Monday, August 30, 1999
A palace that is one of a kind
Reds desire ballpark that's traditional yet different
BY JOHN J. BYCZKOWSKI
and JOHN ERARDI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Palace of the Fans
1902-1911 |
Crosley Field
1912-1970 |
Cinergy Field
1970-Present |
Opening Day 2003 |
Joe Spear has this idea out in left field for Cincinnati's new ballpark. Baseball fans will probably love it, if he can just work out the details.
Mr. Spear and HOK, the architecture firm designing the ballpark, want to put a double-deck section of bleachers in left field. Fans sitting in the first rows of the upper deck there will actually be over the outfield, the way they are in Tiger Stadium in Detroit.
The problem is how high to put the upper deck. It has to be high enough to allow fans on the lower deck to see pop flies. But the ballpark's main scoreboard will sit above the upper deck. If you raise it too high, people sitting across the field — in the high-priced, covered club seats behind first base — might not see the scoreboard.
HOK also neglected to put concessions and restrooms in the bleachers — “We kind of kicked ourselves,” Mr. Spear lamented — and so the architects draw and redraw the section, trying to get it just right.
Such is the state of the design of Cincinnati's new downtown ballpark: A collection of concepts where the details still need to be worked out.
The Enquirer, on a six-city exploration of ballparks to learn what separates the good from the empty, heard time and again about the opportunity facing the Reds.
Chuck Armstrong, president of the Seattle Mariners, knows it first hand. He grew up in Louisville as a Reds fan, and he just opened Safeco Field, the Mariners' new ballpark.
“I love Cincinnati. It's a great town,” he said. “They need to have a baseball-only stadium. All that history! What they could put in a museum, they could stock their own hall of fame.”
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THREE-DAY SERIES
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With the Reds and architect HOK Sport close to unveiling a design for the team's new ballpark, The Enquirer wanted to show readers what the state of the art looks like. Reporters John Byczkowski and John Erardi visited six of baseball's newest ballparks — Safeco Field in Seattle, Camden Yards in Baltimore, The Ballpark in Arlington, Turner Field in Atlanta, Coors Field in Denver and Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix.
Sunday:
• A search for the perfect ballpark
• The best of Coors and Camden Yards.
• Comparing state-of-the-art ballparks
Today:
• The latest design plans for the Reds' new ballpark
• Who else in Major League Baseball is building ballparks.
Tuesday
• Twenty-five tips from our experts on how to build a special ballpark in Cincinnati
Talk it up
Join a discussion on the new ballpark at www.cincinnati.com/talk.
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The Reds and HOK know what they have to work with: a dramatic, urban site on the banks of the Ohio River, a rich history, and a deep baseball heritage extending across villages and valleys for a hundred miles in every direction.
The final drawings won't be seen until late September at the earliest, but this much can be said: The new Cincinnati ballpark isn't shaping up to be a cookie-cutter product, aping the famous 1990s “retro” ballparks in Baltimore, Cleveland and Denver. It's being woven into the fabric of the city, with seats close to the field and views of the city and the river from many vantage points.
The design is expected to be unveiled in late September. As Mr. Spear indicated in a recent interview, the placement of every brick and every seat hasn't been finalized. The design must be affordable within the $297 million budget set by Hamilton County, and the Reds haven't signed off on anything yet. And little is being said about what everyone wants to know most: what the ballpark will look like from the outside.
“We are really interested in this feeling like Cincinnati,” Mr. Spear said. But whether that means brick, steel, glass, concrete, cheese, onions or beans, he won't say.
The conversation starts, though, with a set of drawings HOK showed Hamilton County commissioners at a brief meeting in June — after which the drawings were zipped back into a portfolio and returned to the firm's Kansas City, Mo., headquarters. HOK now says the drawings are no longer accurate, but some of the big features depicted remain.
The drawings depict many unusual features, not the least of which is a big “hole,” a break in the upper deck, to the third base side of home plate. It's right in line with Sycamore Street, so anyone looking down Sycamore will see straight through. A bridge will connect the separated concourses under the upper deck seats.
Mr. Spear calls it a “picture window” for the ballpark, and the fact that it lines up with Sycamore is important.
“It reinforces the tie to the city grid,” he said. “What we think is one of the most important things about the whole Fort Washington Way riverfront redevelopment, was to try to get the city of Cincinnati to touch the river.”
That's how the ballpark fits that plan, as HOK sees it.
“With the bridge across,” Mr. Spear said, pointing to it on the drawings of the upper deck, “you're going to have a spectacular view of the ballgame, the river. You turn around and you see right up Sycamore Street, so we think that's pretty cool.”
It is a weird and intriguing feature; there's nothing else like it in baseball. That fissure and the river are the things that will say “This is Cincinnati” when seen on TV.
Is this what's proposed for a team that didn't even allow its players to have facial hair till this year?
“I expected to have to do a lot more talking to John about it,” Mr. Spear said, referring to Reds managing executive John Allen. “But he said, "That's really interesting. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for.' That was really cool.”
The Reds are pushing HOK for something both different and traditional, to take advantage of what planners like to call “context.” The keeper of the context is Michael Schuster, a Cincinnati architect, Reds' season ticket holder and Knothole coach. He is the Reds adviser on dealing with HOK.
HOK Sport has also designed ballparks under construction in Houston, San Francisco, Detroit, Pittsburgh and San Diego. Mr. Schuster said the Reds will make sure their ballpark is different from the rest by emphasizing to HOK what's unique about baseball in Cincinnati.
“We're on the riverfront, we have a long history on the river, we have a long history of baseball, we have a great baseball heritage, we have world championships,” Mr. Schuster said. “If we start pushing those things enough, we can get something unique.”
HOK is trying to design the ballpark to favor the river, creating a number of decks and porches from which fans can watch the game and take in the landscape.
That means massing the building to the north side — the third base side — facing Fort Washington Way and keeping views open south toward the river and west toward the Suspension Bridge. On the north side will be the Reds offices and big ramps leading to the upper deck.
That indicates a couple of unusual things. A fan standing in the main concourse behind third base will see the Cincinnati skyline over the low concession stands.
Behind first base will be a double concourse. One runs between the seats and the concessions (you can get a hot dog and never lose sight of the game). The second runs between the concessions and another set of buildings on Main Street, tentatively housing a retail store, a Reds hall of fame and a theater where ballpark tours will begin.
That concourse will be uncovered, with the Roebling Suspension Bridge as a backdrop — a corridor of food and activity reminiscent of Eutaw Street at Baltimore's Camden Yards, which has the old B&O Railroad warehouse as a backdrop.
“There's a great opportunity,” Mr. Schuster said. That area might be a gathering place for pregame or post-game fun. “But we don't know what it is yet. We're working on it.”
That same kind of split also applies to the upper deck. The deck on the north side — the third-base side — will be split into upper and lower halves, with a concourse running between. The concessions will be on the outside edge, blocking Fort Washington Way and favoring views of the field. Again, the feature will be unique: No other ballpark has such a concourse on its upper level.
The west, first-base side upper deck will have the concessions tucked beneath a continuous grandstand, so fans will have views of the Suspension Bridge.
All of this reveals something about the exterior. “It's not a single building but a collection of buildings,” Mr. Spear said of the ballpark. “And we think that will be probably a lot more interesting in the long run than a building with a tight facade like Coors Field.”
Inside, the ballpark should do well on the nebulous quality called “intimacy.” It appears most fans should be close to the field, but those details won't be shared until the designs are unveiled in September.
“It's interesting as an architect working in this type of specialty, you see some teams are concerned primarily with distance, and they don't worry about other factors such as height or rake,” Mr. Spear said. “Other teams — the Reds are one — are aware of all these things. If you define what makes a ballpark intimate, I think it is a blending of distance, height and the steepness, and the sense of enclosure.”
He added that some clubs favor the premium seats to the detriment of the average fan. That's not the case with the Reds, he said, who don't want to offend their longtime fans, some of whom went to Reds games with their grandparents and are now bringing their grandchildren. “It's really refreshing to see the Reds be very aware of that,” he said.
Building that tradition into the ballpark is something neither HOK nor Mr. Schuster is saying much about. “Hopefully it (the new ballpark) doesn't look like Cinergy,” Mr. Schuster said. The Reds will want to commemorate the Big Red Machine of the 1970s somehow. Crosley Field has more to draw on, but how that might happen, Mr. Schuster said he's not sure.
History won't be ignored, though. “We think we have to represent that into the ballpark, whether we do that through a hall of fame, or whether we do that throughout the ballpark with different little graphics, signage, statues, logos, banners, whatever that is. I don't think you would build a ballpark without encouraging that to happen. How it's going to manifest itself, we don't know yet.”
The Reds are nervous about offering too many specifics because when everything is costed out, some features might have to go.
But when the Reds park is built, the Cleveland Indians and their record string of 350-plus consecutive sellouts will have some competition, Mr. Schuster predicted.
“You're going to have something like that happening here for a period of a few years,” he said. “We're going to get a fan experience here that we haven't had here since Crosley Field, and I think that's going to be very, very positive for all the fans that go there.”
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