Give Me a “Ball Park Figure”: Creating Civic Narratives Through Stadium Building in Newark, New Jersey by Laura T
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Give Me A “Ball Park Figure”: Creating Civic Narratives Through Stadium Building in Newark, New Jersey By Laura T. Troiano A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-Newark Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in American Studies Program Written under the direction of Beryl Satter And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ Newark, New Jersey October 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Laura T. Troiano ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Give Me A “Ball Park Figure”: Creating Civic Narratives Through Stadium Building in Newark, NJ By Laura T. Troiano Dissertation Director: Beryl Satter I came to this project interested in the question, what can narratives about baseball stadiums reveal about the development of Newark, NJ spanning the twentieth century? From this question arose an exploration of narratives that offered insight into competing interests within the city, definitions of civicness, the employment of nostalgia as an argumentative strategy, and how urban development plans are constructed and sold to citizens. The primary focus of this history is centered on two baseball stadiums in Newark, NJ, Ruppert Stadium, built in 1926 and demolished in 1967 and Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium, completed in 1999, sold in 2016, and is now slated to be replaced with mixed use retail space and condominiums. The narratives fashioned to support both stadiums construction and maintenance are strikingly similar. For both stadiums, for over a century, Newark mayors, councilmen, successful businessmen, community organizers, newspaper columnists and reporters, and local citizens all craft, repurpose, and used these civic narratives to further their own varied agendas. It is through these crafted narratives about these stadiums that I explore the competing views of the city and the competing visions for its future. ii For my mom, my life-long cheerleader iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................iii DEDICATION ...................................................................................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS.....................................................................................................v INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................1 SECTION ONE: RUPPERT STADIUM………………………………………………. 16 BASEBALL AS BUSINESS…………………………………………………………….16 BEARS IN TRANSITION………………………………………………………………34 DAVIDS THE BASEBALL “BUG” BUILDS A STADIUM…………………………..40 THE BLOCK ERA………………………………………………………………………63 SPLITTING THE DIAMOND ………………………………………………………….66 THE EAGLES FLY INTO TOWN……………………………………………………...70 THE WAR AT HOME FRONT/FIELD…………………………………………………85 END OF TWO ERAS………………………………………………………………..…100 LIFE AFTER THE BEARS AND EAGLES……………………………………...……123 SECTION TWO: BEARS AND EAGLES RIVERFRONT STADIUM………...…….138 NEWARK BUYS WHAT THE STADIUM CRAZE IS SELLING…………...………139 A DESTINATION CITY IN PROGRESS……………………………………………..157 THE FIGHT FOR RIVERBANK……………………………………………………....162 THE NEW JERSEY MINOR LEAGUE FOREFATHERS……………………………167 GAMBLING ON STADIUMS…………………………………………………...…….172 A “SPARK” IGNITES THE SPORTS COMPLEX PLAN…………………….………182 HISTORY IS CALLED INTO ACTION……………………………………………....204 CHANGE OF PLANS………………………………………………………...………..207 iv REVITALIZATION THROUGH A BASEBALL STADIUM……………………...…214 OPENING DAY……………………………………………………………..…………227 WHAT’S IN A NAME?..................................................................................................240 THE FINAL STRETCH………………………………………………………………..257 BIBLOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................268 v 1 1926. Concrete and steel. Wrap your eyes around 435 feet of frontage three stories high. Inside, enclosed by sixteen-feet high concrete walls. Steel towers by 1930, let there be light. Walk through one of the six turnstiles; you enter into the large rotunda where wide runways lead you down to your section. Right, left, behind, grandstands, 15,000, bleachers, 2,000. Pay your 40 cents for a bleacher seat; it’s over on your left. Don’t worry you will have a fine view, even the furthest bleacher seat allows you to be only 175 feet away from home plate. Headed for the grandstand? Once you put your 65 cents down you head to the right, situated one floor under the club offices. It was 85 cents for the box seats, not that you could afford it, but it’s behind home plate and on the third baseline. Look out. Brown dirt then the green expanse. Sod, irrigation hidden beneath. Look out further, the scoreboard, the clock on top. Come back in, back to the dirt, with 306 feet chalk foul lines on each side, three plastic pads, three bases, come closer, an isosceles right pentagon, home plate. Home. 26 Wilson Avenue, Newark, New Jersey. 1999. Concrete and steel. A brick façade, 300,000 bricks in all. 9,000 cubic yards of concrete and 700 tons of structural steel. Inside, three plastic pads, three bases, come closer, the same isosceles right pentagon, home plate. 395 feet from home plate to the centerfield wall. $8 will get you in. Head through eight turnstiles, a view of the field everywhere you look. Your seat, one of 6,014. Through the concourse, your choice of five concession stands. Home. 450 Broad Street, Newark, New Jersey. Home. A new kind: condominiums. 2 This story began for me on my ride home from work at Rutgers University Newark. Every day I took a left onto Broad Street in Newark and there it was, Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium. At least once a week I had the same thought: what a strange name for a baseball stadium. What do a bear and an eagle have to do with one another or baseball or Newark? An assignment in my last class for my doctorate offered an opportunity to answer my weekly stadium-naming question. The answer was more than I bargained for. The result, one dissertation later, I have a good idea why they named that stadium on Broad Street Bears and Eagles Riverfront Stadium; the name was not about one stadium, but two. The name I discovered is one part of a century-old strategy used in Newark and cities across the country and around the world. It is a way to build and maintain sports stadiums using a narrative imbued with civicness, boosterism, and nostalgia. The name was my way in. But once inside the metaphorical and literal walls of both of these Newark baseball stadiums, I began to see the narratives constructed through them. How competing interests, definitions of civicness, and urban development plans for the city were being played out. How the economic condition of the city, its social and cultural state, and its future trajectory was all there, enveloped in baseball stadiums. I went looking for a simple answer and found a new way to look at cities and their stadiums. It truly is an epidemic. It has spread around the world. It is an epidemic we often attribute to the twentieth and twenty-first century, but no, this epidemic, the building of stadiums, takes hold in the eighteenth century. They are so prevalent you might not even notice them. Today, stadiums are scattered among the landscapes of cities and towns across the United States and around the world. They are of course buildings, but they are 3 other things too. They are structures where people congregate to watch events of all kinds. They are public spaces where communities gather, where communities are formed, reinforced, and dismantled, sometimes simultaneously. They are spaces of community activism. They are extensions, representations, and commodities of the cities in which they are located. They are places of consumption, of entertainment, of production, and of values. What we build is who we are. If buildings can represent a city and its communities, then by extension so do stadiums. The choice of how a city is represented is an exercise in power; contestation soon follows. Here is where things get interesting, in the conflict. Politicians, developers, residents, and entrepreneurs, where their agendas align and where they clash are where the stadiums narratives are created. In the struggle over urban development and the messaging of those plans, stadiums can be focal points; they can be used as tools to that end. There are the narratives we tell ourselves and there are narratives we tell to others. Those narratives we tell to others, they shape the way people view us. Scale that up, and the narratives people tell about their city, it shapes the view of the city and the people who reside within it. A city’s narrative is not a singular one; it is an amalgamation of competing narratives that offer a revealing look into the state of a city. Yes, its problems and assets, but also its residents, city officials, and businesses, and the imagined paths to the city’s future aspirations. Stadiums are representations of the cities they are in. They allow us insight into the construction of communities; how they are comprised, how they are changing, and their desires. Stadiums can reveal and offer space for contesting social norms, potentially shifting the cultural and social direction of the city. 4 One of the most important avenues to understanding what a stadium can offer is in the narratives told about its physical