THE GOOD NEWS BEARS
It's opening night at the Newark Bears' new Riverfront Stadium,
the home of the city's independent minor-league baseball team,
and Mayor Sharpe James is in his element. Introduced during the
opening ceremonies as ''the greatest cheerleader Newark has ever
had,'' the Mayor dresses the part, wearing the full purple-and-white
uniform of the Bears. Unlike most politicians at a ball game,
he stays until the very last out, roving through the stands, shaking
hands, actually leading cheers, pressing his hands, palms up,
toward the sky, encouraging Newark's fans to raise the figurative
roof.
James
is doing more than just rooting for the home team. The Mayor says
baseball can revive his city, and in this strange faith he is
not alone. Nourished by an almost fetishistic nostalgia, new minor-league
ballparks have sprung up all over the country like mushrooms after
a summer rain. In New York, a Yankee farm team plans to build
a state-of-the-art park to rejuvenate Staten Island's musty downtown
district. Coney Island is also due for a sprinkling of baseball's
magic dust, a proposed stadium for a Mets farm club. Promoters
of these new ventures take baseball's most treacly fantasy—if
you build it, they will come—and add to it the promise that
by coming, fans will invigorate the tired old neighborhoods, towns
and cities trapped in their industrial pasts.
This
idea that baseball is imbued with transformative powers has deep
roots. The fabled major-league parks built early this century
were situated in dense urban districts; the beautiful green fields
between the foul lines were a simulacrum, an ''improved'' chunk
of the American heartland transported to the city—much as
the great urban parks of the same period, conceived by America's
first landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, and created
by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Olmsted, were artificial plots of
wilderness brought to the inner city to ''improve'' and assimilate
the new urban, immigrant masses. In legend, baseball was an outgrowth
of rural America—the mythic field of dreams amid stalks of
corn—but in fact, the first recognized game was played at
Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, a 19th-century working-class picnic
grounds only a few miles from the site where Riverfront Stadium
now stands.
Baseball's
mythological power grew as it became an immigrant's game, dominated
in its early decades by Irish players, and later producing stars
like Joe DiMaggio, the son of an Italian-born fisherman. As the
first big money-making sport, baseball was capable of lifting
poor boys out of the slums and turning them into heroes. Their
accomplishments were celebrated in stadiums that were among the
nation's great public spaces. Like Grand Central Terminal, the
original Penn Station and the dreamy, vanished towers of the amusement-park
cities on Coney Island, these ball parks were irresistible attractions
to a public whose own private spaces were often claustrophobic,
firetrap tenements.
It
is more than coincidence that baseball—and particularly minor-league
baseball—declined with the rise of the suburbs. The suburbs
are all about home, a place where ordinary Americans have nice
little greens wards of their own. Television provided further
incentive not to travel to the ball park. Minor-league teams died
out by the hundreds—dwindling from an all-time high of 448
franchises in 1949 to a mere 130 by 1963—while big-league
clubs moved to sleek, efficient stadiums. Astroturf and vast acres
of parking were the hallmarks of the modernized game.
By
the early 1990's, all that began to change again. The new trend,
inspired by neotraditional stadiums like Camden Yards, in Baltimore,
and Jacobs Field, in Cleveland, represents a shift in the game's
mythology. These new parks don't simulate Arcadia the way the
old ones did; they are instead an idealized form of urbanism,
a fragment of our memory of the American industrial city at its
peak, and that's what makes them so attractive to mayors like
Sharpe James. An old-time ball park like Riverfront Stadium is
more than a link to the past; it approximates the feel of bygone
prosperity. Not even Newark's gracefully appointed performing-arts
center—another vaunted symbol of the city's rebirth—does
that.
The
fans who pack Riverfront Stadium on opening night are drawn by
many things: cheap tickets and diversions (a water-balloon-hitting
contest, a booth where they can measure the speed of their own
fastballs), not to mention a safe, friendly atmosphere and an
abundance of parking. If they enjoy the experience, the thinking
goes, maybe they'll hunt for other places to spend their time
and money in Newark. As generators of new jobs and private investment,
baseball stadiums generally haven't justified their enormous expense.
(The Newark park cost $29 million, nearly all of it from the public
trough.) But their effect on the image of a city is harder to
measure.
Riverfront
is a handsome park, though the hybrid of urban stylings and suburban
conveniences has more than a whiff of Disney about it, like so
many reconstructed city attractions these days, and invites an
easy cynicism. But then, Central Park was something of an artificial
space when it was built, too: a romanticized re-creation of wilderness,
denounced by some as no more than an attempt by speculators to
boost land values. Its stated purpose, though, was to bring all
New Yorkers together in a public place. The crowd at Riverfront
is as integrated as you will ever see at a public event in America,
and it's clear that the fans are rooting not just for the Bears
but also for Newark. It's hard not to root with them, at least
until the stadium is renamed Continental Airlines Ballpark.
©
Copyright The
New York Times
