Rooftop Seating Throughout History

With the Cubs/Mets LCS in full swing and the series coming to Wrigley Field, let's take a look at rooftop seating throughout history.

Boston's South End Grounds, built in 1894. On everyone's list of one of the most picturesque ballparks of all time. A somewhat slipshod fence was built to prevent the properties on the first base side outside the park from getting a good view into the park.

With the help of Tom Shieber of the Baseball Hall of Fame and their virtual reality tour of the ballpark, I created this image of South End Grounds with the rooftop seating clearly shown on the left.

West Side Park or West Side Grounds, home of the Chicago Cubs 1893 - 1915.

They even had their own inside the park version of rooftop seating, when they expanded the bleacher seating that was built in front of their centerfield clubhouse to include a section on top of the roof.

Here's my image showing locations of the rooftop seating.

Bennett Park, home of the Detroit Tigers from 1901 = 1911. The owner of the Tigers disliked these so much that he came up with a novel solution.

This is from Marc Okkonen's excellent "Baseball Memories 1900 - 1909". 

I can't recommend this book enough.

And here's my rendering, based on Marc's drawing in his book (with his permission).

Shibe Park, Philadelphia. Home of the A's. That is one solid street length set of non revenue enhancing bleachers! Ownership despised these freeloaders and set out to build a spite fence to thwart them. These photos are screen captures of a Modern Marvels video posted by SultanOfWhat on Baseball-Fever.com

 Take that!

Which brings us to today. With the construction of the large video boards and signage, Cubs ownership is being forced to buy the properties across the street whose view is blocked, after previously squeezing them for a cut of their revenue several years ago.

PetCo Park in San Diego created a built in version of rooftop seating with the inclusion of the Western Metal Supply Co. Building into the footprint of the park. What's not to like about this?

And now, with the Ballpark Village construction complete, St. Louis has gotten into the mix with this "officially a part of the ballpark" addition.

As always, check out my ballpark prints and posters at ThereUsedToBeABallpark.com

South End Grounds

Here's how the illustration of South End Grounds is looking.

South End Grounds

While conducting research into the South End Grounds, it was discovered that the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown has a digital recreation of the Grand Pavillion, the version most of us think of when we do think of SEG. I contacted Tom Shieber and he told me all about the project. It's coming about in three stages. The first stage has been completed with the digital recreation of the Grand Pavillion. The second stage is in progress with a recreation of Ebbets Field, and the third stage will be old Comiskey Park. I'm not really sure how you view the park. Gives one a good reason to go to Cooperstown (besides the obvious reasons) don't you think?

Huntington Avenue and South End Grounds

Here's two photos of Huntington Avenue Grounds (pieced together in the computer) with South End Grounds (a single decked version, not the famous double decked version) visible in the background. The year is 1911 and the photos were taken from an "aeroplane". Tom Shieber of the Baseball Hall of Fame tipped me off to this. The photos are from the aforementioned Sports Temples of Boston website.

Marc Okkonen

The man who I think deserves the most credit for spreading the knowledge of early 20th century ballparks is Marc Okkonen. He wrote a series of Baseball Memories books in the early 1990's. His "Baseball Memories 1900-1909" had unique aerial view drawings/maps of whatever ballparks the major league teams played in during that time period. He drew these using the old fashioned method of plotting out perspective vanishing points and then laying out old fire insurance maps into that perspective grid. He then drew the buildings up from that base. For the purpose of the book, he was sure to include the angle of the midday and setting sun, knowing that was information any baseball fan would need to imagine themselves at those games. Take a look at this remarkable view of the two Boston ballparks of the day, South End Grounds and Huntington Avenue Grounds.






His books also help put things into the perspective of their time. Included are all of the newspapers of the era and the sportswriters who contributed to them. Also in each book are a couple pages describing the popular culture of the time and a mention of the peculiarities and customs of the game of that era. Oh, and they also have player, manager and owner photos galore. You know that Marc spent a LOT of time poring over all the newspapers of the era.

The only complaint one would have is a biggie, in that most of the reproductions are from photocopies, not photos of the original newspaper clippings. I would assume most of that is from the weak microfilm sources. I curse the day microfilm was adopted. Why couldn't libraries have waited 40 years until true digital technology came about before tossing their bound copies of newspapers away?

I urge anyone with an interest in these old wooden parks to pick up this book through a used bookseller. I've seen a bunch on Amazon through various used book dealers.