Joni Mitchell Was Right

For the past week, there have been all sorts of stories on the improvements in and around Wrigley Field.  Mix that with a comment someone made Sunday on WGN Radio, and I think about what might have been had the White Sox done the right thing—which also happened to be the smart thing—with Comiskey Park.

I’m pretty neutral on the Wrigley stuff, don’t much care for the upscale add-ons, though I am impressed by the team’s commitment to maintaining a classic ballpark.  The White Sox looked for excuses to tear down their onetime “Baseball Palace of the World” while the Cubs have been fairly relentless in finding ways to keep their ballpark around for another hundred years.

It’s not like the Sox were clueless; I was part of a group that proposed turning Comiskey into a working national monument devoted to baseball.  But the late ’80s were the heyday of “mall thinking,” and what killed Main Streets across America destroyed classic ballparks, too.  The Sox got their mall, the Cubs an entire neighborhood.

I was reminded of all this Sunday when a sportscaster on WGN said he’d like to bring back Comiskey Park and the Stadium; the malls now known as Guaranteed Rate Whatever and the United Center have grown as stale as their retail counterparts.  There is no there there in the upper decks that scrape the sky, only vertigo to go with the knowledge that history was bulldozed to make way for luxury suites.

Ted Lyons and Bobby Hull are memories shorn of context.  That’s what happens when mall-makers get their way.