for any relocating major league teams. City leaders planned for the Brewers, of the minor league American Association, to play there until they could attract a major league franchise.64
FIGURE 22. A game crowd exits Braves Field in 1935, filing slowly past the main entrance beyond right field. COURTESY OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, LESLIE JONES COLLECTION.
Visitors to the new County Stadium arrived via freeway, decamped in the parking lot, and navigated their way between rows of gleaming chrome, approaching what looked like an airplane hangar dropped on a suburban office park. Two stories of red brick and ribbon window wrapped around much of the first tier. Visitors filed under a long, low canopy through the ticket gates into the belly of the ballpark. A gray metal barn sat atop the brick base, rising up like a receding layer cake. Inside, the double-decked grandstand stretched from first to third base, seating 28,011. There were two banks of roll-away bleachers along the third-base line and beyond the left-center field fence that could house an additional 7,900 visitors. The total capacity was 35,911 in 1953. A wire fence outlined the boundary of the playing field, curving symmetrically around the outfield: 320 feet down the foul lines, 376 feet in the power alleys, and 404 feet in center.65 A scoreboard, 57 feet tall and 61 feet across, sat beyond the right-field fence. Beyond the bleachers and scoreboard, a permanent green wall defined the ultimate edge of the stadium; beyond that was the expansive parking lot.66
The total cost of the stadium, funded by the county, was five million dollars. County leaders had expected to collect $35,000 per season in rent from the minor league Brewers but offered a discounted rental to entice the major league Braves westward. The contract called for the Braves to pay an annual rent of $1,000 for the first two years. For the following three, the county would receive 5 percent of gate receipts and most of the concessions.67 The Braves owned the radio and television rights in Milwaukee; however, Perini banned the broadcasting of regular-season games in his new home, believing that television had seriously undermined his attendance in Boston.68 Boosters expected the club to attract 400,000 out-of-town visitors who would spend, on average, six dollars per person in the area—theoretically reimbursing the city in lieu of the paltry rental fees.69
The arrival of a big-league team, as a civic status symbol, was important to many of Milwaukee’s most powerful men. Fred Miller, owner of Miller Brewing Company, was at the front of this effort to attract a big-league team to the city. He was a force on the Greater Milwaukee Committee for Community Development, which planned a range of improvements for the city, including airport enhancements, new expressways, a new zoo, a new library, a museum, and a war memorial—all at an estimated cost of over two hundred million dollars. The city had already built a four-million-dollar downtown arena and the new County Stadium.
Major league baseball wasn’t just a status symbol, though; the people of Milwaukee embraced the Braves unabashedly. Magazines like Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post ran articles about the city’s response to the new team, painting a portrait of an unaffected midwestern community showering country charm on a team spurned by easterners who couldn’t be bothered. These stories were accompanied by photos of players pulling homemade sausage from gift boxes, players’ wives going through piles of donated merchandise and sitting on free furniture, and community groups presenting players with gifts at the dugout steps. Articles noted free groceries and gas, and they described when the crowd regaled pitcher Max Sukront with “Happy Birthday.” Manager Charlie Grimm confessed, “I’ve got to watch out they don’t smother us with kindness, beer and sauerbraten.”70 This lovefest wasn’t just a media concoction. Braves star Eddie Mathews remembered, “The way the fans treated us—I can’t even describe it. We were getting cars loaned to us, free gasoline, free drycleaning, gifts of every kind. This went on throughout the fifties. We were taken into people’s homes. It was just like one big happy family.”71
FIGURE 23. Milwaukee’s County Stadium, home of the Braves, pictured in 1955. WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY, PHOTO BY MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL, WHS-50114.
Milwaukee’s successful courting of the Braves became a fixation for baseball owners, the worried fans of their teams, and the civic and business leaders of cities without a major league team—places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, Dallas, Houston, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Kansas City, and Seattle.72 An American city wasn’t truly significant, in the eyes of many boosters, unless it was “big league,” and being big league in the 1950s meant having a major league baseball franchise.73 An executive for the Milwaukee Journal victoriously proclaimed, “Big League Baseball put Milwaukee on the map and brought it into national prominence more quickly and more completely than anything else in the community’s history. That includes our reputation for beer.”74 He noted the impact on community spirit: even if times were tough on the economic front, residents would be happy “as long as Mathews keeps slugging.” Prominent civic figures in other cities, eager for major league status, looked to Milwaukee and used that episode to try to spur action in their communities. The proud claims of the Milwaukee Journal executive, for example, were republished as a foreword to a promotional magazine printed by the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce in 1954, titled, “A Prospectus of a Metropolitan Sports Area for the Twin Cities.” The group hoped to motivate support in Minnesota for a publicly funded ballpark there, to attract a major league club just as Milwaukee had; they would use a new stadium to successfully lure the Washington Senators westward in 1960.75 In 1959, as some Houstonians tried to make their city “big league” by building a new stadium and attracting a team, a columnist for the Houston Chronicle celebrated the drive and gall of “the thrifty burghers of Milwaukee County [who] took a $7.5 million gamble and won.” That “gamble” was building a stadium without a tenant in hopes a club would move there.76 The writer from the Chronicle suggested, not so subtly, that Houston, too, should have that sort of panache and ambition (and it would, in spades, when it began building the incredible Astrodome a few years later).
Alongside that Houstonian’s call for community bravado in the Chronicle was a photo that revealed what was, fundamentally, at the heart of the success of baseball in Milwaukee and the game’s economic failure in many old major league cities. It was an aerial photo showing what was arguably the park’s most distinctive feature: the massive parking lot. The lot’s expanse, while visually clear, was reiterated by the caption: “Home of the Braves—and Lots of Parking Room. Milwaukee’s County Stadium Surrounded by 11,000 Cars.”77 This was not the baseball park of most people’s imagination, shoehorned into an old neighborhood, like Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, New York’s Polo Grounds, Washington’s Griffith Stadium, St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park, or Boston’s Braves Field. Nor was it like Milwaukee’s old grounds, Borchert Field—a bizarre, rectangular ballpark squeezed into a residential neighborhood. Bill Veeck called Borchert an “architectural monstrosity”: the foul poles were just 266 feet from home plate, fans sitting along the first-base line couldn’t see the right fielder, those on the third-base side couldn’t see who was playing left, and no location in the stands provided a view of the entire field.78
County Stadium was a huge improvement over Borchert Field, but it was hardly cutting-edge; it was a simple, multitier ballpark architecturally notable only for its plainness and symmetry relative to some of the early twentieth-century urban baseball parks. Yet the stadium’s situation made it the envy of many owners—Brooklyn’s Walter O’Malley in particular. The challenge of parking was particularly acute for the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. In O’Malley’s mind, the Milwaukee parking lot created a competitive imbalance between the Braves and the rest of the league. He told a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post in 1960 that one of the reasons he would eventually leave Brooklyn for Los Angeles was that the Braves were drawing twice as many people to their games.79 O’Malley was unimpressed by County Stadium itself, thinking it little more than a newer Ebbets Field with its vision-obstructing support poles and steep stairs to the upper deck. O’Malley was, however, clearly impressed by Milwaukee’s commitment to the automobile and the advantages gained from easy access to freeways and abundant parking. This was the catalyst for the Braves’ explosive attendance figures, these automotive veins to the spreading suburbs and its middle-class populations that had more money than ever before and more time to spend it. Perini himself noted, “People here can afford to support baseball.”80
FIGURE 24. Milwaukee’s County Stadium, new home of the Braves—most noteworthy for the acres of parking. WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY, WHS-54731.
Milwaukee instantly became a symbol of future possibilities, both for owners who craved a new stadium without the heavy personal investment and for fans who feared their club’s owner might head for greener pastures. Perini, along with most baseball watchers, had a sense of what the Braves’ move west signified for baseball and sport more generally. He predicted, “Baseball in general will benefit. I feel that this is just the start of a realignment in baseball. California may well come into the majors within the next five years. There are going to be great changes.”81 Tim Cohane of Look added, “As pioneers in the redrawing of baseball’s major-league map, now definitely under way, the Braves will be remembered.”82 Though the stadium site itself was nothing much to speak of, the situation profoundly impacted the sports landscape in every large American city.83 In the coming years, major league cities reckoned with Milwaukee’s example, either by losing a team, gaining one, or building a stadium to keep the team there.
The St. Louis Browns had very nearly been Milwaukee’s new darling. Bill Veeck bought 80 percent of the club’s shares in 1951, “knowing perfectly well that the city could support only one team.” The Browns’ local rivals, the National League’s Cardinals, were certainly the more popular of the city’s two teams, drawing nearly 1.1 million to Sportsman’s Park in 1950, while the Browns couldn’t even muster a quarter of a million to the same ballpark. Over the previous twenty-five seasons, no team other than the Yankees had won as many pennants as the Cardinals. The ambitious and inventive Veeck was convinced, however, that Cardinals owner Fred Saigh didn’t know how to properly run a baseball club and that the Cardinals could be pushed out of town. Veeck’s plans were torpedoed when Saigh, imprisoned for tax evasion, sold the club to St. Louis–based Anheuser-Busch in 1953. The Cardinals, now flush with cash, weren’t going anywhere. Veeck’s Browns were doomed, and he tried to plot an escape to new pastures. Thwarted by Perini’s move to Milwaukee in 1953, Veeck looked to Baltimore, which had built the first level of a new stadium and was poised to top it off with a second deck. By the time the Browns moved to Baltimore for the 1954 season, however, Veeck had been squeezed out by American League owners. For them, Veeck was a headache, regularly besmirching their game with lowbrow promotional antics, and they forced him to sell his Browns shares to a group of Baltimore businessmen.84
Baltimore had once been a “big-league” city, if a major league baseball team was the measuring stick. The Orioles played there at the start of the century but relocated to Manhattan in 1903, where they became known as the New York Highlanders and, a decade later, the Yankees. At the end of World War II, Baltimore’s business and political leaders hoped to reclaim that status. As German forces surrendered in early May 1945, industrialist Charles P. McCormick, chairman of Baltimore’s mayor-appointed stadium committee, warned citizens: “Baltimore stands today at a civic crossroad.” The committee had been tasked with exploring and proposing stadium options for a city with major league ambitions. According to the stadium committee’s report to the mayor, the city had been “outrun by a number of younger cities in the race for national and international prominence.” Once “the hub of the world’s shipping,” the city had seen its “progress . . . gradually [slow] down.” The war had brought people together, reversing that trend. But “it is for the leaders of Baltimore and Maryland to see that the reversal is permanent.” Building a new stadium, the committee concluded, “should be only the first step in a broad general program—but it would serve . . . as would no other concrete action in announcing to the nation our concerted intentions for the future.”85
The stadium committee recommended the construction of a war memorial stadium seating up to 100,000 under an aluminum roof that stretched 900 feet across and 170 feet tall at the center, and covered 13 acres. The revolutionary roof—just one-eighth of an inch thick—would be “pumped up” from its resting position (about twenty feet above spectators’ heads) to a maximum height in ninety minutes. The roof would then slowly deflate over the course of a month, before requiring reinflation.86 Plans were for an integrated sports complex, equipped with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a gymnasium, bowling alleys, a roller rink, handball courts, a cafeteria, a small theater, a coffee shop, a travel office, gift and sports equipment shops, and even a pistol range. Though the stadium’s primary purpose would be to host baseball and football games, flexible seating arrangements would allow for non-sporting events as well, including town hall meetings, conventions, religious exercises, musical performances, circuses, and other entertainments. The stadium committee called for a site outside the city limits along two highways, with “ample” parking space to attract people from the suburbs. The stadium committee whetted the appetites of Baltimoreans by promising, “The youth who yelled his enthusiasm at a Saturday football game could easily be made to feel just as much at home applauding a symphony orchestra the following Wednesday evening. He couldn’t fail to take a more personal interest in a political convention if it were held in the same place where he watched the Orioles trim Jersey City.”87 Thus the stadium might function as a threshold, initiating young sports fans into the world of high culture and democratic values. Aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin, a member of the stadium committee, urged action: “Speed is essential, obviously. To the first city to begin such a project as we propose will go not only the advertising and publicity value, but the recognition accorded the pioneer in any field.”88 Much more than a building, the postwar stadium could be a material advertisement for a city’s spirit and intentions. According to the stadium committee, it would also have great financial value, attracting conventions and stimulating private investment in the tourism industry, particularly the construction of new hotels. But in Baltimore, as in most cases, the funding didn’t match the ambition. The estimated stadium cost of five million dollars soon grew to seven million. By August 1946, the mayor had pivoted to support reinvestment in the city’s horseshoe-shaped Municipal Stadium—a structure that would be reinvented as a traditional, open-air, double-decked stadium in the 1950s. By 1947, the roofed stadium project had effectively died. One war veteran, writing in to the Baltimore Sun, was relieved. “Half the enjoyment of a game is freezing to death in a windy stadium, cheering for the home team,” he wrote. “Perhaps we Americans are getting soft, after all.”89
The new Memorial Stadium emerged from the shell of old Municipal Stadium. Its egg-shaped first deck was built in 1949 and 1950. The minor league Orioles played through the reconstruction, as did football’s Colts—first as part of the All-America Football Conference, beginning in 1947, then as a member of the NFL in 1950. That team was dismal, winning just one game out of twelve, and its owner sold the franchise and its player contracts back to the league. Three years later, a new version of the Colts—assembled from the ashes of another failed NFL club, the Dallas Texans—began play in new Memorial Stadium. When the Colts’ season started in 1953, the new concrete stadium—a work in progress—had a capacity of just 23,715. But as the season progressed, construction workers added seats and a second deck, pushing stadium capacity to over 45,000 seats in 1954. Though the Colts wouldn’t enjoy a winning record until 1957, a vibrant stadium culture developed at Memorial Stadium in the 1950s, replete with a cheerleading corps, a band, majorettes, flag lines, and a pony mascot named Dixie that darted around the field after Colts’ scores. By the end of the decade, the team had won back-to-back championships, as the club grew with the league itself. The 1958 championship game, played against the Giants in Yankee Stadium in the first NFL game to be telecast to a national audience, is considered by many to be “the greatest game ever played” and pivotal to the NFL’s rise to national prominence. The Colts’ quarterback, Johnny Unitas, sporting a crew cut and high-topped black shoes, channeled working-class grit and up-by-the-bootstraps perseverance; the Colts had signed him from the sandlots of western Pennsylvania where he was making six dollars per game. Unitas exemplified the spirit of professional football in the 1950s—this wasn’t a game for college alums swelling with pageantry and school spirit but a game for skilled and tough professionals in an era of postwar prosperity that threatened to render Americans soft. When Unitas and the Colts played at Memorial Stadium it became, in the words of a writer for the Chicago Tribune, “the world’s largest insane asylum.”90
But in 1953, an NFL franchise didn’t grant a city major league status. Baseball would make Baltimore big league again, and American League owners were convinced that Baltimore was a better bet for major league ball than cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Montreal, and Toronto—thanks to the new stadium, the city’s vibrant baseball history, and an ownership consortium with $2,475,000 to buy out Bill Veeck’s controlling interest in the St. Louis Browns. The newly minted Orioles began play in Baltimore in 1954. A civic spectacle marked opening day. Joseph Sheehan—sent by the New York Times to cover Baltimore’s reintroduction to the majors—noted, “This normally sedate old city was prepared to pull out all the stops in celebration of the return of major league baseball to one of the diamond sport’s original hotbeds after an absence of fifty-two years.”91 Schools were closed and city workers were granted a half-day holiday, as 350,000 people lined the parade route that hailed Baltimore’s return to the big leagues. It was a “spectacle of Mardi Gras proportions,” Sheehan wrote, as twenty bands, thirty-two floats, and convertibles filled with baseball players and dignitaries rolled three and a half miles through streets to City Hall.92 Life magazine called it the city’s “biggest and most exuberant demonstration since Civil War days.”93 “The Orioles were almost overwhelmed by the frantic welcome they were given,” a reporter judged. “Pretty girls tossed 5,000 orchids into the streets as Baltimore’s answer to the red carpet Milwaukee laid out for its Braves last year. Everything had to be bigger and more lavish than the Milwaukee ‘miracle’ of 1953.”94 It wasn’t enough to simply be major league: Baltimore needed to be more major league than Milwaukee, whose residents had famously committed themselves to their new team the preceding season.
On the approach, Memorial Stadium appeared a modern monument—orderly and geometrical in a way that mirrored its large and symmetrical outfield within. Its perimeter was cloaked in smooth swaths of red brick wall broken here and there by windows and the slanting concrete of pedestrian ramps, stacked neatly atop one another. The second deck leaped out from the brick below, perched delicately on stretching concrete supports. Steel lighting standards patrolled the air above. At night, the stadium insides glowed through the spaces in the wall and against the bottom of the concrete bowl of the upper deck. Its public face was a 116-foot-tall memorial wall of brick and cast stone, boldly marking it as “MEMORIAL STADIUM” in a custom-designed Art Deco typeface that seemed more depression era than postwar. Upon the wall were the city seal and a long dedication to veterans of the world wars that concluded, “TIME WILL NOT DIM THE GLORY OF THEIR DEEDS.” But if the typeface expressed a previous era, the engineered austerity of the exposed concrete second deck suggested changes to come in American stadium design. In 1954, the stadium was largely seen as an improvement, but nothing revolutionary. Sportswriter Povich thought the city “came up with one of the better baseball parks,” for the six-million-dollar cost.95 For Sheehan of the New York Times, it was “a fine ball park and a worthy acquisition by the major leagues.”96
Memorial Stadium was, in a sense, between times. Even at its opening, its brand of modernism seemed already a bit out-of-date—one writer would later claim it “looked like the worst of stark Socialist Realism.”97 This sort of modernism didn’t exactly signify the future in 1953, and the city’s future didn’t look entirely bright. It was clear to Baltimore’s business and political leaders in the early 1950s that the glow of a war-era boom fueled by the concentration of heavy industry and military in the area was fading. Middle- and working-class whites were leaving the city for the suburbs of Baltimore County. With them went tax revenue, then companies in the service industry, and then manufacturing. Attracting a major league baseball team might stem the flow of money to the suburbs and catalyze the redevelopment of the center city. But then again, Baltimore wasn’t an ideal place to relocate a major league team. The market was geographically restricted, hemmed in by Philadelphia to the north and Washington to the south—and both of those cities would shed clubs westward in the coming years. Of course, it took a club-friendly deal to get the big leagues there—the city ran an annual deficit of over two hundred thousand dollars to keep the stadium running. Though Memorial Stadium wasn’t a perfect situation for the Orioles—not enough parking, too many bleachers, not enough backed chairs, too many obstructed-view seats—the club was happy with the setup. It had a new stadium in a white, middle-class area. In fact, the stadium location served as a recruitment tool for the club, whose agents would show off the neighborhoods around the stadium to potential signings, then take them to Washington’s Griffith Stadium, in the heart of the District’s black community, as a point of comparison.98 Black Baltimoreans were accustomed to such racism from the city’s baseball men. Many remembered how white Baltimoreans had abused Jackie Robinson when he played against the Orioles as a member of the Montreal Royals in 1946.99 Indeed, the new major league Orioles were happy to pretend that blacks didn’t exist, motivated by a mixture of prejudice, anxieties about losing racist white fans, and the possibility of racial conflict in the stadium or locker room.100 A stadium that aspired to modernity, but didn’t quite make it, seemed appropriate for such a club.
FIGURE 25. Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium during the 1958 All-Star Game. Residential neighborhoods framed the parking lot. COURTESY OF THE MARYLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ITEM ID #PP79.1314.
For the Philadelphia Athletics, the third major league club to change cities in consecutive years, ignoring African Americans wasn’t an option. The club relocated to Kansas City for the 1955 season, moving into an area that was 99 percent black.101 Like the Braves in Boston and the Browns in St. Louis, the Athletics had become the second club in a one-team city. And also like the Braves and many other clubs to follow, the A’s moved west. But unlike other clubs, Kansas City’s new team played in a stadium that was built in the black part of town. Chicago businessman Arnold Johnson bought the club from legendary owner-manager Connie Mack and his family. He then purchased Muehlebach Field, a minor league ballpark opened in 1923, that had been the home of the Kansas City Blues and the famed Negro League club, the Monarchs, employer of luminaries like Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and Ernie Banks. Kansas City bought the old park from Johnson, tore it down, and replaced it in just six months with Municipal Stadium, a double-decker stadium modeled after Detroit’s Briggs Stadium (a ballpark opened in 1912). Not only did the stadium seem to step out of the past but so too did its scoreboard in right-center field; it had been in Boston’s Braves Field two years before.102 Johnson’s Athletics leased the new ballpark from the city at a pittance, and the city guaranteed them one million spectators for each of the first three seasons.103 If the stadium and the setting seemed old, the deal making was not—a city aspiring to be “big league” in the 1950s paid for the privilege.
As the national sports landscape shifted, Walter O’Malley continued to explore options for a new stadium in Brooklyn. Norman Bel Geddes had given shape to what seemed a fantasy for many in New York’s sporting press, but increasingly O’Malley was squeezing him out of the picture and leaning on his trusted engineer, Emil Praeger. O’Malley told Geddes in January 1954 that it was “quite unlikely that there will be a chance for you to collaborate on any phase of the proposed new stadium.” Geddes continued to contact O’Malley, however, writing to him in September 1955 about the possibility of a wide-span roof and insisting that he would keep his plans under wraps in deference to their friendship. O’Malley responded, “Feel perfectly free to submit your idea to any other club. We are still far from doing anything definite. I know that Capt. Praeger has had ideas about a covered stadium and he, Buckminster Fuller and I have had several conferences.”104 Perhaps O’Malley trusted that Praeger could execute some form of Geddes’s vision (and at a lower cost); perhaps O’Malley had tired of Geddes’s self-promotional antics; perhaps O’Malley wanted input from another design visionary in his turn to Fuller. Without a site at which to build a new stadium, the Dodgers were certainly “far from doing anything definite.” By turning to Fuller, O’Malley signaled that a roof was an absolute requirement to any stadium he would build in Brooklyn; it also suggests that he thought the publicity accompanying his flirtations with name designers might mobilize political support for his project in Brooklyn. Fuller was, after all, the master of the dome, and everyone knew it.
In the 1950s, Buckminster Fuller was largely viewed as an eccentric tinkerer on the fringes of the establishment, a figure whose visions were seductive and revolutionary but not quite generally accepted and practiced; he was an engineer of futuristic solutions but not a legitimate architect. This “white-haired, crew-cut man of 60, built along the lines of a jar of yogurt,” as a writer for Sports Illustrated described, had “purged himself of all worldly ambitions save one: to remake the face of the earth.”105 Time magazine claimed in 1958, as Fuller’s status as an intellectual and designer became more secure and accepted, that he had “been the gadfly, delight and despair of the technological world” for years.106 In 1955, he would have been best known for his Dymaxion projects of the 1920s and 1930s, which attempted to maximize functionality from a minimal use of materials and energy, and the geodesic dome. In the early 1950s, the geodesic dome was a much-talked-about, but infrequently executed, building form—one that seemed poised to enjoy wide use but hadn’t yet. Aline B. Louchheim of the New York Times wrote, “Many serious and informed persons in the field of building and architecture agree with the inventor that such geodesic domes will some day be accepted as an important solution to housing” given their light weights, relatively low costs, functional flexibility, and mass-production capabilities.107 Fuller’s most prominent dome to that point topped the rotunda at the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan, which opened in 1953; ninety-three feet wide, it consisted of aluminum struts covered with a plastic skin.108 He also had dipped his toes in the water of stadium design, having consulted with an interested minor league club owner in Denver and planners in Minneapolis.109
O’Malley contacted Buckminster Fuller in late May 1955 regarding the design of a new domed stadium for Brooklyn, voicing his interest in a roofed stadium that would not only abolish the rain check but also open the structure up to other uses besides baseball. Though a roof might be constructed of concrete or other materials, O’Malley thought that it should be translucent, and had spoken with representatives from Owens-Corning Fiberglass Corporation. Previously alarmed by Geddes’s price tags, O’Malley required that Fuller’s dome be more affordable. And yet O’Malley pledged his intention of building the next generation of stadium, telling Fuller, “I am not interested in building just another baseball park.”110 Fuller, who seemed up for any project, set to designing a quarter-sphere domed stadium that was seven hundred fifty feet in diameter and tall enough to cover a thirty-story office building, as many publications noted. Fuller claimed the dome—an aluminum truss structure with plastic skin—would be the largest clear-span structure in the world.111 According to the Dodgers, New York enjoyed only sixty-five usable playing days a year for an outdoor stadium. Adding a roof would not only make weather irrelevant for baseball but also expand the stadium’s suitability for other events like conventions, prizefights, and the circus. This would add, according to O’Malley, two hundred thousand dollars to his bottom line annually. The stadium would have “natural air conditioning,” according to the New York Times, whereby “natural currents” of air would circulate under the dome. These currents could be controlled in winter to heat the structure as well. The plastic, translucent roof would diffuse sunlight, cutting down on glare and shadows. Besides diffusion of light, there would also “be diffusion of sound to prevent deafening cheers,” as a reporter for the Washington Post noted. Another welcome feature of the stadium, according to the New York Times, would be the absence of support posts, thus “making the discomfort of fans seated behind columns a thing of the past.” The Washington Post agreed: “Every fan knows what a pain those posts are.”112 Fuller claimed that the plastic skin would allow fans to get tans without being burned and eliminate troubling shadows from the playing surface. O’Malley particularly liked that the sky above would be visible, calling that feature “extremely important psychologically because baseball is traditionally an outdoor game.” It would be a landmark, O’Malley promised, “big enough to enclose St. Peter’s in Rome. . . . It would be one of the wonders of the world.”113
FIGURE 26. Walter O’Malley and Buckminster Fuller stand in front of a model for a domed Dodger Stadium. O’Malley’s hand rests on the shoulder of Theodore Kleinsasser, a Princeton architecture student whose design attracted the attention of the Dodger boss. BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES.
Fuller put some students at Princeton’s School of Architecture on the job that winter, when he was a visiting lecturer there. In January 1956, they presented their studies to a panel including Fuller, Emil Praeger, and O’Malley. O’Malley particularly liked some of the ideas of Theodore W. Kleinsasser, whose design called for a 55,000-seat structure with a plastic dome 550 feet in diameter and 250 feet tall at its highest point (compared to Fuller’s design that would be 750 feet in diameter, 300 feet tall). Located at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic, it would include seating for 2,000 in hanging box seats, a small tramway across the top for tours, and parking for 5,000 cars.114 The estimated cost of the stadium would be $6 million, with $1.5 million going toward the dome itself.115
Published images of the Fuller-designed stadiums accentuated their modernity. A November 1955 article in the New York Times included a photo of two men lifting the lid off a large stadium model designed by Fuller, four feet tall and five feet wide—an image that would also appear in other publications. The stadium was a simple white bowl, with five peaks around its rim, connecting to a translucent dome that resembled the top of an umbrella. It smooth, white minimalism stressed the design’s cool, clean modernity.116 The trade journal Progressive Architecture superimposed a sketch of Lever House, the iconic modern office tower, atop an architectural sketch of Fuller’s stadium. And thus a stadium—what many readers might have previously considered a mere feat of engineering—was elevated to the status of elite architecture.117
Another version of the Fuller dome was published in the July 1956 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. An illustrator for the magazine, inspired by Fuller’s plans, drew a circular stadium topped with a translucent white shell. It was a “huge plastic bubble” to replace “hallowed but decaying” Ebbets Field. Like the Collier’s illustration of Geddes’s plans, a portion of the stadium was removed to reveal the human activity inside—an underground parking lot, escalators, and an interior promenade lined with shops and restaurants. As with many modern stadium illustrations staged in the city, the structure’s curves contrasted notably with the boxy grids of old office buildings and street patterns depicted around it. Its sense of ordered symmetry expressed a brand of rationality at odds with the idiosyncratic ballparks in use in the 1950s. Clean, monumental, and spacious, it seemed a modern space capsule had landed in the city.118
And yet, this space pod never landed in Brooklyn. Only O’Malley knew how serious he was about ever constructing any of his roofed stadium projects; Kleinsasser, for one, didn’t think O’Malley was committed to the design he and Fuller produced at Princeton, speculating that it was a public relations ploy.119 This interpretation seems plausible and might also explain O’Malley’s repeated dalliances with Geddes, as he indeed had to muster public support for his stadium as a means to generate political backing. Space pods required landing spots, and any new Dodgers’ stadium downtown would occupy some very costly real estate—even in a period of urban decline.
O’Malley had been scouting the area in downtown Brooklyn near Borough Hall in 1947, but by the mid-1950s he coveted a site near the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush. His new stadium would displace the Fort Greene Meat Market and multiple small businesses, while also requiring the redevelopment of the existing Long Island Rail Road depot. The stadium would then sit adjacent a two-thousand-car parking garage (down from five thousand as proposed in 1952), two major subway lines, and a publicly redeveloped Long Island Rail Road station that would give Brooklynites who had moved to the Long Island suburbs easy access to arena events.120
O’Malley wanted to fund stadium construction privately so that he would control stadium revenues; however, he needed public support to acquire the site and make other infrastructural improvements around the new ballpark, which would have been prohibitively expensive. An engineer’s report for a stadium-centered redevelopment proposal from Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore estimated that it would cost the city upwards of twelve million dollars for this, while removing about five million dollars per year in tax revenue from the loss of the existing taxpaying properties.121 O’Malley asked that the city employ Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949 to acquire the land; this would enable the city to use federal funds to secure the site and turn it over to a private developer who would construct something there for a public purpose. Unfortunately for O’Malley, Robert Moses was the chairman of the city’s Committee on Slum Clearance. Moses told O’Malley in 1955, “A new ball field for the Dodgers cannot be dressed up as a Title I project.”122
In truth, Moses used Title I funds liberally in postwar New York and could have certainly helped the Dodgers had he wanted to; he simply had no interest in supporting a stadium project in downtown Brooklyn. For one, Moses believed in the automobile, not public transportation. He built freeways and bridges, and his power emanated from the dollars that flowed through his tollbooths—much of which came from the swelling stream of cars from the Long Island suburbs. While O’Malley wanted his customers to have easier access to his new stadium by car, his plans also called for arrival by subway and commuter rail, and Moses had no interest whatsoever in improving the Long Island Rail Road terminal that would sit beneath the new stadium. This would be aiding the competition to his new freeways.123 But Moses also had another plan for sport in the metropolis—a new modern stadium to be built in Queens’s Flushing Meadows, where he had converted swampland into a home for the 1939 World’s Fair and Geddes’s Futurama. While Moses actively stymied O’Malley’s overtures, he wasn’t the only political hurdle the Dodgers needed to clear. Though Mayor Robert Wagner publicly supported helping keep the club in New York, his political support was lukewarm at best. Furthermore, politicians from the other boroughs had no interest in financing Brooklyn’s team.124 Public support for a stadium might be widespread in a minor league town like Milwaukee or Baltimore, but New York had two other major league clubs to go along with all the rest the city could offer those looking to spend their leisure dollars.125 Moses wasn’t the only one to scoff at O’Malley’s plans. Arthur Daley, of the New York Times, called his domed stadiums “fanciful” and suggested that O’Malley knew as much, writing, “The Dodger president is realist enough, however, to know that Utopia Stadium was a mote too frothy for anyone but a Space Cadet to consider.”126
One of those space cadets was Hulan Jack, borough president of Manhattan, who pitched an enormous new stadium complex to rescue the Dodgers’ great rivals, the Giants, from the aging Polo Grounds. He first mentioned the possibility of a new, privately financed “stadium in the sky” in a radio interview in March 1956.127 The 110,000-seat domed stadium would sit atop stilts sixty feet above the New York Central railroad tracks, bordered by 60th and 72nd streets, West End Avenue, and the West Side Highway.128 By April, a thirty-five-man committee of bankers, government workers, sports businessmen, and engineers were reportedly sketching out a two-million-square-foot project that might help the city compete for the 1964 Olympic games and stage major college football contests (including a “Sky Bowl” to rival the Rose, Orange, and Sugar bowls). The dome would be similar to those envisioned for downtown Brooklyn and the Dodgers, though the complex—which would come to be known as “Stadium City Center”—would also be expanded to include a new thirty-five-story-tall office building housing a “Television City” production center and studio for networks. Project add-ons included a heliport, a subway station, a theater, a Skyline restaurant overlooking the Hudson River, and a massive 20,000-car parking garage equipped with escalators for patrons (box holders would enjoy parking spaces directly adjacent to their seats).129 Arthur Daley noted in May that it was “almost too grandiose a scheme”—indeed, plans quickly unraveled after that.130 Though Mayor Wagner would meet with project architects and Horace Stoneham, owner of major league baseball’s Giants, by late May he had backed off the Manhattan plan, which by then was being estimated to cost seventy-five million dollars.131 Days later, a writer for the New York World-Telegram-Sun claimed that the stadium was “not likely to become a reality . . . a fatal victim of its own enormous proportions.”132
New York had three major league teams in 1957; in 1958, only the Yankees remained. Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson began his courtship of the Dodgers at the 1956 World Series, a few months after Fuller’s Brooklyn dome was published in Mechanix. Poulson and other powerful Angelenos hoped to secure big-league status for what was, at the end of World War II, the nation’s second largest population center and third largest center for manufacturing. The war economy had fueled this growth, with $70 billion of federal money spent regionally on shipyards, aircraft plants, and other war-related research and development between 1941 and 1945.133 This spending was joined to federal subsidies for the construction of highways and suburban homes.134 Atop this foundation, the area population exploded. Los Angeles County alone grew from 2,785,643 (1940) to 4,151,687 (1950) and 6,038,771 (1960)—more than doubling over two decades. Orange County, directly to the south, more than tripled in population during the 1950s alone, growing from 216,224 residents to 703,925.135
Los Angeles civic leaders were particularly anxious about the city’s downtown. Poulson told Angelenos in 1955, “We’ve got to support and strengthen the downtown area. It’s my notion that no city can be a great city without a strong downtown core.”136 Strengthening the downtown core meant more than just building modern corporate office towers; influential residents believed it essential that institutions like museums and opera houses culturally anchor that downtown core. The Los Angeles Times, one of the most prominent boosters for downtown growth, editorialized that a modern and vibrant downtown would answer “the critics of Los Angeles” who insinuate “that we have no culture, that nothing really important ever happens here, that there is no metropolitan ‘feeling’ to the town, that we are a mere collection of suburbs in search of a city.”137 In downtown Los Angeles, that would mean using the powers of eminent domain and Title I funds to bulldoze Bunker Hill—a racially diverse working-class community—replacing it with modernist office towers, luxury apartment buildings, and finally a new Music Center that would open in 1964. If Bunker Hill would be the new home for high culture, a new modern stadium located near the city center might be a magnet for more middlebrow tastes. Chavez Ravine, it seemed to many, would be an ideal central location—at the crux of regional freeways—to further manufacture a sense of city spirit and cohesion.138 After his initial meeting with Poulson in autumn 1956, O’Malley sent an engineer to investigate Chavez Ravine as a possible site for a new stadium.
Chavez Ravine was a hilly area, five minutes north of downtown by car. Just a half decade before, it had been home to the Mexican American neighborhoods of Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde—a place with a vital street life and a strong sense of community. The houses and shops were, however, considered “substandard” by outsiders. Given its already working-class makeup, relatively low population density, and valuable location near central Los Angeles, Chavez Ravine was targeted as an ideal site for new public housing under the terms of the National Housing Act of 1949. Plans called for a massive complex to house 3,360 families—over three times the number that then lived in the area—in 24 thirteen-story towers and 163 two-story structures. By the end of 1951, most of the families that had lived there had been relocated elsewhere and their homes destroyed. However, plans for new housing had run up against a well-organized antihousing campaign—from a group including the California real estate lobby, the Home Builders Association, and the chamber of commerce, allied with the powerful mouthpiece of the Los Angeles Times—charging that such projects were “creeping socialism” or even communistic, and most certainly an affront to American values.139
After a year of court battles, city council scraps, and investigations of the California Housing Authority by anti-communist state senators, plans for public housing at Chavez Ravine were undone. Congressman Poulson—with the full backing of the Los Angeles Times—defeated the four-term, pro-housing mayor, Fletcher Bowron, in 1953. Poulson negotiated a series of compromises that allowed those projects already under construction to move forward in exchange for canceling plans at Rose Hill and Chavez Ravine—the two largest projects that would have accounted for more than half of the total planned units. The federal government, owners of the land, sold the parcels back to the city under the condition that it be used for public projects. The city bought Chavez Ravine for $1.28 million, $4 million less than the federal government had paid for it. Residents of Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde who had resisted removal were temporarily spared their homes, as members of the Los Angeles elite tried to figure out an appropriate “public purpose” for Chavez Ravine that didn’t reek of communism.
All-American baseball certainly didn’t smell like communism, and for the city’s powerful, a new big-league stadium was very much a “public purpose.” Poulson appointed a “Blue Ribbon Commission” in November 1956 that was tasked with examining the city’s park and recreation needs. The commission, unsurprisingly, recommended a new modern stadium be built in Chavez Ravine. To start the project, it also recommended a two-million-dollar item in the 1957 budget for land preparation of the site. In February, O’Malley exchanged his Fort Worth minor league franchise for the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels and their ballpark, Wrigley Field, located on a nine-acre lot about a mile south of downtown. This gave the Dodgers the major league rights to the territory, facilitating a possible move. The courtship continued at Dodgertown, the club’s spring training facility in Florida, where a city delegation led by Poulson hoped to strengthen the budding relationship. O’Malley afterward visited Los Angeles, ostensibly to review his new minor league club, but he also brought along an engineer to again examine Chavez Ravine; after this visit, he was certain that this location would be the best for the Dodgers, given its access to three freeways nearby. At that time, Los Angeles was prepared to offer the Dodgers 185 acres in Chavez Ravine and the two million dollars for land preparation—money that was technically to be used, according to the 1957 budget, for building access roads to a new zoo and art gallery. And yet, on a map prepared for a May 11 city council meeting, a stadium had replaced the gallery.140
Later that month, National League owners cleared the Dodgers and Giants to move to California. The clubs were, according to Joseph Sheehan of the New York Times, “backed against the wall” because of declining attendance, “a result of obsolete facilities and metropolitan New York’s saturation with televised baseball.” It wasn’t, however, a done deal: O’Malley was reportedly still hoping for a downtown Brooklyn stadium and Los Angeles had not yet delivered legislation meeting the Dodgers’ terms there. Neither had San Francisco, and a new municipal stadium there was essential to convincing Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move.141 While O’Malley and Stoneham were publicly noncommittal, talk in the sports pages was loud enough to prompt an investigation of antitrust laws by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Emmanuel Celler of Brooklyn—a probe that resulted in public declarations and political grandstanding but no action.
More threatening to O’Malley’s plans for Chavez Ravine than the congressional hearing was the increasing awareness among Los Angeles officials that the restrictive clause in the land deed, which required its use for public purpose, might be a legal obstacle to turning over the site to the Dodgers. The mayor pushed forward. The city negotiated a contract with O’Malley that would give the Dodgers 315 acres in Chavez Ravine in exchange for the minor league ballpark, Wrigley Field, and its nine-acre plot. The city would kick in $4.74 million in land preparation, and O’Malley would build a youth recreation center on forty acres adjacent the new stadium; this was added to satisfy the “public purpose” stipulations of the deed (though, in the end, the public recreation center was never built).142 O’Malley announced the Dodgers’ relocation from Brooklyn to Los Angeles on October 8, and the Los Angeles city council approved the contract on October 9.
The Dodgers were on their way, but the Battle of Chavez Ravine had a few skirmishes in it yet. Opponents of the contract—objecting to the donation of public land to a private enterprise—collected signatures to trigger a referendum, Proposition B, for the following June. A massive campaign to vote “yes on B,” which would approve the contract, was highlighted by a televised “Dodgerthon,” featuring star power like Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, George Burns, Groucho Marx, Debbie Reynolds, and Ronald Reagan. The measure passed narrowly, but the opposition took its cause to Los Angeles County Superior Court in July. There the voters were overturned, as the judge ruled that land purchased with public monies and specifically deeded for public purpose couldn’t be transferred to a private business. The California Supreme Court unanimously overturned this decision in January 1959. After this decision was appealed, the United States Supreme Court validated the city’s contract with the Dodgers in October 1959.143 By then, the Dodgers had already played their second season in Los Angeles, drawing over two million fans to their temporary home at the Coliseum, an athletics and football oval that had been awkwardly rigged to host baseball.144 With the Supreme Court decision, Walter O’Malley could finally start building his new stadium. Poulson celebrated victory by asserting, “Progress must not be stopped in Los Angeles.”145 The Los Angeles Times, once so adamantly against public development, deemed the stadium “one of those mixed public and private enterprises which end happily if they are properly planned. . . . Although it would never be designated as such by the bureaucrats the Chavez Ravine stadium is an excellent example of urban renewal and development.” Councilman Edward Roybal disagreed, arguing, “It is not morally or legally right for a government agency to condemn private land, take it away from the property owner through Eminent Domain proceedings, then turn around and give it to a private person or corporation for private gain.”146
FIGURE 27. Walter O’Malley discusses plans for a new stadium at a Los Angeles press conference in June 1958. AP PHOTO.
FIGURE 28. New Dodgers fans watch the team in the third game of the 1959 World Series. The playing field was shoehorned into the Los Angeles Coliseum from 1958 to 1961, as Dodger Stadium was planned, adjudicated, and constructed. An enormous mesh fence bracketed off left field in order to cut down on cheap home runs. AP PHOTO.
San Francisco’s power brokers also had big-league aspirations, and the realization of those ambitions was indelibly intertwined with those of their rivals to the south. In 1953, a coalition led by Mayor Elmer Robinson and city businessmen began pitching citizens on the need to draw a major league baseball team there, believing it would benefit the city economically and culturally. As was so often the case, local newspapers championed a cause that would also make them “big league”: sportswriter Curley Grieve was a major advocate for the plan, writing regularly about the city’s need for a major league team in his column for the San Francisco Examiner. At Robinson’s request, the Board of Supervisors approved a $5 million bond proposition for a new stadium. City supervisor Francis McCarty argued that if Los Angeles was going to build a stadium to attract a major league baseball team, San Franciscans “must keep pace. We don’t want that city to get the jump on us.” Voters seemed to agree, approving a $5 million stadium bond in November 1954, provided the city bring a major league team to San Francisco within five years.147
The pursuit of a major league club gained traction in 1957, when Mayor George Christopher visited New York to pitch Horace Stoneham on relocating to the West Coast. Stoneham’s Giants played at the Polo Grounds, a stadium that was “unconventional, illogical, absurd, and a lovely place to watch a ball game,” according to a writer for the New York Times.148 It was certainly distinctive, for better or worse, with its peculiar pinched horseshoe shape and memorable location, wedged between the Harlem River to the east, an escarpment known as Coogan’s Bluff to the west, and 155th Street to the south. Like most major league clubs, the Giants had enjoyed an attendance boom in the immediate postwar years followed by a 1950s decline; attendance peaked at just over 1.6 million in 1947, but by 1952 it had dropped below one million.149 The decline—as in Brooklyn—was attributed to a combination of the suburbanization of many of the club’s fans, shortages of parking around the stadium, the relative convenience of watching games on television, the physical deterioration of the ballpark, and suburban perceptions of the area around it. The Polo Grounds, built in 1911, adjoined the neighborhoods of Harlem and Washington Heights. Harlem had, of course, been famous for decades as a center of African American cultural, economic, and political life. But like Central Brooklyn, it suffered from the economic and social effects of racial segregation. Washington Heights hovered above the Polo Grounds atop the bluff, a distinctive physical and psychological boundary. As had happened in central Brooklyn, many white ethnics—particularly Irish and Jews—left Washington Heights in the 1950s, often replaced by new African American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban residents.150
Talk of a Giants departure began to circulate in the early 1950s. In a September 1953 article in Sport magazine, Jack Orr noted rumors that the Giants would leave the Polo Grounds, after their 1962 lease was up, to become tenants across the Harlem River at Yankee Stadium. Robert Moses, the gatekeeper for the city’s Title I funds, suggested that the Giants abandon the Polo Grounds before then so that the stadium could be torn down and replaced with public housing.151 The Yankees seemed unlikely, however, to assist their National League rival with an affordable lease. The Giants remained profitable in the 1950s, but tenuously so. The club relied on radio and television; in a market like New York, television both gave and took away, driving down stadium attendance but compensating in rights payments. Stoneham rented out the park for events like football games, boxing matches, and religious revivals. The eleven home games with the archrival Dodgers each season were also crucial to the Giants’ bottom line.152 That bottom line, though, took a major hit when the NFL’s Giants moved to Yankee Stadium after the 1955 season, following thirty years at the Polo Grounds. They had worried about the future of the Polo Grounds given the rumors about the baseball team’s possible departure; they were also attracted by the larger seating capacity, better parking facilities, and better transit service at the stadium just across the Harlem River in the Bronx. The departure of the football Giants cost Stoneham’s baseball business approximately seventy-five thousand dollars per season in rental and concessions revenue.153 It was clear to most that the Polo Grounds was nearing its end and that the Giants—known as the Gothams at their inception in 1883—might not be in New York much longer, particularly once the Dodgers began contemplating a move to Los Angeles.
FIGURE 29. A view from the Polo Grounds grandstand in the late 1930s, obstructed by second-deck support posts, illustrates the sense of compact intimacy—and absurdity—of watching sport there. WPA FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT, NEW YORK CITY MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES. COURTESY NYC MUNICIPAL ARCHIVES.
FIGURE 30. The Polo Grounds were squeezed by Coogan’s Bluff to the west, the Harlem River to the east, and a new housing development to the north. Directly south of the parking lot was 155th Street, the northern edge of Harlem. This aerial view is from April 1963. AP PHOTO.
FIGURE 31. A 1955 land map suggests the shifting modes of urban space—from the dense cityscape of Washington Heights atop Coogan’s Bluff to the west of the Polo Grounds, to the new, modern, space-positive Colonial Park Houses to the north. LIONEL PINCUS AND PRINCESS FIRYAL MAP DIVISION, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY. "PLATE 165, PART OF SECTION 8," NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTIONS.
Though the future of the Giants in Harlem seemed uncertain, even unlikely, Stoneham reportedly scoffed at San Francisco’s initial $5 million proposal, saying “any figure other than 10 or 11 million dollars shouldn’t even be discussed.” Mayor Christopher returned to San Francisco, needing to convince his stadium allies to up the city’s ante. Publicly, Christopher claimed that a major league team would “give San Francisco a dateline in almost every daily newspaper in the country” and economically benefit the city. But privately, stadium advocates worried that another proposition doubling the bond issue might not get past the voters, and so Christopher and his partners created a nonprofit corporation called Stadium, Inc.154 This instrument allowed stadium advocates to issue city-backed bonds without a vote. It also shrouded stadium dealings in secrecy, as the corporation could evade the city charter and assign contracts without competitive bidding and open books. Stadium, Inc., floated an additional $5.5 million bond issue, dodging the vote required of the first bond. On the first board of directors for Stadium, Inc., was area contractor and multimillionaire Charles Harney—who would play a key and controversial role in the stadium’s construction—along with two of his employees.155
FIGURE 32. The Giants, led by Bobby Thompson, race toward the center-field clubhouse at the end of the club’s final home game at the Polo Grounds in September 1957, outpacing pursuing fans. Apartment buildings of Washington Heights, perched atop Coogan’s Bluff, are visible in the background. BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES.
As Stoneham considered his options in New York, San Franciscans debated potential stadium sites over the summer of 1957. Candlestick Point, on the southern edge of the city, became the favorite spot of Christopher. It offered the open acreage that might fit a 50,000-seat stadium and 10,000-car parking lot. A reporter called it a “breezy track of wild grass, red rocks, chaparral and torn trees . . . all strewn with whiskey bottles and beer cans.” That “breeziness” concerned some, but Christopher dismissed these complaints. After engineers tested it one morning, the mayor reported that the wind never exceeded fourteen miles per hour, not “enough to blow a peanut sack from first to second.” The city had owned the targeted forty-one-acre plot just four years earlier but had sold it to Charles Harney for $2,100 per acre. In 1957, Harney sold it back to the city for $65,853 per acre—over thirty times the original price. At the time of the sale, the city bought land adjacent Harney’s plot for just $6,540 per acre. Harney was paid $2.7 million for the land; he was also given a construction contract for $2 million and another $2 million for grading and filling—all in a privately negotiated deal with Stadium, Inc.156
The Giants’ move seemed increasingly inevitable, though it wasn’t quite official. In an article titled “San Francisco or Bust,” John Drebinger of the New York Times claimed that the Giants were as good as gone. He pointed out that the drop in attendance didn’t correlate to a decline in quality on the field, as the 1951 and 1954 versions of the club were pennant winners. He figured, “When, in the thick of a sizzling pennant race, the top contenders pass in review and draw 3,000 in the afternoon and 9,000 at night, brother, you’ve had it. . . . The Polo Grounds is dead.”157 On August 19, 1957, Stoneham’s board of directors voted 8–1 to move to San Francisco.158
There were 11,606 at the Giants’ last game at the Polo Grounds, a 9–1 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates on September 30. As the final out was being recorded, many fans were already pouring over the walls and onto the playing field. The players, expecting this, began running across the field toward the center-field clubhouse. The fans chased them there, a “mass pursuit . . . touched off by affection, excitement, nostalgia, curiosity and annoyance at the fact the team next year will represent San Francisco,” according to New York Times reporter Milton Bracker. Most of the players and coaches made it safely to their clubhouse; Bracker observed, “The players having eluded them, the fans went to work on the field.”159
Over the next thirty minutes, many of the crowd unharnessed a fit of destruction. They tore out the regular and warm-up home plates, the wooden base beneath the main plate, two other bases, and the foam rubber protection for outfielders on the center-field fences. They broke the bullpen sun-shelter. They stole signs and telephones. Some even ripped a memorial plaque off the center-field wall. Others looking for a souvenir turned to the field itself, pulling up scalps of turf and handfuls of infield dirt. Four boys took the pitcher’s rubber onto the subway. Home plate was dragged away by a small woman who claimed to be a teacher from Queens. She embodied the pervasive sense of abandon, as people seemed to momentarily lose their minds in a baseball riot.160
Onlookers were variously somber, bitter, and angry at the Giants’ departure. One reporter interviewed an ensemble of horn players blowing the “Giant Victory March,” which had historically been played at special events and after wins. The interviewees—a barber from the Bronx, a steamfitter from Brooklyn, a cab driver from Manhattan, and a seventy-four-year-old housewife from Staten Island—weren’t pleased. One suggested that they should have played a funeral march. Another said, “I came here to attend a wake.”161 As some silently mourned and some pillaged, others congregated outside the center-field clubhouse. They called for their idol, Willie Mays, hoping that he would emerge on the steps as so many Giants had over the years, to receive the fans. He didn’t. They called for the head of Giants owner Stoneham, chanting, “We want Stoneham! We want Stoneham! We want Stoneham—with a rope around his neck!”162
Perhaps the spirit of the day, the mixture of nostalgia, of anger, of attachment, of resentment that seemed to overwhelm the fans, was best captured in one of the group’s final songs as the stadium darkened. To the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell,” they sang:
We hate to see you go,
We hate to see you go,
We hope to hell you never come back—
We hate to see you go.163
Though the Giants were on their way, stadium construction in California had still not begun by February 1958. Harney announced in July 1958 that the stadium would not be ready for next season’s opening day. The following month, a grand jury began investigating the financial dealings, focusing particularly on Harney’s land deals with the city. The stadium foundation was finally poured at the end of October 1958—an event met with protests by area residents. At year’s end, the grand jury submitted its report, which found that the price paid to Harney for the land at Candlestick Point was “exorbitant”—between $650,000 and $1 million too much—and that Mayor Christopher had acted “hastily” to draw Harney into the project. The report stated that voters had been misled; San Franciscans had approved a $5 million stadium construction bond in 1954 but now faced costs of over $15 million.164
The grand jury report made waves, but the stadium project limped forward—thanks in part to favorable coverage from the major local papers.165 Even so, the ballpark wasn’t ready for 1959, and by the end of the season, costs had reached $17 million. Harney’s construction company remained in charge of the project, though Harney was reportedly miffed when San Franciscans voted in March to name the stadium Candlestick Park and not Harney Stadium. While some speculated that a resentful Harney then dragged his feet on construction, it is also true that this was the first stadium he had ever built—just as it was the first stadium that architect John Bolles had ever designed.166 They built a stadium that was visually striking, auguring a new age of engineered stadium, but also tragically flawed.
As the Giants waited for their new stadium in San Francisco, they made do with pleasant Seals Stadium, where the Pacific Coast League’s San Francisco Seals had played for a quarter century.167 The Art Deco park, opened in 1931, had a single-decked, roofless grandstand that looked out across the recently constructed James Lick Freeway toward Potrero Hill, crawling with homes and apartments in the distance. A Hamm’s brewery towered behind the grandstand; a three-dimensional, thirteen-foot-tall goblet of beer sat atop its roof. While charming, Seals Stadium was a minor league park designed for a different era. It had been expanded twice over the years and yet still only held 22,900 at its peak. A second deck couldn’t be added, as the existing structure could not support the weight. Even without expanded capacity, there wasn’t enough space adjacent the ballpark to install the parking lots that George Christopher had promised Horace Stoneham. Furthermore, the area around the park was becoming increasingly Latino and working class. Sixteenth Street, just over the right-field wall, reflected these changes; by the late 1940s, it featured Latin restaurants, bakeries, and other specialty shops. As more people moved in, housing was subdivided and deteriorated; it soon had a reputation as a poor neighborhood.168 Densely textured, working class, and non-white—this was the sort of area most ball clubs would try to escape in the coming years.
Candlestick Park was finally completed, after two years of delay, in April 1960. Sports Illustrated’s Robert Boyle wrote that the occasion stamped the city as “major league once and for all.” Seals Stadium, he allowed, “was a charming little park, but in San Francisco, where appearances count for a lot, it was a reminder of the times when the town was minor league.” San Francisco Chronicle columnist Charles McCabe concurred, writing that the games at Seals Stadium “always looked rather as if a major league team was playing in the high school field . . . for some terribly worthy cause.” Candlestick Park, by the looks of it, was no high school park.169 “With its soaring wind baffle, immense but seemingly fragile,” a writer for the city’s News-Call Bulletin suggested, “the stadium was like some great conch shell, settled on the shores of the Candlestick Cove.”170 Candlestick Park’s signature feature was the baffle, sitting atop the main grandstand—a concrete piecrust around the stadium rim. The upper deck rested on a series of inverted V-shaped concrete columns that loomed over fans making their way into the ballpark. Part boomerang, part swept wing, part tail fin, these iconic supports almost seemed in motion—an understated cousin to Southern California’s Googie modernism of the roadside strip.171 Inside, the doubledeck grandstand curved, cool and collected, around a lightbulb-shaped playing field with symmetrical outfield distances—from 335 feet at the foul poles to 420 in dead center. As in New York, the Giants’ home sat between hill and water. At the stadium’s back was Morvey’s Hill, peeking over its left shoulder; beyond the outfield was San Francisco Bay. Whereas Seals Stadium fit snugly into the diverse cityscape of North Mission, Candlestick Park sat solitary in a 9,000-car parking lot—an engineered sculpture fully on display. Upon its opening, J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News, celebrated the park as “simply wonderful, marvelous, unbelievable,” adding, “Baseball has never known anything like it.”172 Horace Stoneham boasted, “The new stadium is a beautiful structure—I like to think it is the finest sports arena anywhere . . . all San Franciscans have reason to be very proud of it as one more expression of civic enterprise and progress.”173
FIGURE 33. Seals Stadium in 1957, months before the Giants committed to San Francisco. AP PHOTO.
Visually striking and a symbol of civic progress, it was also designed to improve the comfort of the stadium experience. Red Smith noted, “Every seat commands an unimpeded view. The seats are broad, of comforting contour design, with ample leg room. The wide aisles should eliminate congestion.”174 A writer for Baseball Digest assured readers that the modern fan would be “considerably more comfortable than his grandfather, or even his father, was.” The Candlestick seats represented “the peak of the engineer’s art,” with their “form-fitting curves” and “all-weather finish” that guaranteed “a splinterless existence” for visitors.175 One of his colleagues called the park a “fat man’s paradise” because the seats were two inches wider than those in any other stadium.176 Not only were the seats wide, but many were supposed to be heated as well. As the park was being constructed, reporters were particularly interested in the installation of heating pipes throughout the concrete terraces—thirty-five-thousand-feet worth that channeled hot water beneath fans to battle the nighttime chill of the bay.177
Creature comforts were amplified in some of the stadium’s more exclusive spaces. John Drebinger of the New York Times remarked on the “sumptuous club offices” and “plush stadium club, patterned after the one in the Yankees’ abode but with far more polish.”178 The Stadium Club housed a restaurant and bar where dues-paying members could eat dishes like brook trout “fresh from Springfield Rocky Mountain Waters” for $4 or filet mignon “selected for tenderness” at $5.95.179 A writer for the Los Angeles Times ran readers through the catalogue of stadium features: the heated floors, the seats with backs and armrests, the deluxe loge boxes, the members-only Stadium Club with a bar and restaurant, the twenty-two bathrooms, and—significantly—“Oh, yes, and usherettes yet!”180 The all-female usher staff caught the eye of visiting reporters and players alike; Yankee icon Mickey Mantle called Candlestick “a beautiful park,” adding, “The ushers are also very nice.”181
At first glance, Candlestick Park seemed a portrait of modernist functionality—an orderly and sculptural home for sport, near the city but not fully in it, with its spacious parking lots liberated from urban gridlock and updated amenities catering to an affluent postwar society. In practice, however, the stadium was a notorious failure. Robert Lipsyte of the New York Times told New Yorkers, “There is no joy . . . in Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It is a masculine stadium of strong, bleak lines, a fortress on a hill silhouetted against a sky that can suddenly turn as dark as turtle soup. The wind whips in from everywhere carrying portents of tragedy: It is here that Oedipus could tear out his eyes; here that a little fearful governess could knock on a door thrown open by a mad and violent Rochester.”182 A stadium full of enchanting female ushers couldn’t soften the stadium’s “masculine” concrete austerity—what one architectural critic has called its “muscular, tense energy.”183 Nor could they outcharm the weather that regularly turned Candlestick into a scene of sporting madness. The New Yorker’s Roger Angell, an aficionado of the old, boxy ballparks, thought that Candlestick looked “like an outbuilding of Alcatraz” with its “raw concrete ramps and walkways and its high, curving grandstand barrier.”184 No doubt many visitors—and the Giants themselves—would come to feel like prisoners there.185
FIGURE 34. The cool, engineered modernism of Candlestick Park is accented by precast concrete supports that boomerang around the stadium’s iconic “wind baffle.” SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY.
Candlestick Park was a powerful argument for the type of roofed stadium many had been imagining over the previous decade. Its cold and windy setting became its defining characteristic, outrageous even for San Francisco, where fans were used to sitting through winds and evening chills at Seals Stadium. Candlestick quickly became known as the “cave of winds.” Sportswriters from sunny Los Angeles particularly enjoyed mocking the grounds of the Dodgers’ relocated rivals to the north. Al Wolf referred to it as “cyclonic Candlestick Park . . . where the icy winds blow.” Visitors, according to Art Rosenbaum, were forced to “dress for an Alaskan costume party.” Frank Finch joked, “It’s been written before but we’ll write it again: Compared to Candlestick Park, the late Admiral Byrd could have disported in his undies with impunity at Little America.” Giants pitcher Stu Miller, who would be blown off the mound by wind gusts during the 1961 World Series, complained, “You just don’t like to say this is a lousy ball park, but it is.” His teammate Ed Bressoud agreed: “This is a joke. This is the worst ball park I ever played in, and I’m not alone in my sentiments. Ask the other guys.”186 Giants’ fans, at least according to Roy Terrell, had it better than the players; “the weather does not faze the natives,” he wrote in Sports Illustrated, “who simply wrap up in parkas and blankets and Martinis and sit there as if shivering were fun.”187
Architect John Bolles was often blamed for the stadium’s inability to cope with the wind and cold, though perhaps unfairly. He was familiar with the location: he was in fact born not far from there and had designed a number of structures nearby during World War II. His preliminary designs for the stadium had called for a roof covering both decks and wrapping almost fully around the playing field to protect it from powerful and swirling afternoon winds. Cost concerns forced a redesign and reduction of the wind baffle. Bolles also wanted to landscape Morvey’s Hill with eucalyptus and pine trees to use as windbreaks. But these plans were also scotched.188 The Giants hadn’t realized the problems the wind would cause until the stadium was well under construction. Chub Feeney, Giants vice president and nephew of Horace Stoneham, typically visited the architect at the site in the morning. Then, one day, he visited in the afternoon and could barely stand up to the winds. When he asked a worker if it was always like that, the worker replied, “No sir. It only blows like this between the hours of one and five.” Feeney, knowing that this was when the Giants typically played their games, realized he was stuck with what Arthur Daley of the New York Times called “a $15,000,000 lemon.” Daley mused, “Candlestick Park will be with us for a long time to come unless—happy thought—the wind blows it into the bay. It’s the one hope for saving real baseball for San Francisco.”189
Arctic conditions weren’t the only problem fans and players faced, and once again the siting of the stadium was blameworthy. Moving out of North Mission would have, presumably, made a stadium more automobile friendly. In this case, it made it worse. One Giant official admitted, “We don’t anticipate any three or four hour trips to the ballpark, but we know it’s going to be rugged.”190 Motorists could arrive via the Bayshore Freeway—a major thruway for city commuters—or take busy Third Street. Narrow access streets clotted up as cars tried to enter the expansive parking lot. The bus service to the stadium—there were two regular and three express routes—might save one from driving but not the traffic. Only the well-popularized pier that received water traffic would allow patrons to avoid the cramped automobile arteries.191
Once inside, blanketed, and properly martini’d, fans had to battle other obstacles.192 One headline announced, “Giants’ Park Not ‘Intimate’”; the reporter noted the need for binoculars.193 Some referred to the stadium as “Candlestink Park”; a nearby lagoon received raw sewage and waste dumping.194 Those sitting below the upper deck had to watch for dripping water, as the pipes from the seat-heating system leaked. Business manager Jerry Donovan said of the celebrated heating system, “I’d have to call it a total loss.”195 During the planning phases, John Bolles had referred to the ballpark as “an old man’s stadium” because there would be no long flights of stairs, just a simple ten-foot ramp to the upper level from the parking lot. In practice, some thought the stadium was actually killing its customers. Just six weeks after the stadium opened, the long walk from the parking lot had been blamed for six fatal heart attacks. The police department announced plans to build a new parking facility just fifty feet from the stadium entrance for patrons with heart problems. Incredibly, coroner Henry W. Turkel suffered a slight heart attack while studying the problem.196 The parking lot itself, which had been partly built on bay fill, was already sinking into San Francisco Bay that same month, according to the director of public works in San Francisco. This would require $15,000 immediately to fix and $5,000 to maintain each year.197
Nevertheless Giants fans endured. Attendance climbed from 1.4 million at Seals Stadium in 1959 to 1.8 million at Candlestick in its first season. This far exceeded the numbers at the Polo Grounds, where just 1.3 million fans came through the gates in the final two years combined. Attendance would remain well above the levels in New York, averaging about 1.5 million through 1966, but by 1972, the Giants were drawing fewer fans than they had in their final season in Harlem. Candlestick Park had never been a place to draw fans on its own merits; by the 1962 World Series, columnist Wells Twombly would write, “Candlestick was already starting to look like the world’s oldest new stadium.”198 It was modern and had plenty of parking, and yet San Francisco had clearly got it wrong—a point that other stadium builders were well aware of. Emil Praeger would design Shea Stadium in Queens, future home to the New York Mets—the new club that would replace the Giants and Dodgers back east. He provided his assessment of Candlestick in a letter to Robert Moses in May 1960, writing, “I inspected Candlestick Park shortly before it was complete and while it is better than many old stadia, I do not think we have a great deal to learn from it.”199 Praeger also designed the Dodgers’ new stadium in Los Angeles. When planning that park, Walter O’Malley reportedly told him to look closely at the plans for Candlestick. “Study these,” O’Malley instructed, “and learn what not to do.”200
As San Franciscans battled nature, Dodger Stadium was celebrated as a symbol of man’s ability to tame it. On its opening in 1962, Walter Bingham told readers of Sports Illustrated, “Walter O’Malley had turned a goat pasture called Chavez Ravine into the finest baseball stadium in the world.”201 This turn of phrase echoed the way many had been talking about the 315-acre plot over the previous years. Dodger boosters—including club officials, politicians, and the Los Angeles Times—often made a point of describing the area’s desolation. O’Malley called it “210 taxable acres of hilly ground that would be of interest only to goats.”202 An editorial in the Los Angeles Times pronounced it “a sort of half-forgotten wilderness” that was “nearly empty and requires little displacement of anything except irregularities of terrain.”203 Charles Detoy, a former president of the chamber of commerce, claimed, “The property has no market value today. . . . The city is fortunate to be getting someone to develop this problem property.”204 For Frank Finch of the Los Angeles Times, Chavez Ravine was “300 acres of steep hills, eroded gullies, weeds, stunted trees and a few ramshackle dwellings, including an abandoned schoolhouse. The area was densely populated by possums, skunks, jackrabbits, gophers, rusty tin cans, rotting tires, moribund mattresses and broken beer bottles.”205 Dodgers vice president Fresco Thompson’s first impression was “of Hades without the River Styx. The topography featured a series of crisscrossing gullies, all trying to escape each other. I couldn’t visualize any game being played there except tag by the gophers.” Chavez Ravine, he continued, “had always been a haven for possums, jackrabbits, skunks, and squatters.”206
It was a disingenuous portrait of Chavez Ravine. The land was extremely valuable as the largest undeveloped parcel in the center city; an outside consultant hired by the city council in 1958 appraised the “commercial value” of the land at up to eighteen million dollars, were it to be leveled. It also remained the home to more than four-legged wildlife in 1959.207 Dodger Stadium construction could only begin once area residents had been forcibly removed from the land by the police—an eviction that was captured on television and horrified many Angelenos who saw it as a violation of the country’s first principles.208 One of those evicted was Abrana Arechiga, who had settled in Chavez Ravine with her husband, Manuel, in the 1920s, raising four children there. As her family home was being bulldozed, she pointedly shouted in Spanish, “Why don’t they play ball in Poulson’s backyard—not in ours!”209 Arechiga understood the uneven burden of postwar redevelopment and growth far better than most.
But the spectacle of eviction and possession was one that stadium advocates, even in McCarthyite Los Angeles, preferred to erase. Charlie Park of the Los Angeles Times told readers—as O’Malley already had and Sports Illustrated would—that the stadium occupied a space that “only a short time ago was a mountainous goat pasture.” The primitive had been replaced by progress—“an artistic and engineering marvel.” To make wilderness productive required massive effort—the moving of 8 million cubic yards of dirt; the assembling of staggering amounts of steel (13 million pounds), concrete (40,000 cubic yards), wood (375,000 board feet), cast iron (550 tons), and asphalt (80,000 tons).210 The numbers were astonishing—and worked as expressions of modern progress in their enormous scale. The Dodgers’ 1962 Souvenir Yearbook, which fans would have bought for fifty cents upon arriving at the new stadium, celebrated the process of construction—and the men who made it possible—more than the stadium itself. Photo after photo portrayed the reshaping of this seemingly vacant frontier. A photo caption textually anchored this visual story, telling readers that there were “mountains to be leveled; ravines to be filled.” Judging by the stadium program, the act of building was more exhilarating than the building it produced.
FIGURE 35. Chavez Ravine is excavated to make way for Dodger Stadium in May 1960. Downtown Los Angeles is visible to the south. AP PHOTO.
But what a stadium it was. The eighteen-million-dollar Dodger Stadium opened in April 1962 and instantly became the gold standard in baseball venues.211 It was, according to local writers, a “mammoth, multicolored mansion,” a “gorgeous triumph of high-rise architecture in living Technicolor with levels of ocher, aqua, coral and skyblue,” the “Taj Mahal of Sport,” an “elegant edifice of which every Angeleno can be justly proud,” and the “Taj O’Malley.”212 Pastel decks of sweeping, cantilevered stands hugged a symmetrical playing field cleansed of the dimensional oddities back at Ebbets. Fifty-six thousand fans enjoyed open views of the field and verdant Elysian Park beyond; there were none of the pesky structural posts that obstructed fans’ views at old ballparks. Clean and orderly, it seemed a rebuke to Brooklyn. Even more, it projected the glamour of Hollywood through its “swank” members-only Stadium Club where the elite could sip scotch at linened tables.213 Ushers, with uniforms designed by a Beverly Hills fashion house, orchestrated crowd movement.214 Young and attractive usherettes patrolled the dugout boxes at field level—what a sportswriter called “your own little private domain, far from the maddening throng high above you.”215 Four terraced parking lots—each for a different seating level—rationalized entry and exit, minimizing the stairs that had to be climbed. A five-lane drive circled the stadium, with traffic lights to manage the swarm of cars entering and exiting. Dodger Stadium’s exterior was painted a light blue, with silver and gold accents. Made of concrete, steel, and plastic, the stadium’s bright modernism echoed the new corporate skyscrapers and civic structures being erected in Los Angeles’s reinvented downtown.216 This was a long way from Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
From above, Dodger Stadium resembled the stylized boomerang or parabola emblazoned on postwar consumer products from Chryslers to butterfly chairs to cigarette lighters. This was “the shape of motion,” as design historian Thomas Hine has noted.217 And while the Dodgers’ 1962 Souvenir Yearbook privileged the Faustian process of carving out a stadium spot in Chavez Ravine, the program’s cover told car-crazy Angelenos that this was a stadium designed for the driver. It featured an enlarged and colorful Dodger Stadium upon a black-and-white map of the Los Angeles area, with different communities clearly labeled—from San Fernando to Huntington Beach, Malibu to Pomona. Massive pastel arteries stretched outward from the stadium through these communities like veins, suggesting just how easy it would be to traverse this cluttered landscape.218 All roads, it seemed, met at Dodger Stadium—great comfort for a population that used automobiles for 95 percent of their trips around the city.219
Even as the 1962 program cover advertised the stadium’s automobile accessibility, it also proposed the stadium as a centerpiece to a sprawling collection of communities—a point that many stadium advocates had made over the years. Days before O’Malley announced the club’s departure from Brooklyn, a Los Angeles Times editorial argued, “The major league baseball team might be expected to bind the neighborhoods together with a sort of communal glue.” The Dodgers “will sow a new seed of civic consciousness and pride,” the editor promised, adding, “Consider what happened to Milwaukee.”220 Upon the stadium opening almost five years later, the newspaper editorialized, “It will be the most easily accessible gathering place in the community, literally at the crossroads of the freeway network.” It would be both geographically and spiritually central to a city some thought was spread too thinly: “Dodger Stadium is another of those things that help to give the city a living heart. It is additional insurance that the central city will not wither. It is a show place built on an ancient enclave of dinginess which, 10 years ago, seemed to have no future except as an institutionalized slum of low-rent public housing.”221
Ebbets Field had also functioned as a sort of community center for Brooklyn. In Los Angeles, however, a great deal was made of the “wholesome” character of baseball and the new Dodger Stadium.222 Those eager to build the stadium and draw the Dodgers westward often made this point. O’Malley promised “everything here [Dodger Stadium] will be in keeping with the high family standards in Southern California.”223 This emphasis on wholesome family values led many to compare the stadium to nearby Disneyland. Pro-Dodgers forces made this connection explicit during the Proposition B campaign. The similarities weren’t lost on outsiders; Bob Addie of the Washington Post referred to O’Malley’s “own type of Disneyland out in Chavez Ravine.”224 Just as Disneyland cleansed the carnival experience of another Brooklyn icon, Coney Island, Dodger Stadium tamed the disorderly ballpark experience of Ebbets Field for the suburban middle-class family. As historian Eric Avila argues, Dodger Stadium could function—like Disneyland—as a postwar town square for a sprawling suburban metropolis. Each brought the appearance of public space under the eye of private, commercial interests—a simulated public, narrower than those to be found at the old ballparks.225
FIGURE 36. Visitors to Dodger Stadium in 1962 might have bought this program, which highlighted above all else the ballpark’s connectedness to freeways. A. BARTLETT GIAMATTI RESEARCH CENTER, NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME.
Roger Angell compared the new stadium to another component of the postwar landscape after visiting in 1962. He figured that Dodger Stadium must have been designed by an admirer of suburban supermarkets, with its pastel color scheme; electronic message board that functioned like a grocer’s placard; “superfluous decorative touches,” like the rickrack roofs over the outfield bleacher pavilions; and the “same preoccupation with easy access and with total use of interior space.” The dugout boxes behind home plate, where “movie and television stars, ballplayers’ wives, and transient millionaires” were stocked, seemed to Angell “a special shelf for high-priced goods.”226
Angell revisited Dodger Stadium in 1965. In spite of his affection for the old boxy ballparks, he admired this one, calling it “the finest plant in baseball—a model of efficiency and attractiveness.” He seemed less impressed by the crowd; the scene he sketched might have come straight from Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A.—hardly the crowd of committed rooters Angell valued. Fans wore “green stretch pants and russet golf cardigans.” Men in the upper decks sported “long bellies and golf caps,” sitting by their wives and their “elaborately waved white or dyed hair, their mahogany hands crossed in their laps.” Angell noted the ubiquity of transistor radios in the crowd—announcer Vin Scully’s voice floated over the stands like an opium cloud, seeming to pacify the audience; he suspected the Dodger fan carried it “in order to be told what he is seeing,” as “fans here seem to require electronic reassurance.”227 When the Dodgers were winning, victory was “a source of continuous and uncritical self-congratulation” and accompanied by “a nonstop high-decibel babble of joy”—“Marvelous! Oh, marvie, marvie, marvie!” one woman cried after Dodger hits, Angell recorded. On one visit, he said, he had the feeling he “had wandered into a radio breakfast show for moms” with mass sing-alongs. When the Dodgers were losing, however, fans “sat there, inning after inning, in polite, unhappy silence, like parents at a rock concert.”228
Fellow New Yorker Robert Lipsyte didn’t bother to hide his contempt for the sort of crowd Dodger Stadium cultivated. Writing for the New York Times, he called it “Lollipop Park,” noting its Hollywood atmosphere. It seemed to Lipsyte that it was more important to be seen at the park than to see the Dodgers; he claimed, “Only in Lollipop could Doris Day throw licorice bits into [player] Frank Thomas’s mouth during batting practice and leave in the seventh inning of a no-hitter. No one watches the game, for the stands are alive with long-legged cupcakes.” Like Angell, Lipsyte was continually aware of the buzz of the radio, noting, “Sometimes the play-by-play announcers stopped talking long enough for the crowd to hear itself not cheering wildly.” “Round and jolly, painted in pastel,” he wrote, “there is nothing but joy in Los Angeles’s Chavez Ravine. Brooklyn Bums, they weren’t.”229
Doris Day had replaced Hilda Chester. The transistor radio had replaced the Sym-Phony. Where there was once the street life of Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde, now there was what Angell called “O’Malley’s Safeway,” packed with suburbanites in golf shirts and stretch pants. The shift from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, Ebbets Field to Dodger Stadium, the old city to the new suburban metropolis, marked radical changes in what the stadium was and what it might be. In just over a decade, the stadium had gone from private business to public investment. The rusting industrial Northeast was giving way to a booming Sun Belt, where status was marked by becoming “big league.” Sports space was being untangled from dense urban neighborhoods and plopped into enormous parking fields. And a new modernist idiom—a visual marker of progress itself—had been adopted by designers. The growing suburban middle classes were the target now, as new stadiums would have to compete with television for their dollars. In the end, Walter O’Malley’s replacement for Ebbets Field resembled Geddes’s futuristic “pleasure dome” not in form but in spirit. And the man who had thwarted Geddes’s dome in Brooklyn, Robert Moses, would soon build a new stadium that he thought suitable to the automobile age. But first, New York’s baseball purists—like Roger Angell and Robert Lipsyte—would see old stadium culture get a brief reprieve.
