People are here to hear you talk about kauffman stadium. Have you talked to the audience about who you are and what you have done prior to writing about ballparks, which is a long story . Paul i have spent most of my life i have been lucky because i have spent my life about what interests me, but i guess so have you. Whitney i try. What pisses me off. Paul whether it pisses you off or you like it. I have already i have always loved architecture and journalism and i am not very good at making choices. I have found a place where the two of them intersect. Whitney did you study architecture . Paul i studied architectural history. I went to yale, a place where those of you went to princeton do not always acknowledge. Whitney i heard about it. In connecticut . Paul a place called connecticut. I studied architectural history. I then began a career as a journalist. I toyed with going to architecture school. I thought the world had enough second rate architects and did not need another. I did think i was a pretty decent writer. I went that route. Whitney what was that like working at the new yorker . Paul that was the Second Chapter of my career. I started at the New York Times. Whitney we can talk about either one. What is the difference between working at the times and the new yorker . Paul two great institutions. The difference the New York Times is like a huge university. It does everything and has amazing people and a huge range, but not everybody is necessarily whitney there are some stoners. Paul right. Exactly. It is sort of a mixed bag. Everyone is at a certain level but not necessarily the most amazing. The new yorker was like a Small Liberal Arts College where everybody was as good as the best people in the big university. That is how it felt for me when i went from one to the other. I had a great time there. Whitney did you have an office in the old building . Paul i moved over in the late 1990s when they were on 43rd street. I was in the second old building. They had moved the murals. Whitney maybe you can tell everyone about that. Paul a cartoonist famously started drawing on the walls. They were kept as a sacred object. When the new yorker emerged across the street, they managed to cut it out of the wall and take it across the street. The new yorker was bought by the newhouse family, which owned conde nast, the Magazine Company. For several years, they allowed it to operate as a separate entity. And then gradually, they started folding it into the rest of the Magazine Company to save money on back office stuff and accounting. And then it moved into the headquarters of conde nast and became not quite just another egg is in but not quite as special. I have been to the offices in the replacement of the world trade center. One of the things i loved was the research you did into the earliest ballparks and how emphatic you are that baseball is an urban game. Not a game played in iowa cornfields. Paul despite field of dreams, which is everyones favorite tearjerker. It is not an accurate statement of what baseball has been about. An urban this westerner midwesterner, so i am fine about that fine with that. The beginnings maybe specifically a new york game. You talked about how they were 100 baseball teams in Brooklyn New York by 1858. Paul new york was a huge center of baseball. It was a game that in the early years really grew big in a lot of the both northeastern and midwestern industrial cities. It was played a lot by workingclass immigrants. Whitney yeah. Paul brooklyn had all of these teams. They were sometimes made up of men from within a few blocks of a residential area or sometimes they were connected with a factory. And they all played each other. Whitney these early chapters, which to me was totally new information that i love to her what i love. It was connected with the population growth of brooklyn. You talked about how brooklyn was 25,000 people in 1835. There were 200,000 by 1855. Half of them are immigrants. It is interesting to me how you talk about the connection between immigrants and this american pastime that is so important to us now. Paul absolutely. One of the other things that was fascinating to me as well, so much of the game was built on immigrant laborers, but immigrant players. Early years, it transitioned into being a spectator sport, but it did not start out that way. It started as a thing people played. It got more and more organized. People started going to see it. A lot of the early games of the new york teams played across the hudson river in hoboken on a field that was called elysian field. But then, whitney you mentioned they played a lot of games in Madison Square. I was like, that is where Madison Square garden is. Paul no. The first Madison Square garden was at Madison Square. They moved away because development was coming up around it. I talk a lot in the book, the theme of the book is how baseball is a city game. Playedeless attend to be it tend to be played on the outskirts because even in those 19th century years, land was cheap, cities were developing really fast. You did not put a ballfield in the center of the Business District next to the bank. You needed more land. It was too expensive. They would be on the edge, but the cities were growing so fast that those parcels of land were often surrounded by development and became in the center of a neighborhood. Fenway park is a good example. Whitney and we are going to get to that. I have never been there, but you are going to tell me all about it. Speaking of immigrants, you have some interesting facts we talk about the bifurcated world of baseball. In your book, one half of this world is separated by a german immigrant who bought the st. Louis browns in the 1880s. Could you introduce him . Paul this is a great story. It is a missouri story even though it is the other side of the state. He was a german immigrant, a tavern owner. Whitney go ahead. He had a beer station in the outfield. Paul he thought it would be a great way to sell more beer. He opened up a branch of his tavern. Whitney the balls could role in among the chairs. A little beer garden in the outfield that would be a branch of his tavern from down the street. He was good at Cross Marketing because he also had the waiters in the actual tavern dressed up in browns uniforms. He was pushing both directions. He had a lot of other things to entertain people. He billed the ballpark as the coney island of the west. It was all about entertainment. If we think there is too much distraction in ballparks today, it has a long history. Whitney but he was like a workingclass he wanted a workingclass audience. He kept ticket prices down to a quarter. He served beer. He did all this other stuff. Paul it was all about entertaining the workingclass. Likeey and that was American League sort of event. Paul he was part of a group of teams that were officially called the American Association. It was colloquially known as the beer and Whiskey League. Whitney that is the league i want to be in. Paul the beer and Whiskey League was the coolest thing. Their opposite number was the National League. The American Association is not the root of todays American League. The National League is the root. It started out trying to push baseball in the opposite direction. It was all about making it more whitney presbyterian. Paul presbyterian, a good word. Exclusive, virtuous. There was no baseball played on sunday. There was no alcohol served in any of the ballparks. It was all about how baseball represents virtue and uprightness and every noble thing in the american character. But a lot of those things were code words for a certain kind of elitism. In keeping out the riffraff and so forth. They would allow the riffraff in where they could make money from them. In many of the ballparks, particularly the National League ones, there was a very rigid economic segregation. The bleachers were completely separate from the rest of the ballpark. You could not walk from a cheap seat into the grandstand area. You had a separate entrance, separate bathrooms. It was a very rigid economic segregation. Some of that, to be fair, was kind of the weird way people did things in those days. The old Metropolitan Opera House in new york, which was built in 1883, around the time baseball was getting bigger and bigger and a lot of the stuff we are talking about was happening, the upper balcony, the cheapest seats were called the family circle. You entered them from a separate door on the street through their own lobby and their own staircase. It never connected to the main lobby so the fancy people did not have to mix with the poor people upstairs. There was a kind of expectation of economic segregation in those days that was considered strangely normal by both sides of the equation for a a while. Avatars for that, we know in kansas city, i think it comes from chicago. William hobart who owned the Chicago White sox. Paul he was the founder of the National League. Whitney and albert spalding. Paul he founded spalding sportinggoods. They were the great advocates of the National League and virtue and and the kind of mythology that led to ultimately field of dreams and stuff like that. Whitney you have some of his writing in the book. He was wildly over the top about character and manhood. Whitney all that virtual stuff virtuous stuff. Paul it also led to what was later revealed to be an entirely and completely fake history of the origins of baseball. The National League commissioned a study or all of Major League Baseball studied commission on the history of baseball that determined it was invented by this man named Abner Doubleday on a field in rural cooperstown, new york. Baseball was started and subsequently started. That was basically a fiction created to further this myth of rural virtue because cities were considered dirty and messy and full of immigrants and all that. This noble game could not possibly have had its roots there. So they devise this history. It carried the day enough to get the hall of fame built in cooperstown. Even the hall of fame itself has acknowledged that it was pretty much made up. Whitney what is thought to be the actual origins . I do not know. Paul there is a wonderful guy named john thorne who is a fantastic writer who is the official historian of Major League Baseball who wrote a book called, baseball in the garden of eden. It traces the early years of how the game itself developed. In fact, it developed from many games, some of which are english games like not only cricket but rounders. There were different versions played in different areas. A lot of it was in new england. Whitney there is no James Naismith. Paul there is no single moment like James Naismith with basketball. Then it all gradually came together and got more and more popular. There was one set of rules played in new york and another in boston. At one point the game became more and more common and more and more popular and intercity games began to be played, there was a kind of summit meeting and they actually brought together representatives of teams from various cities into new york. They agreed on codifying a set of rules. If i remember correctly, i think the number of innings was not nine everywhere. Certain other key things. Different versions were played differently. Beginning in the mid19th century onward, those things were more codified. Whitney all right. There is a section in your book after the part we are talking about which you call the golden age. I want to talk about that. Why when did the golden age of american ballparks arrive and why was it golden . Paul i guess i should say first there was an age before the golden age. As things were getting bigger and baseball was becoming more popular and a spectator sport, the fields with a few seats became more elaborate. The construction became more elaborate. Whitney and started burning down. Paul and started burning down. The most elaborate was this amazing thing in boston called south end grounds that had these huge victorian towers. Whitney a beautiful picture of that in the book. Paul it only lasted Something Like eight or nine years and it burned down. The owners had underinsured it so they could not afford to rebuild it. But then as fireproof construction became possible, steel, concrete, they began to be built that way. And baseball was becoming bigger. It was other than a little bit of boxing, it was essentially our only professional sport in this country. Another thing let me digress for half a second to say that another thing that contributed to its growth and this is another wonderful reminder of how baseball connects to everything was the development of intercity train service. It was when there were train connections between various cities that the leagues really developed and professional baseball whitney meaning they could travel to places. Paul a team in brooklyn could really only play another team in brooklyn or maybe across the river in new york. You cannot really play a team in chicago and it was going to take three or four days to get there. You could not have a reliable schedule. Once there was intercity train service, everything began to fall into place and real modern baseball developed. At the same token, just jump ahead, it was only at the moment of jet travel permitting fast coasttocoast travel in this country that baseball, Major League Baseball, expanded to california. It is not an accident those things coincided. Whitney these classic stadiums most of these will be familiar. Ebbets field. We know about wrigley in chicago. Shyde park. Paul i wish i brought pictures because shyde park is incredible. Shyde park was 1909. It was one of the earliest of the golden age. One of the most ornate. It was like an elaborate beauxarts building on the outside. Then you go through this huge rotunda and you are in the field. As you saw it from the other side, it was just a field. The homew it from plate side, you could have thought it was an upper house. That was an incredibly important moment in the evolution of this. And then of course came forbes field in pittsburgh. And then fenway, tiger stadium, wrigley. Whitney which of those is the greatest . What are your standards of judgment . You do develop a clear way of thinking. Maybe you could explain that to people, like what you think is good. Paul it is a combination of things. First, on the exterior, is it a nice piece of civic architecture that feels at home in the city . As if it belongs in a city and enriches a city. Because a ballpark, other things is an important part of public space. Along with parks we were beginning to develop in the mid19th century and even cemeteries, the ballpark was one of the ways in which workingclass immigrants or workingclass people in general could experience some bit of the countryside. If you worked in factory, you probably worked six days a week, had nothing but sundays off. You had no way to go to the country. Going to the ballpark was one of the experiences you could have. That is another reason the National Leagues ban on sunday games had a whole other agenda. It was about keeping immigrants out. It was the only day they could go for many of them. There is also the field itself and the seating and how close you felt to the action. How well you saw it. The way in which the whole thing worked together as a kind of communal space. Whitney one of the things that is remarkable to me of these fields, i have been to fenway. I have jogged around wrigley. It is amazing to me how much it fits into the neighborhood it is in. It does not feel over imposing. It is right there. I expected it to be a big deal. I was like, it is a building. Paul exactly. You have this enormous thing that seats 40,000 people. And yet, it sits there with all these houses around it. It all seems absolutely normal. You put it very well by saying that. Probably although i never saw it, ebbets field was the best of all. Whitney it is so legendary because it was lost. Paul partly. A lot of important history happened there. Whitney does everybody know what ebbets field is . Paul majorleague baseball was integrated because Jackie Robinson let the record show seen by the dodgers when he played for the negro league in kansas city. He was signed in kansas city to come to brooklyn and play for the dodgers in the 40s. Kansas city plays an Important Role in that history. I think it was probably the very best. Both because of its history and its physical qualities. Whitney that is the one where there are funny things where they screw things up. Is that the one where they had only one entrance . Paul it was a rotunda and it was designed too small. Whitney you could not get in. Paul it would never pass the fire loss today in terms of people getting out. They made some tweaks. They also forgot a pressbox, which is interesting. All of that eventually got taken care of. The early ballparks, while they were grand and beautiful buildings, also were creatures of circumstance. Their shapes were determined by the streets of the neighborhood or by how much land the owners could buy. Griffith in washington, d. C. Had an amazing notch cut out of right field because there were two houses that would not sell. They shaped it around. It was far enough out. Whitney like that bugs bunny cartoon where he refuses to sell his house. Paul right. The most famous example is the Green Monster at fenway, which has to do with the way a street cut close to the edge of the site and could not allow the field as much space in left field as in right field. That asymmetry and difference and idiosyncrasy is a key part of baseball and baseball history. Unlike a hockey rink or a basketball whitney that is like your thesis. Paul the diamond is exact and precise. The outfield varies. There are kind of no rules about the outfield. Theoretically, it could go on forever. Whitney like the polo grounds. Paul it was so far. There are no absolute rules. Whitney all of those parks had their idiosyncrasies and were strange as you mentioned. As the book progresses, we enter what i call the Empire Strikes back period of baseball stadiums, which you call the era of concrete donuts beginning in the 1950s. Can you set that up . Paul you just said all that needs to be said. Another part of the thesis of the book is that baseball reflects our whole cultural attitude about cities over the years. As we were everywhere in this country pretty much rejecting cities and moving out wherever the automobile would take us in the postwar era, we started moving baseball out too. Whitney clevelands mistake by the lake. Is that part of that . Paul clevelands mistake by the lake is almost in category by itself. It was built in the late 1930s. What it actually did it is actually the beginning of a very pernicious trend which was municipal financing of stadiums which nobody else was doing then and cleveland just decided to do it. It opened a lot of bad doors. It was not a good stadium because it was far too big. It was bad on so many levels. Whitney it led to one great movie, which i just recently watched with my son. Majorleague holds up. What are other concrete donuts that were the most egregious offenders . Paul probably rfk in washington, Veterans Stadium in philadelphia. Three rivers in pittsburgh. Candlestick in San Francisco. Truly horrible place. There were plenty of others. Even worse was the later part of that generation when they foolishly thought that the way to solve the problems of those things was to put roofs on them so we got things like the king dome in seattle, which is truly the worst place in which i have ever seen a baseball game in my life. And many others. That was a grim time. It was also based on a myth i am talking a lot about myths tonight. Whitney baseball is about myth. Paul there are good myths and bad myths. Maybe i should have said fallacy. The fallacy that you can have football and baseball in the same ballpark. You cannot without compromising both of them a lot. Whitney here is where we come off looking semidecent. Or even better than that. We did not do this. Paul kansas city was the only smart city in america in the 1970s actually in that it is the only place other than l. A. Where Dodger Stadium was built for baseball only. In the postwar era for several decades, only Dodger Stadium and arrowhead and kaufman were built as baseball only places. Everybody else thought you could do it all in the same stadium. We got this whole generation of truly horrible places. Whitney you are very complementary of the architecture. You point out that one of the things it does not do is be a irregular the irregular. What are the things that you think are good about kaufman . Paul i am mixed about it. The first thing that has to be said as it was built as a baseball park, not a multipurpose stadium. Kansas city deserves credit for making that decision. And then, there is a beautiful lyrical flow to the way the walls curve down. It is quite lovely, really. If you see it from the home plate side, it looks a little more like a big concrete stadium. Whitney outside of it. Paul they have done a lot of work on it in the last generation when the team decided to stay there. I think it is more comfortable in some ways than it was before. The nicest thing is the lyrical thing in the outfield. And then the waterfall and the scoreboard and all that stuff, which is kind of a cool relic of a certain mid century style that i like a lot. Even though i like it, i do not like it so much i would argue against a downtown stadium. Whitney we are getting there. I would love there to be a downtown stadium. I have a couple of steps want to leave you to. One of them is the next thing that happened was camden yards. You spent a lot of time talking about camden yards. Paul camden yards was transformational. Whitney everybody is familiar with this in baltimore . How many people have been to camden yards . A lot. Paul the Baltimore Orioles completely changed baseball in 1992 with the opening of that ballpark. Sad we kickedou their ass in the playoffs . Paul unfortunately, good architecture is not a guarantee of good baseball. That is a whole other discussion. Every building type evolves a certain amount. Libraries, hospitals, schools, houses. Everything changes over time. Baseball parks is the only example i can think of where one single building completely turned around a whole way of building things 180 degrees. Whitney everybody started building downtown after that. Paul most built downtown. Everybody started building baseball only and fairly traditional in layout, often more eccentric and idiosyncratic, which it very much is. Is pack taile part, my wife is from San Francisco. Being able to hit a homerun into the ocean is awesome. Paul San Francisco went from having one of the worst ballparks to one of the best. Leaping over everyone else in one fell swoop. Camden yards was transformational. It really was. Whitney is that an hok stadium . Paul it is an hok stadium. Designed out of kansas city. Whitney so we have this Amazing Design firm and this long tradition. You are very emphatic about how important it has been. Im going to quote you. By happenstance, kansas city became the Nations Center for sports architecture from the last quartercentury to onward. Many of the architectural designs for sports facilities all over the world would emerge from this mediumsized midwest city that otherwise had no claim as an architectural center. Elaborate. How did this happen . Is this good . Why did they get all that business . Paul it kind of goes back to the arrowhead kaufman complex. When that was originally done, the basic idea is done by an architect named Charles Deaton who came up with this notion of a rolling roof. Whitney we talk about all the time. Paul that would sit in between the two stadiums and could roll in one direction or the other depending on which one was in use. When it was not in use on either one, it would be in the center and create a covered plaza. That was the early 1970s when no one was doing anything remotely like that. It was quite visionary. Everybody said this is really cool. They started building it and then discovered not only was the technology not fully there to do it easily, but it was going to be quite a bit more expensive than the county had anticipated. It was engineered out. By then, they had already begun to build the two separate stadiums so they kept going. Charles deaton ended up working for a local firm which then merged with another firm. It got so much attention that they started getting other jobs to do ballparks and other athletic facilities. They attracted the attention of hok, which is an enormous International Firm that happens to be st. Louisbased that was not strong in sports architecture. They said, why dont you let us buy you and become part of us . We will be sports architects. You guys can keep doing it. Several of the architects said ok. They became the Sports Division of hok but set the condition they would remain in kansas city. They were smart, aggressive and got an enormous amount of work. And just kept growing. There are not all that many ballparks and arenas in football stadiums that get built. It is not as though unlike houses and schools it is not as though we need 100 different Architecture Firms doing them. 90 of them would be out of work most of the time. It is small and specialized. They were able to say to clients, we know how all this stuff works. Indeed they do. That firm over the years eventually broke away from the parent firm hok and then changed its name to populace. They are still across the street. Their success made kansas city as i said, the world capital. Sports architecture is one of the major exports of kansas city. Whitney we are going to open this up for questions in just one second. Im going to try to end this at 7 30 so you can have paul sign books for you. Now is the time when i want you to talk about the downtown stadium in kansas city that we should have built. Paul i think it would be awfully hard for kansas city to not have whitney lets get that firm from denver. Paul there are a couple of other people doing stuff. The rather interesting and talented new york architect is doing the new ballpark for oakland, which is one of the most interesting and promising projects around. Populace has done some wonderful stuff including the ballpark that i think is my very favorite among relatively recent ones, which is pnc in pittsburgh, as well as camden yards, San Francisco, which is fantastic and quite a number of others. It would be hard to imagine that the team would not select the local architect given that the local architect also happens to be the most famous sports Architecture Firm in the world. It is not like they would say, these are just local guys. We better go to some big guys from new york and chicago when the biggest people happen to be the local people. The big question about a downtown ballpark is not who the architect would be but precisely where the site should be and how it would be paid for. For me, there is no question it is the right thing for kansas city to do. The thing that is least appealing about kaufman is the location. Whitney there never was any Economic Development around the stadium. Paul kind of a nowhere place. You have to drive to and from it. It is surrounded by a sea of asphalt parking spaces. It is not connected to anything. What we have seen in the years since baltimore is how beautifully baseball integrates into a whole urban fabric. People want that. They like it. They love being able to walk or take a streetcar to a game. They love being able to have something to eat, drink, go to other places, combine it with other things. Whitney a lot of those things were available at the old metropolitan stadium, which i never saw. Paul 22nd in brooklyn. Whitney that was the site of baseball stadiums in kansas city up until the 1970s. The chiefs played there the last time they won the super bowl. Paul the chiefs were playing their. Underscoring the point that a good ballpark is not going to work for football. Municipal stadium was so much a baseball park. So completely and so good a baseball park that to make it work for football, they had to put huge rows of temporary seating into the outfield on one side. As a result of that, the chiefs could not play any home games for the first month of the season. Whitney that is sad. Paul they had to wait for the baseball season to end before they could actually convert it to football use because it was so much of a natural baseball park. Whitney this is part of what your book is about. If you have a question, step up to the microphone. Now is the time. Walk right up here. My dad has told me stories about going to that stadium when the as were leaving and nobody was there. And getting a whole pile of foul balls. He would run around and pick them up. Here we have our questioners. I am from chicago, but have been here 10 years. Im fully behind the local team. How much would you say the longevity of Wrigley Field and fenway park has to do with their locations . I know that [indiscernible] stravinsky park closed. That was traumatic for a lot of white sox fans. The locations are sewn into the neighborhood. Paul completely. It is a lot of different historical circumstances that led those ballparks to be retained. We almost lost fenway. The red sox under the previous ownership were working on plans to replace it. And then, the team there is no certainty what would have happened but ultimately, they sold the team. The subsequent ownership decided that was crazy and they had a great asset. If they could only upgrade and whichize a little bit , turned out to be the case. Chicago is beautifully integrated into the neighborhood. It remains one of the most beloved places there is. On the other hand, so are other places we were not lucky enough to keep. It is ironic that ebbets field in brooklyn was lost. It could be spectacular today. It went in the 1950s partly because nobody cared about brooklyn and the fan base had moved to the suburbs. Today, Everyone Wants to be in brooklyn. If it had a ballpark that was even better than wrigley and fenway, it would probably be the nicest place of all. It is always many factors. Location is a big part of it. I know about the multipurpose ands like pittsburgh cincinnati. They knocked those downs and built separate baseball and football stadiums. Here, we already have separate stadiums. If we were to build the ballpark downtown, with day would hey necessarily follow with football or would they leave arrowhead where it is . I am quite sure they would leave arrowhead where it is. My understanding is the chiefs what actually wanted to acquire kaufman as a practice field. They would use it as a turn it into a practice field . But theyth seating, would use it as a practice field. That is one reason. The other is that football does not fit downtown the way baseball does. Football, you want a huge parking lot. Paul there are several reasons and tailgating is a very important one of those reasons. It is part of a culture of football. People do tailgate, you need a parking lot and so forth. Also, a football stadium is invariably bigger. Therefore, i think a little more intrusive in city. A baseball park it is hardly small. It is just enough smaller that it fits into a city nicely. The final reason that maybe is the most important, a football stadium is used eight times a year. A baseball park is used at a minimum 81 times as year. That is 10 times as often. The thing that kills a city is dead things that are not operating. It is enough that we have every city needs a convention center, but they are big boxes that are empty often. We do not want another big empty thing. My strong argument would be, leave arrowhead where it is. Let them take over the whole complex and move the royals into downtown. Whenever i see the proposals for a downtown ballpark, there are the negative comments, what will people do for parking . Paul they will figure it out. San francisco has minimal parking and it seems to work. Most of them do. Youre going to have more and more People Living downtown and more and more people will walk or they will park in outlying areas or have a shuttle. It will work. What has worked so well in a dozen or more other cities including houston, which is one of the most automobile centric cities in the world and they moved from the astrodome into downtown and it worked. It would work here too. In your book, you argue the hok original design for camden was going to be another concrete dome. Without the pushback of jacob smith, would we have had a proliferation of concrete domes . Paul that is an interesting question. It is definitely true the first scheme hok presented to the orioles it was not a dome, but it was a more traditional concrete open stadium. The owner of the orioles said to me, i think what they did was run to chicago and give that to the white sox. The new Kaminski Park looked a lot like what they tried to sell. It opened the year before. It is possible given that it did take longer to build the baltimore one. But then they got it. They produced something quite wonderful. If that had not happened, somewhere, Something Else would have happened because we were beginning to experience a huge resurgence of downtown living, downtown working, Downtown Entertainment and so forth. It might not have happened in baltimore in 1992. It could have happened in another city five years later. Some other team would have said at some point, we do not want a concrete donut that looks like a freeway overpass. We want a real baseball park. Architects would have ultimately i think responded. We will never know 100 because what happened happened. The customer did not want the product. Paul in all of architecture, what clients want matters. One of the things the people at populace are proudest of is that they serve their clients. They do what their clients want. They had a very enlightened client who wanted something important. To the point about downtown revivals, which is happening anyway, it would have made its way into baseball somewhere. It is one of the reasons i feel for kansas city. Maybe it is just as well it did not happen 15 years ago when there was a minor push to move the royals downtown. I do not know that Downtown Kansas City was truly ready for it yet. We might have expected or you might have expected too much from a ballpark. It cannot alone turn around a downtown. What it can do is be a fantastic reinforcement of a larger revival and make it Even Stronger and push it forward even more and connect all the other things happening. Today as opposed to 15 years ago, there are so many more People Living in Downtown Kansas City. There are more people working. There are whole new neighborhoods that are developing. The whole momentum of the city is more focused downtown than it used to be. In fact, now, it would not be on the shoulders of a ballpark to turn around a downtown, which it would not have succeeded in doing anyway. Whitney we have time for two more questions. I am the white sox guy. I was curious, your impression of the old kaminski. And that monstrosity of the new kaminski. Paul i agree with you. It is the last of the concrete donuts. It opened one year before camden yards and baltimore changed everything. It was out of date the minute it opened. It is a sort of sad story. I gather that a few years ago, they did some changes that people say made it a little better. I think a better way to put it, it made it a little less awful. The best comment about it was from a really perceptive writer named john who is another architecture writer who loves baseball. He calculated that the front row of the upper deck is farther from the field than the old upper deck in the old one. So much about baseball is about intimacy and, how can you maneuver things so the greatest number of people are the closest to the field and the most connected to the field, which is another important thing that baltimore did. They thought of that. Many of the concrete donuts are truly just circles that were about this abstract shape of a big circle. You can put a diamond in it. Could put a football gridiron in it. It could all be plumped into a circle. It does not work for baseball. Very briefly, the good and bad of the old kaminski . Paul the old kaminski i thought was funky and nice. It did not have quite the truly beautiful appeal of wrigley uptown. It did not have the magic of the brick wall and the ivy and that stuff. It did not integrate into the neighborhood as well. It was a wonderful ballpark. The best of those early generations of ballparks were among the only buildings ever built that combined funkiness and monumentality. Two things that are almost always mutually exclusive in architecture. That one exemplified that. It was something grand and funky about it at the same time. I found it very likable, but not lovable as wrigley was always lovable. It was still 100 times better than the new one. Whitney you get the last word. Lucky me. I was going to say, i agree with you on everything, actually. Paul even my wife does not agree with me on everything. I am better than she is. Im all for downtown development. I lived in kansas city and watched it grow over the years. I would love to have a stadium downtown. We have this one cultural part of our city that has made me not like other towns because we are from the midwest and into cattle and barbecue. You talk about football being tailgating. But here, tailgating is a really big part of baseball. I wonder how the general public that goes to those games and tailgates and they spend hours setting up their tailgates for the royals baseball games and it may not be as big as for the chiefs. Paul it is an interesting question. I do not have an answer to that. I would say the tailgates at the royal stadium, and i have been a ticketholder for many years. Im going to defer to the local on this, actually. Look, i am not a tailgater. I prefer to go to a restaurant, but i know there are a lot of people who tailgate. Paul i defer to the local. I said at the talk of the Downtown Council this morning that any city that is big enough to contain both Arthur Bryant and the Nelson Atkins museum has to be more interesting than most cities in america. I still believe that. Do your barbecue some other time. [laughter] thank you. Whitney thank you. Could we give a round of applause . [applause] 1920, tennessee became the 36 and last state needed to ratify the 19th minute, granting women the right to vote. On sunday, august 16 at 8 00, American History tv and washington journal mark the 100th anniversary of womens suffrage. The author of the womens hour, the great fight to win the vote, joins us to take calls and tweet during the live program, looking at the fight to win the vote. The amendments ratification and its legacy. Tv onrican history cspan3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Sunday, the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of nagasaki, japan after the bombing of hiroshima. American history tv and washington journal will look back at how the bombings ended world war ii and the aftermath. Downfall, and a professor at american universitys Nuclear Studies institute, we will take your calls, facebook questions and tweets. At 4 00 p. M. Eastern, the 1946 film, effects of the atomic bomb on here oshima and nagasaki and documented the origins of hiroshimas peace park. And then at 8 00 p. M. Eastern, the 75th anniversary of the potsdam conference where the president harry truman informed churchill of england and stalin of the soviet union about the new u. S. Super weapon. Exploring the american story, watch American History tv this weekend on cspan3. Next on the presidency, a conversation about portraying Abraham Lincoln on the stage. Force theater director Paul Tetreault talks with richard playsen, the writer of a about the meeting between Abraham Lincoln and frederick douglass. They are joined by actors Craig Wallace and david selby. Fords theater provided this video. Today, we are happy to welcome playwright Richard Hellesen and actors david selby and Craig Wallace. All of these men have either appeared on the ford stage or created works that appeared on the ford stage too many times to count. So we are thrilled to have them with us today. Id also like to say we have been watching demonstrations unfold in our neighborhoods and