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MAGAZINE | JULY 08, 2019, ISSUE
Ballpark: How Baseball Stadiums Became Beautiful Again
By RICH LOWRY
June 20, 2019 11:28 AM
Memorial Stadium during the World Series featuring the Baltimore Orioles and the Pittsburgh Pirates, October 1979 (Rich Pilling/Contributor/Getty Images)
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, by Paul Goldberger (Knopf, 384 pp., $35)
Memorial Stadium in Baltimore wasn't much of a ballpark. I didn't know that when I went there for my first major-league baseball game as a kid in the late 1970s and while walking up to our seats caught a glimpse through a tunnel of the field, the greenest, most perfect grass I'd ever seen, a color I didn't know existed. (This was long before the advent of high-def TV.)
The lush field at the center of an enclosure of concrete and steel provides one of the themes of Paul Goldberger's new book. For him, the ballpark is the garden in the city, the rus in urbe, a sports combination of the Jeffersonian agrarian tradition and the Hamiltonian emphasis on cities and industry.
A former architecture writer for the New York Times and The New Yorker, Goldberger calls the ballpark “one of the greatest of all American building types” and argues that, “as much as the town square, the street, the park, and the plaza, the baseball park is a key part of American public space.”
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