![]() ![]() ![]() Baseball was almost an indigenous local sport, with a lot of teams, and a lot of smaller ballparks-Washington Park, and many others-all culminating in the great cathedral of Ebbets Field, which opened in 1913. ![]() It emerged out of a time when baseball was a commanding presence in Brooklyn. It was intimate but had a certain aspiration to grandeur at the same time. So the stadium had a sort of astonishing personality. The mythology is deeply intertwined with the history of the team, which was incredibly colorful, and an amazing group of fans. Baseball parks are a significant part of the public realm they’re a public experience, in an age when so much is pushed toward private and virtual experience. It’s a mirror to how we’ve viewed our cities and what we think about them. As I researched the piece, I realized how the history of baseball parks is also the history of American cities. In 2009, when I was at the New Yorker, David Remnick asked me to write about Yankee Stadium and Citi Field, both of which opened that year. But I’d never seen one like this, and it was right in the middle of the Bronx. I remember as a kid, the first time I went to Yankee Stadium, being blown away by the most beautiful lawn I’d ever seen in my life, and I grew up in the suburbs, where there were lots of lawns. But I’ve always found there’s something magical about a baseball park, about the way it’s both city and country woven together in the most miraculous way. We could talk for half an hour on the second question. ![]()
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