Retro Ball Parks: Instant History, Baseball, and the New American City (review)

Since the opening of Camden Yards in 1992, fourteen new downtown Major League ballparks have opened, fifteen if Turner Field in Atlanta is included. Under the rubric of "new old" parks or "retro" parks, these baseball venues have dazzled fans and media and, at least for a few years, resulted in a sharp increase in attendance for each franchise. Most of these parks were publicly financed and/or subsidized by the taxpayers through services and infrastructure. All of them have been hailed as boons to their community's effort to revitalize downtown.

In Retro Ball Parks Daniel Rosensweig, a professor in the Inter-disciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia, meditates on the meaning of this as a cultural development. He draws upon the history of the baseball, literature, postmodernism in history and literature, and a nostalgic vision of his own baseball experiences, in search of illumination.

Starting from a nostalgic exploration of Baltimore and the promise of Camden Yards, Rosensweig focuses his attention on Cleveland's Jacob's Field, "The Jake," located in the Gateway Center of the city. Drawing on the skills of a cultural anthropologist, Rosensweig immerses himself in the area and within the ballpark. He talks to fans, team executives and employees, neighbors including shop keepers, residents, and the homeless. What he finds is the sense of community pride in "The Jake" and Gateway Center. He also finds many questions raised by this approach to urban renewal.

Rosensweig is drawn to his subject by his recollections from childhood that led him to find the urban ballpark as a place of authenticity, at least when contrasted with his own suburban upbringing. He ends his introductory chapter with the following:

What is it about reality encoded through urban experience that promises so much recompense? Each chapter of this book in its own way attempts to answer this question through a search for provisional understanding of the real as it is expressed and packaged in and around new old urban baseball stadiums.

(p. 20)

The promise embedded in this paragraph is largely fulfilled. Chapter 1 offers a very astute analysis of the lay of the land in the Gateway Center neighborhood as well within the stadium. Some history of the politics involved in building "The Jake" is offered along with some of the history of Cleveland baseball, including the African-American teams. Most interesting is Rosensweig's contention that the new old urban ballparks have created a nostalgic urban space isolated from the dangers of urban existence surrounding the park, which simultaneously evokes a safe version of that same milieu. This sanitized urban experience is not unlike the wonderful world of Disney and other theme parks based in the American entertainment zone.

In Chapter 2, "Baseball's 'Beneficient' Revolution," Rosensweig examines the history of stadiums and stadium building from the perspective of urban planning and reform, and the construction of a class system within the confines of the seating arrangements of the ballpark. Drawing on the history of urban revitalization and public recreation in the nineteenth century, as well as the issues of race and class, Rosensweig places "The Jake" and other new old parks into an illuminating historical context.

Chapter 3 looks at the tensions between the concepts of equality and tolerance and their intersection with authenticity, once again drawing on the nineteenth century urban experience in interesting and creative ways. Chapter 4 follows up nicely with an examination of "The Bleachers" and its changing meaning as a designated space within the ballpark. Again "authenticity and reality" get a hard look in this context.

Chapter 5, in many ways, is the most interesting of all. Here, issues of race are confronted in a variety of contexts. Rosensweig looks at the decline of the African-American players, the whitening of the fans, and what he describes as attempts by Major League Baseball to market blackness as a safe and congenial...