Also this issue: Stink Town -Daniel Brook

November 27-December 3, 2002

cityspace

Ballpark Frank

Erection Set: As long as the stadiums are going to be in South Philly, letâs find a way to bring business to the area. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

OK, so the stadiums were built in the wrong place. The Phillies and Eagles should lead the way in making the best of a bad situation.

by Steve Conn

Hard as it may be to believe, we are approaching the 10th anniversary of perhaps the most magical baseball season the Philadelphia Phillies have ever given their beleaguered fans.

Nineteen ninety-three. The year a collection of overweight, chaw-spittin', beer-swilling thugs went to the World Series. Dykstra, Incaviglia, Williams. John Kruk.

And a city of overweight cheesesteak eaters, from the mayor on down, embraced them as family. Sure they lost the series, but watching them pound those overpaid pretty boys from Atlanta was pleasure enough for me.

Sadly, however, the lesson the Phils management drew from '93 was that they could cobble together a baseball team from used parts and expect it to run like a Porsche. Thus, for the better part of a decade the Phillies became a team that couldn't make it out of the garage.

At about the same time, so the story goes, Bill Giles went down to Baltimore to check out Camden Yards, the new home of the Orioles. So impressed was he, the story continues, that he vowed to build one too, right in Philadelphia.

And just as they mistook the meaning of 1993, Giles and company left Baltimore having learned the wrong lesson.

What impressed Giles and others was the building itself -- its smaller, more intimate scale and its obvious references to ballparks of yore. The yards that got torn down to make room for places like the Vet. With Camden Yards, postmodernism came to baseball. Retro to the future!

So the new Phils park will look a lot like an old Phils park. Grass and dirt and brick. The kind of place your grandfather went as a kid, though with newfangled ticket prices that would surely make his head spin.

The real significance of Camden Yards, however, has more to do with its urban context than with its old-timey architectural touches. Camden Yards was conceived as part of a larger whole, as a means of redeveloping Baltimore's sagging downtown, not as an end unto itself. In short, Camden Yards was designed to be a part of the city.

This, I think, was the crux of the debate that took place a few years ago over where to locate Bill Giles' new field of dreams. It pitted those who saw a new ballpark as part of a larger urban vision -- those who proposed places like 30th Street, Northern Liberties and Vine Street -- against those who simply wanted a new ballpark and the path of least resistance to it. In the end, of course, expediency won out over creative urban design, and even as I write, construction crews are raising the new stadium about two blocks from the Vet.

The result may prove to be quite strange: a neighborhood baseball park without any neighborhood; an island of pastoral nostalgia floating in an all-too-contemporary sea of asphalt parking lots. In the end, this new field won't be any more a part of Philadelphia than the Vet was.

Yet while the opportunity lost when the current site was chosen was much lamented, we have not talked much about the new opportunity this stadium could create.

Even with this new stadium -- and the one for the Eagles besides -- no one, not even Bill Giles, would argue that this particular corner of the city constitutes a "destination" of any kind, except for those attending sporting events and concerts. How many people wake up on a Saturday morning and say, "Let's take an invigorating walk around 11th and Pattison?" After the two stadia are finished, the whole area will still be bleak and desolate.

But it doesn't have to be. With a little creativity, and a whole lot of development capital, a new neighborhood could grow up at the bottom end of Broad Street, with the new sports facilities integrated into this new urban fabric.

The area has three things going for it, all of them completely underutilized.

First, terrific transportation access. The Broad Street line gets you to Center City in minutes, and the highway access is easy. Second, green space. While people have bemoaned the lack of park space in Philadelphia, there sits FDR Park, largely forgotten and forlorn. That park could be the jewel of a new neighborhood. Finally, land. Lots of it compared to other parts of the city, and little of it being used to best advantage.

The sports teams are the major players in this corner of the city, and so they ought to take the lead in imagining what this area could look like in 20 years -- a 24-hours-a-day place with housing, retail, restaurants. A place worth visiting even if you aren't going to a game.

In the end, the only justification for spending millions of public dollars on these private businesses is if the city can get a new center of urban gravity -- a real neighborhood to go with that neighborhood ballpark -- in the bargain.

Steve Conn is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University and a member of Design Advocacy Group.