the new Comiskey: age well with time? (Chicago: appointed, landscaping)

[Drover]

Originally Posted by edsg25

I don't think so, tony. Don't forget that unlike Wrigley (which the Wrigley family kept in pretty good shape all those years they spent more on the ballpark than the team), Comiskey was falling apart at the end. There was no rescue.

As for the Cell today, I actually think it looks fairly good and stands up well to many of the retroparks. Those parks are often over the top in all the odd quirks they add to give the retro feel. To me, few of those techniques work at all. They just deliver visual overload.

The ones that work best do so naturally. Baltimore was spot on to keep the warehouse in right field. San Francisco's short right field dimensions were dictated by China Basin, an arm of the bay.

The Cell has natural, clean lines. In some respects, it bears a similiarity in layout to the new Yankee Stadium, but IMHO pulls things off far better than in the Bronx because it acutally feels like a ballpark, not the ridiculous palace the Yankees had built for them.

The Cell has been humanized in recent years. It is anything but a bad ballpark. I would at some point like to see the outfield signage removed to the point that opens up a view. Sure that view isn't downtown which it should have been if the park had been oriented the right way. But it still opens up a vista across the South Side, arguably towards Hyde Park with its high rises visible.

"Oriented the right way" is what the park is -- for the benefit of the players. There's a reason why most parks open up to the east. A skyline view would have been nice, but not practical.

[NearWestSider]

Originally Posted by css9450

I've heard that story too. Supposedly the architects (HOK - who also designed many or most of the new parks that came afterward) presented two plans - one retro plan and another which was chosen and was built as the new Comiskey. So a year or two later, the retro plan was used with only minor changes in Baltimore.

HOK was NOT promoting a retro stadium.

The retro stadium was put forward as an alternative by a local architect, and it was immediately panned both by HOK and Reinsdorf.

The old stadium could have remained. The structural report condemning it was done by HOK's consultant, the same SE firm that designed the then recently-completed Robie Stadium in Miami, and was originally pegged to do the structural work on new comiskey (and later bumped due to political reasons). That report was a politcal smokescreen for the ISFA and nothing more.

What the old stadium could not do was accomodate a wide band of club seating sandwiched between two levels of skyboxes. So it had to come down. That's it. Premium seating was all the rage in the late 1980's when it was designed, and new comiskey took it to a new level.

FYI, the retro design in Baltimore was forced on them by the owner, who also insisted it be framed in steel. HOK's prototype back then was the KC Royal's stadium, which is a concrete, perfect geometry, detached site-type stadium.

HOK had been tweaking that basic design for years, modifying it to accommodate local conditions. Camden Yards forced them to rethink many things, and the result is their work got a lot better after that. In computerspeak, what the Sox got was HOK 1.8.2. The Orioles got HOK 2.0.

[NearWestSider]

Originally Posted by Drover

"Oriented the right way" is what the park is -- for the benefit of the players. There's a reason why most parks open up to the east. A skyline view would have been nice, but not practical.

A ball park absolutely has to face east. But........

If the new stadium were mirrored on 35th st you would have:

1. The skyline view in the right field upper deck.
2. A far more pleasant place to attend a day game in summer.

Those are just two of the so many things wrong with new comiskey I am astonished that anyone would bother to start a thread defending it.

That said, the things that it does right (sightlines, concourses, and egress) it does extremely well. Add to that the superior food and beverage choices, and its not a bad experience overall.

Not even close Wrigley Field, but still not bad, and when you factor in the ticket scalping, hype, and general BS that goes along with the Cubs brand, I've been finding myself more and more often at 35th and Shields in recent years.

[css9450]

Originally Posted by NearWestSider

HOK was NOT promoting a retro stadium.

You're probably right; I'm trying to remember where I read otherwise. Its probably just urban legend after all these years.

Its likely that by the time Reinsdorf & Co. saw the plans for Camden Yards, the New Comiskey was already under construction (or almost ready to start construction).

[jwaiter]

Will Wrigley now be home to more fair-weather fans? - Chicago Tribune

[Drover]

Originally Posted by jwaiter

Will Wrigley now be home to more fair-weather fans? - Chicago Tribune

Certainly part of it "fair weather" as people who jumped on bandwagon for what they hoped would be the end of the world series drought have hopped off now that the wagon wheels have fallen off. But the bulk of it is not "fair-weather" so much as even Cubs fans have limits to how much you can exploit their goodwill before they've had enough. Right now there is a huge imbalance between the price to attend a game and the performance of the team on the field. The stands will fill up again when the team owners return some balance by either fielding a team that earns those absurd ticket prices or by bringing those prices down closer to reality.

[NearWestSider]

Originally Posted by css9450

You're probably right; I'm trying to remember where I read otherwise. Its probably just urban legend after all these years.

Its likely that by the time Reinsdorf & Co. saw the plans for Camden Yards, the New Comiskey was already under construction (or almost ready to start construction).

Reinsdorf did not and even if he had he would not have gone for it.

Remember, the Sox were threatening to leave Chicago altogether. There was no time to play around with new ideas, and an unrealistic deadline to get construction started. Going retro would have killed the project and likely resulted in the Sox heading off to Florida .

HOK got the job because they had the basic layout and new exactly what was needed to make it work in terms of getting people into the stadium, into unobstructed seats, needed parking, egress ramps, how big the big screen TV needed to be, etc. This is the advantage of working off a proven design, and is why the stadium functions as well as it does despite the condensed design phase.

But you won't find a lot of nuance to new comiskey because there was literally no time to think things trough, and even less time to make substantial changes when things were found to be suboptimal. All that mattered was getting it done, making it work, and stopping the Sox from leaving.

Which, after seeing the way the whole Cleveland Browns drama played out, is probably unfortunate.

The best outcome for the city would have played out similar to the Browns, with the old Sox moving to Tampa as the Buccaneers, and a new AL franchise called the "Chicago White Sox" taking over old Comiskey Park and renovating it at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, emotion, rather than logic, prevailed and a Chicago landmark was lost as a result.

[thePR]

Originally Posted by NearWestSider

Reinsdorf did not and even if he had he would not have gone for it.

Remember, the Sox were threatening to leave Chicago altogether. There was no time to play around with new ideas, and an unrealistic deadline to get construction started. Going retro would have killed the project and likely resulted in the Sox heading off to Florida .

HOK got the job because they had the basic layout and new exactly what was needed to make it work in terms of getting people into the stadium, into unobstructed seats, needed parking, egress ramps, how big the big screen TV needed to be, etc. This is the advantage of working off a proven design, and is why the stadium functions as well as it does despite the condensed design phase.

But you won't find a lot of nuance to new comiskey because there was literally no time to think things trough, and even less time to make substantial changes when things were found to be suboptimal. All that mattered was getting it done, making it work, and stopping the Sox from leaving.

Which, after seeing the way the whole Cleveland Browns drama played out, is probably unfortunate.

The best outcome for the city would have played out similar to the Browns, with the old Sox moving to Tampa as the Buccaneers, and a new AL franchise called the "Chicago White Sox" taking over old Comiskey Park and renovating it at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately, emotion, rather than logic, prevailed and a Chicago landmark was lost as a result.

That would not have been logical.

[chet everett]

Reinsdorf and even Eddie Einhorn (Chicago White Sox: Front Office) knew that the key to having a stadium that looked "full enough" even when it was not very fully was far more desirable than any kind of cool exterior or retro layout.

The club level seats, together with the skyboxes and the dining options (which have been tweaked to incorporate some of the better features of everything from Comiskey to Arlington Park) are huge selling features to season ticket holders, corporate event types, and even families -- knowing that there is some place to get out of the weather (good or bad) with little kids or the elderly is HUGE plus for an "open air" stadium.

No sports owner could have made money with Comiskey AND the awful mess that the east edge of Bridgeport was. The "sins" of McCormick Place (which should have been on the old Ampitheatre site and NOT expanded to span LSD...) along with "walls" afforded by routing of the Dan Ryan and Stevenson (which still serve as barriers to the near south / southwestern neighborhoods from getting to the lakefront as well as being funneled much to close to the Loop...) really doomed Comiskey to being an "island" long before the sea of parking lots that currently surrounde it. You can see the "car centricity" that was at play even in '59 -- Chicago white sox 1959 comiskey park image by BillBurgess on Photobucket There still are not enough "regular customers" in the immediate vicinity of the facility -- Wrigley has a HUGE advantage with its captive bands of perennial barflys with money to burn.

[tonythetuna]

Originally Posted by edsg25

I would at some point like to see the outfield signage removed to the point that opens up a view.

A view of what?