He explores the relationship between American Cities and the youth of baseball looking at the changing architecture and loeks of ballparks over the years and what those reveal about society and culture at large. The Kansas City Public Library hosted this event and provided the video. Thanks. I want to thank the library for putting on this event. Library board. Jonathan kemper and staff who worked with us. Steve, she mention ed as well. The library is a fan tas ik institution. Were very lucky to have it. Look at this awesome auditorium. So, speaking of great public spaces, this is one. Yes, yes. All right, paul. Libraries involve parks. Two most important things in the city, right . Youve had this incredibly distinguished career as an architectural critic, people are really here to hear you talk about kaufman stadium. Have you talked to the audience what who you are and what youve done prior to write iing about ballparks, which is a long story. Well get some of it any way. No, i spent most of my life. Ive been very lucky because i spent my life write iing about t interests me, but so have you. I try, or what pisses me off. What it pisses you off or your like it. Ive always loved journalism and im not good at making choices so i found a place where the two intersect. Ive spent most of my life writing about ark tchitecture. Sxwl did you study snit. Architectural history. I went to yale. A place that those of you who went to princeton, dont always acknowledge. I heard about it. Its a little school. Little to the north in a place called connecticut. And studied architectural history. Then began a career as a journalist. I thought the world had enough architects, didnt need another. I thought i was a decent writer so i went that route. What was it like working as a, at the new yorker . Second chapter of my career. I started at the New York Times then went to the new yorker. Whats the difference between the two . Those are two great jobs. Two great institutions in many ways. 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 you know stoners. Exactly. Sort of a mixed bag. Everybodys at a certain level, obviously, but not necessarily the most amazing. The new yorker was like a Small Liberal Arts College that where everybody was as good as the best people in the big university. Thats how it sort of felt to me when i went from one to the other. I had great time there. Did you office in the old new yorker building . I moved over there in the late 90s when they were still on 43rd street. Murals. I was in the second old building. Maybe you could tell everyone about that. James thurber, the cartoonist, famously started drawing on the walls and they were kept as this almost kind of sacred object then when the new yorker moved across the street, they managed to cut out a piece of the wall and take it across the street to the new yorker. New architecture. Right. And then the new yorker was bought by the new house family which owned conde naste. For several years, they allowed it to operate as a separate entity then gradually, they started folding it into the rest of the Magazine Company to save money on you know, back office stuff and accounting and the other stuff. Then it moved into the headquarters of conde nast and became not quite just another magazine. Ive been to the offices that are down in the replacement of the World Trade Center. Yeah, the World Trade Center where theyve now been for a few year, yeah. One of the things i love d about ballpark was the research you did into the earliest ballparks and how emphatic you are that its an urban game. Not a game played in iowa corn fields. Despite field of dreams, which is everybodys favorite tear jerker, but its not an accurate statement of what baseball has been about. Im an urban mid westerner, so im fine with that. The beginnings of it, maybe even specifically a new york game. You talk about this that according to some historians, they were nearly 100 baseball teams in brooklyn and new york by 1858. New york was a huge center of baseball. Not the only one, but a huge one. It was a a game in the early years that really grew big in a lot of the both northeastern and midwe midwest earn cities and it was play ed a lot by working class immigrants. And brooklyn had all these teams. They were sometimes made up of men from within a a few block residential area or sometimes they were connected with a factory or Something Like that. And they all play ed each other. These early chapters in the book were totally new information. And i didnt know it all that i love and i think people will love when they read the book. And that growth of brooklyn specifically. You talk about brooklyn was 25,000 people in 1835. 200,000 by 1855. Half of them were immigrants. Were in an immigrantphobic time and its interesting the way you talk about the connection of immigrants and this american past time that is so important to us now. Absolutely. One of the things that was fascinating to me when i read it because i hadnt known as much about it as i do now. So much of the game was built on to say on built immigrant labor makes it players. Immigrant players. Exactly. And in the early years it was also, it transitioned into building a spectator sport but i didnt start out that way. It started out as a thing people played and it got more and more organized and people started going to see it and a lot of the early games the new york teams played in across the hudson river in hoboken in a field that was called illusion field. Yeah. But then and you mentioned theres one part in the book you talk, they played a lot of games in Madison Square because its an open space and i was the first Madison Square garden was at Madison Square. The one that is there now is the third. But they moved away because in fact development was coming up all around it. And it was too hard. While i talk a lot in the book, in the theme in the book is how baseball is more of a city game. Nevertheless it was it tended to be played kind of on the outskirts because even in 19th century years, they were growing and you didnt put a ball field in the center of the Business District next to the bank. You needed more land and it was too expensive. So they would be on the edge but the cities were growing so fast that those parcels of land were often then surrounded by development and became in the center of a neighborhood. Fenway park is a good example of that. And were going to get to that. Youre going to tell me all about it. Speaking of immigrants, you have interesting passages where you talk about bifurcated spectators. Onehalf of this world is represented by a german immigrant who bought the st. Louis browns in the 1880s. Could you introduce people to him. Its a great story. This is a missouri story even though its the other side of the state. Chris was a german immigrant, a tavern owner im sorry. Go ahead. I interrupted you. He had a beer station in the outfield of he bought the st. Louis browns because he thought it would be a good way to sell more beer. He opened up a branch of his tavern. The balls would roll in among the chairs. And then he had he was good at Cross Marketing because he also had the waiters in the actual tavern dressed up in browns uniforms. So he was pushing both directions. Talk to the new royals ownership about putting a bar in there. And he billed sportsman park as the coney island of the west. And it was all about entertainment. So, you know, if we think that theres too much distraction in ballparks today, it has a long history. But he was like a working class he wanted a workingclass audience. He kept ticket prices down to a quarter. He served beer to draw in it was all about entertaining the working class. That was American League sort of it was something he was part of a group of teens that were officially called the American Association. Right. It was known as the beer and whisky league. And thats the league i wanted to be in. It was the cool thing, clearly. And it was their opposite number was the National League. Talk about those guys. The American Association is not the root of todays American League. But the National League is the root of todays National League. And it started out trying to make push baseball in the opposite direction. It was all about making it for presbyterian, exclusive. There was no baseball played on sunday. There was no alcohol served in any of the ballparks. And 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 actually code words for a certain kind of elitism. And keeping out the working class. They would allow the riffraff in where they could make money from them. But in fact in many of the ballparks then, particularly the National League ones, there was a very rigid economic segregation. The bleachers were completely separate from the rest of the ballpark. You couldnt walk from a cheap seat into the grand stand area. You had a separate entrance, bathrooms and so forth. It was a very rigid economic segregation. But some of that, you know, 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 1983 around the time that baseball was getting bigger and bigger and a lot of the various stuff that were talking about was happening, the upper balcony were called the Family Circle and you entered them from a separate door on the street through their own lobby and their own staircase and it never connected to the main lobby so that the fancy people didnt have to mix with the poor people upstairs. So 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 while. Your avatars for that we know in kansas city that chicago nothing good comes from chicago. William holebert he was the founder of the National League. And spaulding. They were the great, you know, advocates of the National League and virtue and this whole and the kind of mythology that led to ultimately field of dreams and stuff like that. You have some of spauldings writing in the book. He was wildly over the top about american character and nobility and manhood. Yeah, yeah, all that stuff. But 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 sort of study all of major league basketbaeball, a Study Commission on the history of baseball that determined that it was invented by this man named doubleday in cooperstown, new york, which is why the Baseball Hall of fame is in cooperstown. They discovered that that was basically a fiction created to further this myth of kind of rural virtue because cities were considered dirty and messy and full of immigrants and all of that, this noble game could not possibly have really had its roots there. So they devised this history and it carried the day enough to get the hall of fame built in cooperstown but in fact now even the hall of fame itself has acknowledged that it was pretty much made up. What is thought to be the actual origins . Do you know . I dont know. Yeah, theres a wonderful guy named john thorn who is a fantastic writer who is the official historian of Major League Baseball who wrote a book called baseball in the garden of e den and it traces the early years of how baseball developed. And it developed from many games, some of which are english games like not only cricket, but rounders. And there were different versions played in different areas. A lot of it was in new england. No James Naismith moment no. And they tried to pretend doubleday was that, but it apparently wasnt. And it all gradually came together and there was apparently one set of rules played in new york and another in boston and stuff. And at one point as the game became more and more common and more popular and intercity games began to be played, there was a kind of big summit meeting and they actually brought together representatives of teams from various cities into new york and they agreed on codifying a set of rules. The number of innings was not nine everywhere and things like that. And certain other very key things were actually different versions were played differently. Beginning in the 19th century on ya ward, those things were more codified. All right. So theres a section in your book after the part were talking about which you call the golden age. I want to talk a little bit about that. Why when did the golden age of american ballparks arrive and why was it golden in your view . What makes it . The golden age, first, there was an age before the golden age which as things were getting bigger and bigger and baseball was becoming more and more popular and becoming more of a spectator sport, the fields with the few seats became more and more elaborate. They were all built of wood and started building down. And started building down. And the most elaborate of all was this amazing thing in boston called south m grounds that had these huge towers beautiful picture of that in the book. It only lasted eight or nine years and it burned down. And turned out the owners had underinsured it so they couldnt afford to rebuild it. But then as fireproof construction became possible, steel, concrete, and so forth, they began to be build that way and baseball was becoming still bigger. Remember, it was other than a little bit of boxing, it was essentially our own professional sport in this country. And another thing, let me digress for half a second to say that another thing that contributed to its growth, by the way, and this is another wonderful reminder of how baseball connects to everything, was the development of inner city train service. Oh. It was when there were train connections between various cities that the leagues actually really developed and professional baseball they could travel to play somebody else, right . Exactly. A team in brooklyn could really only play another team in brooklyn or maybe across the river in new york. You couldnt play a team in boston or chicago or whatever if it was going to take three or four days to get there and back each time. And you certainly couldnt have a reliable schedule. But once there was inner city train service, then suddenly everything began to fall into place and real modern baseball developed. Sort of by the same token, just to jump ahead, it was only at the moment of jet travel permitting fast coasttocoast travel in this country that Major League Baseball expanded to california. It wasnt there its not an accident those two things coincided. These classic stadiums, most of these will be familiar, but not all of them. Abbotts field, wrigley in chicago, shy park . I wish i brought pictures. It was incredible. There were beautiful pictures in the book these people all have access to that book. It was 1909. It was one of the earliest of the golden age and one of the most ornate, actually. It was it was like an elaborate building on the outside but then you go in through this huge rotunda and youre in a field. As you saw it from the other side, it was just a field. If you saw it from the home plate side, it looked like a monumental building, you could have thought it was an opera house or Something Like that. And that was an incredibly important moment in the evolution of this and then of course came forbes field, fu y fenway which of those are the greatest . What are your standards of judgment. You develop a clear standard way of thinking about ballparks in the book. Maybe you could explain that to people, what you think is good. Its a combination of things, really. First, on the exterior is it a nice piece of civic architecture that feels at home in a city and as if belongs in a city and enriches a city . Because a ballpark among other things is an important part of public space. Its part of a thesis of the book is to say, along with parks that we were beginning to develop the mid19th century and even cemeteries, the ballpark was one of the ways in which working class immigrants or workingclass people in general could experience a bit of the countryside. If you worked in a factory, you probably worked six days a week, had nothing but sundays off. You had no way to go to the country. And going to the ballpark was one of the experiences you could have. Thats another reason the National Leagues ban on sunday games had a whole other agenda. It was about keeping immigrants out of the park because it was the only day they could go, for many of them. Theres also of course the field itself and the seating and how close you felt to the action, how well you saw it, and the way in which the whole thing worked together as a kind of communal space. One of the things that is remarkable to me of these fields, the other one that ive seen, ive never seen a game at wrigley. I stayed near it. Its amazing how much it fits into the neighborhood that its in. It doesnt feel overimposing. Its right there. I was like i expected it to be a big deal. Its just right here. Its a building. Exactly. You have this enormous thing that seats 40,000 people and yet it kind of fits there with all of these houses around it and it all seems absolutely normal. You put it very well i think by saying that. Probably although i never saw it. Abbotts field was the very best of all. Its so legendary because it was lost in essence, right . Partly. A lot of important history happened there it was where the dodgers played and where Major League Baseball was integrated because Jackie Robinson was actually let the record show, seen by the dodgers when he played for the negro league team in kansas city and was signed in kansas city to come to brooklyn and play for the dodgers. Kansas city plays an Important Role in that history. I think it was probably the very best, actually, both because of its history and just its physical qualities you said there are funny things where they screw things up in these parks which i find amusing. Was that the one where they had only one entrance and you couldnt get everyone in the ballpark in time. There was a there was a rotunda and it was designed too small. You couldnt get in. It would never pass the fire laws today in terms of people getting out. They did make some tweaks to fix it over time. But they they also forgot a press box which is sort of interesting. All of that eventually got taken care of. But they were the early ballparks, while they were kind of grand and beautiful buildings, also were kind of creatures of circumstance and they 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. And so they kind of shaped it around. It was far enough out so like that bugs bunny cartoon where he refuses to sell his house . Right. And the most famous example is the Green Monster at fenway which has to do with the way the street right close to the site and could not allow the field as much space in left field as in right field. But that kind of asymmetry is a key part of baseball history. Unlike a hockey rink yeah, thats your thesis here. Every ball field is a little bit different. The diamond is exact and precise. The outfield varies and there are kind of no rules about the outfield. And theoretically, it could go on forever. Like the right. It was so far. But, you know, there are no absolute rules. It just speaking of all those parks had their i. D. Odiosyncra and were weird and strange. We enter this Empire Strikes back period of baseball stadiums which you call the era of secret doughnuts beginning in the 50s. Sure. You said all that needs to be said about it, i think, too. But another part of the thesis of the book is that baseball reflects our whole cultural attitude about cities over the years and 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. Clevelands mistake by the lake, is that part clevelands mistake by the lake is almost in a category by itself. It was built in the late 30s when nothing else was being built at all. What it actually did, its actually the beginning of a very prenichous trend which is financing of stadiums which no one else was doing then and cleveland decided to do it. And it opened a lot of bad doors i would say. And it was actually not a good stadium because it was far too big. It was 80,000 seats and it was bad on so many levels. And cleveland is it led to one great movie which i just recently watched with my son. The other what are other concrete doughnuts that were the most egregious offenders . Probably rfk in washington, Veterans Stadium in philadelphia. I went to a pink floyd concert there. Candlestick in San Francisco. Truly horrible place. Yeah. And there were plenty of others. And then 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. 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 went there. And many others. That was a grim time. We were and it was also based on a myth im talking a lot about myths tonight. I didnt mean baseball is about myth. Good myths and bad myths. Maybe i should have said fallacy. The fallacy that you can have football and baseball in the same ballpark. Right. You cant without compromising both of them a lot. Here is where we come off looking semidecent kansas city we didnt do this. 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. But between in the postwar era for several decades only Dodger Stadium and arrowhead and coffman were built as baseballonly places. Everybody else thought you could do it all in the same stadium and we got this whole generation of truly horrible places. Youre very complimentary about the architecture. You point out one of the things it doesnt do is be regular. What are the things that you think are good about coffman . What makes it work . Im mixed about it. The first thing that has to be said about it thats really good is that it was built as a baseball park, not a multipurpose stadium. And, again, kansas city deserves credit for making that decision. And then theres a beautiful kind of lyrical flow to the way the walls kind of curve down it is pretty. Ive spent a lot of time in that stadium. Its quite lovely really. If you see it from the home plate side, it looks like big, concrete stadiums. Outside of it. Right. And theyve done a lot of work on it in the last generation when the team decided to stay there and reup and i think its actually better and more comfortable in some ways than it was before. But the nicest thing is that kind of lyrical thing in the outfield the way the sides go down. And then, you know, the water fall 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 dont like it so much that i would argue against the downtown stadium. I think were getting there. I would love there to be a downtown stadium. I have a couple steps i want to lead you through before we get to that part. Take your time. One of them is the next thing that happened was camden yards. It was transformational everyone is familiar with this. How many people have been to camden yards . A lot. The Baltimore Orioles completely changed baseball in 1992 with the opening of that ballpark. Glad by kicked their ass in the playoffs a couple of years ago. Look, unfortunately good architecture is not a guarantee of good baseball. And so thats a whole other discussion. But it is the only every building type evolves a certain amount. Libraries, hospitals, schools, houses, everything evolves and 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. And everybody started building downtown after that . Most built downtown, not all, but everybody started building baseball only and fairly traditional in layout, often more acentric. Being able to hit a home run into the ocean is awesome. Fantastic. San francisco went from having one of the worst ballparks in the major league to having one of the best, leaping over everyone else in one fell swoop. But camden yards was transformational. That was is that an h. O. K. Stadium . It was designed out of kansas city. We have this Amazing Design firm here and this long tradition. And youre very emphatic in the book about how important that is. Im going to quote you. Kansas city became for all intents and purposes the Nations Center of sports architecture from the last quarter century on ward. Many designs would emerge from this city that had no claim as an architectural center. Elaborate. How did this happen . It happened was it just good . Why did they get all of that business . Well, it kind of goes back to the arrowhead coffman complex. When that was originally done it was the basic idea was done by an architect who came up with this notion of a rolling roof. Right. We talk about it all the time. Its the greatest fopart of our stadium. It could roll in one direction or the other depending on which one was in use. When it was not in use, it would be in the center and create a covered plaza. And that was the early 70s when nobody was doing remotely like that. It was quite visionary. Everybody said this is really cool and they started building it and then discovered that it was not only was the technology not fully there to do it smoothly and easily, but it was going to be quite a bit more expensive than the county had anticipated and so it was value engineered out. And so by then, they had begun to build the two separate stadiums so they just kept going. Charles ended up working for a local firm which then merged with another firm. But it got so much attention that they then started doing getting other jobs to do ballparks and other Athletic Facilities and then they attracted the attention of h. O. K. Which is an enormous firm that was not strong in sports architecture and they said, hey, guys, why dont you let us buy you and become part of us, and then well be sports architects but you guys can keep doing it. So several of their architects said, okay, they became the Sports Division of h. O. K. But set the condition that they would not move to st. Louis, they would remain in kansas city. And that they were smart, aggressive, and got an enormous amount of work and just kept growing. Its not there arent all that many ballparks and aerrena and football stadiums that get built and its not as though, unlike houses or Office Buildings or schools, what have you, its not like we need 100 different Architecture Firms doing them. 90 of them would be out of work most of the time. Its small and specialized and they were able to say to clients, you know, we know how all this stuff works. And indeed they do. That firm over the years eventually broke away from the parent firm h. O. K. And then changed its name to populous and theyre still across the street. But does this mean we should and their success made kansas city, as i said, the world sports architecture is one of the major exports of kansas city. Were going to open this up for questions in just one second because were im going to try to end this at 7 30 so you can come up and sign. Now is the time when i want you to talk about the downtown stadium in kansas city that we should have built with the architects from populous. I think you would be awfully hard for kansas city to not lets get that firm from denver . Right. Exactly. There are a couple of other people doing stuff and in fact a talented and interesting new york architect is now doing the new ballpark for oakland which is one of the most interesting and promising projects around. But populous 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, you know, camden yard, San Francisco which is fantastic and a number of others. So it would be hard to imagine that the team would not select the local architect given that the local architect happens also to be the most famous sports Architecture Firm in the world. Its not like they would say we you know, these are just local guys. We better go to some big guy from new york or chicago when the biggest people in the industry happen to be the local people. I think 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. Right. But for me theres no question that its the right thing for kansas city to do. The thing that is least appealing about coffman is the location and the there never was any Economic Development around the stadium. Its just if you drive out there. Thats right. In a nowhere place, and you have to drive to it and from it. Its surrounded by a sea of asphalt parking spaces. Its not connected to anything. What weve seen in the years since baltimore is how beautifully baseball integrates into an 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 and so forth. And that is those things were available, by the way, at the old metropolitan stadium which i never saw but was municipal. 22nd and brooklyn. Yeah. That was the site of baseball stadiums in kansas city up until the 70s and the chiefs played there in in fact, i think they were playing there the last time they won the super bowl, speaking of which. But underscoring the point that a good ballpark is not going to work for football because Municipal Stadium was so much a baseball park. So completely and so good a baseball park in its layout and everything else. To make it work for football, they had to put huge rows of temporary seating into the outfield on one whole side. As a result of that, the chiefs could not play any home games for the first month of the season. That seems bad. It overlapped with the baseball season. 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. And this is part of what your book is about too. If you have a question, step up to the mic. Walk right up here. My dad remembers and has told me stories about going to that stadium when the as were leaving and it was known and nobody was there and getting a whole pile of foul balls because he would run around and pick them up. That was his memory. So here we have our questioners. Okay. Thanks. Im from chicago. Ive been here ten years. Im fully behind the local teams. How much would you say the longevity of Wrigley Field and fenway park has to do with their locations i know that all the the lights. Wh it was traumatic for a lot of white sox fans. How much their locations are so into the neighborhood. Completely. I think its a lot of different historical circumstances that led those two great ballparks from the golden age to be retained. We almost lost ten years. And then the team in the end was theres no certainty whatever happened but they were serious about doing it but they sold the team, the subsequent ownership decided that was crazy and they had a sort of, a great asset that if they could only upgrade and modernize gently, chicago, yeah, it is beautifully integrated into the neighborhood and it remains one of the most beloved places there is. On the other hand so are other places that we were not lucky enough to keep. Its ironic that ebbets field in brooklyn was lost because it could be spectacular today and now, everyone, it went in the 50s partly because nobody cared about brooklyn and the fan base had moved to the suburbs and so forth and so on. Today everybody wants to be in brooklyn. And if it had a ballpark that actually in some ways was even better than wrigley and fenway in its heart, it would probably be the nicest place of all. Theres always many, many factors. But, yes, location is a big part of it. Yeah. In the cities with the multipurpose teams, pittsburgh, philadelphia, cincinnati, they knocked those down and built separate baseball and football stadiums while here we already have separate stadiums. So if they were to build the ballpark downtown, would they necessarily follow suit with football as well or leave arrowhead where it is . Im quite sure they would leave arrowhead where it is. The chiefs would actually wanted to acquire coffman as a practice field. Like they would turn the baseball field into a football field not with seating, but they would use it as a practice field. And so thats one reason. The other is that football doesnt fit downtown the way baseball does. Football you want a huge parking lot because theres only eight games a year. Tailgating is an important part of that. You need a parking lot and so forth. Also a football stadium is bigger and therefore i think a little more intrusive in a city. A baseball park, while its hardly small, is just enough smaller so it kind of fits into a city nicely and well and then the final reason, maybe its the most important, is a football stadium is used eight times a year. Right. A baseball park at the minimum is used 81 times a year so its ten times as often. And the thing that kills the city is dead things that arent operating and so right. Its enough that we have every city needs a Convention Center but their big boxes that are empty often, we dont want another big empty thing all the time. My strong argument would be leave arrowhead where it is, let them expand and take over the whole complex and move the royals into downtown. I guess whenever i see whenever i see the proposal for a downtown ballpark on facebook, there are the inevitable negative facebook comments, what will people do for parking . How are they trying to address that . Theyll figure it out. They figured it out you know, San Francisco has minimal parking and it seems to work. Most of them do. You know, you can have more and more People Living downtown and more and more people will walk or theyll park in an outlying areas and have a shuttle. It will work. It has what has worked so well in, you know, a dozen or more other cities, including, by the way, houston, which is one of the most automobile centric sis in the world and they moved from the astrodome to downtown and its worked. It would work here too. Yes, sir . In your book you argue that h. O. K. s original design for camden was going to be another concrete dome. Without the pushback of jacob smith and others, would we have a proliferation of concrete domes . Thats an interesting question. Theres no yes, it is definitely true that the first scheme that h. O. K. Presented to the oregioles, it wasnt a dome but it was a more traditional concrete, open stadium. In fact, the owner of the orioles once said to me, i think what they did was run to chicago and give that to the white sox. Because the park looked a lot like sorry to your earlier white sox guys. Indeed, it opened the year before. Its possible given that it did take longer to build the baltimore one. Anyway, but then they you know, they got it and produced something quite wonderful. I think if that hadnt happened, somewhere Something Else would have happened because, you know, we were beginning to experience a huge resurgence of downtown living, downtown working, Downtown Entertainment and so forth. And it might not have happened in baltimore in 1992, it could have happened in another city five years later, ten years later, but some other team would have said at some point we dont want a concrete doughnut that looks like a freeway overpass. We want a real baseball park. And the architects would have ultimately, i think, responded. Thats my sense. But we never know 100 because thats what happened, what happened. Customer push back. The customer didnt want the product. Yes. And ultimately if all of architecture, what clients want matters. One of the things that the people of populous are proudest of is that they serve their clients. And they do what their clients wanted. Happily here they had a very, very enlightened client who wanted something important. You know, another but to the point about downtown revivals were happening anyway and it would have made its way into baseball somewhere for the first time, its one of all the reasons i feel for kansas city that maybe its just as well that i didnt happen 15 years ago when there was a minor push to put the royals downtown, because i dont know that Downtown Kansas City was truly ready for it yet. And so we might have expected or you might have expected too much from a ballpark. It cant alone turn around a downtown. But 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 to all the other things happening. Today as opposed to 15 years ago, you know, there are so many more People Living in Downtown Kansas City, there are more people working, theres more entertainment, there are new neighborhoods that are developing and the whole momentum of the city is more focused downtown than it used to be. So in fact now it wouldnt all be on the shoulders of a ballpark to turn around a downtown which it wouldnt have succeeded at doing anyway. We have time for two more questions. Im that white sox guy. So i was curious, your impression, good and bad of the hold comisky and that monstrosity of the new comisky. Its the last of the concrete doughnuts. It opened one year before camden yards and baltimore changed everything. It was out of date the minute it opened. And its a sort of sad story. I gather, though, i havent been back to it in a while, that they a few years ago did some changes that people say it made it a little bit better. A better way to put it is it made it a little less awful. The best comment about it it was from a really perceptive writer who is another architecture writer who loves baseball who calculated that the front row of the upper deck of the new comisky park is farther from the field than the old one. How can you maneuver things so that the greatest number of people are the closest to the field and the most connected to the field which is, again, another important thing that camden yards and baltimore did. They thought of that. Many of the concrete doughnuts are truly just circles that were about this abstract shape of a big circle because you could kind of put a diamond in it, a football fridgridiron in it. But it wasnt work for baseball. The good and bad of the old comisky. Of the old comisky . The old comisky, i thought, was funky and nice. I didnt have quite the truly beautiful appeal of wrigley, uptown. I didnt have the magic of the brick wall and the ivy and all that stuff. I didnt integrate that well into the neighborhood. But it was a wonderful ballpark and, you know, the best of those early generation of ballparks were they were among the only buildings ever built that sort of combined funkiness and monumentality, two things that almost always exclusive in architecture. That one everyone xample fied t. It was grand and funky at the same time, but i found it likable, but not lovable as wrigley was always lovable. But it was a hundred times better than the new one. And you get the last word. Lucky me. I was going to say i agree with you on all on everything, actually and i would love even my wife doesnt agree with me on everything. Im better than she is, right . I would love ive lived in kansas city and watched it grow over the years, would love to have the stadium downtown. Were from the midwest, and were into barbecue and you talk about football being a tailgating kind of sport and baseball not. But here tailgating is a really big part of baseball and 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 it is for the chiefs. But i wonder thats an interesting question. I dont have an answer to that. I would say that the tailgates at royal stadium are pathetic and go away. I thought thats what he was going to say. Im going to defer to the local on this, actually. Look im not a tailgater. I prefer to go to a restaurant myself. I know theres a lot of people who tailgate. But you were kind. He said you know, and i deferred to the local and his wisdom. I said at the talk this morning, any city that is big enough to contain both Arthur Bryants and the Nelson Atkins museum has to be more interesting and complicated than any other city. And i still believe that. And just do your barbecues some other time. Thank you. Thank you. Can we give a round of applause for paul. [ applause ] youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on american artifacts, library of congress curator on life in the 1930s and 40s through color photographs and sunday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern on real america, three films on the 1976 elections produced by the u. S. Information agency for an international audience. Then at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the presidency, acceptance speeches from president ial nominees. Exploring the american story, watch American History tv this weekend on cspan3. Next coauthors david mills and kayla westra talk about their book which focuses on prisoners of war and concentration camps. This is an hour and 15 minutes. Good evening. Im steve with the librarys Public Affairs staff. Thanks so much for joining us tonight and thanks to the u. S. Army commander and general staff college, one of our longest, one of our best, one of our favorite programming partners for yet another what i