We had the good fortune to attend another baseball game here Monday evening. It was cool, unlike the heat we now endure, and as magical as ever. The Rochester Red Wings (AAA) beat the Norfolk Tide 5-2, and evening in the city in the stadium was, as always, sublime. As the sun slipped away, the city lit up, and the eternal pairing of the timeless Eden of green grass and batted ball, and the temporal urbanity of our actual surroundings made itself powerfully felt. Which got me to thinking.
There are a few things that I believe are key to understanding any city. How the blocks of our city are formed for example, and how our houses are arranged on those blocks. Where we work and shop. How dense we are, or aren’t. How we move around. Where we get our water, and dump our refuse.
But certainly one element essential to understanding any American city is understanding its baseball narratives. So I decided to investigate baseball in Rochester, to see if our city could really measure up. I was in for a surprise.
Bay Street Ball Grounds, 1919.
Rochester is home to the oldest minor league franchise in the history of professional sports, dating back to 1877. They joined the International League (they are still in the International League) in 1885. Yikes.
In 1907, the Broncos opened their season at the Bay Street Ball Grounds. The following season they were the Hustlers, then the Colts in 1921, the Tribe from 1922 to 1928, and finally the Red Wings starting in 1929, when they abandoned Bay Street for Red Wing Stadium, which would later become know as Silver Stadium. They played there until 1996, when the current stadium, Frontier Field, took over. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Bay Street near Webster Avenue in our city, where the ballyard was to be found, was in the sticks in 1907. Very near the edge of the city, most of the surrounding land was fields. Lots were being platted at a pretty fast clip, but not much had been built. Take a look at opening day in 1909. It turns out that our man Mr. Stone spent a great deal of time at the ballpark, thankfully.
Note the folks in the trees, above the third base grandstands.
Again, opening day in 1909.
In those days, the place was known simply as Baseball Park. Opening day in 1909 drew 13,000 fans. Not bad.
And even though the left field fence urges us to “Fone 519 for carriage service,” cars and parking in those days were becoming more and more important. Here’s opening day in 1910.
Baseball played an important role in this city’s life. Here’s Mayor Edgerton throwing out the first pitch in 1910.
The Mayor was quite a regular at Baseball Park.
I love the peepholes drilled into the fence. The guy on the left is Charlie Chapin, owner of the Hustlers.
Here’s the Rochester Hustlers playing Newark, again in 1910. This view gives you a good sense of the Park and its urban context. Well, kind of urban.
Mr. Stone got around the Park during this game – here’s a view from the first base side, again giving you a good sense of the surroundings. Mr. Stone caught the action in this one – the first base coach leaps into the air as a run heads to the plate.
Summer in the city includes hot days, like our days this week here. But baseball goes on. Check out this crowd on a very warm day in 1911.
Hats and ties and long sleeve shirts and even coats. Ugh. Not a soul in a tee-shirt and shorts enjoying a cold one. See that guy in the lower right with a handkerchief under his hat? Check him out, seen here with his pal.
Out in left field the wall was battered – it sloped. And here are six guys who understood how to capitalize on that fact, in 1912.
One of the true joys of baseball in the city, once upon a time, was how the field and the park adjusted itself to its locale in a kind of inventive, circumstantial and provisional fashion, thus rooting it in time and place.
As I thought about baseball and our city, we took a trip out to Bay and Webster to see if any trace of the park remained. At that intersection is a large park, and I was sure that Baseball Park had once been positioned there. Wrong.
Further research led me to this 1918 plat map for that part of our city. Take a look at where the ballyard was actually located.
Note that all the building lots had been platted, but in 1918, very few had been built upon. The city was moving out to swallow Baseball Park.
And today?
Gone. As in totally, completely gone.
But before baseball moved away from Bay and Webster, and to underscore that the place was a robust part of our urban life, we find a few superstars in attendance.
Yes, under that mask and padding is none other than George Eastman. 1917.
A couple of years later, in 1921, this guy showed up at the park for an exhibition game.
History doesn’t tell us where Babe’s swat landed, unlike that famous home run at Wrigley, but he must have really smacked it.
In 1928, the ball club played its last season at Baseball Park. Why? Not enough parking? Too much adjacent development? Not enough seats for fans?
In 1929 the club opened its season in Red Wing Stadium, which ultimately was named Silver Stadium in the 1960s, after Morrie Silver, who was president of the club in those days. This early image by Mr. Stone in 1930 illustrates yet another wonderful ball park, knitted and folded into the fabric of the city.
By the late 90s, this stadium too was razed. Its location, on Norton in the middle of the city, had at least two major liabilities: not near the expressways, and not enough parking. Once again the car assassinates the city.
And so we return to Frontier Field, conveniently located near the on and off ramps, and surrounded by a sea of parking.
Well, almost everything downtown is surrounded by a sea of parking.
And so the story of baseball in Rochester is a perfect metaphor for the life of the city itself. In our golden age, just after the turn of the 20th century, Rochester was a lively, robust, sometimes rowdy place. It was dense, urbane, and magnificent.
Milk Week at Baseball Park, 1922.
And then, in the 1930s, the city began its dreadful transition for the sake of the car. Due to a depression and a world war, this happened slowly at first, as Silver Stadium shows us.
But after the war, the atomization of our urbanism picked up speed. By the 1990s, when our baseball was moved to Frontier Field, the city had pretty much emptied out, and our cars were our regional deities.
In the end, we still have the extraordinary stories of this place, the extraordinary images, the sure knowledge that once the urbanism here was spectacular, and that baseball tells a part of that story, those stories. We still have baseball in the city, and so there must be some hope for our urban future.
Offerman Stadium – Buffalo – gone.
http://www.tripletonline.com/offerman/OffermanStadium5.jpg
David, I think every American city has at least one Offerman: gone but not forgotten. Thanks for sharing the image – a really great looking ballpark.
It’s interesting to me that so many of the old parks had outfield walls but no outfield seating – no bleachers or grandstands out there. Both Bay Street and Silver here had only walls, and folks just stood out there often at Bay Street, as the images indicate.
Many of the old, great ballyards were made of wood, couldn’t meet any municipal building code, and often burned down. But they sure were magical places.
One still remains, Wrigley Field in Chicago. I’ve only been once and didn’t get much time to explore the neighborhood, but it seemed so natural to have a ballpark ingrained in a neighborhood like, at least on the superficial level that I got to see. THAT is what baseball and urban living is supposed to be.
Bill, I grew up in Chicago, and lived for many years just 5 blocks from Wrigley. I can testify that it is, indeed, the perfect marriage of urbanity and sport. Attending a game at Wrigley should be on everyone’s must-do list.
The other old park that remains is, of course, Fenway Park. I have to confess that one of the things I am most proud of in my entire career is being a part of the Fenway 7, a group led by Prof. Philip Bess, that met in Boston 11 years ago this summer, at the invitation of the organization called “Save Fenway Park,” and we did. Save Fenway Park, that is. The seats on the green monster? That was an idea originating with the Fenway 7, among many, many ideas. We have never been credited for the save, except by our SFP colleagues, bless them, but all of our ideas have now been implemented.
And to further confess, baseball and cities are a bit of an obsession. At least I’m not alone.
Great post. Your comparisons of old atlases and plat maps to the present-day aerial photography (e.g., Franklin Square) never disappoint. Hopefully, you have already realized that a book lurks therein.
Thank you sir. I am still not quite sure how to turn all this into a book, but I have always sensed that possibility. I guess I need an editor….
I must extend a thank you then for your part in saving Fenway, even this Yankee fan can appreciate something like that.
I didn’t include Fenway in my comment since I had never been there and wasn’t sure the role it played in the surrounding neighborhood. I had been to Yankees Stadium (the now demolished one) shortly after my visit to Wrigley and was pretty disappointed.
Bill, the first time I walked into Fenway, during a Saturday afternoon game, I was led up the stairs behind home plate by Fenway 7 colleague Rolando Llanes. As we emerged into the daylight, I could see that we were literally on top of the action – closer than I have ever been to a professional contest except maybe a hockey game. Less than fifty feet. I was dumbfounded – those guys are really good.
Get on a train. Go to Fenway. Enjoy the way the park is cranked into the city. Notice the quirky shape of the playing surface, as the city impinges on the game. Or just check it out on Google Earth (but you will miss a sensational experience).
This is what urban baseball used to be – a kind of transaction between the fabric of the city and the timeless (literally – without time) game of baseball. The city was a circumstance, a palpable presence and definer, in and of the game. And that transaction became part of the lore. And if we were really lucky, we had an Albert Stone at hand to translate the lore into living history.
Frontier could be worse. It could have required its own dedicated parking lots instead of sharing the existing Kodak parking. It could have been built in a neighborhood that a large portion of the team’s fan base is genuinely afraid of. At the same time, all the hopes, dreams, and desires of Frontier Field being the anchor of an entertainment district kind of died because of the two blocks of surface parking between the stadium and High Falls, where the redevelopment of the parking lots along Morrie Silver and State for mixed use development would have served to tie the two pieces together and helped to create a neighborhood feel, rather than the two pieces with asphalt in the middle.
Chris, I agree that Frontier could be worse. At least it’s still almost downtown, and it reuses multiple hundreds of thousands of feet of existing surface parking, which by the way is seldom full on a game day.
And I agree that the surface parking within a couple of blocks of the stadium, and between the stadium and High Falls, has acted as a definite impediment to neighborhood redevelopment. An asphalt desert.
Now here’s an exercise. Go to google Earth. Go to Wrigley Feld in Chicago. Turn on the measuring tool. Take off the area of surface parking at the park. You may not count the fast food restaurant parking across the street from the stadium. Now compare the number you arrive at with the nearly 1,000,000 square feet of surface parking around Frontier. (I am not counting the parking garages).
Pretty astonishing, yes? Amazing what you can do with good public transit and a walkable city neighborhood.
It is, and if cities and stadiums built after 1945 ( I took a few minutes and looked at some other east coast stadiums I am familiar with) had been thinking more seriously about transit, the world might be a better place. The sad reality is that if someone proposed building Wrigley Field where it is today, it would never get beyond the first committee meeting because of the neighborhood and the distance from the interstate.
Well, there is Camden Yards as one exception, but I think basically you are correct. If you can’t park within 200 yards, it’s not a deal.
Prof. Bess and I once did a regular architecture column for a magazine called Inland Architect. Our column was called the Chicago Architecture Police. In the late 80s, with night baseball coming to Wrigley, we did a piece that calculated how many night games it would take until the value of the land for parking was greater than the value of the land for anything else. In those days the Cubs were limited by an agreement with the City to 18 night games a season. I believe the number is now 30 a season. In 1988 we calculated that it would take 40 night games and the neighborhood would start to come down in favor of parking.
Here, where Frontier Field is not in the middle of a thriving neighborhood, the value of the surrounding land is so low that paying $5 to park for a game is probably more profitable than anything else one might do with the land.
Sigh.
I think there are still opportunities for urban ballparks. Camden Yards maybe be one of the first of the most recent, but since then others have been built: Nationals Park in DC, Safeco Field in Seattle, Petco Park in San Diego (still a little heavy on parking), Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati (little bit too much highway), PNC Park in Pittsburgh (a little too much of both). I’d like to see the Phils move back downtown into Philly someday, but I fear it may not happen based on the convenience of maintaining a “Sports Complex” where they currently play.
Matt, yes there are opportunities. Especially since most MLB teams like to blackmail their hometowns into building new parks on a regular basis. Surely we’ll see more soon.
In my experience, the very worst of the later generation of MLB parks is the new Comiskey, opened in 1991 (called U.S. Cellular Field in 2003, but no one really calls it that). It is a grisly mess – the upper decks had to be revised because of all the incidents of vertigo.
I grew up watching Nellie Fox and Minnie Minoso in the old Comiskey, and it was a wonderful place. And I still remember those air raid sirens being sounded when they won the pennant in ’59. Chaos.
As to Nats Stadium in D.C., it has a lot of parking around it, both surface and structured. When we left D.C. the recession had hit that redeveloping neighborhood pretty hard, and a lot of the planned structures had been stopped. Don’t know what it looks like today.
Safeco in Seattle is near Pioneer Square and Chinatown, to be sure, but between the ballpark, the football stadium and the container port, it’s a bit of a twilight zone down there.
And that seems to be the current strategy. Build something that seems urban, but put it on an edge, and sneak in a ton of parking. Make the park look traditional – ala Camden – but make sure one foot is on the exit ramp and the other on the entrance ramp.
A real favorite of mine is Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Mass. It’s wooden, and remains. Gorgeous. Another favorite is/was the field for the Beavers, in Portland, Oregon. But the club was put up for sale and relocation in 2010, and the stadium is being converted for soccer. Hope they don’t wreck it.
As I see it, the best of the remaining parks are all for minor league teams – smaller, and less destructive of their settings. Wahconah only seats 5,400, after all.
Re: New Comisky or US Cellular Field
I had read that the firm (HOK?) who designed it brought basically the plans for what essentially became Camden Yards to Reinsdorf and he turned them down.
Re: PNC Park (I didn’t want to be the guy who brings up Pittsburgh every time, but someone else mentioned it)
PNC Park, and Heinz Field were built basically in the same spot Three Rivers Stadium was. The sea of parking lots around Three Rivers had been there for 30 years at that point. One of the stipulations of getting the (public) funding to build the stadiums was that the teams had to invest and develop some of that parking area. Everyone was always using Wrigley as a model of what the ideal experience would be.
It is still a work in progress, but in the 8-10 years the stadiums have existed, they have actually reduced surface parking by quite a bit. Looking at the google satellite image really doesn’t do the amount of development justice. Now some of that development has been parking garages, and they include street level retail, restaurants, etc. But you are pretty much right when you say “one foot is on the exit ramp and the other on the entrance ramp”
Three or four new mixed use buildings with no parking garages have popped up between the stadiums.
The Steelers are planning on building an outdoor amphitheater on some of that surface parking, but I’ve always been a little confused about what that will actually bring to the area, since there already is one across the river.
Both stadiums utilize existing downtown parking garages, and they close off the Roberto Clemente Bridge (formerly the 6th Street bridge) for Pedestrian use on game days so people who work, live (slowly growing in population) or park downtown can walk to the stadium easier. The bridge has really become an extension of PNC Park but still a part of the city.
You can reach the stadiums easily through light rail, bus, bike, walking, and of course driving. If you have a boat, you can dock right on the river and go up and watch the game, or take the Gateway Clipper from across the river and get dropped off right at the stadiums.
They are currently extending the light rail over to “The North Shore”, but even before I would take the “T” into town and walk the three or four blocks to get to the stadiums. The North Shore Extension has been the source of a lot of controversy, and they missed a great opportunity to serve more than just the stadium areas with the project, but that is a whole other discussion.
Of course there have been some swings and misses along the way, but to me they are batting close to 1.000, and I haven’t even begin to talk about the actual ballpark. However the big missing piece is a connection with the north side neighborhood. Unfortunately I don’t see this improving any time soon since I279 acts as a barrier and completely severs that part of town with the stadiums.
Thinking more on this topic, it occurred to me that downtown stadia, in their own way, are a sad commentary on the value of center city real estate for more productive pursuits.
It seems to me, historically, ball parks were built on the urban fringe, with private funds, where the land was cheap. Now they’re built downtown, with public funds. The land isn’t necessarily cheap, but certainly undervalued for things like commerce, industry, retail, or housing. I bet many of our forebears of 100 years ago would be incredulous at the thought of devoting several acres of prime downtown real estate to the leisurely diversion of baseball. The private sector economics of sport and commerce, as they functioned then, would not have been able to afford to build a stadium where Frontier Field now stands.
A related thought I had: is there any evidence of the then-privately-owned streetcar companies encouraging the fringe locations of ballparks to stimulate ridership? They certainly did this with amusement parks, picnic groves, hotels, piers, etc.
Bill, thanks for the Pittsburgh update. I have walked to the park across the bridge on game days, and it’s a great experience.
Jason – a couple of things. First, yes, most first generation parks were built in areas that were near but not in downtown, on land that was less expensive than center city real estate. And of course our urban forebears might well be shocked at the conversations we have now about keeping professional sports in the city, and without a sea of parking.
(And I hope they would be shocked that team owners expect very substantial public subsidies at the same time that their players make astronomical salaries. Maybe they would all just stay home and watch the games on TV and bag the park. The economy of major league sports is part of the American Dark Side – just ask the NFL as it prepares to implode).
But don’t forget that when the Bay Street Ball Park was the place for Rochester baseball, it was 2.5 miles from Main and the river – a 45 minute walk. Even Silver Stadium was only 2.5 miles from downtown.
So our ancestors might be amazed at the conversation, but they would also know from experience that they could walk, bike, or streetcar to the park easily from work or home. The city was much more compact, and dense, and so an edge was not the absolute curse it is today. An edge was close, and enjoyed by all city dwellers, as the city bled into fields and orchards.
And yes, private streetcar lines played a very instrumental role in developing and constructing urban ball parks. Examples are many, many: Chicago, Cleveland, Augusta, Birmingham, Charleston, Macon, Mobile, Montgomery, New Orleans, Baltimore, Atlanta (two parks, competing, built by two competing streetcar magnates), Brooklyn.
You might enjoy reading this brief piece linked below as a bit of background – and thanks for zeroing in on an important reason why these places worked so well for so long.
http://scopt.transportation.org/Documents/trnews266transitbaseball.pdf
After looking up Wahconah Park I was going to suggest you take a little trip over to Batavia to check out a NY Penn league game at Dwyer Stadium.
Alas they tore down the original:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks/batavia/92dwy_exterior.jpg
On the same spot they built this:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks/batavia/03dwy_exterior.jpg
Bill, thanks for the links. I am glad to see that the park still exists.
But in the realm of architecture, I am at a loss to explain why one would decide to turn a baseball park into a train station. Kind of a mess, and a shame to lose the old wooden place it replaces.
And the design of the walls, with the stepping motif, is especially egregious.
We just can’t seem to leave well enough along, can we? I am reminded of a quote by Alain de Botton, from his book “The Architecture of Happiness:”
“The architects who benefit us the most may be those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.”
Howard, your comments remind me of an event in Rochester history that is, for me, the measure of pre-automotive America’s willingness to walk. It was the occasion of the re-dedication of St. Patrick’s cemetery on Pinnacle Hill, after a recent expansion. I think it was in 1860. Participants met at St. Patrick’s church (near present Kodak HQ) at 5 PM on a Sunday in July, walked the 5 miles to Pinnacle Hill, and climbed to the summit. The crowd, which had grown along the way, now numbered in the thousands. The people then stood patiently for 90 minutes while Bishop Timon walked the grounds (all 30 acres), sprinkling holy oil. After a few words, they all returned home. Being Sunday, I presume many then got up the next morning and went to work. Real experiences, it seems, once cost real effort.
Jim, nice story. By my calculations, the Pinnacle Hill trek must have taken something like 7 hours. This would mean participants got home around midnight.
At least they got their exercise….
Even with Camden Yards, there is still plenty of nearby parking, between the surface lots and garages in the few blocks of no-mans land between the stadiums (I’m counting M&T Bank Stadium here) With Nationals Park, if we wait 10 years (if we aren’t really in the middle of the second version of the Great Depression but haven’t had enough perspective yet) we might find that many of the lots around it have been swallowed up by the Navy Yard development and other projects that were half done when I went there last summer, providing even more incentive for people to use the Metro to get to the stadium and neighborhood.
As far as the future goes in Rochester, the best we can hope for is that at some point, Kodak has to divest of some of its land holdings or chooses to redevelop the lot between State St and the stadium in a way that reflects their existing building, High Falls, and the stadium complex. As part of this, it would make sense for a parking structure similar to the one across next to the WXXI building.
This might be a long way down the road, however, but is still a better scenario than in other places, like St. Petersburg, where you have 5 or 6 blocks of no-mans land between a u and coming downtown and a white elephant dome adjacent to multiple interstates that has failed since it was built on spec, with the hope that once the (Devil) Rays came, it would lead to the revitalization of the Central Avenue corridor between the stadium and the downtown area. Instead, because of the highway accessibility, sparse crowds, and depressing stadium experience (at least under the former ownership), you had a situation where only businesses in close proximity to the stadium and parking facilities (specifically Fergs’s (http://fergssportsbar.com/) located adjacent to the railroad underpass leading from Central Avenue to Tropicana Field) was able to succeed, while the remainder of single and two story buildings, interspersed with surface parking have been home to a series of bars,restaurants, and shops, never lasting more than a season or two, suffering from having baseball season not be enough to make up for the dead off-season.
Chris, you raise some interesting things to think about.
First, the Nats and DC will indeed have a while to wait until that neighborhood, and specifically the Navy Yards, gains momentum. When we were there last, there were a couple of mammoth excavations adjacent to the park – projects that had come to a halt with the recession. Time will tell.
Camden, though, is an interesting case. It’s north of the expressway, with football south, so the parking can be aggregated. But the north side is the city side of the expressway, so Camden cozies up to the city on one hand, and has on and off ramps as well, Maybe the best, if you can call it that and love driving around, of both worlds. The experience of the park is mostly an urban one, unless you have to go south for your vehicle.
Tropicana is simply a disaster, from that generation of parks where the stadium was a giant blob in the middle of a sea of parking. Pretty nasty stuff, and of a type that has mostly passed away, thankfully.
But what I really like is Progress Energy Field, down near the marina in St. Pete and only a mile or so to the east. Nice little place, nicely inserted in the city. And expandable – it would be easy to add seating on the base lines and in the outfield – though probably never to MLB capacity.
As for Rochester, we have history to teach us what to do – we did it right here twice – but it will be a very long time, if ever, as you observe, before there is enough energy in the city to fill in around Frontier. Nice to think about, though.
Actually Al Lang (I refuse to call it Progress Energy) Field was supposed to be torn down for a new (Devil) Rays stadium at one point, but between the economy going south and having it still be on the St. Pete side of the bay, the concept didn’t go very far beyond the drawing board.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rays_Ballpark
One of the handful of things that are good about an economic downturn, I guess.
Agreed. Personally I’m hoping for the Rays to move to Tampa and a Double A team would move into a renovated Al Lang, but I’m dreaming.
Oh man Al Lang Field…so much history there. My favorite spring training park even though the current grandstand is a late 70′s concrete mold. I don’t really understand why the Rays decided to move Spring Training to Port Charlotte. They claimed regionalization, but it was really cool to have a team training in their own backyard. That part of downtown along with the pier was very interesting and enjoyable the couple of times we were there.
Even spring training stadia have created an obscene revenue producing model. See: The Phillies Complex in Clearwater.
Not for nothing, but Silver Stadium was very close to the 104 Expressway.
What happened to Silver is best summarized by Gary Jarvis of minorleagueballparks.com when he said:
“What’s Not So Good: Nothing. Sure, plenty of people (most of them with a financial interest in the team or the new ballpark) claimed all kind of things were wrong with Silver, but they weren’t necessarily true. Complaints I am aware of included “it’s economically obsolete” (translation: there are no skyboxes) and “it’s in a declining neighborhood” (translation: there are minorities living near the ballpark, and suburbanites are fearful).”
http://www.minorleagueballparks.com/silv_ny.html
I never made it to Silver as I came to Rochester over 2 years after its demise, but I visit the grounds each year on the occasion of Northeast Clean Sweep. The ticket and team offices still stand and are a N.E.T. office now.
Some tremendous Silver Stadium photos from over the years can be found here:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~rochballparks2/rochester/silver.htm
Can you believe the entire place was basically rebuilt in 1987 and they still scrapped it within 10 years?
It was (mostly) about the parking, or perceived lack thereof, since the Red Wings couldn’t control the parking in all the churches and private lots in that part of town, while they could keep more of the money downtown (kind of like one of the prime arguments for scrapping the Auditorium Theater, but that’s for another day). That being said, I’m glad that the Red Wings found a way to make the Frontier Field site work out, since the other option (390 and Ridgeway area) would have been a train wreck for them from both a fan standpoint and from how the stadium would benefit the region.