As of January 2015, nearly 90,000 lots within Detroit’s cityscape lay vacant. (“Vacant Lots in Detroit Draw Ideas, Creativity.”) With all this empty space, we’re left the question of “where to go?” To answer this, it’s important to retrace our steps to how we got to the way we are. An easy way to contextualize the city with history is to view the changes in its urban form (Warner, Bass, Whittemore, 1) and the perfect example of this change can be found in the people of Detroit’s move from the old Tiger Stadium to the new and commercialized Comerica Park. Using the two parks as an example, we can analyze the ways in which we as people have thought about the city in the past, and by projecting that knowledge into the future, we can hopefully prevent re-experiencing what the rest of the country called “Detroit’s Agony” (ABC News)
The Site that is Tiger Stadium used to holda stadium considered to be a classic, before it closed down it tied Fenway for the oldest park in America, An interview done by Sports Illustrated on a number of professional baseball players ranked it within the top 5 favorite fields for the athletes to play on and the “Tiger Stadium fan club” had over 12,000 members at one point. (Steinbreder) At its peak, on Game-day the stadium could fill out all 54,220 seats it had to offer. (“1969 Tigers”, 4) Today if you go to Tiger Stadium, you would not be able to differentiate it from any of the other sandlots here in Detroit, it is a large field with a baseball diamond, surrounded on three sides by a chain-link fence. The one side still has the historic gates, but that’s only because when they razed the stadium it was too great a hassle to fence the fourth side in. We can sit there and ask ourselves, “What happened?” but we as Detroiters know exactly what happened to the old. It got old, Tiger Stadium wasn’t sleek, modern, commercial or fast, and in a city where a whole new industry was created based on the premise of constant motion, artefacts like the old stadium just won’t do.
According to James Kunstler “Eighty percent of everything built in America has been built in the last fifty years,” (Lecture 11/16) Our cities were designed with the mindset of planned obsolescence, indeed this has been our way of seeing the city through the whole 20″ century, proof of this can be found in this bulletin written by Bernard London, a depression era business man, “The cause of our present stagnation is that the supply line or arteries furnishing the needs of the country are clogged with obsolete, outworn and outmoded machinery, buildings and commodities of all kinds. These are obstructing the avenues of commerce and industry and are preventing the new products from coming through.” (London, 7) His view is to let out the old and let in the new. Economics trumps History with this view, furthering that logic Comerica will always trump Tiger Stadium with this view.
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Comerica isn’t a baseball park, it is a business. A multimillion-dollar complex designed for a consumerist culture. The flashy scoreboard alone, a $10,000,000 project, was designed so that every 6,096 square foot of space could be used for advertisement. (Shea) The old Tiger Stadium was too cost-inefficient to remain a park for major league use. An article written in April of 1991 compared Tiger Stadium to Fenway, and concluded that both would be torn down and rebuilt with more modern ways of thinking in mind. (Steinbreder) In reality, the Boston landmark has remained open and there is no talk of it closing anytime soon. The prediction for Detroit, on the other hand, was spot on. Comerica was constructed as a solution to the problem that the managers of Tiger Stadium were facing, Tiger Stadium did not have any luxury boxes, which is what brings in a large chunk of profit for the new age stadiums. (Steinbreder) The old stadium also had the highest amount of low-cost seating over any other ballpark in the nation. (Steinbreder) All these examples emphasize the fact that the old stadium was no longer profitable for the owners, and by further reasoning no longer profitable to the city. So we tore it down. Us as a people decided to adopt the way of seeing of Mr. Bernard London and let out with the old, and take in with the new. As a result of this way of seeing, the urban form that developed was Comerica.
But what about Boston? Fenway has remained open, and John Henry, owner of the stadium and the team that calls it their home has maintained and upgraded the stadium to ensure that this generation can enjoy what has been voted ‘America’s Most Beloved Stadium’ (McDonald) So Boston, gets to keep Fenway, while Detroit destroys Tiger Stadium Comerica certainly isn’t a bad ballpark, but erasing our past for convenience will ultimately leave us Wondering how we got to where we are, and with no direction on where to go.
