ancient cities

762 Sports Stadiums
Sp o r t S St a d i u M S
Sports stadiums have long been the cornerstone of
varied urban conglomerations. Today, sports stadiums
are generally conceived of as large, enclosed,
and often comfortable arenas in which the public
can gather to watch both professional and amateur
sporting competitions. Historically, in both
Greek and Roman civilizations, sports stadiums
occupied prominent material and ideological positions.
From the 40,000 spectators at the stadium
in Olympia to watch the 200-foot “stade” race in
776 BC to the vast coliseums of ancient Rome,
stadiums can be seen as important symbolic models
of particular conjunctural moments. Dependent
upon the dominant mode of social regulation and
production, sports stadiums have played differential
roles in the morphology of the city. This can
be demonstrated through conceptualizing sports
stadiums over time in three main stages: pre-1945,
1945 to 1990, and post-1945.
Sports Stadiums, Pre-1945
Germany laid claim to the largest stadium in the
world at the turn of the twentieth century. Built for
the 1916 Olympic Games—which were aborted
due to World War I—the Deutches Stadion was
built by Otto March and had a capacity of 40,000.
In 1933, when the Nazi party took power in
Germany, Adolf Hitler realized the potential of a
spectacular stadium as a centerpiece for propaganda
conceived for the 1936 Olympic Games.
Again employing the March family, Hitler built a
new Olympic stadium on the same site, with a
capacity of 110,000. The stadium became the
material base from which to express the ideological
ambitions and significance of Nazism.
In North America, as cities grew as a result of
accelerated urbanization, immigration, and industrialization,
it was not until the 1920s that sports
stadiums started to have a drastic impact on the
urban landscape. Bound with the emergence of
early sporting economies, space in which to watch
sporting activities became gradually regulated and
restricted as entrepreneurs started to capitalize on
the profits to be derived from charging spectators.
If by the late nineteenth century any major league
city was expected to have a sports team, by the
1920s local officials began building public stadiums
to provide facilities for these teams, promote
civic pride and boosterism, and promote tourism.
Early examples include the 1922 Rose Bowl in
Pasadena, the 1923 Los Angeles Coliseum, the
1924 Soldiers Field in Chicago, and, in the same
year, the Memorial Stadium, home of the University
of Texas Longhorn football team in Austin. Aided
by the development of infrastructure, communications,
transportation, and eventually, the motor
vehicle within the city, many early examples can be
termed enchanted stadiums. Often designed to
materially harmonize with the built environment,
these early stadiums were often quirky environments
and are the repositories of many of sports
greatest historical moments. Examples include
Chicago’s Wrigley Field (ivy-covered batter’s eye),
Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field (upper deck sun shade),
and New York’s Polo Grounds (wrought-iron row
ends). Perhaps most notably, and similar to other
stadiums from the early-modern era of stadium
construction in North America and indeed within
the designs of football stadiums in the industrial
cities of England, Boston’s Fenway Park (built in
1912) can be seen as the unique product of its circumstances,
as the stadium is integrated into the
neighborhood alongside office buildings, residential
apartments, two schools, and various retail and
entertainment establishments. Indeed, the stadium
has been identified as having five historic districts
under National Park Service guidelines for landmarks:
the playing field itself, the main grandstand,
the right field grandstand, the left field grandstand,
and the left field wall, which, at Fenway Park, is
also known as “the Green Monster.” Built in an era
long before night games, television, suburbanization,
and corporate boxes, and despite multiple
updates and refits, many of these enchanted sports
stadiums lack many of the amenities that have
become familiar to sports stadiums in late capitalist
consumption environments. However, Fenway
Park remains as the oldest Major League Baseball
facility remaining in operation, and, despite having
the smallest capacity, is the most successful, with
Major League Baseball’s highest gate revenues.
Sports Stadiums, 1945–1990
The decline of industrial manufacturing, the concomitant
rise of the service sectors, and the rise in