Oriole Park at Camden Yards - Still the Model for Urban Ballparks

When fans stream into Oriole Park at Camden Yards for Opening Day today, they enter what many consider the best baseball park in the country. Certainly, it is one that set a whole set of new standards.

There are many who claim to be the fathers and mothers of Camden Yards, above all the the late "do it now" governor William Don Schaefer. HOK the architects of record and the young RTKL architect, who as a student, had developed the idea of using the historic B&O  warehouse as the backdrop for the stadium.  Then there is Janet Marie Smith, architectural adviser to the Orioles who carefully orchestrated the detailed design and feel of the ballpark to be as intimate as the nation's oldest Major Baseball League ballpark, the 1912 Fenway Park in Boston. 

Oriole Park with Hilton Hotel

The Oriole Park.com website states this under its history tab:

When Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened on April 6, 1992, a new era of Major League Baseball began. The park was brand new, but still old-fashioned. State-of-the-art, yet quaint. At less than a day old, it was already a classic.
Oriole Park at Camden Yards inspired a generation of ballpark construction. No longer would communities across America build multipurpose stadiums devoid of character, surrounded by vast parking lots. Ballparks would now be created to nestle neatly into existing and historic neighborhoods and play key roles in the revitalization of urban America.

Fenway Park, Boston

Oriole Park at Camden Yards captured the nation's attention from day one and in the 20 seasons that followed, has served as the standard by which all new ballparks are measured. Citizens of Baltimore and all of Maryland, as well as Orioles fans throughout Birdland, should take great pride in the fact that our team makes its home in the ballpark that forever changed baseball.

By 2012 when Camden Yards celebrated its 20th anniversary many others had copied and improved of Baltimore's formula of success. When Oriole Park opened its 20th season with some improvements and renovations including fewer seats, the New York times had this to say:

Not surprisingly, Camden Yards ...is being marketed as the “ballpark that forever changed baseball.” There is no argument on that claim. The proof is out there at newer stadiums like PNC, AT&T and Citizens Bank Parks and in Citi, Target and Coors Fields.Photos
But 20 years is a generation. Camden Yards was a template for other teams to try to improve on.
Most newer stadiums are smaller and cozier and have concourses that allow fans to watch the action as they buy food or beverages. Other stadiums are effectively theme parks where baseball sometimes seems like a secondary concern. And some look out to better skylines.

From an urban planning perspective, Camden Yards had departed from the standard model consisting of placing a very large multi-purpose stadium with "flying saucer" architecture somewhere at the outer periphery of cities, isolated from everything around it by a huge sea of parking. That model had been in place for decades. Instead, Oriole Park used these the ingredients that made it a model for all ballparks that followed:

• A location directly adjacent to downtown as an aggressive attempt of revitalizing downtown with a sports venue (there was no downtown living in 1987 when the location was first selected)
• The reuse of a fairly large underutilized industrial area that made a poor gateway to downtown (there were no "brownfields" legislation and incentives in place back then)

  

  the restored historic Camden Yards warehouse (from the north)

• A direct multi-modal public transit connection with a new light rail line designed to open with the first Opening Day in 1992 (the new light rail line was one of only a handful new light rail projects in the country and Oriole Park was a transit oriented development before the term TOD became made popular) 
  
  

  

  The pedestrianized portion of Eutaw Street west of the preserved
  warehouse

• Shared parking assumed to take place mostly in adjacent downtown garages (the term "shared parking" was also not yet in use and not building seas of parking was a novel idea)
• Adaptive reuse and preservation of two historic structures that were integrated into the stadium design and gave the park its name (the first larger adaptive reuse buildings in Baltimore happened  around 1985-87, the Sailcloth Factory in Ridgely's Delight and Tindeco on Boston Street)
• A stadium designed specifically for baseball connecting back to historic ballparks such as the Boston's Fenway Park and Wrigley Field in Chicago
• The incorporation of the downtown street grid as a design element for public spaces open to everyone outside of ballgames and events (the Eutaw Street pedestrian corridor between the warehouse and the ballfield)

  

  Fans waiting for the trains at Camden Yards

• The management of design and construction through a specifically created entity, the Maryland Stadium Authority (a state institution still in place, currently overseeing the Baltimore school renovation projects).

In spite of these major achievements that remain a full success even 23 years later,  not everyone cheered in 1992 when the stadium opened. Just like architectural critic Muschamp, several local architects were skeptical about the retro mode in which this ballpark was conceived. I watched the progress on my daily commute entering the city via Russell Street and watching the daring steel structure slowly disappear under enormous amounts of brick turning what I deemed an elegant superstructure into the heavy Colosseum type masonry monument we see today. In the New York Times of April 6, 1992 the architectural critic Muschamp wrote this on the occasion of the grand opening:

"Sports stadiums are major urban investments. Along with convention centers and "festival marketplaces" like Baltimore's Harbor Place, they make up the trio of large-scale projects on which many declining older cities have staked their economic futures.
But what about a city's stake in its creative future? To design these new buildings in a retro style risks sending a message that contradicts their forward-looking purpose: that cities have no future except as well-endowed museums of their better days".

These questions arose again when a few years later a new football stadium was considered, just a block down from Oriole Park, a move that had already been included in the baseball park masterplan. Could Oriole Park's success be duplicated? Could a much larger football stadium use the same recipe, when it had no historic buildings to repurpose, or historic urban precedents to glean its design language from?Could a publicly funded football stadium even be considered an investment in economic development in the same way as the baseball park with its much higher usage?   

the provisional rail transit facilities before MTA hung advestising on
the structure

In June of 1996 the Baltimore AIA Urban Design Committee pondered all these issues and decided that the answers may be yes, if the football stadium would not just be dropped into the blank that the Oriole Park masterplan had left for it, but rather would expand the vision and be used to leverage larger urban design break-throughs like opening up the Middle Branch, what the UDC then called the "second Baltimore waterfront".

"The football stadium, as a large public investment, potentially provides huge opportunities for the surrounding communities of Washington Village, Sharp Leadenhall, Otterbein and South Baltimore. Opportunities include providing a new gateway at the southern entry to the city, improved greenways, pedestrian and vehicular connections from downtown to the Middle Branch waterfront. The official masterplan which was created chiefly for the baseball stadium and included the area of the football stadium deserves a higher level of refinement for the football stadium area. The current public discussion about the design of the new stadium should include the larger master planning issues which will ultimately determine what kind of civic presence the new facility will acquire in our City.  With its task force,  the Urban Design Committee wants to ensure that the spirit of its Middle Branch study will be included in the plans for the new stadium and that the civic benefits are indeed maximized." (Baltimore AIA, Urban Design Committee)

Many of these aspirations remain unfulfilled. The gateway into Baltimore has been much improved by both stadia but it is still a checkered experience. The Gateway is lately dominated by Baltimore's own casino that somewhat incongruously rose south of the football stadium, neither a logical extension of the prior public investments nor the celebration of the Middle Branch the UDC had imagined. Instead, with a gigantic parking garage right on the water's edge the casino is the nail in the coffin of the idea of opening the Middle Branch up from downtown, at least along this western side of it.

The view of downtown from the seats before during construction

Some of the core elements that were essential for the success of Oriole Park came under threat in the years since then. The glorious view from the seats back into downtown was severely curtailed by a blocky city funded convention center hotel that also buried forever another idea of the UDC, that of a great open space in front of the old Camden Station that the AIA Committee back then dubbed "Oriole Victory Park" and which had been envisioned as a

the view of downtown from the seats before the hotel was built (2004)

link between the still ailing Westside of Baltimore's downtown and the vibrant waterfront and stadium areas. A probably flawed idea of decking over the track area on the rear side of the Camden warehouse for a "Medmart" complex failed. Because this mega project had been on the boards back then, a MARC train and light rail station facility that would be appropriate to the prominent setting at the Yards had been designed but not realized back then, and it still hasn't 23 years later. MARC and light rail riders are still served in a trailer that is clad in ballpark green and camouflaged by a space-frame with canvas roofs to provide some protection  from rain and snow. To make matters worse, the MTA has since clad the space frame in tattered advertising banners.

Still, Oriole Park remains an urban design, urban renewal and architectural success. On game days downtown streets become livelier, light rail trains get heavy use and fans can step off the trains a few feet from the gates, the historic Camden station head house has been lovingly restored as a baseball museum and event space, the huge warehouse is not only a wonderful backdrop to the stadium but also filled with offices, a restaurant and the Orioles" gift shop. The historic buildings in a street triangle along Russel Street which would have had a very hard time finding any use without the stadium have been converted into a series of popular sports bars, serving as the pregame party area. Even the historic Ridgely's Delight area has not only learned to live with the hustle and bustle of a stadium but enjoys the improved property values associated with the revitalization of the entire area.

the restored Camden Station (Sports Legend Museum)

One can quibble if Oriole Park is still of the number one  urban baseball field. Baseballparks.com doesn't think so, and puts Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Denver and some other parks that copied our bird's nest ahead, but who cares? With The Inner Harbor and Oriole Park, Baltimore has two urban concepts that have been copied worldwide. What will be the city's next innovative urban design move?

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff

The author was the project manager for the architectural portions of the light rail line serving Oriole Park and coordinated the two stations serving the stadium closely with the Oriole's chief designer Janet Marie Smith and the Maryland Stadium Authority. He also has been the co-chair of the UDC and helped prepare the documents suggesting opening up Baltimore's second waterfront. However, he knows nothing about baseball.