Ballpark: Baseball in the American City

In Ballpark, longtime architecture critic Paul Goldberger treats the baseball stadium as a serious building type worth studying alongside cathedrals and civic halls. He traces its evolution from cramped wooden grandstands, through the great early-twentieth-century parks like Fenway and Wrigley, into the concrete "doughnut" stadiums built for both baseball and football, and finally to the wave of retro, downtown ballparks like Baltimore's Camden Yards that reshaped how cities build for the game.

Along the way, Goldberger connects ballpark design to the broader story of American urbanism — how each era's stadiums reveal what cities valued, and how baseball's built environment shaped the experience of watching the game.