The archived ramblings of my time as a world traveler up to my current life in Washington, D.C.in with the new Busch
Caught a game at the new Busch Stadium yesterday, pushing the stadium total to 14 (a number that should jump rapidly soon, since I've only seen a game at one east coast stadium.
None of my Cardinal fan friends have been overly enthusiastic about the new stadium. Essentially on the exact site as the old one, the new Busch was designed with the same "retro" aestethic as every other new stadium since Camden Yards. The biggest knock against the old stadium, from a fan's perspective, was that it was a cookie-cutter round cement structure, just like the ones in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and other cities that built stadiums in the 60s or 70s (I'll have a chance to revisit the cookie-cutter look soon, at RFK). The biggest knock on the new park is, as one of my friends puts it, it's a "new Cookie-cutter". Since the elements designed to give the park "character" are the same as every other new park out there the park actually is devoid of any character.
Valid point. But I still prefer the new park to the old one. Got to see a day game in the bleachers yesterday, even if the weather wasn't perfect. Clouds hung in the sky most of the day, and the ninth inning was broken up by a 49-minute rain delay. The temperature reading behind home plate stayed in the high 70s, though, and for a few of the mid innings the sun beat down.
I reached my seat with a $5 hot dog and $8.50 beer in hand and looked around the stadium. Granted, there isn't any unique distinguishing feature to this park. But the brick facade and iron roof supports rising above the upper deck just look nicer than the old concrete ring of arches, even if every other park uses them.
Just being shiny and new and having 11 different kinds of concession stands will wear off. In 20 years, there might be calls for a new park as this stadium style falls out of favor. But it's going to age at least as gracefully as the Old Busch, and probably a little bit better.
For my money, there are two very important reasons this stadium is better.
1. It's obviously a baseball park. By the time I saw a game at the old Busch they'd torn up the artificial turf, put a grass bank in the outfield as the hitter's backdrop (a feature kept in the new park) and set up a shrine of rememberance in a few upper deck centerfield sections, featuring the team's Championships and retired numbers. They made it look probably as nice as you could make a cookie-cutter stadium look. But that didn't change the fact it was orginally built as a multi-purpose stadium. And it didn't change the most glaring deficiency of the old Busch, which was fixed with -
2. You can see out of the new stadium. The tiers of seating decks, skyboxes and club sections wrap around the field from foul pole to foul pole, but the pile of seating decks has breaks, visual interupptions, to allow spectators some view of the surrounding city. St. Louis has one iconic view - the arch. Now you can see it from parts of the stadium. The only place you could see the arch from the old stadium was if you climbed to the top row of the upper deck and looked out. This sounds like a small thing, but to me it's important for a stadium to have some sort of geographical identity. The new stadium might now have much unique character, but neither did the old one, and at least now you can tell with a glance which city you're in.
(A last point: Busch Stadium policy allows fans to bring in their own drinks, and I believe food. But the only place this is mentioned on the Cardinals website is on an "A to Z" guide of Busch Stadium under the letter I. For inspection (of bags). Obviously not a policy they're hoping people stumble upon.)
