Heavy Metal (construction) vs. the Cubs - new Wrigley Field, on the street, and on tonight's season opener on ESPN

It's like deja vu all over again.  But supersized.

click images for larger view

It was less than a decade ago that the Chicago Cubs were rebuilding the Wrigley Field bleachers, removing the original 1914 brick walls to add over 1,700 new seats, extending the structure out over the public sidewalk.

Child's play.  Now under it's new ownership, the Cubs are completing the transformation from a neighborhood ballpark to the cash machine of a modern franchise eating up the surrounding community.

image source: Wikipedia Commons

Back in 1890's, the Chicago Lutheran Theological Seminary had built their new campus on what was them the largely unsettled outskirts of the city, but the tranquility of the site was soon overtaken by the city's explosive growth.  After the trestled "L" was constructed right at their back door in 1900, their was no stopping the development.  The seminary picked up stakes and moved to Maywood, selling their land and buildings for the construction of the 14,000 seat Weeghman Park.  On opening day in 1914, the Seminary buildings could be seen just outside the stadium's walls.

In 1917, the Chicago Cubs made the park their own. For decades, the team was owned by chewing gum tycoon William J. Wrigley, Jr. and his heirs. The closing years of their reign was marked by a kind of lazy decrepitude that was the source of what has come to be seen as Wrigley's unique charm.  Teams were most often not very good, crowds often dipped into the low thousands, and residents living in the greystones across the street from the park would sometimes drag lawn chairs and beer up to the roof to take in the game.

This was the legacy up through 1981, when the Chicago Tribune bought both the Cubs and Wrigley field for $20.5 million.  Mostly the deal acquired a cheap source of lucrative programming for the Trib's broadcast properties.  The Trib tinkered - executing that 2005-6 renovation and expansion of the bleachers, adding lights to allow for the first night games.  Changes were conservative and incremental.

Outside Wrigley field, however, the future was already simmering right under the Trib's nose.  An astonishing mutant capitalism emerged, catering to fans willing to spend big bucks to emulate the rooftop experience the guys in bermuda shorts sitting on a lawn chair used to get for free.  The greystones became corporate "baseball clubs" which constructed their own slices of bleachers on the rooftops.  In 2004, the Tribune company actually entered into a 20 year revenue-sharing deal to allow the rooftop clubs to continue to poach on their attendance.

By then, however, things had changed dramatically.  The newspaper publishing business was no longer a license to print money, and Tribune Company's revenues and profits were in a free fall.  As journalism waned as an industry, professional sports teams went from the playthings of millionaires to the creator of billionaires.   In 2009, the club the Trib had paid little more than $20 million for less than 30 years before was sold to the Ricketts family for $845 million.  Last month, after the Ricketts sold a minority int6erest in the club for $175 million, Forbes Magazine placed the current value of the Chicago Cubs and their stadium at $1.8 billion.

Last year the Ricketts announced a $575 renovation and expansion plan for Wrigley Field.  A large part of that is taking control of a large part of the surrounding neighborhood.  After a major court victory last week, the Ricketts are in the process of destroying the views and running the rooftop clubs out of business. As part of agreements with the city, they'll be able to shut down adjacent streets on game days.  They've acquired major pieces of the property just to the west of Wrigley.  The nearest block, site of tall coal silos for much of the stadium's history, is currently under construction for a new office building and plaza.  On the other side of Clark street, a Ricketts-owned hotel is next. An 800 car garage is also on the boards.

The original Weegham Field was constructed in just two months.  The renovations, by VOA Architects, aren't so lucky.  A "harsh Chicago winter" has been blamed for the new bleachers not being ready for opening night (tonight, April 5th).  Right now, the site is a festival of steel and steelworkers.

Since the brick wall that Bill Veeck began planting with ivy over 70 years ago, isn't all there at the moment,  there's faux ivy imprinted on the screens for the construction fences.

The Cubs are saying the left-field bleachers will be finished on May 31st. (Even after the concrete is poured, it has to cure for a month.)  The right-field is scheduled to follow sometime in June.

There may be no seats for many season-ticket holders, but the Cubs at least have their priorities straight.   The 6,000 square-foot Jumbotron should be ready for its network debut for the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball broadcast beginning at 7:00 CDT tonight.

Cubs rendering of Jumbo-tron

42 feet high and 95 feet wide, it's as tall as a shoe-horned River North condo project, and a lot more capacious.  To power all the pixels, there looks to be enough wiring to connect a small city.

Right now, the construction crews at Wrigley are putting on quite a show.  Let's hope it doesn't prove more winning than the one on the field.

Clean Up, sculpture by Ted Sitting Crow Garner

Play Ball!

Read More:

Ragged Liberty or Polished Upscaling? Speculating on the Future of Wrigleyville's Mutant Urbanism.

Foul Ball Hotel: the In-Your-Face Mediocrity of The Wrigleyville Sheraton

 Four Buildings and a Funeral - Wrigley: The Architecture that Remains after a Great Company Dies

Chicago 4th Most Miserable; 1st Most Gullible. Why Top Ten Lists about Cities are Whack

click images for larger view

When was the last time you heard or read "as reported by Forbes Magazine" at the lead of a major news story shooting across the media?  Never?  But you're hearing the name Forbes a lot now, especially in Chicago.  Why?  Because we made number four on Forbes just-released list of America's Most Miserable Cities.  I won't lower myself to providing a link,  You can find far better ways of spending your time; clipping your toenails, perhaps.

A long time back,  Forbes Magazine gave up on being a second-tier Fortune or Business Week and settled on becoming the Fox News of business reporting.  Indeed, after taking over the magazine from his far more talented and ebullient father Malcolm, presidential wannabe Steve Forbes turned a publication once known for scrappy reporting into the kind of journalism melding news with alternative reality right-wing wish fulfillment that gave the magazine's motto "Capitalist Tool" a whole new and not entirely flattering meaning.

And so, in the tradition of David Letterman, just a lot less entertaining, the "List" has become a Forbes staple.  Over time, you can choose from Top 10 Ski Resorts in the U.S., the 10 Best Cities for Newlyweds, and Top Ten Richest Rappers,  Surely, the Top Ten Trophy Wife Bikinis can't be far behind.  And now they've done it again.  With America's Most Miserable, they've gotten $100 million dollars worth of press and air time, not to mention social media buzz, by rubbing people's noses in their own shortcomings and getting high on the resulting outrage.

Yes, there's a lot of misery in Chicago.  It lives like a murderous canker within a world of wonders.  In contrast, the kind of small towns that get on ‘most livable’ lists tend to be safely homogeneous.  They take fewer risks, have smaller ambitions and more modest results.  There is nothing wrong with this.  I have never visited an American city, no matter how small,  that I didn't fall at least a little in love with.  In fact, these are the places where most of live.  Forbe's Most Livable dotes on college towns like Ann Arbor.  Chicago actually has two of these.  They're called Hyde Park and Evanston.

A truly great city is not constrained.  It incorporates the universe.  From all across the nation, the best, the most ambitious and aspirational - and also no small number of the worst - choose to move there because that's where the action is.

If it doesn't actually kill you, Chicago will break your heart.   Chicago will also make you feel more fully alive than you ever imagined possible. 

That is the glory and terror.  It doesn't allow you to just move in the cocoon of your car through a Potemkin-perfect world between office, home and mall, as is the norm in a "livable" city.  No matter how gleaming the neighborhood, you're never more than a few feet away from the most intractable dark side of human nature.

While it's always possible to simply live in denial, for most big-city dwellers, an awareness of the basic contradiction is something we carry with us always.  It can curdle our worldview, or expand it.  Not unreasonably, we all want to live pleasant lives, but a great city, a complex city, a contradictory city, keeps you close enough to the battle lines to at least raise the possibility that you might achieve a moment or two in your life where you actually find a way to stare down the monster in a new and effective way.  Even as you're close enough to the abyss to never entirely forget just how vulnerable we are, you're also close enough to the marvels of a great city to always be aware of the kind of world we can create at our best.  It's not impossible to find such things in a small, ‘livable’ city, just a bit less likely.  The molecules are farther apart, a bit slower in motion; the environment a lot less than heated.

There is no awareness of the exaggerated duality of urban life in a Top Ten or ‘Most’ list.  There's is a binary world - on or off.  It's results are suitable, not for serious discussion, but for arguing - loudly - after downing a few drinks at the corner bar and exhausting more important debate about the Bears.

And as you're slugging down your beer, allow yourself a bit of civic pride.   If Forbes is to be believed, Chicago is not only miserable in itself, we can claim to be the source of misery in others.  According to Forbes, the larger Chicago area is a global slough of despond rivaled only by Tunguska, Siberia after the 1908 meteor strike.  Fully a quarter of Forbes 20 Most Miserable are in Chicago's orbit: the city itself, plus Rockford, Gary, Milwaukee, and even the whole of Lake County.

Yes, Lake County.  Don't walk, run, to 60045 (or take an Uber limo).  Bang on the doors of the mansions.  Evacuate the residents and exile them from their misery to - let's say - Provo, Utah, which happens to be on the Forbes list of America's Most Livable Cities, along with places like Manchester, New Hampshire, and Omaha, Nebraska, on which Chicago poet Carl Sandburg can be said to have had the final word . . .

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
     of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
     go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
     and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
     pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
     answers: "Omaha."

Carl Sandburg, Limited