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CITY
BASEBALL MAGIC: PLAIN TALK AND UNCOMMON SENSE ABOUT CITIES AND
BASEBALL PARKS
by
Philip Bess
Knothole
Press; ISBN: 0967398606
$8.95,
paperback--64 pp., including 46 black and white plates
Copies
are available directly from Knothole Press
1-888-535-9742
www.knotholepress.com
or
may be ordered from any bookstore.
CITY BASEBALL MAGIC is a polemic on behalf of the
traditional urban baseball park, and an exercise in "pragmatic
idealism." Today’s new "retro" baseball stadiums look
wonderful, but are outrageously expensive and do not provide the
intimacy or community of the classic neighborhood ballparks built in the
early 1900's. They are a
drain on taxpayers, they yield seating arrangements that are worse for
the average fan in the upper deck, they result in huge ticket price
increases, and they tend to destroy the physical and spatial fabric of
cities. But most of these liabilities can be ameliorated by once again
understanding the baseball park as an urban building subject to the
physical constraints of urban networks of streets and blocks. To
demonstrate this thesis, Bess offers the wonderfully conceived Armour
Field, a proposal for neighborhood design and a new ballpark originally
presented in the late 1980's as an alternative for the new stadium that
the Chicago White Sox were determined to have built to replace the
venerable old Comiskey Park on Chicago's south side.
Still relevant today, the proposal addresses social, cultural,
and economic issues, as well as issues of baseball and urban aesthetics;
and demonstrates the superiority of the traditional neighborhood
ballpark over the modern stadium in ways both tangible and intangible.
What
the critics say about CITY BASEBALL MAGIC:
"Bess' thin but incisive...book...has become a
cult classic among those who want to do more than just grumble about
eating $5 tube steaks in the nosebleed sections of new $500 million
"baseball entertainment complexes."
In this book, Bess details how huge stadiums have torn the fabric
of urban neighborhoods, distanced fans from the game they love, and
fostered the inflationary spiral that has enabled greed to permeate
baseball.... With a
new preface its only update, this year's 10th anniversary
reprint...feels as fresh and relevant as ever."
--Britt
Robson, Utne Reader
"Bess approaches baseball park design from the
perspective of a committed urbanist and baseball fan….
He argues convincingly that the issues that surround stadium
design are important to everyone, and are the same issues that confront
cities as a whole: suburbanization, the dominance of the automobile,
neglect of central cities and local neighborhoods, and architectural
standardization."
--Kevin Fry, AIA Memo
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