Overview
Bathed in sun and suds, Wrigley Field is home to the perfect baseball viewing experience. The ultimate neighborhood ballpark serves as a sort of time capsule, transporting us to an era where every park felt like a day at Wrigley Field. But postcard memories aside, Wrigley’s modern cachet is a unique success story. From its construction in 1914 by the implausibly successful Charlie Weeghman (for a baseball team that was not the Chicago Cubs) to serving as the venue for George Halas’s Bears, Wrigley Field has hosted many different kinds of sporting events for America’s second city. Stuart Shea’s unparalleled history of Wrigley Field documents a park and its place within the surrounding community, its influence on who lives where in Chicago and why, and as a home to teams and events that have helped a city define itself.
Beyond Wrigley’s status as both a living treasure and a historical artifact, Shea looks at the current plans to renovate the park; the combative relationship among the team’s owners, the city, and the neighborhood; and the strange blend of interdependence and mutual annoyance that have handicapped efforts to preserve, promote, and adapt the park to the twenty-first century. Unlike any other history of a ballpark, this “unauthorized biography” chronicles the ballpark as a venue for women’s baseball, football, boxing, and soccer, among other sports. As Shea explains, the tension between past and present, memory and the future, or America as we imagine it and as it is, has rarely been so well captured in one place.