Atlanta is hardly the only city to face questions about stadiums and their upkeep and financing. Perhaps the most notorious fleece job of late was down in Miami, where the Miami-Dade municipality ended up on the hook for the bulk of the cost of Marlins Park, to the point that some elected officials quickly found themselves no-longer-elected officials. But there are other examples -- the Yankees sticking NYC with the tab for the current, bloated iteration of Yankee Stadium, and the Mets doing likewise with Citi Field or whatever it's called now; the bizarre spectacle of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the US, not having an NFL franchise despite two venerable stadiums (and former Super Bowl hosts) in the greater metro area; the heist that transformed the Seattle SuperSonics into the Oklahoma City Thunder; and so forth.
One doesn't hear about these kinds of kerfuffles when it comes to non-major-league sports, but the issues don't necessarily avoid the minor leagues. Here in my current location, Richmond is undergoing a protracted stew over the proposed replacement of The Diamond, a 70s-vintage stadium built for the Braves' AAA franchise of the day. The R-Braves hotfooted out of Richmond for the Atlanta suburbs some years ago, and after some wanderings in the baseball-less desert the city finally attracted a new tenant in the form of the San Francisco Giants' AA franchise, which had been somewhere in Connecticut previously.
The team, renamed the Richmond Flying Squirrels (I kid you not), has played in The Diamond since 2010, and has, to quote the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "become a regional asset that enjoys the public's affections to an extent the R-Braves did not." The management of the franchise has worked hard to be an attractive and good neighbor in the city, offering the over-the-top in-game attractions typical of many minor-league teams, the kind that are so prolific that you (not me, specifically, but perhaps some of you) might even forget a game is going on. They've made good connections with local businesses, sponsored activities outside baseball season to benefit the community, and generally hit all the right marketing and community-relations buttons during its tenure here.
There is one small issue, though, on which the organization has, even before relocating to Richmond, been unequivocal: The Diamond had to be replaced.
The Diamond, exterior (right field/first base side)
To put it kindly, The Diamond is an odd duck of a stadium. From a distance it can look a bit like a UFO broke apart in midair and half of it landed here. For a minor-league stadium it feels huge, even though it isn't necessarily all that big, I guess.
Aerial view of the Diamond, with a team logo cut into center field.
As the above picture shows, while the stands feel a bit ginormous, the only extend a small stretch beyond first and third bases, and there is no outfield seating. It is basically surrounded by its own parking lot, and as the picture suggests, the stadium hasn't necessarily gotten surrounded by a lot of commercial development on its street, The Boulevard (clever names seem to abound). To be honest, that stretch of The Boulevard is a little bleak.
Hey, who turned out the lights? This has happened more than once.
To put it a bit more bluntly, The Diamond has seen better days. I don't know if it's an issue of upkeep, or if what worked in the 70s was a bit shortsighted, or what the issue is, but the best I can say of it as a place to watch a ball game is "it's okay." Concourses for getting around the stadium are a bit cramped, the bathrooms need help badly, the concessions facilities struggle with large crowds, and the sight lines from the stands are fairly bad unless you're directly behind home plate.
Apparently the parts of the stadium not populated by fans have bigger issues. A substantial chunk of the left-field fence was taken out in a strong thunderstorm back in 2012. The clubhouses for both home and visiting teams apparently flood easily in any kind of non-trivial rain. And as the previous picture suggests, the power goes out a bit too easily for a large facility that tends to be highly occupied.
Lookit the crowds! Lookit the crowds!
The Squirrels draw well. They tend to be at or near the top of the Eastern League in attendance (admittedly, The Diamond is a bit bigger than most of the stadiums in the league, having been built for a AAA team), thanks mostly to the tireless promotional efforts of their front office. They may in fact be undermining their efforts towards a new ballpark by being so good at their jobs. When so many show up so readily for the big concrete thing, it's hard to persuade those so many that something better (and probably not bigger) is needed. Perhaps inviting fans into the flooding clubhouse during the next rain delay might help.
Not everybody is so easily swayed, however. A certain level of irritation is evidently settling in with the Flying Squirrels management (though they're far too savvy to show it in public), the parent Giants, and the Eastern League, whose president invoked the specter of a "Richmond Braves sequel" in a statement last December. That statement, along with one from the president of Minor League Baseball (also included in that last link), seems to have prompted some movement. The mayor of Richmond came forward with a plan for a ballpark/development plan that would move the team from that location on The Boulevard to a part of the city known as Shockoe Bottom.
One rendering of the proposed Shockoe Bottom development.
Shockoe Bottom and Shockoe Slip are two different sectors of Richmond down by the James River. While Shockoe Slip has started to flourish as a business and nightlife location, the Bottom (cut off from the Slip by I-95) has seen spottier development. There are some businesses and other organizations there (full disclosure: the office of the organization for which I am doing my internship this year is located in Shockoe Bottom), and it does have some of the best restaurants in Richmond, increasingly a foodie town. It also has a lot of vacant buildings.
It also has a microcosm of the history of slavery in the United States.
Shockoe Bottom was the site of the second-largest antebellum slave market in the United States (after one in New Orleans). Almost seventy slave dealers and auction houses dotted the district. Also found in Shockoe Bottom were Lumpkin's Jail, a slave jail, and a large burial ground. Some active excavation is still underway in the area, and exact locations of these facilities can be hard to pin down in some cases.
Hence building much of anything in Shockoe Bottom is fraught with complications and heated passions. There are factions who find Shockoe Bottom unendurable in its present state and badly in need of redevelopment. There are those who are vocally insistent that any kind of redevelopment is equivalent to desecration. And there are probably hundreds of positions in between.
The mayor's plan would include all sorts of other stuff besides the stadium in the Bottom: a grocery store and other retail locations, and of course plentiful nightlife options. Most notable is a plan to build a long-awaited slavery memorial of some sort as part of the project. In the meantime, The Diamond's location on The Boulevard would also be targeted for commercial development (a tacit admission that stadiums don't automatically bring a neighborhood redevelopment), probably as a sop to the building of a training-camp site for the Washington NFL franchise that first operated this past summer and an attempt to generate more commercial traffic for that site that functions for about six weeks a year.
The mayor and council have made a few road trips in the course of developing a plan, including to Denver and Coors Field, one of the few fairly successful redevelopment plans with a stadium involved, and Durham, NC, a minor-league town that had its own struggles in replacing an aging park. A local columnist suggests they should visit Tulsa, OK, which faced a somewhat similar situation in building a ballpark on the site of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot.
A series of public meetings have been held on the project, marked mostly by heated accusations and recriminations and a general lack of listening. (At this point it's probably best to refer you to the Times-Dispatch's coverage of the ballpark issue. The T-D is far from my favorite paper, but it has generally been decent at covering this story.) The mayor, once roused to action by the aforementioned grumblings from the Eastern League and Minor League Baseball, has been relatively resolute in pushing the new plan, and a fairly aggressive public-relations campaign has simultaneously been pushing the concept. (That sprang up in Shockoe Bottom pretty quickly; I showed up for work one day and there were signs all over the Bottom.)
And there the situation sits.
If you're expecting a fully formed answer out of me on this one, you're going to be disappointed. I'm torn, and in many ways not totally invested as I hope to be moving away from Richmond some time in the reasonably near future. But it is a disturbing situation that touches on many things I care about, and I can't totally ignore it.
So, a few thoughts:
1. That there has not yet been any kind of slavery memorial or museum or anything done in Richmond (capital of the Confederacy, remember) is bizarre and repulsive. You can find about sixty million Civil War museums or memorials around here, including the infamous Monument Avenue statues of Robert E. Lee, Jeb Stuart, "Stonewall" Jackson and other Civil War figures (along with tennis star Arthur Ashe, incongruously). There's a Holocaust museum. There are sites related to the Revolutionary War era, and some dating back to the 1600s. Aside from the Lumpkin's Jail site and one statue marking Richmond as a corner of the "slave triangle" slavery in Richmond is kept largely hush-hush. That's nuts, and wrong. If this redevelopment finally pushes along the establishment of some kind of memorial, it deserves not to be dismissed out of hand.
2. There is a lot of unknown, as indicated before, about where exactly everything was in Shockoe Bottom. It's probably not a great idea that home plate or the pitcher's mound end up smack on top of a major slave cemetery. Is there not a way to get some greater clarity about the Bottom before rushing into the project?
3. Shockoe Bottom is near the James River and I-95. What about traffic off that interstate (already rather snarled on frequent occasions) or flooding? I'm sure these have to be addressed in any such plan. As I railed about the environmental horror of the Braves' plans in Cobb County, so I'll want to see that this isn't going to create a similar emissions nightmare for Richmond (obviously, the number of cars is going to be a bit smaller).
4. In the mayor's and council's travels, I wish they had bothered to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. It is the cite without peer for getting an understanding of baseball and race in America. Far from being confined to the famous Negro Leagues of the 30s and 40s, the museum tracks a long history of baseball and the African-American experience and their frequent intertwining. The Richmond folk should visit for two reasons. One, this is the place to learn how to make baseball and history work together. Baseball is about the only sport that could possibly be moved into Shockoe Bottom and work in harmony with the history/memorial project that has to happen there. Baseball's history is long, and may well have intersected with the lives of slaves -- it certainly was played among free blacks in various locations, and games similar to baseball are recounted in stories of slave life. Its intersection with African-American life after slavery is much easier to trace. (Side note: your homework assignment is to go to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum if you're ever in Kansas City, along with the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial.)
In short, baseball is uniquely suitable to be the sport in this situation. (If basketball's history went any further back than 1904, it might have worked.) If a stadium is going to be built in Shockoe Bottom, it better be a ballpark. (And it better be named for Ray Dandridge.)
5. A stadium does not have to be built in Shockoe Bottom. They aren't magic bullets for development. The pairing of sports facilities and memorial/museum sites is actually not without precedent; in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, with its related story, sits nestled in between Paul Brown Stadium (Bengals) and the Great American Ballpark (Reds). But you have to explain why it works, and how the ballpark will honor and serve the memorial/museum and the story that must be told (and avoid dishonoring site and story). But being able to do that takes time and research and commitment. And I don't know if anybody in the city or with the Squirrels is able or willing to do that.
The Great American Ballpark, as seen from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center
Some people will recoil at the thought of building so frivolous as a ballpark on what they view (and think everybody should view) as sacred or sacralized ground. If you want to go forward, you have to take those claims seriously and make the case that it is not frivolous. Baseball does offer a unique opportunity to do that, but it takes work.
6. On the money issue: I cannot make the case that municipalities should never spend money on sports facilities. I kinda wish I could, but I have this problem: I like symphony orchestras. I like history. I like art. And the facilities that house such things -- concert halls, museums, galleries and such -- tend not to happen without some sort of public participation. And if I like my concert halls and museums, I'm not in the position to deny a ballpark to those who like having that available (admittedly, that number does include me too). (And yes, there are plenty of folk who would call concert halls and such frivolous, on the brilliant reasoning that "if I don't like it, it's frivolous" -- don't be that person, folks, about either one.)
I can, however, say that no municipality should ever foot the total bill for said sports facility. The Squirrels have indicated they will pay part of the cost in this case, though the exact proportions are not clear. And I can say that a municipality with a 35% poverty rate should not be throwing wads of money around for a stadium without first addressing that poverty rate (looking at you, Richmond). And please don't try to convince me that the whole redevelopment plan is going to fix that. Developers are not particularly charitable.
In short (too late!), I think a Shockoe Bottom stadium can make sense, and even be useful in doing a profoundly good thing and righting an injustice (something always theologically in favor). But it takes time and careful thought and foresight, whereas in Richmond neither seems to be readily available. This kind of process should probably have started the first time Shockoe Bottom was proposed as a ballpark site, several years ago; I see no evidence that it was.
Of course there is time pressure; the Squirrels (along with the Giants, Eastern League, and MiLB) are getting restless, and too much more delay might provoke Nutzy the Flying Squirrel mascot to throw up his hands and stick out his thumb on I-95 or I-64 and hitch a ride to a municipality with its act together (or a bigger sucker, whichever you prefer). But doing it right, in a way that hears all voices and respects and honors the horror and tragedy in Shockoe Bottom's history, can't be achieved by shortcut. In a way maybe it's fitting that sports entertainment should "earn its keep" by putting itself at the service of something larger than one team, by being a servant to history and the public good. I just wonder if anybody in Richmond has that kind of vision.
Note: the image used as the background for this blog is from one of my frequent trips to The Diamond for a Flying Squirrels game, from my usual general admission seating choice behind home plate.
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