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Reeling from scandals in the 1870s, baseball’s owners consciously sought to make the sport respectable by broadening its upper- and middle-class fan-base. The stadiums they built in the 1880s and beyond would separate fans based by class and race, inviting “bourgeois white men and women to the center of spectatorship” as historian PJ Carlino puts it, while marginalizing non-white, working class, and immigrant fans to the bleachers.

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Baseball spectatorship was relatively egalitarian initially: fans stood or sat on the ground around the field. Class stratification became marked by elevation: standing on a carriage. Then came the first enclosed baseball stadium in the US, Brooklyn’s Union Grounds (1862), which was also the first ballpark to charge an entrance fee and the first to use fencing to block the view from outside. Women were welcomed with seating and facilities. “Profit underlay the rhetoric of female accommodation and civility” writes Carlino, because a respectable woman in public was supposed to have a male escort, thus doubling the box-office take. As in waiting rooms and on trains and ships, “ladies” accommodations at the stadium were restricted to white women.

The presence of ladies was supposed to make men gentlemen. Theaters taught baseball that seating played a big role in this; supposedly, a sitting crowd was a more genteel crowd, especially in numbered and reserved seats that acted as barriers to neighboring seats. Baseball stadiums started using opera chairs in the grandstands in the 1880s, as “[m]iddle class spectators associated the [opera chair] design with entertainment free from corruption, vulgar behavior, and unclean bodies.”

Buffalo’s National League stadium charged seventy-five cents for a male escort seat in the ladies stand in 1883. Ladies paid thirty cents; the surcharge was supposed to convince women that their male neighbors were of the best class. In that same year, a Cincinnati stadium “charged sixty cents for reserved and numbered grandstand chairs, fifty cents for a section of unreserved covered benches, and twenty-five cents for seats on massive tiers of uncovered benches.” Unstated was the color line: regardless of what they could afford, Black spectators could not buy into the good seats—although exceptions were sometimes made in northern stadiums during games between all-white and all-Black teams.

The Boston South End Base Ball Grounds in 1876.
The Boston South End Base Ball Grounds in 1876. via Wikimedia Commons 

Meanwhile, how to accommodate the majority of fans away the grand stands? The bleachers get their name from their exposure to sunlight. Fans would be bleached by the blazing sun during the games; the wooden benches would be bleached on non-game days. Because bleachers held standing fans as well as sitting ones, a bench seat could be a contested spot, held by the seat of the pants and defended with elbows, if not fists. There was no guarantee that your seat would be there if you went to the concession stand. This gave birth to walking vendors selling snacks and drinks. Mixed crowds could be rowdy, but bleachers also encouraged camaraderie, fandom, and a sense of belonging. It was, however, a contained belonging, as bleachers were typically separated from the more expensive seats by wide passages between sections.

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“‘Bleacher bug’ and ‘bleacherite,’ epithets frequently used by sportswriters, defined occupants as a less-than-human collective of foreigners—a mob identity that elite America had come to fear in response to riots and labor unrest,” Carlino writes.

By the early twentieth century, ladies days, prices, and special seating sections were being phased out as more and more women went to games (and joined the labor force). While many today may be familiar with the chorus to “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” (1908), fewer may be aware that the song is actually about “baseball mad” Katie Casey, who would much rather go to a ballgame than the show proposed by her beau.

“Baseball is for all people and not a few,” declared the president of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1909, but the comfort levels of his new Forbes Field were definitely not egalitarian. The steel and concrete stadium, in use until 1970, had 300 private boxes ringing the three tiers of the grandstand. Stadium box seats aren’t a new phenomenon—although the late-twentieth-century efforts to get the public to pay for plutocratic box-seating construction would be.

Separate entrances and ticket windows, barriers like railings, chains, and even barbed wire, plus police and/or Pinkerton deployments, were all used to maintain the separation of fans in the period about which Carlino writes. Virtually anybody with the price of admission would be let in, but the supposedly democratic game was just as class-, ethnicity-, and race-riven as society at large.


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Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 5–29
University of Minnesota Press