The Best Ballpark (that never was) explores the relationship of baseball park design to that of their surrounding environments through the lens of competing plans for Chicago’s New Comiskey Park in the late 1980s. When it opened in 1991, New Comiskey was the first baseball-only Major League Park constructed since 1973, and it marked the beginning of a ballpark building boom that continues through today. Unfortunately for White Sox fans, the White Sox organization, and the City of Chicago, New Comiskey (now Rate Field) is widely considered an architectural flop. Fans complained about the steepness of the upper deck, the distance of seats from the field of play, and it lacked many of the interesting features incorporated into ballparks that followed. Perhaps the biggest strike (pardon the pun) against the stadium, however, was 70 acres of surface parking cutting off the stadium from its surrounding community. The park could have turned out quite differently had the White Sox and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority followed the suggestions of a young architect, Philip Bess, who proposed an alternative design- a more intimate, retro-style ballpark called Armour Field. Most importantly he proposed housing and commercial development adjacent to the ballpark. In essence, he suggested a neighborhood in addition to a sports stadium much like ballparks built in the early 20th Century.
