>> paul goldberger discusses his book "ballpark: baseball and the american city." exploring baseball and the american cities, changes of locations and ballparks over the years and what they reveal about society and culture at large. the kansas city public library hosted this discussion and provided the video. >> look at this awesome auditorium. speaking of great public spaces, this is one. >> yes. >> all right, paul. >> libraries and ballparks, two

most important things in the city. right? >> people are really here to hear you talk about kaufman stadium in the end. >> right. >> have you talked to the audience about who you are and what you've done? >> i've been lucky because i've written about things that interest me. >> or pisses me off. >> right. whether either way you like talking about it. i always loved journalism and i'm not very good at making choices.

so i found a place where the two intersect. i've spent most of my life writing about architecture. >> did you study architect? >> architectural history. i went to princeton, a place that those of you who went to princeton, don't always acknowledge. >> i heard about it. >> it's a little school. little to the north in a place called connecticut. and studied architectural history. then began a career as a journalist. i toyed with the idea of going to architectural school. i thought the world had enough mediocre architects and didn't 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. >> what's 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. everybody's 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. that's 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. they moved the murals there. >> 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 office. >> new architecture. >> right. and then "the new yorker" was bought by the newhouse 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, but not quite as special and different. >> i've been to the offices that are down in the replacement of the world trade center.

>> yeah, the world trade center where they've now been for a few years, yeah. >> one of the things i loved about ballpark was the research you did into the earliest ballparks and how emphatic you are that it's an urban game. not a game played in iowa corn fields. >> despite field of dreams, which is everybody's favorite tear jerker, but it's not an accurate statement of what baseball has been about. >> i'm an urban mid westerner, so i'm 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 mid western industrial cities, and it was played a lot by

working-class immigrants. >> yeah. >> and brooklyn had all these teams. they were sometimes made up of men from within a few block residential area or sometimes they were connected with a factory or something like that. and they all played each other. >> these early chapters in the book were totally new information. stuff i didn't really know at all, and that i loved and that i think people will love when they read the book. the rise was connected with the population growth. you talk about brooklyn. 25,000 people in 1835. 200,000 by 1855. half of them were immigrants. we're in an immigrant-phobic time and it's 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 hadn't 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 didn't 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 -- there's one part in the book you talk, they played a lot of games in madison square because it's an open space, and i was like, that's where madison square garden is now. >> no. >> am i wrong? >> 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, and the theme of 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 didn't put a ball field right in the very center, central 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 we're going to get to that.

i've never been there, but you're going to tell me all about it. speaking of immigrants, you have interesting passages where you talk about bifurcated world of spectators, later than we're talking about now. one-half of this world is represented by a german immigrant who bought the st. louis browns in the 1880s. could you introduce people to him? if they're not familiar with him. >> sure. this is a great story. this is a missouri story even though it's the other side of the state. chris vanderuy was a german immigrant, a tavern owner who -- >> who had -- i'm sorriment i'm going to get to this later. i interrupted you. he had a beer station in the outfield. >> 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. >> like a beer garden in the outfield that was a branch of

his tavern across the street. 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 there's too much distraction in ballparks today, it has a long history. >> but he was like a working class -- he wanted a working-class 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 teams that

were officially called the american association. >> right. >> it was colloquyally known as the beer and whiskey league. >> that's 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 today's american league. but the national league is the root of today's national league. and it started out trying to make -- push baseball in the opposite direction. it was all about making it -- >> presbyterian. >> presbyterian is a good word. 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. >> and keeping out the riffraff. 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 couldn't walk from a cheap seat into the grandstand area. you had a separate entrance, bathrooms and so forth. >> oh, really? >> yeah. 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 1883 around the time that baseball was getting bigger and bigger and a lot of the various

stuff that we're 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 didn't 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 holbert, who owned the chicago white sox -- >> 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 spaulding's writing in the book. >> he was wildly over the top about american character and nobility and manhood. >> yeah, yeah, all that stuff. >> all this virtous 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 baseball, 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 don't know. >> yeah, there's 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 eden" and 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. >> no james naismith moment -- >> no. and they tried to pretend doubleday was that, but it apparently wasn't. and it all gradually came together. and as it became more popular, there was apparently one set of rules played am 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. 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 versions were played differently. beginning in the 19th century on ward, those things were more codified. >> all right. so there's a section in your book after the part we're 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? >> well, the golden age -- i guess i should say 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, victorian 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 couldn't afford to rebuild it. but then as fireproof construction became possible, steel, concrete, and so forth, they began to be built 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 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 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 coast-to-coast travel in this country that major league baseball expanded to california. it wasn't there -- it's 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. >> yes. >> which these people will all have access to if they want. >> it was 1909. it was one of the earliest of 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 in pittsburgh and then fenway, tiger stadium, abbotts, wrigley -- >> which those are the greatest. you do develop a really good standard way of thinking about how ball parks should look, and maybe you could explain that to people, like what you think is good. >> it's a combination of things, really. first -- on the exterior, is it a really nice piece of civic architecture that feels at home in a city, as if it belongs in a city and enriches a city. because a ballpark, among other things, is an important part of public space. that's part of the thesis of the book is tors along with parks that we were beginning to develop in the mid-19th century and even cemetaries, 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 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, you had no way -- you know, and going to the ballpark was one of the experiences you could have. that's another reason the national leagues 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, for many of them. but there's 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's remarkable to me, of these fields -- i haven't been to fenway, i've never seen a game at wrigley but i've jogged here it, it's amazing how much it

fits into the neighborhood that it's in. it doesn't feel overimposing, it's just right there. i expected it to be a big deal and i'm like, no, no, it's just right here. it's buildings. >> cannotly. -- exactly. you have this enormous thing that fits thousands of people and there's houses around it, but it all seems very normal. you put it very well by saying that. probably, although i never saw it,ebbitts field was the most famous. 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 in the '40s.

kansas city plays an important role in that history. but i think it was probably the very best, actually, both because of its history and just its physical qualities. >> is that the one where you said, though -- there were also funny things where they screw things upamusing. is that the one where they had only one entrance and you couldn't get people in the ballpark in time? there was a rotunda? >> there was a rotunda and it would never pass fire laws in terms of people getting out. they did fix it over time, and they also forgot a press box, which is sort of interesting. all of that eventually got taken care of. but, you know, the early ball parks, while they were kind of grand and beautiful buildings, also were kind of creatures of

circumstance. and, you know, their shapes were often 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 it didn't -- >> like that bugs bunny cartoon where they refuse to sell his house? >> and of course the most famous example is the green monster at fenway which has to do with the way a street is 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 idiosyncracy is part of baseball and history. unlike a hockey rink or baseball or grid iron, every baseball field is a little different. the diamond is exact and precise. the outfield varies, and there are kind of no rules about the outfield, and theoretically, it could be infinite. it could go on forever. but, you know, there are no absolute rules. >> right, just -- all right, so speaking of all those parks had their idiosyncracies and were weird and strange as you mentioned. then we enter this sort of what i call "empire strikes back" period of baseball stadiums which you call the era of concrete donuts beginning in the '50s. could you set that up for us a little bit? >> 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 post-war era we started moving baseball out, too. >> this is like cleveland's mistake by the lake. is that part of that? >> cleveland's mistake by the lake is almost in a category by itself, i would say, because it was built in the late '30s when nothing else was being built at all, and what it actually did was it's actually the beginning of very pernicious trend which was municipal financing of stadiums, which nobody else was

doing then, and cleveland just decided to do it. it opened a lot of bad doors, 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 -- >> but it led to one great movie. >> yes. >> which i just recently watched with my son. major league holds up with what you guys are familiar with. >> true. >> what are other concrete donuts that were the most egregious offenders? >> the most egregious offenders were probably rfk in washington, veterans stadium in philadelphia -- >> i went to a pink floyd concert there. >> oh, candlestick in san francisco, a 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 roofs on them, so we got things like the king dome in seattle, which is truly the worst place in which i have ever seen a baseball game in my life, and many others. so that was a grim time because -- and it was also based on a myth. i'm talking a lot about myths tonight. i didn't mean to, but -- >> baseball is about myths. >> there's good myths and bad myths. maybe i should have said fallacy, the fallacy that you can have football and baseball in the same ballpark. you can't without compromising both of them a lot. >> and here's where we look semi-decent. >> 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 the dodgers stadium was built for baseball only. in the post-war era or several decades, only dodger stadium and arrowhead and coffman were built 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're very complimentary about the architecture of that, although you point out one of the things it does not do is be irregular because it's set in open space. what are some of the things you think are good about coffman? >> the first thing that has to be said about it that's really good is it was built as a baseball park, not a multi-sport

stadium. kansas city deserves that credit. then there's a beautiful kind of lyrical flow to the way the walls kind of curve down in the outfield. it's quite lovely, really. if you see it from the home plate side, it looks a little more like a lot of other big concrete stadiums. >> outside of it. it's not so much when you're walking to it, it's not so beautiful. >> right. they've done a lot of work on it in the last generation when the team decided to stay there, and i think it's 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 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. but even though i like it, i don't like it so much that i would argue against the downtown stadium. i think it's actually -- >> we're 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. >> the other bad thing that happened was camden yards. >> camden yards was transformational. >> this is in boston? >> boston. -- baltimore. the baltimore orioles completely changed baseball with the opening of that park. >> we kicked their asses. >> unfortunately, good architecture is not a guarantee of good baseball. that's a whole other discussion. but it is the only -- every

building type evolved a certain amount. i mean, libraries, schools, hospitals, everything evolves and changes over time. baseball parks is the only example i can think of where one single building completely turned around the 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 eccentric and idiosyncratic. san francisco went from having one of the worst baseball parks in the world to having the best, actually, leaping over everyone else in one fell swoop. but camden yards was

transformational. >> was that an hok stadium? >> it was an hok stadium, so it was designed out of kansas city. >> yeah! so we have this amazing design from here and this long tradition. and you're very emphatic in the book about how important that has been. in fact, i'm going to quote you. by happenstance, kansas city became, for all intents and purposes, the nation's center of sports architecture from the last quarter century of the 20th 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? >> it happened -- >> was this good? why did they get all 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 named charles deton, who came up with this motion of a rolling roof -- >> we talk about it all the time. >> -- that would sit between the two stadiums and could roll 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 '70s 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 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. but by then they had already begun to build the two separate stadiums so they just kept going. charles deton ended up working for a local firm called kevon and meyers. they then started doing other ball parks and facilities, and they attracted the attention of hok which is an enormous international firm which happens to be st. louis based, which was not strong on architecture, and they said, hey, guys, why don't you let us buy you and become part of us, and then we'll be sports architects but you guys can keep doing it? so 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.

and that they were smart, aggressive, got an enormous amount of work and just kept growing. there weren't all that many ball parks and arenas and football stadiums that get built, and it's not as though, unlike houses or office buildings or schools, what have you, it's not like we need 100 different architecture firms doing them, because if we had 100 different architecture firms doing them, 90 of them would be out of work most of the time. it was smaller and specialized and 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 populist and

they're still across the street. sports architecture is one of the main exports of kansas city. >> we're going to open this up to questions in just one second. i'm going to try to 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 which we should have built, obviously, with the architecture from populist. >> i think it would be awfully hard for kansas city to not have -- >> let's get that firm from denver. >> exactly. there are a couple other people doing stuff. in fact, bjork engles, a very talented architect, is doing the new park for oakland, which is one of the most interesting and promising projects around. but populist has done some

wonderful stuff, including the ballpark that i think is my very favorite among relatively recent ones, which is pnc in pittsburgh as well as camden yard in san francisco which is fantastic and quite 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 to also be the most famous sports architecture firm in the world. so it's not like they would say, eh, these are just local guys, we better to some big guy from new york or chicago when the biggest in the industry happened to be the local people. i think the big question 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's the right thing for

kansas city to do. i mean, the thing that is least appealing about coffman is the location and the fact that -- >> there never was any economic development around the stadium. >> right, in kind of a nowhere place. you have to drive to it and from it. it's surrounded by a sea of asphalt parking spaces. it's not connected to anything. and what we've seen in the years since baltimore is how beautifully baseball integrates into a whole urban fabric. people want that, they like it, they love being able to walk or take a street car 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. >> all of those things were available, which you write about quite a bit, at the old metropolitan stadium, which i

never saw but was at 18th -- >> municipal. 22nd and brooklyn, yeah. >> that was the site of baseball stadiums in kansas city up until the '70s. the chiefs played there, in fact, i think they were playing there last time they won the super bowl. >> the chiefs played there, 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, and as a result of that, the chiefs could not play any home games for the first month of the season. it would overlap with the baseball season, so they had to

wait for the baseball season to end before they could actually convert it to football use because it was so naturally a baseball park. no, no, walk right up here. my dad remembers and has told me stories about going to that stadium when the a's were leaving and it was known, and nobody was there, and getting a whole pile of foul balls because he would just run around and pick them up. that was his memory. >> right, right, right. >> here we have our questioners. >> okay. >> thanks. i'm from chicago, but i've been here ten years so i'm 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 drama over the lights, and when comitsky park closed, although a lot of blocked view or no view, that was traumatic for a lot of white sox fans, but how much their locations are so much into the neighborhood? >> completely. it's a lot of historical different circumstances that led to those two great ball parks from the golden age to be retained. we almost lost fenway. the red sox, under the previous ownership, were working on plans to replace it, and then the team in the end was -- there is no certainty it would have happened, but they were serious about doing it, but then ultimately they sold the team. the subsequent ownership decided that was crazy and that they had a sort of -- a great asset that if they could only upgrade and

modernize gently a little bit, which turned out to be exactly the case -- 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. it's ironic that ebbetts field in brooklyn was lost because it could be spectacular today, and now it went in the '50s probably because nobody cared about brooklyn and the fan base had moved to the suburbs, so forth and so on. today everybody wants to be in brooklyn, and if it had a ballpark that actually was, in some ways, better than wrigley or fenway in its heart, it would have probably be the nicest thing of all. but yes, location is a big part of it.

>> so now in the cities with multi-purpose teams, like pittsburgh, philadelphia, cincinnati, they knocked those down and built separate baseball and football stadiums, where 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 arrowhead where it is? >> i'm quite sure they would leave arrowhead where it is for a couple reasons. one, my understanding is the chiefs would want 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. so that's. the other is that football doesn't fit downtown the way baseball does. >> i mean, football you want a huge parking lot. >> there are several reasons nd

tailgating is a very important one of those reasons. it's part of the culture of football. people do tailgate. you need a parking lot and so forth. also, a football stadium is and, therefore, i think a little more intrusive in a city. a baseball park, while it's hardly small, is just enough smaller so it kind of fits into a city nicely and well. the final reason, maybe it's 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 it's ten times as often. and the thing that kills the city is dead things that aren't operating and so -- >> right. >> it's enough that we have -- every city needs a convention center, but sadly, they're big boxes that are empty often. we don't want another big empty

thing all the time. so, 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. >> and i guess i'm -- just to -- whenever i see -- whenever i -- whenever i see the proposal for downtown ballpark on facebook, there are the inevitable negative facebook comments. how will -- what will people do for parking? how have they been trying to address that? >> they'll figure it out. i mean, 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 they'll 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 cities in the world, and they moved from the astrodome into downtown and it's worked. so, 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. >> right. >> so, without the pushback of jacob smith and giano, would we just have a proliferation of concrete domes? >> well, that's an interesting question. there's no -- yes, it is definitely true that the first scheme that h.o.k. presented to the orioles, it wasn't a dome, actually, 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 new comiskey parked liked looked like -- >> sorry, earlier white sox guy. >> looked like what they were trying to build. indeed, it opened the year before. it's possible given that it did take longer to build the baltimore one. anyway, but then they -- you know, they got it and they produced something quite wonderful. i think if that hadn't 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 don't 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. that's my sense. but we never know 100% because that's -- what happened, what happened. >> customer pushback. the customer didn't want the product. >> yes. and ultimately, in 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 just happening anyway and it would have made its way into baseball somewhere for the first time, it's one of the reasons i feel for kansas city that maybe it's just as well that it didn't

happen 15 years ago when there was a minor push to move the royals downtown. because i don't 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 can't 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, there's more entertainment, there are whole 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 wouldn't all be on the shoulders of a ballpark to turn around a

downtown, which it wouldn't have succeeded at doing anyway. >> we have time for two more questions. >> i'm that white sox guy. so i was curious, your impression, good and bad, of the old comiskey -- >> the oakland scheme? >> the old comiskey. >> i'm sorry. the monstrosity, it's horrible. >> i agree with you. it's 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 and it's a sort of sad story. i gather, though, i haven't 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. i think a better way to put it is it made it a little less awful. the best comment about it was

from 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 co-miss co-spai -- comiskey park is farther from the field than the old one. and so much about baseball is the 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 things 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 gridiron in it. it all could be plumped into a circle. but, in fact t doesn't work for

baseball. >> it's very briefly, the good and bad of the old comiskey? >> the old comiskey? the old comiskey i thought was funky and nice. it didn't have quite the truly beautiful appeal of wrigley, uptown. i didn't have the magic of the brick wall and the ivy and all that stuff. it didn't integrate into the neighborhood as well, but it's a wonderful -- 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, almost two things that are mutually exclusive in architecture. that one exemplified that. it was grand and funky at the same time, but i found it very likeable, but not loveable,

as wrigley was always loveable. but it was still 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 doesn't agree with me on everything. >> i'm better than she is, right? no. i would love to have -- i'm all for downtown development. i've lived in kansas city and watched it grow over the years. would love to have the stadium downtown. we have this one cultural part of our city that's maybe not like other towns because we're from the midwest and cattle and we're into barbecue. you talk about football being a tailgating sort of and baseball not. >> right. >> 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 -- >> right. well, that's an interesting question. yeah, yeah, that's an interesting question. i don't have an answer to that. >> i would say the tailgates at royal stadium, and i'm a season ticketholder, and have been for 20 years, are just pathetic and can go away. >> i thought that's what he was going to say. >> i'm going to defer to the local. look -- >> i'm not a tailgater. i prefer to go to a restaurant myself. i know there are a lot of people who tailgate, but you were kind. >> well, i defer to the local and his wisdom. i said talk of the downtown council this morning that, you know, any city that -- that is big enough to contain both arthur bryant's and the nelson atkins museum has to be more interesting and complicated and wonderful than most cities in america. >> thank you for that compliment. >> so, i still believe that.

and, you know, just do your barbecue some other time. >> thank you. >> thank you. can we give a round of applause for paul. [ applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪ week nights this month we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every week owned c-span3. tonight an evening of african-american history. civil rights activists cleveland sellers talks about his work in

the 1960s aas a national leader as a student, nonviolent coordinating committee and recounts the orangeburg massacre where state troopers fired on students. three students were killed and mr. sellers was among the nearly 30 wounded. former south carolina mayor joseph riley conducts the interview at the citadel, where he's now a professor. watch tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern and watch american history tv every weekend on c-span3. next historian david pietrusza describes the 1919 world series fix by the chicago white sox which came to be known as the black sox scandal. he talks about how films. david pietrusza is the author of two books on the subject, rothstein and lifetime of the criminal genius who fixed