No. 3: San Diego, the Padres, and urbanism: A love story
No. 3: San Diego, the Padres, and urbanism: A love story
What the history of the Padres' ballparks says about the city
One of my favorite nights was spent at Petco Park when, on August 25, 2021, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the San Diego Padres in sixteen innings. The sellout crowd thinned after the Padres didn’t walk it off in the ninth, and by midnight my buddy and I sprawled our bodies across two empty rows and alternated trips to the water fountain. We didn’t know it then, but when the ballpark ended alcohol sales after the seventh we had a full nine-inning game left.
For six consecutive extra innings neither team could score their ghost runner from second, a sad and improbable display of baseball that we reveled in. Without a dog in the fight, and with my friend in town for vacation, we rooted for the game to carry on forever, as is theoretically and uniquely possible in the sport. Alas, the game ended just before 1:00 a.m. I walked the four blocks home to my East Village apartment and my friend went the other way toward his Gaslamp hotel. We had spent close to seven hours at the ballpark.
I complain about nearly everything in San Diego: the amount of car infrastructure in Balboa Park, how long it takes to get the walk signal to cross El Cajon Boulevard, and a civic identity based on an absence of weather, to name three things. But Petco Park is the apotheosis of San Diego and, despite my being a Phillies fan, the one constant in my life since moving here in 2013. It’s where I feel the safest in and most a part of the city, which is to say it is the place where I feel most connected to its people. That’s because the ballpark is San Diego at its most urban. It’s the embodiment of what the city once was. It’s the embodiment of what the city could be again if we let it.
Lane Field (1936-1957)
Bill Lane earned a fortune prospecting for gold in Alaska and then founded a baseball team in Utah, as one does, and in 1915 his Salt Lake City Bees joined the Pacific Coast League. Before the New York Giants and Dodgers moved to California in 1958, the PCL was the premier professional baseball league out West and featured several major league-quality ballparks, like the Los Angeles Angels’ Wrigley Field, to which Lane moved his team in 1926. He renamed his outfit the Hollywood Stars.
They were stars in name only, so Lane looked south after the 1935 season to escape declining revenues and a rent hike. With efficiency that breaks my brain, San Diego city and port officials identified a site for baseball at Broadway and Harbor Drive downtown, and by April the following year San Diego had a brand-new, WPA-funded ballpark by the bay. (The city had first charmed a young F.D.R. in 1914.) The team was again renamed and on March 31, 1936, the San Diego Padres played their inaugural home game at Lane Field. It was a rapidly built ballpark for a rapidly developing city—San Diego’s population had more than doubled between 1920 and 1936, and the city had become one of the fifty largest in the U.S.
It’s no coincidence baseball found San Diego during its growth spurt. For all its pastoral mythologies, baseball is an urban sport and form of entertainment. Games were played in Manhattan’s Madison Square as early as 1842, and by 1858 New York supported dozens of ball clubs. That same year, it cost fifty cents to watch an all-star game held at Fashion Race Course in present-day Queens. It was likely the first time people paid to watch baseball.
As the nineteenth century progressed, games took over empty lots, parks, and polo grounds. The working class didn’t do dressage, which businessman William Cammeyer acted on by building the country’s first enclosed ballpark in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He charged nothing for Opening Day, 1862. Entry cost a dime thereafter. Gambling was encouraged and a band played throughout games. The fence Cammeyer constructed in the outfield was meant to keep non-paying fans from the fun, not demarcate home runs, but the rest is history.
Baseball didn’t just happen to be in the city. It needed the city. Traveling to rural open space to stage games was often impractical in the sport’s early days, and most baseball fans didn’t live on farms. They lived in tenements and boarding houses, and ball games were scheduled around the timetables of intercity trains. As New York urbanized, chasing after and spurring development with new streetcars and els, baseball didn’t die with the loss of empty lots. It thrived. Urban density is what created and sustained baseball—the Dodgers are named for the art of avoiding trolleys, and the only historically accurate thing about MLB’s Field of Dreams Game is white entertainment executives exploiting nostalgia for profit. Baseball’s hall of fame should be in New York City, not upstate in Cooperstown.
Conventional wisdom holds that San Diego was built around the car, but when 8,000-seat Lane Field opened, it sat at or near the terminus of several San Diego Electric Railway streetcar lines. Most neighborhoods then were a trolley ride from the ballpark, and the Padres’ left-handed batters, including an eighteen-year-old local named Ted Williams, aimed at the Santa Fe Depot sign behind the right field fence. That history is preserved in the modern trolleys that use Santa Fe today, as well as the buses that sit in car traffic: the 2, my best friend and greatest foe, adopted the identifying number of the streetcar line it replaced, one that would have dropped me off a block from Lane Field. (Then, as now, “Dodgers” would be a fitting name for a San Diego team.)
San Diego had its own tenements, too. They were the nearby ships and military bases packed with young, poorly paid newcomers. They were the lifeblood of the PCL Padres, who in their first year achieved a cumulative attendance of 178,000 in a city of 165,000. In the Padres’ 1937 championship season, attendance reached 217,000. In 1944, the team was awful. The Padres sold 246,000 tickets anyway. “During the war, the town got real crowded,” Padres pitcher Wally “Preacher” Hebert told baseball historian Bill Swank. “Those Navy and Marine guys would come to the games from basic trainin’ [sic] and cheer for us.” More than the team’s performance, density and proximity drove attendance at Padres games, just as they did in New York.
In 1948, the Cabrillo Freeway created the Balboa Car Park. A year later, the streetcar system shuttered. The Clairemont subdivision opened in 1951. Construction of the 5 began in San Diego in 1954. By 1956, the Padres’ attendance slumped to 152,000. After the 1957 season the team would move to Mission Valley, once a fertile river basin, then a wartime encampment, then a suburban commercial district. The team’s new home was only five miles as the crow flies from Lane Field. For a carless sailor stationed at the 32nd Street naval base it might as well have been on the moon. The Padres would stay there surrounded by asphalt for the next forty-five years. Lane Field became a parking lot, like much of downtown did after World War II. San Diego was bulldozed for the car.
Mission Valley (1958-2003)
As an inducer of car trips, San Diego/Jack Murphy/Qualcomm/SDCCU Stadium was toxic and dangerous. As a real estate asset, it was unproductive. As a piece of architecture, it was indistinctive. As a civic space, it was exclusionary. And as a ballpark, it was all wrong.
Unlike other sports, baseball is best observed as close to the field as possible. That’s why, in the first generation of modern ballparks, the sport fit the urban environment so well. Street patterns hemmed in the grandstands and outfield, creating intimate ballparks specific to their city. Fenway’s Green Monster didn’t descend from the heavens. It was a response to Landsdowne Street creating a weirdly shaped plot of land and in turn a shallow left field. And while column-supported stands inconvenienced some attendees at field level, they maximized valuable real estate and allowed for upper decks close to the action. Detroit’s Tiger Stadium famously featured an upper deck in right field that extended over the playing field.
Unbound from the street grid, and needing to accommodate football’s dimensions and crowds, mid-century all-purpose stadiums pushed seats at all levels away from the field. This resulted in cavernous buildings for baseball and acres of parking to make the stadiums “accessible” in the first place. These concrete donuts, overbuilt and overwrought, were an inefficient use of space and barely contemplated the gameday experience outside of the car. San Diego’s stadium was the suburbs. Westgate Park, a short-lived predecessor at the current Fashion Valley site, at least looked like a ballpark, but it was also surrounded by parking and lefties swung not for a train station but for the freshly paved 163. (If you think I’m picking on you, San Diego, know that Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, a spiritual cousin of the Murph’s, was drearier and more carbrained. Getting detained in the Vet’s holding cell may have been a convenient way to wait out stadium traffic.)
Of course, the Stadium Formerly Known As Qualcomm fostered millions of memories, including one captured by San Diego Union-Tribune photographer Charles Starr of four San Diegans jury-rigging a feed of the 1992 MLB All-Star Game. For as iconic as that photograph is, it shows a stadium with its back to the city. It’s a place not worth being near if you don’t have tickets and a place you can’t get to if you don't have a car. And it harkens back to when society seemingly functioned fine with pickup trucks that weren’t the size of M1 Abrams tanks. But it also shows San Diegans being human in unprogrammed public space. Their drinking beer and watching the game on a canyon rim feels like they’re getting away with something, which is what great urbanism feels like to Neanderthal Americans like me.
Downtown again (2004-forever, hopefully)
When I lived downtown I would often visit Gallagher Square, beyond Petco Park’s center field fence, and it always surprised and amazed me to see a 42,000-seat ballpark. Tucked in among apartment and office buildings and sited near dozens of trolley and bus stops, Petco Park is “one of the most successful integrations of a new ballpark into an existing urban fabric that any city has pulled off,” according to architecture critic Paul Goldberger. San Diego sells its beaches, but a greater and more accessible landmark—and one that better reflects its civic life—is its ballpark, which is possibly the best non-Wrigley, non-Fenway urban ballpark in use today. I will grant you PNC Park in Pittsburgh if you put up a fight, but Yankee Stadium is a mausoleum with a lawn and Camden Yards has been surpassed by the ballparks it inspired. (I’ll take that back if the Orioles fix their mutilated left field.)
But Petco Park’s development plan, authorized by a successful 1998 ballot measure, included the provision of 5,000 new parking stalls on properties surrounding the ballpark. If voters/drivers didn’t think that was enough, then the plan let the public know that “There are approximately 12,000 additional parking spaces within a 15 minute walk of the Ballpark for a total of over 17,000 stalls,” or just 1,500 fewer spaces than were at their Mission Valley site. Leadership at the local transit agency estimated that, when Petco Park first opened and before all the parking was built, half of Petco’s attendees traveled by transit. Today, that number is about 15%, thus proving urban planning scholar Donald Shoup’s theory: parking spaces are the fertility drug for cars. Funneling these cars to and from the nearest freeway as quickly as possible are multi-lane one-way streets, which are as welcoming, safe, and quiet as an aircraft carrier’s flight deck.
What’s worse, if harder to quantify, is that the bloated car infrastructure around Petco Park deadens the streetscape when there isn’t an event. Who pays that price are the residents of downtown, not the motorists who drive to the ballpark a few times a year. What is the worst is that the urban space used to temporarily house cars could be used to permanently house people. That’s a price we all pay.
There may be practical reasons for providing so much parking. It’s not 1936, when Lane Field welcomed crowds a fifth of the size of Petco Park’s. And many of today’s Padres fans live nowhere near downtown after seven decades of San Diego sprawling away from itself.
These are excuses, and they obscure an ideology of control.
“The history of zoning law is boring,” write Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett in their book Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City. Fittingly, zoning makes cities boring. Everything has its place, public space is often controlled or over-programmed, and a desire for order creates a “rigid city … that [becomes] an iron cage.” In my North Park neighborhood, I find myself walking 30th Street almost exclusively, as it’s the only hospitable mixed-use corridor for a pedestrian. Not coincidentally, it’s the neighborhood’s most dynamic and interesting street. That’s because humans use it throughout the day and motorists are (mostly) tamed by the street design.
One block in all directions from 30th Street are zero businesses, single-family homes setback from wide streets, and miles of deserted sidewalks. There are some apartments, but they’re mostly variations of the “Huffman six-pack,” which is the mullet of residential design: parking in the front, living in the back. Their cars crowd onto the sidewalk and make the streetscape look like the overflow parking lot of a county fair. Newer buildings are usually denser and neater, but they have craters underneath them called garages. Yet we wonder what to do about traffic that is seemingly worse than ever, on-road transportation remaining the single-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and housing that is more expensive than it needs to be. At the same time, cars allow us to make crushing commutes and avoid seeing or interacting with people experiencing homelessness. The monthly car payment is worth it, apparently. This all reminds me of Bo Burnham’s satirical suggestion in Inside: “One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine: suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.”
Sendra and Sennett argue that this method of urban planning reflects the division of labor in capitalism, as social and economic power is translated through the built environment. At or near the top of the hierarchy is car-centric suburbanism and its imposition of order and control through segregated land uses. There’s also a racial element to this in the United States.
Black studies scholar George Lipsitz called it the spatial imaginary, and among white people it’s centered around “a racially-marked form of consumer citizenship that seeks to secure services for itself at the cheapest possible price, while passing on the costs of remedying complex social problems onto less powerful and less wealthy populations.” This describes most of San Diego exactly, as low-density areas with segregated land uses are money losers. Urban areas must subsidize the typically richer and typically whiter suburbs. It’s American economics at its finest.
On the other hand, Lipsitz describes the Black spatial imaginary as favoring public expenditures for public needs. “Residents of the differentiated spaces of cities,” he says, referring to Black residents, “have emerged as the most fervent advocates for fair and affordable housing …[and] for the creation and maintenance of efficient and safe transportation systems.” These goals are most achievable in urban environments, and it’s a matter of simple math. Valencia, Spain, with almost half as many people as San Diego, is four times as dense and has sixty bus lines, five subway lines, four tram lines, and several intercity commuting options. We have … not that, and the roads in the US are four times more deadly than those in Spain. To make this more painful, seaside and sunny Valencia is, according to CityNerd, “what San Diego would be if San Diego had high speed rail, good urban fabric, less annoying people, and cost 20% as much.”
Lipsitz acknowledges that, on an individual level, not all white people consciously embrace their spatial privilege and that not all white people benefit from it. Still, the perpetuation of suburbanism represents a collective refusal to let go of the implied sense of control over urban space and the corresponding benefits that accrue only to some people. It’s what the Padres did when they returned to downtown but brought with them their parking.
In the words of Sendra and Sennett, the city outside of Petco Park is “highly articulated and regulated public space” where everything must be used as intended: that’s the area for cars, that’s the area for businesses, and so on. People who flout these controls—say, protestors or the homeless or a cyclist who takes the full lane so they are seen by drivers and don’t die—are ostracized, excluded, or removed from space. It’s annoying that they are in our way or are unsightly, but we really resent them because they’re violating our idea of who or what is supposed to inhabit that space. At Petco Park, everyone has a seat. The whole point is to sit together with strangers and observe and experience. Out in town, there are few public benches or areas within our neighborhoods to congregate. We don’t know or trust who might sit there, so we deprive ourselves. Community is designed out of existence.
Inside the turnstiles, Petco Park can make the world’s great cities jealous: it’s car-free; you can walk to fish tacos and local beer from any seat (but I’ll take a Bud Light, thank you); old, handsome buildings are adapted and reused; new buildings in the evolving skyline are on display above the playing field; and thousands of people hang out like friends to watch a game, then carry on with their lives after the last pitch. The latter point is what makes the ballpark so salient to San Diego’s civic life. At no single location besides Petco Park do so many San Diegans gather in public so often, and they do it downtown, the economic and political heart of the region.
And like great cities, Petco Park enables a low-grade chaos that makes any one game exciting and interesting and spontaneous. It may be raucous. It may be boring. There may be boot Marines roasting their ass off in the upper deck so civilians can clap at them between innings. Occasionally, there are fights and streakers. But in all cases we’re reminded of the joys and dreads of our fellow man, depending on who sits next to us. On the field, the players sometimes do things that have never been done before. Sometimes they do nothing right. Sometimes, they play for sixteen innings. However the game goes, I never leave the ballpark thinking that there’s no reason to come back, that I’ve seen it all at Petco Park.
It’s a dynamic space because the American ballpark is, or should be, a democratic space, one designed for organic action and participation. This activation depends on its participants being free and free to be themselves, alone amid the crowd. Should they try to import the suburbs into the ballpark—you can only cheer over here, you can only eat over there—then I will be the first at the barricades. Yes, there are more quarter-zip sweater vests in the lower bowl than the upper deck, but people of all incomes and backgrounds share space at Petco Park, make it their own for a few hours, and perform together the civic act, first put in practice in New York in the 1880s, of rooting against the Dodgers. None of it is possible without the players’ labor. Baseball in the city is utterly human.
It’s cliche that sports bring us together, but it’s not because we cheer for one team or the other. (See: American politics.) Sports, and baseball, most of all, unite us because it makes us literally and proverbially bump into each other over and over and over again. “The unbridgeable distances, the necessary silences, between people who differ,” write Sendra and Sennett, “should be acknowledged and respected. That’s what makes civil society ‘civil’, and what a big, dense, diverse city—unlike a nosy village—makes possible.” For at least eighty-one days a year, Petco Park is that city. We could have that everywhere in San Diego on all days, and we wouldn’t even have to pay for tickets.