I've Got Friends in Old Places (1928)
Why new sports venues aren't always better than the old ones.
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I.
I suppose we could begin roughly three thousand years in the past, but for the sake of brevity, let’s fast-forward roughly a couple dozen centuries. Let’s leap straight into the 1920s, which were, among other things, the prime of a wunderkind Philadelphia-based architect named Charles Z. Klauder. At the age of 15, Klauder began working at renowned local firm; by the time he reached his mid-50s, he’d become one of the premier designers of the Gothic revival architecture that came to define a lot of East Coast college campuses.
Here is where you may be asking yourself, what does this newsletter have to do with early 20th-century academic style? And here is your answer: In the mid-1920s, Klauder designed a basketball arena at the University of Pennsylvania that a professor—when it opened in 1927—dubbed the Palestra, after the cramped boxing and wrestling arenas of ancient Greece. The Palestra quickly became the platonic ideal of what a basketball gym should be, and a year or two later, the Pennsylvania State University hired Klauder to design its own arena, a claustrophobic bandbox in a plain brown wrapper known as the Recreation Building, or Rec Hall.
If you have never been inside this building, that facade probably looks like an ideal location for a slasher film set in an abandoned state prison. But I can assure you, it is one of my favorite sporting venues of all-time, even though what’s taken place inside has murdered my soul more than once.
I have written before about the endless travails of my alma mater’s basketball program; I have no great desire to go all the way down this dead-end road again. But let me get to my larger point, which is something that you probably know about no matter where you came of age: The ideal sports arena or stadium relies on an odd sort of architectural alchemy that cannot easily be quantified, and when it happens, you cling tight to it. The fact that Rec Hall was old and ugly on the outside made it better; the fact that it was cramped and tight on the inside was the essence of its identity.
Here is a taste of what Rec Hall looked like in full throat, when Penn State played its home basketball games there in the 1990s and fans were so close to the court that they occasionally got ejected from the arena…
…and here is what it looked like last Wednesday night, when Penn State played (and won) a Big Ten basketball game in Rec Hall for the first time since moving into a sterile arena across campus nearly three decades ago:
In 1996, Penn State built a new arena, because Rec Hall holds fewer than 7,000 people, and because the university felt like it had to build a new arena in order to compete with the remainder of the Big Ten. But the new arena is too big and too stodgy for a basketball program that is perpetually in search of an identity; the new arena was built more for tractor pulls and Travis Tritt concerts than it was built for sports.
And in a larger sense, this juxtaposition of places gets at an existential question of how modern sports arenas balance the perpetual quest for money with the emotional attachment to a place that actually feels like home.
II.
Roughly 30 years ago, the Baltimore Orioles opened Camden Yards. It was the ideal marriage of nostalgia and modernity, the first of a new generation of baseball parks that threw back a generation of old baseball parks. And now that many of those parks are nearing the end of their leases, we are dealing with the repercussions, which involves a variety of billionaires insisting that public money be utilized to either build them a new stadium, or renovate the old one.
The most egregious example of this is in my current home of Oakland, where the most doddering owner in modern sports history has spent years failing to choose a site to replace a legitimately outdated stadium. He’s wasted that time begging for public funds, changing his mind on locations, then teaming up with the most venal commissioner in modern sports history to entangle a pair of cities in a mess of their own making.
But it is also happening in Chicago and in Phoenix and in Tampa, where owners are demanding public funds for questionable upgrades or new construction. In the NFL, it’s happening in Cleveland; in the NBA, several teams are seeking new arenas, as well. “We’re gonna just get a gigantic wave of this,” one stadium financing expert told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich. “Because, you know — although it doesn’t make any sense engineering-wise or economics-wise — business-wise, a 30-year-old stadium is obsolete.”
This is, of course, utterly ridiculous. But this is where we are now; this is the cycle that persists, particularly in sports-addled cities that are willing to bow to the whims of very wealthy men, despite the complete lack of evidence of any taxpayer benefit. The Texas Rangers have played in three different stadiums since the early 1990s; the Atlanta Braves built a brand-new downtown ballpark in 1997, then moved into another new ballpark in 2016. None of those stadiums existed long enough to carry much of an identity or to be freighted with much history; they were essentially just empty shells that you crammed with people 81 times each year.
If there’s any intangible benefit to using public money for new stadiums, it’s that it gives a community a central gathering place. But if there is no emotional attachment to that arena or stadium—if you’re going to treat them as interchangeable cogs with ephemeral shelf lives—then I would ask: What’s the point, really?
III.
I have no idea how things will shake out this time around. I imagine a number of sports owners will continue to get what they wish, and build new stadiums in new locales that will bring in lots of money. Some of them may turn out to be quite nice; but some of them will not be particularly nice, and regardless of whether they are nice or not, in three more decades, we’ll go through this all over again.
It is an odd paradox, because sports and nostalgia are so utterly intertwined, and a sense of place is so utterly evocative of nostalgia. The stadiums we think of when we think of great places to watch a game are almost inevitably the oldest ones: Lambeau Field, Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Madison Square Garden, Notre Dame Stadium, Cameron Indoor Stadium, the Palestra. And yet the powers-that-be continue to turn away from fostering the next generation of venerable old stadiums; they continue to think that they not only can they build something newer and better, but that they have to build something newer and better in order to stay competitive. And what we get in return is so often worse than what we had before.
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As an Illini fan, I've noticed the trouble we've had against Penn State started a year after we lost the national title game against UNC in 05. We lost a home game for the first time the next year in several seasons against a bad Penn St. team, during Dee Brown's last season in Champaign. Since then games against Penn St. have been either generally wins where we scrape by, or bizarre losses like two nights ago. I for one, don't care for it.
Growing up in State College and graduating from Penn State, I’ve gone to countless basketball games at Rec Hall. I 100% agree with your thesis that it is a wondrous place to watch a game (even if we lost much more than we won). When I was in junior high school and then high school, I’d sneak into Rec Hall through the back, past the old racquetball courts, and then into a side entrance to the main gym to watch the games. While I can’t see them playing all of their games there, it would be cool if they continue to play at least one “White Out” type Big Ten game at Rec Hall each year.