\u201cThe ballpark,\u201d Paul Goldberger says, \u201cis a symbolic resolution of two things that remain unresolved in American culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Related: <\/span>London\u2019s MLB crowd offers baseball a new land of opportunity | Matthew Engel<\/a><\/p>\n The Pulitzer-winning critic is referring to urban and rural life, the city and the country, tensions he explores in his new book, Ballpark: Baseball and the American City<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is an engrossing read, starting in the teeming 19th century, soaring through baseball\u2019s gilded age in the first half of the 20th and ending among the roofs, aircon and policed corporate spaces of the new millennium. It\u2019s a work of architectural history and criticism but it can also be read as a history of baseball or of America and its cities. To Goldberger, the game and the buildings dedicated to it are as essential to American society as they are symbolic products of it.<\/p>\n Discussing baseball\u2019s beginnings, Goldberger says: \u201cIt did not spring like Athena from the head of Zeus.\u201d It\u2019s an appropriate phrase, as he\u2019s speaking from a Greek island where he\u2019ll deliver a lecture.<\/p>\n Versions of the game came together over time. The familiar story that baseball was devised by Abner Doubleday<\/a> and \u201cplayed in the fields in Cooperstown, New York\u201d, Goldberger says, is \u201ca longstanding myth that has its roots in a very conscious attempt in the late 19th century to position the game as connected to a more elite and already vanished America\u201d.<\/p>\n As he shows, much early baseball was in fact suburban, played in \u201celysian fields<\/a>\u201d nonetheless close to the margins of cities. It was rackety and contradictory and competing groups fought to exert control. Like America itself.<\/p>\n In the early 20th century the game shifted gears, building beloved city ballparks like Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn<\/a> and Shibe Park in Philadelphia<\/a>. Both are gone but in Chicago and Boston, Wrigley Field and Fenway Park continue to pull in the fans.<\/p>\nThe beginnings<\/h2>\n
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