Old-Style ballparks, fronting on urban streets, spur in-city living

"Context-based" baseball stadiums generate vibrant mixed-use districts despite critics’ questions."

Philip Langdon New Urban News

A July 27 New York Times article has stimulated debate about whether the trend toward "retro" sports stadiums has begun to wane and, if so, whether this will be good or bad news for cities.

"For more than ad decade, what’s new in sport design has been what’s old — or at least old-fashioned," Christopher Hawthorne, a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine, wrote in the Times. Since 1992, when the Orioles opened their ballpark at Camden Yards, near the western edge of downtown Baltimore, major league baseball stadiums have, according to Hawthorne, favored "nostalgic gtouches" such as brick facades, old-fashioned signs, grass rather than artificial turf, and "nooks, crannies and other imposed eccentricities in the outfield."

From an urbanistic perspective, retro ballparks have generally been a big improvement over the multipurpose stadiums that sprouted in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the baseball facilities built in the past several years, such as Coors Field in Denver and Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, front on city streets and are situated within an easy walk of apartments, restaurants, public transportation, and other amenities.

Minor-league teams, which have orchestrated a giant spurt of stadium construction in the past 15 years, have enthusiastically embraced the trend toward old-fashioned traits and downtown locations. One of the best Triple-A baseball stadiums is the Memphis Redbirds’ home, 14,320-seat AutoZone Park, which won a CNU Award in June in recognition of its success in injecting life into downtown Memphis.

Like professional baseball players, the idea of building new stadiums with old-fashioned characteristics came up from the minor leagues. The concept materialized in 1988 when Pilot Field opened in downtown Buffalo. The new home of Buffalo’s Bisons featured design flourishes that were an immednse relief after the prrevious generation of emotionless football-baseball facilities, such as Pittsburgh’s cold concrete colossus, three Rivers Stadium.

Kansas City-based HOK Sport, one of the tiny number of firms that together dominate sports architecture, had at first wanted to give the Bisons’ park an austere form that, according to Buffalo architect Peter Nowak, resembled "a concrete bomb shelter." Nowak and another architect, Ed Kowalewski, went to Mayor James D. Griffin and argued that this would be a mistake — the stadium for the Triple-A team should be designed more like the old ballparks that fans loved. Not long afterward, HOK Sport returned to Buffalo with a far different design — a stadium still built of precast concrete, but with steel-framed arches along the exterior and with a green metal roof, reminiscent of historic ballparks.

Pilot Field has done little to stimulate development in downtown Buffalo, probably because it was built in a relatively desolate area east of Main Street and because the Buffalo area’s economy has been too weak to support an urban renaissance. The 21,050-seat ballpark itself earned plaudits, however. And the Kansas City firm, now known as HOK Sport + Venue + Event (HOK SVE), won enormous acclaim when it produced the first retro ballpark in the major leagues — 48,188-seat Camden Yards. The Baltimore Orioles park used a massive old brick warehouse on its perimeter as an appealing backdrop for the action on the field. The idea of fitting ballparks into the urban fabric and adorning them with materials and motifs derived from nearby buildings became the talk of the sports world.

ECONOMIC STIMULATORS
In metropolitan areas that have the taste and money to pursue urban pleasures, ballparks of this sort have helped generate vibrant mixed-use districts. Coors Field, a ballpark by HOK SVE that opened in Denver in 1995, has — in concert with other public and private improvements — stimulated extensive housing construction in lower downtown, or “LoDo.” Within six years of the Colorado Rockies’ first game at Coors, 600 lofts, apartments, and condominium units were developed in a warehouse area next to the stadium. Restaurants and sports bars proliferated.

The 50,249-seat stadium enticed many metro Denver residents to visit LoDo for the first time, and they found it to be an interesting, walkable, surprisingly safe place. The primary inhabitants of the area near the park, one third of whom own their residences, are single men and married couples without children. Despite being, on average, 50 years old, the residents for the most part tolerate the noise from young men spilling into LoDo’s streets when the sports bars close at 2 in the morning. Some condos and lofts have sold in the $1 million range.

HOK SVE avoids describing its ballparks as “retro.” The firm prefers to call the designs “context-based” or “context-driven” because in cities like Denver, Baltimore, and Cleveland, they take their cues from the materials and styles of structures nearby. Although many resemble buildings from the early 20th century, Earl Santee, head of the Major Baseball Group at HOK SVE, says context-based ballparks are not uniformly “traditional” in style. Jacobs Field, the 43,368 home of the Cleveland Indians, is “relatively Modern,” he avers. Though limestone is used at its base, the nine-year-old park also prominently employs glass and steel and seems to harmonize with Cleveland’s powerful steel bridges.

“Architecturally, the buildings have to be a fit for the neighborhood,” Santee says. “They have to be the right scale, the right massing.” Though he argues that “if you were in a modern city, you would do a modern building,” many fans prefer the warmth and texture of traditional ballparks, so that’s the direction in which ballpark design has headed in the past decade.

Hawthorne argued in The Times that in recent projects such as HOK SVE’s Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, “the retro trend has grown stale.” He further insisted that sports architecture is beginning to move from traditional styling toward something more “bold.” Hawthorne’s evidence was weak, however, consisting mainly of a pair of football stadiums — the 68,532-seat Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia and New York architect Peter Eisenman’s design for the 63,000-seat Arizona Cardinals stadium, to built in Glendale, near Phoenix.

Rarely do football stadiums look or function like baseball parks. Football does not have a tradition and history as deep as baseball’s. Football stadiums are bigger, they generate more automobile traffic on game days, and the team plays there only a few days a year (whereas major-league baseball teams play at least 81 homes games a year). Since football stadiums sit empty most of the time and generally have mammoth parking requirements, they don’t make promising urban building blocks.

ANTI-URBAN BEHEMOTH
Eisenman’s design for the Arizona Cardinals, though praised in The Times, is downright anti-urban — surrounded by parking lots. Such big, isolated structures naturally tend to be designed as “object buildings” or “icons” rather than as contributors to lively, mixed-use urban districts. Photographers conspire with the architects, the team owners, and whatever companies bought the stadium naming rights to show how dramatic these venues look like from the air, as opposed to documenting how they look from the poor pedestrian’s perspective. “They’re designed for the blimp shot,” Sandy Sorlien, a Philadelphia photographer, complained on the Tradarch e-mail discussion list affiliated with the Institute for Traditional Architecture. Not uncommonly, architectural writers glorify such stadiums if they look novel and striking, even though their design and siting are unneighborly.

Some ballparks with retro styling are equally guilty of standing apart from the mix of urban life. Sorlien notes that the Phillies’ 43,000-seat Citizens Bank Park, scheduled to open next spring, sits in a distant part of South Philadelphia in a “stadium ghetto,” surrounded by a sea of parking lots and other sports facilities. The fact that the new ballpark’s designers — Ewing Cole Cherry Brott of Philadelphia and HOK SVE — have incorporated arcades, patterned brick, and other traditional features only makes it seem “a cartoon of a real urban ballpark,” Sorlien contends.

THE RIGHT WAY AT WRIGLEY FIELD
Chicago architect Philip Bess, one of the best new urbanist authorities on ballparks, sees Wrigley Field, which dates to 1914, as a model that’s still worth emulating. “It generates street life, a kind of party atmosphere,” Bess says. The Cubs games enliven the neighborhood, and the neighborhood adds to the character of the 39,214-seat park. The penchant of spectators for watching the games from nearby rooftops has become institutionalized, for better or worse, as clubs occupy some of the buildings.

Denver’s Coors Field spurred conversion of nearby warehouses into living quarters, as had been anticipated. Now, says Santee at HOK SVE, “the biggest trend is new housing, which is a shocker.” Surface parking lots are being redeveloped with high-density buildings that contain food-related businesses or other commercial uses on the ground floor and that have housing above.

Despite Americans’ predominant desire for quiet in their living quarters, a number of individuals will pay extra to live within sight or earshot of a ballpark. Apartments with views into AutoZone Park command premium rents, says Frank Ricks of Looney Ricks Kiss, which designed the Memphis ballpark. (HOK SVE consulted on it.) San Diego and St. Louis both expect residential development to accompany ballparks that are under way or planned. The trend is for residential and commercial development to go hand in hand with ballpark development.

The biggest limitation on the trend is that many major-league baseball tams already have relatively new ballparks and that, according to Bess, “more than 100 minor-league stadiums have been built in the last 15 years.” Slowing demand for new ballparks may put a crimp on mixed-use urban development for a while. But when ballparks are needed, the mixed-use model is the one to follow. Looney Ricks Kiss has been asked to work on proposals in Nashville, Bowling Green, Kentucky, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. The concept of the multipurpose ballpark district is running strong. “They want baseball,” Ricks says of the cities he hears from, “but they want other things around it.”

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