Everything came together to create Oriole Park at Camden Yards — a stadium that looked about as far from a standardized ballpark as the Baltimore Orioles president could’ve hoped for.
A general view of Oriole Park at Camden Yards during the second inning of a baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox, Sunday, Aug. 23, 2020, in Baltimore. BALTIMORE — Larry Lucchino walked into the Williams & Connolly law office in Washington on a Saturday morning, fresh from a conversation with Major League Baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth at spring training.
To do so, it took a collaborative effort from several parties, beginning with the drive of Janet Marie Smith, then the Orioles’ vice president of planning and development. And it continued with a governor hellbent on a downtown location, a creative transit authority representative, contractors who slept overnight in sleeping bags, a graphic designer whose experience didn’t expand past street signs, and a blacksmith in rural Pennsylvania who’d never worked with stainless steel.
He knew Smith could offer valuable help with that development, taking over much of the day-to-day decision-making required for Camden Yards. So he plucked her letter from the pile, called her in for an interview and met with her in his office. She studied postcards of classic ballparks, such as Forbes Field, Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, Detroit’s Tiger Stadium and Chicago’s Old Comiskey Park. What she learned shifted the path of HOK Architects, who were in the process of designing a concrete version of Camden Yards.
By the time an electrician arrived to wire the lighting, he was confused. There was an extra steel catwalk for lights in place, but no plan to attach spotlights to it. “He would say, ‘Lower, lower, lower.’ We finally got it to the height Larry wanted, and it was below the lowest foul ball net in the major leagues,” Wyatt said. “I wasn’t going to do that. So I said, ‘Fine.’ And then I took it up a couple inches so we were not the lowest, and I never got called on it.”
Placing the new stadium on the edge of downtown had benefits the others didn’t, allowing for easy access to the interstate and public transportation on top of the economic impact — more than $10 billion in the past 30 years, according to the Maryland Stadium Authority. But even after a cost-benefit analysis and explaining the limitations of the floor plan, the connection to the structure outweighed Wyatt’s practicality.Wyatt wasn’t alone, either. John Steadman, a longtime Baltimore sports writer then with The Evening Sun, also criticized the decision to refurbish the warehouse. In a column, Steadman wrote that the warehouse was a “rat-infested fire hazard, and therefore it should come down.
In addition, the playing field was excavated about 10 feet, Wallace said, allowing for the stadium to rest at a proportional level with the warehouse, creating a sense of unity between the structures.“When you’re sitting almost anywhere in the stadium,” Wyatt said, “you get this view of the warehouse in the background, and it’s just magnificent.”
He had never done anything of this scale. Smith turned to the designer because time was winding down on outfitting signage at Camden Yards, and Ashton had created a nice brochure about suites at the stadium months earlier. The largest project he had worked on was a street sign advertising a new subdivision.
Steve Butz dressed as the Baltimore Orioles mascot The Bird entertains the crowd at Oriole Park at Camden Yards Thursday, July 22, 2010. THE PATRIOT-NEWSIt extended to his design of the stadium’s name above the home plate entrance. But as he planned out the stainless steel lettering, the bid from a sign manufacturer landed well over budget. And while an alternate option was to make the lettering out of foam, Ashton cringed at the idea.
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