Photograph by Scott Rovak
Ten days before opening day at Busch Stadium III, Bill DeWitt III appears remarkably calm—detached, even. As talk of toilet disparity splashes across the front page of the Post-Dispatch (“If that’s all they can complain about, we must be doing something right”) and nearly 900 hardhatted construction workers scramble around the building in every direction but done, the senior vice president of business development is practically Zen-like. Smiles rarely rise to the surface, but, then, neither do frowns. His answer, when asked what he thinks of the $365 million brick-and-steel building his father, Bill DeWitt II, and the rest of the team’s ownership agreed to finance themselves: “I’m getting used to it.”
There he is, standing in a sea of green Cardinals Club seats on the first-base side of home plate, with a video of a gently waving American flag playing on the 40-foot-tall scoreboard behind the wall in right-center field and the Arch rising behind that, and the best he can do is “getting used to it”? The man is a walking shrug.
Maybe he’s a little burned out. The lack of emotion in his voice as he explains the origins of the limestone carvings of past and present Cardinal logos that dot the walls of the ballpark doesn’t come from a guy who can’t recognize the aesthetic value of what he’s describing. It comes from a tour guide who’s given the tour one time too many.
Or maybe he’s just confident. Maybe after years of taking what one architect at HOK Sport called an “aggressive partnership role” in the design of the new stadium, all the last-minute bleacher installations, all the unfinished concession stands, all the boxes of mysteriously unused seats left sitting in the second-floor concourse are just part of the plan.
Jim Chibnall’s role in conceiving Busch III started in the summer of 1999. Despite a résumé with HOK Sport that was heavy on football-, rugby- and soccer-stadium design, he says he “politicked heavily” for the lead position on the project. (He was, however, responsible for the award-winning Jacobs Field ballpark in Cleveland.) A St. Louis native, he remembered how Cardinals baseball gave him and his grandfather something to talk about—and wanted to be a part of the place where the new generation of Cardinal Nation would make its memories. “It was a dream come true,” he says.
It wasn’t a surprise that HOK Sport won the contract to design Busch III. The Kansas City–based arm of St. Louis’ Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum was the design firm of record in the $8 million renovation of Busch II in 1996, and it wasn’t long before the boys from K.C. were back in town. Chibnall and his team returned the summer after Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs, and, with DeWitt III leading the way, they toured downtown St. Louis on foot, looking for inspiration from the city’s architectural institutions. They stood at Seventh and and detailed cornices of the Wainwright Building. They toured the Anheuser-Busch campus. They pored over architecture books and portfolios full of pictures taken by the younger DeWitt. “Billy kept big volumes of the things that he’d seen and the things that he’d liked,” Chibnall says. “He was involved from the very beginning in what the facility was going to look like.”
HOK and Chibnall came to the table with nearly 20 years of stadium design experience and an extensive portfolio, but DeWitt had his own ideas about how—or what—the ballpark should be. From the beginning, he knew that he wanted a “classic” look (he prefers the term to “retro,” which most use to describe the current trend in stadium design), and he lobbied hard for certain design elements that would maintain that theme, although Chibnall won’t point to any in particular. He calls the process “arduous at times,” and Earl Santee, a senior principal at HOK Sport who was also involved in the project, hints at DeWitt’s high level of involvement. “I couldn’t say that there’s anyone else like the Cardinals ownership,” he says. “They spent more time on this design than any others I’ve seen.”
If ever there were a senior VP of business development qualified to weigh in on the design of a baseball stadium, though, it’s DeWitt III. Having grown up in one of the country’s preeminent baseball families, which has at one time or another been involved with the St. Louis Browns, Detroit Tigers and New York Yankees, among others, DeWitt came of age in some of the most hallowed halls of hardball. Throw in his master’s degree in architectural history from Yale, and you have a résumé built for ballpark-design consultation—or at least suggestions.
Chibnall doesn’t hide the fact that he had to do his homework to justify decisions (“To try to implement an idea, you had to really research it and make lots of comparisons”), but he’s quick to stress that it wasn’t a bother: “In this case, that was very valuable.”
Santee says HOK welcomes a client who takes an active partnership role—as long as the client is willing to accept the boundaries of the relationship. “We embrace it,” he says. “We’re trying to push the design a little bit and give it some original thought and fresh ideas, and he has to understand that, given the context of the overall project. So, obviously, there were challenges given both ways—but that’s when you succeed.”
For better or worse, the retro design approach has been HOK Sport’s “bread and butter,” as Chibnall puts it. When the HOK-designed Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened to rave reviews in 1992, its classic brick arches, asymmetrical layout and aesthetic ties to the surrounding buildings in downtown Baltimore signaled a sea change in baseball-stadium design. “With Oriole Park, we asked ourselves, ‘Isn’t it possible to make these sporting venues actual architecture?’” Chibnall says. “For the first time, a stadium could be more than just a sort of upgraded parking garage.”
Shortly thereafter, the owners of several other teams started asking themselves the same question. Jacobs Field, in the design phase before Oriole Park opened, was the next of the new breed of ballpark to come online, and it met with a similarly ecstatic response, thanks to its marriage of a retro theme and a design approach more modern than Baltimore’s. Baseball had its antidote to the plague of cold, symmetrical multipurpose stadiums that had swept the game in the ’60s and ’70s. One after another, they were razed and replaced with retro ballparks. In all, 16 teams have built new stadiums since 1992. HOK designed 11 of them, and the firm is responsible for 14 since.
After 15 years of seeing one brick ballpark after another, though, at least one stadium architect is ready for a change. “To me, doing the same thing over and over is not necessarily what I would consider advancing the state of architecture,” says Ron Turner, a partner at RTKL, an architectural firm based in Los Angeles. Although the firm’s sports-design department focuses mainly on football stadiums and basketball arenas, Turner had a hand in designing Miller Park, Safeco Field and Chase Field. Each is a ballpark with a retractable roof. “I’m not advocating that we need to start designing buildings that are nothing but contemporary architecture, but to keep repeating the same detail on the back of the stadium at the top with the little arches time and time again ... to me, that’s not the right thing to do.”
Whether or not it’s the right thing architecturally, the retro push has had its fiscal upside—something Turner readily concedes. A new ballpark brings fans out in droves (did you get any Cards tickets this summer?), and in most cases it allows owners to raise ticket prices, sometimes significantly. The average prices of tickets in Houston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have each built new ballparks since 2000, went up by 50 percent, 51 percent and a whopping 75 percent, respectively, the year the stadiums opened, according to Team Marketing Report’s annual “Fan Cost Index” survey. By comparison, the average Cardinals ticket price went up by 12 percent. “Without a doubt, it brought people back to the ballparks,” Turner says. “[Owners] might want to do something different now, but they’re kind of stuck.”
Santee has heard the cookie-cutter criticism before, and he brushes it off, but he isn’t immune to the constant beating HOK Sport takes. In particular, he’s perplexed by the response to the firm’s proposed design for a glass, limestone and steel ballpark in Washington, D.C., that looks like a significant departure from Oriole Park and Busch III. “I saw an article in The Wall Street Journal that said the stadium wasn’t a home run,” he says. “People’s expectations go either way. Some expect you to do a traditional building, and then others want you to do a modern building—and then when you do, it’s not enough.”
You’re only as good as your last completed project, and for now Busch III is the center of attention. A strong proponent of mixed-use entertainment districts built near stadiums, Turner applauds the Cardinals’ plans for Ballpark Village. He’s less complimentary of the ballpark itself, though. “It’s a friendly ballpark,” he says. “All the amenities are there, and all of the features for making money for the team are there, and the fans are going to have great sightlines and be closer to the field. All of that is good. It’s just not that different than any of the others. The only reason you might know you’re not in [Denver’s] Coors Field is that you can see the Arch over the center-field wall.”
“I totally disagree.” DeWitt is visibly offended by Turner’s claims of a Busch/Coors aesthetic connection, or of similarities to Oriole Park, for that matter. It’s the first time he’s shown any real emotion this afternoon. He looks over his shoulder and out toward the diamond from his seat in one of Busch III’s 41 party rooms above the bleachers in right field. “OK, from 30,000 feet, [Busch and Coors] look alike; I’ll give you that,” he allows. “They’re both brick, open-air stadiums. But if you want to go get into the specifics of how the experience differs, they couldn’t be more different.”
He begins by pointing to the difference in seat color—Coors’ seats are green, Busch’s are red. Coors Field holds 50,000 and has a rock pile beyond the center-field wall. Busch holds 44,000 and has a view beyond left field of what will one day be the proposed Ballpark Village. (Of course, technically, the current view beyond left field is also of a rock pile, but, as we’ve been told, it’s only temporary.) Coors’ brick façade is multicolored and on the tan side of the spectrum. The Busch
bricks are a monochromatic red.
These don't exactly sound like huge differences. Does he think the team took any risks with the design?
He pauses for nearly 10 seconds before answering. “The biggest risk was deciding to do it,” he says finally. “People loved Busch Stadium. Of all the stadiums across the country that were ripped down, how many of them had people crying at 2 in the morning, taking pictures of the last wrecking-ball strike? It was a challenge for us to determine whether that love was based on the architecture and the building itself or the memories, and my take on that was that it was 70-30: It was 70 percent sadness for the lost physical connection to those memories, and maybe 30 percent of it was, ‘Man, that canopy of arches was special. I’ll miss that.’”
Appearance may have made up less than a third of the fans’ love for Busch II by DeWitt’s estimation, but if his attention to detail on this project is any indication, he must believe that the look and feel of Busch III will count for significantly more. He says HOK tried to push him in directions he didn’t want to go “a fair amount,” but he typically pushed back. He echoes Chibnall’s assessment of the design relationship, calling it a “creative tug of war”: “My approach was to say, ‘Jim, why do you want to do that? Explain it. Give me some background on the theoretical reason for doing that.’ I tried to force that all the way down through the system, and I think having that attitude really helped this design, because it made guys think about why they made something look the way it did.”
He points specifically to brick arches in the columns at three of the stadium’s corners. HOK wanted flat-top openings. Budget cuts forced him to give up his plan for a bridge on the south side of the park, similar to the one on the Eighth Street elevation, but he stood firm on the arches at the corners. “That’s an example of where HOK was probably thinking along the lines of ‘Let’s be a lot different and really use the brick in a modern way,’ and I was thinking, ‘Let’s not mix apples and oranges. Let’s make this a classic-looking building and touch it up with modern flourishes.’” HOK did, however, win the battle of the arches on the south and west outer walls, using the more modern, flat-top openings.
When asked specifically how much of the design was his, DeWitt demurs. “I don’t really feel comfortable answering that question,” he says. “It was a team effort, but there’s a lot here that’s from me. I don’t want to take away from the guys that were very instrumental in this, but from day one I was the keeper of the design phase.”
It’s after 3 p.m. on a Friday— “beer o’clock” for the average construction worker—but men wearing “StL”-emblazoned hardhats are still hauling spools of conduit through the wide-open concourses; others hang from window-washing platforms and clean the brick on the east side of the building, bags of sunflower seeds clipped to the hand railings. In the video room, where Albert Pujols and Chris Carpenter will eventually sit and watch game film, blank plasma TVs hang from the walls and a handful of support staff cluster around racks of video equipment, sorting out the tangle of wires at their feet. The team will be home from Jupiter, Fla., on Sunday to briefly survey their new digs before flying out again for the season opener in Philadelphia.
The only spot in the building that isn’t buzzing is the locker room. Blank TV monitors hang from the ceiling, still wrapped in plastic. A refrigerator in the team lounge houses a couple of bottles of condiments and nothing else. Clubhouse attendant Chuck Rowan looks up from the papers he’s studying in the players’ lounge and greets DeWitt as he steps into the room. Locker assignments have been made (Rowan wonders allowed whether Jim Edmonds will be upset about getting stuck in the corner), and the name plaques have arrived ... but they’re too big for the brackets and will need to be fixed.
Such personnel-related hiccups don’t seem to register with DeWitt. Instead, he’s staring at the entryway to the shower room. “Something’s missing,” he says, standing at the threshold between carpet and tile. He checks the sightline from inside the showers to the lockers, then the reverse. Anyone standing on the south side of the changing area can see directly into the showers. “You’re going to have guys walking back and forth in here, and if we have press out here, they’ll be able to see in,” he tells Rowan. And then he proceeds to design on the fly, throwing out ideas for a half-wall that would provide Redbirds in the buff a little more privacy. DeWitt, it seems, is in the details.
The Power Perches
The new Busch has its fair share of private suites—and one of them is far sweeter than the others
It looks like F. Scott Fitzgerald was right after all: The rich are different from you and me. But that disparity simply adds to the fun of taking a serious People kind of gander at the plades where they live, play and watch Cardinals baseball. So with not just a little bit of pushing and prodding, we peeked into one privately owned suite and the Redbird Roost, property of the team's owners.
Let's just say that strata of wealth apply even to the rich.
The stadium is only two weeks old, and the carpet in this private suite already sports a serious stain. (No word on who the messy culprit is.) The armchairs and couch in the private suite we saw are upholstered in leather the color of butterscotch. There's a wet bar and, alongside one wall, a tablecloth-covered table with a single chafing dish. On the other side: a plasma TV flanked by wonderful pieces of framed baseball memorabilia—all coordinated by the curator at the Cardinals Hall of Fame. At the other end of the suite, six barstools are lined up in front of a glass wall facing the field. Outside, under the protection of the overhand, is seating for eight.
It's nice. It's cozy. But it's nothin' compared to the owners' perch.
The Redbird Roost is reportedly a replica of Bill DeWitt II's library in his Florida home—and looks a lot like Bill DeWitt III's living room in Ladue. The walls are paneled in beautifully distressed wood. The dark leather armchairs and couch are accessorized with coordinating pillows. The carpet is pristine. There is a four-top round table for dining (or bridge) with chairs designed with an Asian influence in mind. The bartop is granite. Although the private suite had only a sink and fridge, the owners have a restaurant-quality grill and not one but two chafing dishes. Of course, the ubiquitous plasma is on the wall, but the artwork elsewhere, which includes a vintage Rogers Hornsby poster, is fabulous. Against the glass are barstools for seven; outside are baseball seats for 14. The view is perfect. It pays to be the guys in charge. They are different from you, me and ... the merely rich.
—Christy Marshall
The Home Stretch
A behind-the-scenes guy remembers previous parks
If you want Jack Stretch to give you the dirt on the inner workings on Sportsman's Park and Busch Stadium, you need to give him a beer. Unfortunately, we spoke to him on the clock, so we had to settle for the edited-for-TV version.
There was the time he escorted Secret Service sharpshooters to the top of Busch, where they kept an eye on Dubya when he was in town to throw out the first pitch ("I must have looked like I was leading my own little militia"). And then there were the hot dog stands outside of Sportsman's, where he and his fellow ushers spent their breaks because the franks were cheaper than what they could get inside ("Management tried to put a stop to that, but they weren't successful"). And, of course, there was exotic dancer Busty Heart, who pranced through the stands during a May 1990 game and succeeded in turning 40,000 sets of eyes away from the game. "I asked her to refrain from making a spectacle," Stretch says. "But I wasn't going to eject her—I would have caused a riot if I had."
Stretch doesn't collect souvenirs, so the anecdotes are his ticket stubs from a 49-year career in guest services (he's an event manager now). One of his favorites? Getting to know Jack Buck on a first-name basis. "He knew all of my kids," he says. "Having his casket at the stadium ... that was a different experience."
—M.H.
