There Used to Be Two Ballparks Here

Aerial photograph of Shibe Park, bottom and Baker Bowl, upper right,
Philadelphia, September, 1929.
Photograph by George D. McDowell

I love this photograph. It shows not one, but two Major League ballparks at the time concurrently in use in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Swampoodle. For some reason I don't think they call it that any more. Anyway, it may be surprising, but this isn't the only such photograph,

Yankee Stadium was built in the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, home of the Giants and later the Mets. Those two parks co-existed less than a half mile apart as the crow flies, until Shea Stadium was built in 1964, replacing the venerable old Manhattan ballpark.

In St. Louis, on the corner of Grand and Dodier which has seen baseball played continuously for longer than any spot on the planet, stood the ancestral home of the St. Louis Cardinals known as Sportsman's Park. That original park became run-down and in 1893, the team built a new facility Robinson Park,  a few blocks away. Then in 1902, the Milwaukee Brewers, one of the charter members of the then fledgling American League, moved to St. Louis and took over the Cardinal's original name, the Browns, and their former ballpark. The two St. Louis teams played in ballparks a couple blocks away from each other for twenty years until the Cardinals moved back to Sportsman's Park which was re-built in 1909 as a permanent steel and concrete structure as was the new trend at the time. 

That trend began in Philadelphia.

Shibe Park, also built in 1909, would become the home of the American League Philadelphia Athletics. It  usually gets credit for being the first Major League ballpark to have been built of steel, brick and concrete. But actually its neighbor five blocks to the east, National League Park, later more famously known as Baker Bowl, the one time home of the Phillies, is the true holder of that distinction.

Baker Bowl was built in 1895 on the same spot as its predecessor which was destroyed by fire. That was the ultimate fate of most ballparks to date as their wooden grandstands would ignite at the slightest provocation, often resulting in catastrophe. An 1894 fire that began during a game at the South End Grounds in Boston, probably originating from a carelessly discarded cigar, not only destroyed what was perhaps the most ornate ballpark ever built, but twelve acres of the residential neighborhood surrounding it!

Baker Bowl not only has the distinction of being the first "fireproof" ballpark to take advantage of new construction techniques and materials, it also was the first to feature a cantilevered upper deck grandstand.

Despite its technical innovations, Baker Bowl was one of the most idiosyncratic ballparks in the big leagues. The playing field was never level, due to a railway tunnel which ran underneath. The acute rectangular site the park was built upon resulted in odd dimensions. The foul lines ran nearly parallel to the stands resulting in enormous foul territories. That boon to pitchers was mitigated by the tight right field which measured only 280 feet from home plate. To prevent ridiculously cheap home runs, a sixty foot high wall was constructed to keep balls that would be easy outs in other venues, from landing on Broad Street. That wall which measured thirty feet higher than the beloved Green Monster of Boston's Fenway Park, provided the park's most memorable feature, a giant advertisement for Lifebuoy Soap. The copy on one of the iterations of the sign read: "Safe from B.O., The Phillies use it!" That provided the running joke for the decades of the sign's existence, uttered by the notoriously hostile Philadelphia fans: "The Phillies may use Lifebuoy but they still stink!"
   

Baker Bowl, I'm guessing in the early twenties. This photograph illustrates the seamless relationship between the ballpark and its surrounding urban environment, a common feature of ballparks of the day. The building in deep center field was actually part of the ballpark and served as the clubhouse for both teams. Note the figure in the foreground with the megaphone, the ballpark's PA announcer.

                 

Innovations of Baker Bowl notwithstanding, Shibe Park rightfully deserves the distinction of being called the paradigm of the classic Major League ballpark, all of them built within a little over a decade. Of those, only two exist today, Fenway Park and Chicago's Wrigley Field. You can tell from the photographs that Shibe Park wasn't just a set of stands quickly thrown up to seat paying fans surrounding a ball field, it was a serious work of architecture. I love the aerial photograph because it shows how the ballparks of a century ago were built to fit into their urban surroundings. Perhaps there is no better example as these two ballparks take advantage of every inch of their sites as determined by the pattern of the city streets. 

Shibe Park blended in with its surroundings so well that for its first decade or so, from a streetwise view walking up Lehigh Avenue, the street running up and down in the photograph, one would have been hard pressed to know exactly the function of the building. Architectural critic Paul Goldberger calls Shibe Park:

...the first true palace of baseball...the most fully realized architectural statement baseball would make in the first decade of the twentieth century. 

In his book Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, Goldberger continues:

...more than any ballpark before it, (Shibe Park is) a statement about the role of the ballpark as a civic building, as a public gathering place, and as a civic institution worthy to take its place beside museums, courthouses and concert halls. 

Shibe Park shortly around the time of its opening in 1909. For its first few years,
its most distinctive feature, the cupola was visible from the playing field.
That would change after the grandstands were substantially expanded in the twenties..

From the inside, like its smaller neighbor five blocks to the east, the most distinctive feature of Shibe Park, not yet built when the aerial photograph was made, was its right field wall. However it wasn't the distance of 324' down the right field line that necessitated the construction of a massive wall, it was the neighbors. Just as Wrigley Field, from their homes, Shibe Park's neighbors on 20th Street had a perfect view of the ballpark. Originally this was only a slight irritation to the ball club, especially after the neighbors constructed grandstands on their roofs, (sound familiar?) and charged folks half the price as the ballpark to see a game. But in the twenties the Athletics were perennial challengers with the  mighty Yankees for the American League pennant. In fact shortly after the aerial  photograph was made, Shibe Park hosted the World Series where the Athletics beat the Cubs in five games. The ballpark was selling out anyway so what difference did it make that the neighbors were reaping benefits? That all began to change in the following years as the A's began slipping in the standings. More significantly, the Great Depression meant fewer people were coming out to the ballpark. To make matters worse, the "rooftop owners" were actively soliciting fans in line to buy tickets at the box office, attracting them with their half price seats.That was the last straw and in the winter between the '34 and '35 seasons, the owners of the team, the Shibe family along with the most famous name in Athletics history, Cornelius McGillicuddy. better known as Connie Mack, constructed a thirty foot wall to block the view of the neighbors.

It would become known as the "Spite Wall" and its construction all but destroyed the team's relationship with the community, which never healed. Making matters worse, Connie Mack who also managed the team, (he was the last person to manage a team from the dugout wearing street clothes), shortsightedly traded or sold off all his star players.

Meanwhile Baker Bowl which had never been properly maintained, was slipping year after year into decrepitude. Borrowing a page from the Cardinals who began sharing Sporstman's Park with the Browns in the twenties, the Phillies abandoned their old home in 1938 in favor of renting the ballpark owned by their cross-town, or more accurately, down-the-street rivals the A's.

With a few exceptions, as Connie Mack grew older and less with it, the Athletics languished in the second division of the American League until 1954 when they pulled up stakes and headed west to Kansas City. They did a lot  more languishing there until finally finding success in Oakland in the seventies. 

Ironically, the year the Athletics moved to KC and Mack was effectively pushed out of the business, Shibe Park was renamed Connie Mack Stadium. Old man McGillicuddy continued to hold court in his opulent office in the cupola of the ballpark at the corner of Lehigh and 21st that now bore his name, until he passed away in 1956, aged 94. The Phillies would continue to play at Connie Mack Stadium which itself was showing its age, until they played the final game there on October 1,1970. Like so many of their fellow MLB teams, the Phillies abandoned their beautiful, classic ballpark for a nondescript, doughnut-shaped multi-purpose stadium which itself would become obsolete in not all that many years.

That monstrosity known as Veterans Stadium was replaced by a new ballpark, Citizen's Bank Park that was, as was the trend at the time, built to resemble the look and feel of you guessed it, the classic ballparks of 100 years before.

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