We generally enter stadiums to watch football or baseball, or see a huge concert, or perhaps cheer on a favorite political candidate. Chances are such activities don’t lead directly to serious consideration of how and for whom public spaces are used, or how these spaces reflect the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy. But after reading Frank Andre Guridy’s “The Stadium,” you might just find yourself thinking as much about the history of these cavernous facilities as the games on the field.
Subtitled “An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play,” Guridy’s deeply researched book delivers just that. This is a progressive-minded study of inclusion and exclusion, the relationship of highly visible buildings to their neighborhoods, and the ways in which stadiums and arenas have succeeded and ways they’ve failed to live up to the country’s ideals. It is also a defense of the midcentury “concrete donut” stadium — think Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, or San Francisco’s Candlestick Park — which, Guridy argues, fostered a democratic spirit despite their usual location on the city’s outskirts.
Conversely, it offers a critique of the quaint “jewel box” facilities (pioneered by Baltimore’s Camden Yards) that tend to cater to wealth and gentrification despite their centralized urban locations. Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University, has set himself a daunting task with many potential pitfal.