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Once upon a time - let's say, a day in September, 1965 - you could amble down to Wrigleyville and take in a day game. You had no choice; Wrigley had no lights. You may have driven down with your Dad, cruising down the street until you found a kid holding a sign directing you into an alley to a spot in somebody's back yard where you could park for a buck or two. Or maybe you had called in sick and come down via the Howard L or Clark Street bus.
The stadium and the team were the personal possession of one P.K. Wrigley, the taciturn son of chewing gum tycoon William Wrigley, Jr. The senior Wrigley had gained control of the team in 1918, and for decades ran the operation with his team President, Bill Veeck, Sr. Together they were known as the “double-bills”, a pun on the gum company's Doublemint brand.
The teams weren't always terrible, and when they weren't, the old stadium would fill and the streets would become a continuous mass of people, but the last year the Cubs made the World Series was 1945. The last time they won it 1908.
Here's really all you need to know to measure Wrigleyville then and Wrigleyville now. In 1977, P.K. was sent to the showers for the last time, and in 1981 his heirs sold the Cubs and their stadium to the Chicago Tribune - for $20,500,000, a figure only slightly more than the 2012 salary of just one player, Alfonso Soriano. When the Trib resold the team, after less than thirty years, to the Ricketts family in 2009, the price tag had escalated to $845 million. To understand the urban fabric of Wrigleyville today, just follow the money.
When the stadium, designed by architect Zachary Taylor Davis, was constructed in 1914 for Charles Weeghman's Whales, of the Federal League, the tall silos of a Coal and Coke distributor were right across the street. Most of the greystones we see today were already in place.
Those guys on the roof with their folding chairs have long since gone the way of the Potawatomi. As early as 1938, the Sheffield Baseball Club sold $5.00 rooftop seats for the World Series, but after the Trib bought the team, the trend hit warp speed, fueled by 1989 a Championship series sold-out in the stadium. Bare rooftops became slightly more finished rooftops, and then apartments became clubhouses. A guy named Tom Gramatis became a “rooftop mogul”, owning not just the Sheffield Baseball Club, but two other buildings, as well.
The battle to fix Wrigley: the end of public funding?
Joe Ricketts could well be remembered as the man who ended the long run of sports teams building stadiums on the public dime. Valuations of sports club have reached astronomical heights - last year Forbes magazine put the Cubs at $879 million, fourth highest in professional baseball. Along with swelling revenue streams from escalating ticket prices and cable and TV rights, public subsidies have a lot to do with it. It was a great scheme: a team threatens to bolt a city unless it gets government to build it a new stadium. The taxpayer pays the bill; the owners reap the benefits.
Recent studies, however, call into question just how much public-funded stadiums actually benefit cities, especially when the cities are in the usual throes of fiscal crisis. In the case of the new, $639 million publicly-financed stadium for the Florida Marlins, it was revealed that just one $91 million loan has ballooned into a $1.2 billion obligation for taxpayers
When new Mayor Rahm Emanuel came into office in 2011, he was disinclined to write the Cubs any blank checks. Even so, he was reported to be ready to sign off on a plan to split the costs of $300 million in Wrigley renovations - $150 million from the Ricketts; $150 million from easing the landmark restrictions to allow for more advertising. Other plans - for a Tax-Increment-District, or for allowing the Ricketts to divert future increments in amusement tax revenues from general use to funding Wrigley improvements - were also floated at various times.
And then came old man Ricketts. At the height of the 2012 Presidential campaign, the Wall Street Journal ran a report that family patriarch Joseph Ricketts was about to help bankroll $10 million in virulent, racially-tinged ads attacking Barack Obama.
Suddenly, Tom Ricketts, Joe's son and the guy who was actually running the Cubs operation, couldn't get Rahm to return, must less take his calls. Usually a man of sweetest temperament, Emanuel, Obama's former Obama Chief-of-Staff , was said to be “livid”.
In its modern prime, Wrigley Field was the urbane alternative to the kind of isolated suburban stadiums, isolated among the expressways and moated with acres of surface parking lots, that sprang up in the 60's and 70's. More recently, however, new baseball stadiums have returned to the center city, emulating the attractive qualities of old classics like Fenway and Wrigley, itself. Ironically, the long-range plans of the Ricketts for Wrigley entail acquiring and developing a lot of the land on the ballpark's periphery, in essence making Wrigleyville more like those totally-controlled, self-contained, old-style "modern" stadiums.
Will the Ricketts continue to land bank their way through Wrigleyville? Rooftop owners retain a paranoid fear that the Ricketts's ultimate goal is to drive them out of business and buy up their properties on the cheap. And those aren't the only parcels that might be had at a bargain.
I once heard noted zoning lawyer Jack Guthman, arguing against what he saw as excessive landmarking, remarking that no one needs more Class C office space. The fact of the matter, however, is that it's the blue-chip tenants of the Class A buildings that you most often read about finding more and more ways to downsize their workforce. It's in the cheap, Class C space that you find the true entrepreneurs - trying, failing, trying harder, failing better - until one or two become the breakthrough companies of tomorrow. It's the same way with the small businesses along Clark and Addison. Some struggle just to keep the doors open. Most will never escape the shadow of their own neighborhood, but once in a while, one of them will create something entirely new, something that will radiate outward to enrich the character of the city.
This conflict between the bureaucratic and the creative was referenced in a Monday Tribune profile of Bob Mariano, formerly of the Dominick's grocery chain and now CEO of Roundy's, the Milwaukee parent of Mariano Fresh Markets. Mariano talks about the inspection of a deli department by a team from the Safeway mega-chain that had just acquired Dominick's. They asked how many varieties of potato salad were prepared for sale. Mariano answered seven. The Safeway response was “you only need three.” As you might imagine, a few years down the line, Dominick's is struggling to define itself and Safeway is closing locations. Mariano's, with its sparkling stores and goal of becoming “the Nordstrom of the grocery world,” is successful and expanding.
Real life has a way of confounding expectations. If you were up on the rooftop with that guy in the lawn chair fifty years ago, could you ever have imagined how it would all eventually play out with all those surreal mini-stadiums? There's no doubt that the Ricketts and developers like Schulz are looking to make Wrigleyville a lot more dense, a lot more uniform, consolidated and controlled, but if the recent history of this historic neighborhood proves anything, it's that nothing turns out exactly the way you plan. And that what keeps cities interesting and creative.
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