author, paul goldberg or, discusses this book ballpark, baseball in the american city. he explores the relationship between the american cities in the growth of baseball, looking at the changing architecture and locations 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. i want to thank the library for putting on this event, the library board, jonathan and the staff who work with us who she mentioned as well. the library is a fantastic

institution. we are lucky to have it. look at this awesome auditorium. speaking of great public spaces, this is one. >> libraries and ballparks. the city. >> you have had this incredibly distinguished career, as an architectural critic. 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? i've been very lucky because i really spent my life writing about what interests me. so have you. >> i try, for what me off. >> same thing. it's still interests you and whether it you off or you like it. i've always loved architecture. i've always loved journalism.

i'm not very good at making choices, so i found a place where the two of them intersect. and i spent most of my life writing about architecture. >> did you study architecture? >> i study architectural history. i went to yale, a place of those of you who went to princeton don't always acknowledge but nevertheless. >> i've heard about it. >> it's a little school, a little bit to the north. >> connecticut? >> a place called connecticut. i started architect architectural history. art and architectural history. and then began a career as a journalist. i toyed with going to architecture school but i thought the world had enough second rate artists architects and didn't need another, necessarily. and i did think i was a pretty decent writer. so i went that route. >> what was it like working at the new yorker, for instance? >> that was the second chapter of my career. i started at the new york times and then went to the new yorker.

>> we could talk about either one, what is the difference between working at the times and working at the new yorker? >> to great institutions. the difference is, 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 -- >> there is some stone or's. >> exactly. it's sort of a mixed bag. everybody is at a certain level obviously 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's how it sort of fell to me when it went from one to the other. i had a great time there. >> were you in the office in the old new yorker building before they moved over there?

>> i moved there in the late nineties when they were so on 43rd street. the second old building they moved from there. >> you could tell everyone about that >> there's a famous james there burr, the cartoonist, famously started drawing on the walls and they were kept as this kind of almost sacred objects. and 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 office. 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 magazine but not quite as special. >> i have been to the of office 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 about baseball is an urban game. not a game played in iowa cornfields. >> tearjerker. of what baseball has been about. i'm an urban midwesterner, so i'm fine with that. and the beginnings or maybe even specifically new york game. you talk about how according to some historians there were 100 baseball teams in brooklyn, new york, by 1858. >> new york was a huge center of baseball. not the only one, but a huge one. it was a game that was in the

early years, really grew big in a lot of the both northeastern and mid western industrial cities. and it was played a lot by working class immigrants. and brooklyn had all these teams, they were sometimes made up of men from within a few blocks, residential area, sometimes they were connected with the factory. and they all played each other. >> these early chapters in the book, which were to me, totally new information, stuff that i really didn't know at all, that i love. and i think people will love when they read the book. and that its rise was connected with the population growth of brooklyn, specifically. you talk about how broken was 25,000 people in 1835, there were 200,000 by 1855. half of them were immigrants. we are in a sort of immigrant phobic time, it's interesting to me that the way that you talk about the connection between immigrants and this american pastime that is so

important to us now. >> absolutely. one of the things that was fascinating to me as well when i read it, i hadn't known as much about it as i do now. that in fact, so much of the game was built on -- to say built on immigrant laborers makes it sound -- >> players. >> immigrant players, exactly. early years, it transitioned into being a spectator sport, but it didn't start out that way. it started out just as a thing people plate. and then it got more and more organized. people started going to see it. and a lot of the early games of the new york teams, they played across the hudson river in hoboken on a field that was called elysian field. >> there is one part of the

book when you talk about, they played a lot of games in madison square. it was an open space. that's where medicine square garden. is >> no. >> i'm wrong? >> the first madison square gardening was at madison square. they moved away because in fact development was coming up all around it. me the theme of the book is really about how baseball is more a city game. nevertheless, it tended to be played kind of on the outskirts, because even in those 19th century years, even when the land was cheap, cities were also growing and developing really fast in this country. you didn't put a ball a ball field right in the center of the central business district next to the bank. even then, you needed more land and it was too expensive. so they would be kind of on the edge, but the cities were growing so fast that those

parcels of land were off and then surrounded by development and became in the center of a neighborhood. fenway park is a good example. >> we are going to get to that. i have never been there but you're want to tell me all about it. speaking of immigrants, you have some interesting facts in the book about where you talk about the bifurcated world of baseball spectators. just a little later, then when we're talking about now. in your book, one half of this for the separated by a german immigrant who bought the st. louis browns in the 18 eighties. could you sort of introduce -- >> that's a great story. it's a missouri story. even though it is the other side of the state. chris was a german immigrant, a tavern owner, -- i'm sorry >> i get to this later. >> he had a beer station in the field. >> he bought the st. louis browns because he thought it would be a good way to some more beer. he opened up a kind of branch

of his tavern. a little beer garden out in the outfield. it was a branch of his tavern from down the street. and then he had, he was gonna cross marketing, he also had the waders in the actual tavern dressed up in brown's uniforms. he was pushing both directions. >> ownership about putting a bar. >> he had things to entertain people and he built sportsman park, the old st. louis ballpark as the coney island of the west. and it was all about entertainment. if we think that there is too much distraction in ballparks today, it has a long history. >> but he was a working class -- he wanted a working class audience. he kept ticking ticket prices down to a quarter, he served here, he did all this other stuff to sort of drawn in -- >> it was all about entertaining the working class. >> that was american leak.

>> he was part of some of a group of teams that were officially called the american association. it was colloquially known as the beer and whiskey leak. >> that's a league i want to be in. >> the beer and whiskey leak was a cool thing. they're opposite number was the national league. the american association is not the root of today's american league. but the national league is the root of today's national leak, it started out trying to make, to push baseball in the opposite direction. it was all about making it more presbyterian. exclusive, virtuous. they had rules about there was no baseball played on sunday. there was no alcohol served in any of the ball parks. 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 riffraff and so forth. they would allow the riffraff in where they can make money from them. but in fact, 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. so forth. it was a very rigid economic segregation. but 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 that baseball was getting bigger and bigger and a lot of the very stuff we are talking about what's happening, the upper balcony, the chief. seats 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 did not 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. >> you are avatars for that are, because we know in kansas city that nothing good comes from chicago. william whole, bird who owned the chicago white -- socks >> he was the founder of the national league. >> and then spalding, which everyone knows from the

company. >> they were the great advocates of the national league and virtue and this hole, and the kind of mythology that led to ultimately field of dreams and stuff like that. >> you have some of spalding's writing in the book. >> he was wildly over the top about american character and nobility and manhood and everything. >> all that. >> all that virtuous 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 commission a sort of study, i should say major league buddy, a study commission on the history of baseball, and they determined that it was invented by this man named avenue double day on

a field in rural cooperstown, new york, which is why the baseball hall of fame is in cooperstown. baseball started subsequently and was discovered, basically a fiction created to further this myth of kind of rural virtue, because in cities they were considered dirty and messy, and again, 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 they carried the day enough to get a hall of fame built in cooperstown. but in fact, now even the hall of fame itself has acknowledged that it is pretty much made up. >> what is thought to be the actual origins? do you know? i don't know. >> there is a wonderful guy named john for, he offend-tastic writer who is now the official star 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 and in fact, 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. >> there was no single moment? >> not like basketball. and they tried to pretend that avenue double day was that, but he really wasn't. >> and as it became more and more popular, there was apparently one set of rules played in new york and another in boston. 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. so if i remember correctly, the number of innings was not nine everywhere and things like that. and certain other very key things were actually different than they were in the 19th century. but then they were more coat of fide. >> so there is a section in your book, after the part we are talking about what you call the golden age and 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, i should say first, there was an age before the golden age which as things were getting bigger and baseball is becoming more popular and becoming more of a spectator sport, the fields with a few seats became more

and more elaborate and the construction became more elaborate. >> it started burning down. >> and they started burning down. and the most elaborate of all was this amazing thing in boston called south and grounds. it had these huge victorian towers. >> there is a beautiful picture of that in the book. >> it was something like eight or nine years before it burned down. it turned out the owners that uninsured it so they couldn't afford to rebuild it. but then, as fireproof construction became possible, steel, concrete, so forth, they began to be built that way. and baseball was becoming still bigger. remember, other than a bit of boxing, it was essentially our only professional sport in this country. and i will 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 intercity train service. >> oh. >> it was when there were trained connections between various cities that the league's actually really developed and professional baseball -- >> meaning they could travel to places? >> that's. right exactly. a-team in brooklyn could really only play another team in brooklyn, or maybe across the river in new york. you couldn't 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 couldn't have a reliable schedule. but once there was intercity train service, then, suddenly, everything began to fall into place and real modern baseball developed. by the same token, just jump ahead, it was only at the

moment of jet travel permitting fast, coast to coast travel in this country that baseball, major league baseball, expanded to california. it is not an accident those two things coincided. >> so, of these classic stadiums, which most are familiar. abbott's field, we ugly, tsai park in philadelphia? >> tsai park is incredible. tsai park was 1909. it was really one of the earliest of the golden age. and one of the most ornate. it was an elaborate building on the outside, but then you go in through this huge rotunda and you are in the field. and if you saw from the other side, it was just a field.

but if you saw it from the home plate side, it looked like a monumental building. you might 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 in pittsburgh. >> right. >> and then fenway, tiger, abbots, wriggly. >> which of these is the greatest? and what are your standards of judgment? you do develop a very clear standard and way of thinking in the book, maybe you could explain it to people of what you think is good. >> it is a combination of things, really. on the exterior, is it a really nice piece of civic architecture that feels at home in the city? as if it belongs in the city and enrich is the city? because a ballpark, among other things, is an important part of public space.

it's one of the pieces of the book to say that along with parks that we were getting ready to develop in the mid 19th century, and even cemeteries, the ballpark was one of the ways in which working class immigrants, or just working class people in general, could experience some bit of the countryside. if you work in a factory, you probably work six days a week and had nothing but sundays off. you had no way to go to the country. and going to the ballpark was one of the experiences that you could have. that's another reason the national league's ban on sunday games had a whole other agenda. it was about keeping immigrants out, in part because it was the only day they could go. anyway, there is, that but there is also the field itself and the seeding and how close you felt to the action, how well you saw it and the way in which the whole thing work together is a kind of communal space. >> one of the things that is

remarkable to me, of these fields, the only one i have ever seen, i haven't been to fenway, but i have never seen a game at wrigley, but i have jogged round wrigley and stayed near it. it's amazing to me how much it fits into the neighborhood that it's in. it doesn't feel over imposing. it's just right there. i expected it to be a big deal, but it's just right here. it's this building. >> exactly. you have this enormous thing that seats 40,000 people, and yet it just kind of sits 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, abbott field was probably the best of all. >> it is so legendary, because it was lost, in essence, right? >> partly. and a lot of important history happened there. >> does everybody know what that is? >> it's where the dodgers were played and were major league baseball was integrated because of jackie robinson.

let the record show, he was actually seen by the dodgers when he played for the knee grow league team in kansas city. >> yes. >> and he was signed in kansas city to come to brooklyn and play for the dodgers in the 1940s. but kansas city plays an important role in that history. but i think it was probably at the very best both because of its history and because of its physical qualities. >> that is one where you said, there's also funny things where they screw things up at these places. >> it's kind of amazing. is that the one where they had only one entrance and you couldn't get everyone in the ballpark in time? there was a rotunda or something? >> there was a rotunda and it was designed to small. >> you couldn't get in. >> it would never pass the fire laws today. they did make some tweaks to it to fix it over time, but yes. and they also forgot a press

box, which is sort of interesting. but all of that eventually got taken care of. but the early ballparks, while they were kind of grand and beautiful buildings, they also work and creatures of circumstance. their shapes were determined by the neighborhood or 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 shifted around. and it was far enough out -- >> like that bugs bunny cartoon where he refuses to sell his house. >> and of course, the most famous example is the green monster in fenway, which has to do with the way a street cut

right close to the edge of the site and could not allow the field as much space, in left field, as in right field. but that kind of asymmetry and difference and idiosyncrasy, because it is a key part of baseball and baseball history. unlike a hockey rink or a basketball -- >> yes, that's the thesis here. >> or a football grid iron, every ball field is a little bit different. the diamond is exact imprecise. the outfield varies and there is kind of no rules about the outfield. and theoretically, it can be infinite. it can go on forever. >> like the polar grounds theoretically. >> but there are no actual rules. >> right. >> so speaking of all of those parks having their idiosyncrasies and being weird and strange, as you mentioned. so, then as the book progresses forward in time, we enter what

i call the empire strikes back period of baseball stadiums, which you call the era of concrete donuts. that begins in the fifties. can you set that up? >> you just said all that needs to be said about it, i think, to. but another part of the thesis of the book is that baseball reflects our whole cultural attitude about cities over the years. >> right. >> and as we were everywhere in this country pretty much rejecting cities and moving out wherever the automobile would take us, in the post war era, we started moving baseball out to. >> this was like cleveland's mistake by the lake, right? >> cleveland's mistake by the lake is almost a category in and of itself. it was built in the late thirties -- >> that was earlier. i forgot about that. >> and what it actually did was, 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. 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. it was bad on so many levels. cleveland -- >> it led to one great movie. >> yes. >> which i just recently watched with my son. major league holds up, you guys are familiar with it, all set. there >> true. >> what are other concrete donuts that were the most egregious offenders? >> the most egregious offenders are probably rfk in washington, veterans stadium in philadelphia. three rivers in pittsburgh, candlestick in san francisco. truly horrible place.

and there were plenty of others. and then actually, 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 troops on them. so we got things like the kingdom 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 and it was also based on a mid, we're talking a lot about myths tonight. baseball is about myths. >> good myths and there's bad myths. maybe i should have said fallacies. the fallacy that you can have football and baseball in the same ballpark. you can't. you can't without compromising both of them a lot. >> here is where we come off

locking semi decent or even better we didn't do this. >> kansas city was the only smart city in america in the 1970s, actually. and that it is the only place, other than l.a., where the dodger stadium was built for baseball only, but between in the postwar era for several decades only dodger stadium and arrowhead and cough men were billed as baseball only places. everybody else thought you could do it all in the same stadium. and we got this whole generation of truly horrible places. >> you are very complimentary about the architecture. you point out that one of the things it does not do is be irregular. it is said in an open space. what are the things that you think are good about cough man? what makes it work as a stadium?

>> what makes it work is, i mixed about it, the first thing that has to be said about it that's really good, is that it was built as a baseball park, not a multipurpose stadium. again, kansas city deserves credit for making that decision and then there is a beautiful kind of neural flow in the way the walls kind of curve down toward the outfield. it's quite lovely and if you see it from the home plate side, it looks a little more like a lot of other concrete stadiums. outside of it. they have done a lot of work on it in the last generation, when the team decided to stay there and re-up and i think it's actually better and more comfortable 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 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 don't like it so much that i would argue against a downtown stadium. >> we are getting there. i would love there to be a downtown stadium. i have a couple steps i want to lead you through. >> take your time. >> one of them is the next thing that happened after the bad year was camden yards. i >> camden yards was transformational. >> how many people have been to camped in yards? a lot. >> the baltimore oreos completely changed baseball in 1992 with the opening of that ballpark. we kicked their in the playoffs a couple times.

>> unfortunately, good architecture is not a guarantee of good baseball and so that is a whole other discussion. 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. >> everybody started building downtown after that? >> everybody started building, most built downtown, not all, but most started building baseball only and fairly traditional in layout, often more eccentric and idiosyncratic, which it very much -- >> like pat bell park, my wife is from san francisco so i go to that park. being able to hit a home run

into the ocean is awesome. >> fantastic, san francisco went from having one of the worst ball parks in the major league to one of the best. leaping over everyone else in one fell swoop. but camden yards was transformational. >> was that in hok stadium? >> it isn't hok stadium. designed out of kansas city. >> we have this amazing design firm and this long tradition. you are very emphatic in the book about how important that has been. i'm going to quote you. by happenstance, kansas city became, for all intents and purposes, the nation's center of sports are patrick architecture. from the last quarter century onward. many of the architectural designs for sports facilities all over the world would emerge from this medium sized midwestern 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? >> it kind of goes back to the arrowhead kaufman complex. when that was originally done, can the basic idea was done by an architect named charles deaton, who came up with this notion of a rolling roof that would sit in between the two stadiums and could go role in one direction or the other, depending on which one was in use. and when it was not in use on either, one it would be in the center and would kind of create a covered plaza. that was the early seventies. when nobody was doing anything remotely like that, it was quite visionary. everybody said this is really cool. and they started building it and then discovered that 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. by then, they had already begun to build two separate stadiums so they just kept going. charles deaton ended up working for a local firm which then merged with another firm. it got so much attention that they then started getting other jobs to do ballparks and other athletic facilities. and then they attracted the attention of hok, which isn't enormous international firm that happens to be st. louis based, that was not strong and sports architecture. they said, hey, guys, why don't you let us by you and become part of us? and we will be sports architects. but you guys can keep doing it.

several of their architects said okay. they became the sports division of hok, but set the condition that they would not move to st. louis, they would remain in kansas city. could they were smart, aggressive and got an enormous amount of work. and just kept growing. you there are not all that many ballparks and arenas and football stadiums that get built. is not as though, unlike houses or office buildings where schools, it's not like we need 100 different architecture firms doing them, because if we had 100 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. and 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. but their success made kansas city, as i said, the world capital. sports architecture is one of the major exports of kansas city. >> we are going to open this up for questions in just one second. i'm going to try and end this at 7:30 so you can come up and sign, and have paul sign books for you. but now is the time when i want you to talk about the downtown stadium in kansas city that we should've built, obviously the architect is from populace. >> it would be awfully hard for kansas city to not -- >> let's get that far from denver. >> exactly. there are a couple of other people doing stuff and, in fact, an interesting untalented new

york architect is now doing the new ballpark for oakland, which is actually one of the most interesting and promising projects around. but populists is 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 architects happens also to be the most famous sports architecture from the world. it's not like they would say, these are just local guys. we'd better go to some big guy from new york or chicago, when the biggest people in that industry happen to be the local people. i think the big question about a downtown bar ballpark is not

who the architect would be, but precisely where the site should be and how it would be paid for. but for me, there is no question that it is the right thing for kansas city to do. the thing that is least appealing about calf men is the location. >> there never was any economic development around the stadium. if you drive out there. >> it's kind of in a nowhere place. you have to drive to it and from its, it is surrounded by 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 orban fabric. people want that. they like it. the love being able to walk or take a street car to again. they love being able to have something to eat, drink, go to

other places, combined with other things. and so forth. >> all of those things were available at the old metropolitan stadium, which i never saw. >> municipal. 22nd and brooklyn. >> that was the site of baseball stadiums in kansas city up until the seventies. the chiefs played there, i think they were playing their the last time they won the super bowl. >> the chiefs were playing their. kim 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 at baseball park in a sleigh at an everything else, that to make it work for football, they had to put huge rows of temporary receding into the outfield on one hole side.

as a result of that, the chiefs could not play any home games for the first month of the season. it overlaps with a 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. >> this is part of what your book is about. if you have a question, step up to the mic. now is the time. walk right up here. my dad remembers and 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 and he would run around and pick them up. here we have, our questioners. could >> thanks, i'm from chicago, but i've been here ten years so i'm fully behind a 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 even though that place blocked viewer. no you that was traumatic for a lot of white socks fans. but how much they're locations are so into the neighborhood -- >> completely. it is a lot of historical circumstances that led to great ballparks from the golden age being retained. we almost lost fenway. we had the red sox, under previous ownership, working on plans to replace it. and then the team in the end -- there is no certainty what happened, but they were serious about doing it.

ultimately, they sold the team, the subsequent ownership, decided it was crazy and they had a sort of great asset that if they could only upgrade and modernize gently, a little bit, what turned out to be absolutely the case. chicago is beautifully integrated in 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. it's ironic that abuts field in brooklyn was lost, because it could be spectacular today. and now, in the fifties, partly because no one cared about brooklyn and the fan base and move to the suburbs and so on. today, everybody wants to be in brooklyn. >> yes. >> and if it had a ballpark that actually in some ways was

even better than wrinkly and fenway, in its heart, it was probably the nicest place of all. but there is always many factors. but yes, location is a big part of it. >> i know in the cities with multipurpose stadiums like cincinnati, they knock those down and built separate baseball and football stadiums. here, we already have separate baseball and football stadiums. so if they were to build the ballpark downtown, would they necessarily follow suit with football as well? or would they just leave it where it is? >> i am quite sure they would leave arrowhead where it is for a couple of reasons. one, i understand that the chiefs would actually want to acquire cough men as a practice field. >> like they would turn the baseball field into a football field? >> not with seeding, but they would use it is a practice field. >> the other is that football

doesn't sit downtown the way fit baseball does. >> football, you want a big stadium for tailgating. >> there are several reasons, and tailgating is an important one. it's part of the culture of football. people do tailgate. you need a parking lot and so forth. also, a football stadium is invariably bigger and therefore a little more intrusive in a city. a baseball park, it's hardly, small but just small enough to fit into a city nicely and we'll. and then the final reason that is maybe most important is, a football stadium is used eight times a year. >> right? >> a baseball park is used a minimum of 81 times a year. so it is ten times as often. and the thing that kills a city

is dead things that aren't operating. >> right. >> so it's enough that every city needs convention center, but sadly, they are big boxes that are empty often. we don't 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 then move the royals into downtown. >> whenever i see, whenever i see from the proposal for a downtown ballpark on facebook, there's unenviable comments about what will people do for parking or how will they address that. >> they will figure it out. san francisco has minimal parking and it seems to work. most of them do. you know, firstly, there is

more people living downtown and more and more people will walk, or they will park in an outlying area and have a shuttle. it will work. what has worked so well in a dozen or more other cities, including, by the, way houston, which is one of the most automobile centric cities in the world, and they moved from the astrodome into downtown and it worked. so it would work here as well. >> yes sir? >> in your book, you argued that the original design for campaign was going to be another concrete dome. >> right. >> so without the pushback of jp smith and john, what we just have a proliferation of concrete domes? >> it is an interesting question, definitely true that the first scheme that a choke a presented to the oriole's was, it wasn't a dome, but it was a

more traditional concrete open stadium and in fact the owner of the oriole's then once said to me, i think what they did was run to chicago and give that to the white socks, because the new park sort of looked a lot like -- >> sorry, earlier white socks guy. >> it looked a lot like what they tried to do earlier. and indeed, it opened the year before. so it's possible, given that it did take longer to build it. anyway, they got it and they produced something quite wonderful. i think if that had not happened, some, where something else would have happened. 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've happened in another city five years later, or ten years later. but some other team would have said at some point, we don't want a concrete don't at that looks like a freeway overpass. we want a real baseball park. and architects would have ultimately, i think, responded. that is my opinion. but you never know 100%, because what happened happened. >> and there is customer pushback. the customer didn't want the product. >> and ultimately, and all of architecture, what clients want matters. you know? and one of the things that the populists are proudest of is that they serve their clients. they do what their clients wanted. happily, here they had a very enlightened client to wanted something important. but to the point about downtown

revivals that were just happening anyway and it would have made its way into baseball somewhere, it's one of the reasons i feel for kansas city. maybe it's just as well that it didn't happen 15 years ago and there was a minor push to move the royals downtown. i don't know that downtown kansas city was truly ready for it. and we might have expected, or you might have expected too much from a ballpark. it cannot 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 pushed forward even more and connect to all the other things happening. today, as opposed to 15 years ago, there are so many other people living in downtown kansas city. there is more people working, more entertainment. there's only neighborhoods developing.

and the whole momentum of the city is more focused downtown than it used to be. so in fact, now it wouldn't all be on the shoulders of a ballpark to turn around downtown, which it wouldn't have succeeded in doing anyway. >> we have time for two more questions. >> i am that white socks guy. so i was curious about your impression of the old commitment ski and that monstrosity of the new one. >> i agree with you. it is the last of the concrete donuts. it opened one year before scammed in yards and baltimore changed everything. it was out of date the minute it opened. and it is a sort of sad story. i gather, although i haven't been back to it for a while,

that a few years ago they did some changes that people say made it a little bit better. i think a better way to put it is it made it a little less awful. the best comment about it was from a really perceptive writer named john past year, who is another architecture writer who loved baseball. he calculated that the front row of the upper deck at the new comiskey park is farther from the field than the last row of the old upper deck in the old one. and so much of baseball is about intimacy and 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 campaign yards and baltimore did. they really thought of. that many of the concrete donuts are truly just circles.

they were about this abstract shape of a big circle, because you could kind of put a diamond in. it you could put a football grid iron in it. it could all just be pumped into a circle. but in fact, it doesn't work for baseball. >> briefly, the good and bad of the old comiskey? >> the old comiskey, i felt, was funky and nice. it didn't have quite the truly beautiful appeal of wriggly uptown. it didn't have the magic of the brick wall and the ivy and all of that stuff. it didn't integrate into the neighborhood as well. but it was a wonderful ballpark. the best of those early generation of ballparks, was they were among the only buildings ever built that sort of combined funkiness and monumental itty. those are two things that are

almost always mutually exclusive in architecture. there is something kind of grand and funky about it at the same time and i found it very likable. but it wasn't lovable as wrinkly was always level. but it was still 100 times better than the new one. >> and you get the last word. >> lucky me. i was going to say. i agree with you on everything, actually. and >> even my wife doesn't do that. >> i am better than she is. i would love to have, i am all for downtown development. i have lived in kansas city and watch to grow over the years. i would love to have a stadium downtown. we have this one cultural part of our city, though, that is maybe not like other towns. we are from the midwest and we have cattle and we are into barbecue. you talk about football being a tailgating kind of experience and baseball is not.

here, tailgating is a really big part of baseball. and i wonder how the general public that goes to those games in detail gates, and they spent hours sitting up their tailgate for the royals baseball games, and it may not be as big as it is for the chiefs, but i wonder. >> that's an interesting question. i don't have an answer to that. >> i would say the tail gates at royal stadium, and i'm a season ticket holder and have been for 20 years, our pathetic and can just go away. >> i am going to defer to the local on this, actually. >> i am not a tailgate. or i prefer to go to a restaurant myself. but i know there's a lot of people who tailgate. >> and i defer to the local in his wisdom. i said at the top at the downtown council this morning that any city that is big enough to contain both arthur

bryant and the nelson africans museum has to be more interesting and complicated and wonderful than most cities in america. >> thank you for that. >> so i still believe that and, you know, just to your barbecue some other time. >> thank you. >> thank you. could we get a round of applause? (applause) >> you are watching american history tv. every weekend on c-span three, explore our nations past. c-span three, created by americas cable television companies as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. what is available every weekend on c-span three, thursday night, a look at civil war objects, historians harold holster and valerie bailey hold a series of online talks this summer, about

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