April 04--When the Cubs take the field Sunday for opening night, playing alongside unfinished bleachers hidden by 1,000-square-foot panels featuring photos of Ernie Banks, it won't be the first time Wrigley Field has looked lopsided, makeshift or incomplete on game day.
But it will be the first time in a long time.
Today's construction workers should heed what happened on Aug. 6, 1937, in the first game of a doubleheader as the Cubs took on the Boston Bees (now the Atlanta Braves).
Cubs catcher and future Hall of Famer Gabby Hartnett, who would hit the famous "Homer in the Gloamin'" in 1938, slammed a home run over a temporary left field fence that had been put in place to separate the outfield from construction on new Wrigley bleachers. The ball bonked a construction worker who apparently was doing some cleanup and didn't see the white projectile with the red stitching approaching.
"The guy was given the rest of the day off," said Ed Hartig, the Cubs' team historian.
Baseball romantics often describe Wrigley Field as a timeless beauty, an Edenic oasis that offers refuge from a chaotic, ever-changing world. But as Hartig will tell you, that perspective overlooks the fact that Wrigley that has been a work in progress since day one -- its contours buffeted by everything from the forces of economics to Chicago's brutal weather, which helped push the current bleacher revamp behind schedule.
"I gave tours of the ballpark for about 14 years," Hartig said. Tourists awed by Wrigley's beauty would tell him that the ballpark is timeless and immutable. "I said, 'Wait a second,'" the historian recalled. "'This is a living, breathing thing and it's changed.'"
In Wrigley's first year, 1914, when it was Weeghman Park and home to the Chicago Federals of the old Federal League, workmen began tweaking just a week after the ballpark opened, Hartig said. They pushed back the left field wall by 25 feet in response to complaints that its initial location made hitting home runs too easy.
Then there was 1927, when a miserable winter slowed the building of the upper deck that transformed Wrigley from its original single-deck profile.
Because of the bad weather, the Wrigley of that year was architecturally lopsided, with an upper deck along the third base line and a lower deck along the first base line. The rest of the upper deck was finished in time for the 1928 season.
But the year most like this one was 1937, when Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley replaced the awkward outfield bleachers that had been in place since 1922 with a gracefully curving, symmetrical configuration designed by Chicago architects Holabird Root.
The owner was undoubtedly thinking ahead, Hartig said, remembering how a lack of seating capacity had forced the Cubs to erect temporary bleachers outside Wrigley when the team played in the World Series in 1929, 1932 and 1935. With the Cubs contending for another National League pennant in 1937, construction began on July 9 while the team was away on a long road trip.
Work crews tore out the left-center bleachers, a small stand-alone section called "the jury box," and took apart the center field scoreboard, which was topped by a pair of elflike figures promoting Wrigley's Doublemint gum. One third of the scoreboard (the American League side, appropriately) was discarded. The rest was moved to the left field corner.
Construction typically would stop about 2:30 p.m., a half-hour before games got under at 3, Hartig said. The new bleachers were finished by Sept. 19, 1937. The new center field scoreboard became fully operable by Oct. 1.
Naturally, the Cubs did not win the pennant that year. But they did win in 1938 and again in 1945, their last trip to the World Series -- now 70 long and painful years ago.
Today, sports websites offer breathless commentary about how Wrigley Field's construction looks like a mess -- which, admittedly, it does -- without recalling that Wrigley has been a mess before and that the ballpark is a perpetual work in progress.
Architecture is never frozen in time. It is always evolving, perpetually subject to the wind, the rain and our ever-shifting requirements and preferences.
With Wrigley's latest features still under construction -- the big new left field video board is supposed to be ready for opening night, the left field bleachers are scheduled to be done by May 11 and their right field counterparts by mid-June -- it remains to be seen whether this latest chapter in the Wrigley story is a tale of graceful evolution or something to regret.
bkamin@tribune.com
