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 wh