Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 07.25.05

I'm really starting to hate brick. Brick homes. Bricks of cheese. "Brick House," by the Commodores. But most of all, I'm really starting to hate brick stadiums.

For this, I blame Camden Yards. When the Baltimore Orioles' stadium opened in 1992, it was hailed as a return to baseball's roots, a modern-age throwback to the neighborhood ballparks of yore that embraced their surroundings, unlike the cookie-cutter concrete behemoths that sit ingloriously in cities like a fat uncle at the Thanksgiving table.

Little did we know that Camden Yards was Opening Day for using brick as a means to fake history in a building or location that had none. Today we still have cookie-cutter stadiums. It's just a different flavor of cookie. When the St. Louis Cardinals move out of their current, concrete Busch Stadium into new, brick Busch Stadium next year, they will be moving out of one of the last of the old cookie-cutter stadiums and into a new cookie-cutter stadiums.

The term "cookie-cutter stadium" came into vogue with the multipurpose facilities erected in the late 1960s and 1970s — the Astrodome in Houston, Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, the Kingdome in Seattle, Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

Each stadium was a victory of function over form. They could host baseball, football, concerts, monster truck shows or Billy Graham crusades. They were mere depositories for 50,000 to 70,000 people. They were concrete castles surrounded by enormous moats of paved parking lots. They (mostly) had fake grass rolled over concrete floors. All they needed was paneling in the walls to complete their Brady Bunch-basement look.

After the success of Camden Yards, followed by the equal success of Jacobs Field in Cleveland (the Indians' successor to the cookie-cutters' precursor, Municipal Stadium), baseball teams wanted their own "unique" brick facility. So the baseball teams in Houston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego moved out, and all but San Francisco and San Diego imploded their concrete pimples into a literal dustbin of history, as St. Louis will do after the Cardinals move.

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The cookie-cutter stadium was dead. Except that all those teams moved into ballparks that, like Camden Yards and Jacobs Field [editor's note: see letter for a correction], were brick stadiums, boasted a view of the local skyline and were as unique as a branch of Starbucks. The new cookie cutter stamped out ballparks in plenty of minor league cities, too, places where the skyline view wasn't much more than a grain silo.

Sure, a few of the new cookie-cutter stadiums have their local quirks, like San Francisco's stadium allowing home runs to right field to land in San Francisco Bay to be chased down by mad kayakers. But for the most part, if you've been in one, you've been in them all.

The most annoying thing about this trend is how the brick exteriors are meant to evoke a connection to baseball's past that the teams may or may not have — "may not" especially in the case of Seattle, which has continuously been in the major leagues only since 1976. If it were just stadiums, that would be bad enough, but it's overrunning architecture as a whole. I saw evidence of this on a recent visit to my hometown of Carmel, Ind., one of America's many fast-growing exurbs.

Carmel, like many of its exurban brethren, has wholly embraced brick construction as a way to pretend it's an old-timey city, not a recently settled suburb. Brick seems to grow overnight out of vacant lots and farm fields. It has an all-new brick "downtown" with a brick performance-arts center and brick rowhouses nearby. New brick houses surround a brick "meeting hall" and brick shops. An all-outdoor, brick shopping mall with brick street crossings. New brick rowhouses in my parents' 1970s-era neighborhood. Bricks bricks bricks. More bricks than Ignatz Mouse threw during the run of "Krazy Kat."

As if that weren't enough, its nearby pro teams are in love with brick. The Indiana Pacers have a brick "fieldhouse," meant to evoke old-time Indiana basketball. The Triple-A Indianapolis Indians have a Camden Yards-style ballpark. The Indianapolis Colts are soon to break ground on a brick stadium, meant to evoke, what, Red Grange and old-time football? By the time I got back to my Oak Lawn, Ill., brick house, I wanted to cover it with aluminum siding.

I'm to the point where the stadium I appreciate most is US Cellular Field, oft-criticized as a cookie-cutter "ball mall" compared to Wrigley Field, the brick neighborhood stadium that Camden Yards and its descendents emulate. About the only brick at US Cellular Field, opened in 1991, is around a couple of hot dog stands, and the newest addition, a three-story children's play area. The stadium has no skyline view — the only view is from the top of the children's play area, where you can see the Dan Ryan Expressway, the Red Line el tracks, and the remainders of the mostly demolished Robert Taylor Homes public housing complex.

When Camden Yards opened, US Cellular Field seemed instantly generic, what with its resemblance to many of those concrete cookie-cutter stadiums. But these days, that field is like nowhere else. Here's hoping the White Sox never try to dress it up with more brick.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.