Through Good Teams and Bad, Wrigley Field Remains the Coziest Park in Baseball
The Chicago landmark represents the purest form of the American pastime
The first Chicago Cubs game on the city’s North Side was held on April 20, 1916, and new fans flooded the neighborhood. The Chicago Tribune reported that 20,000 people attended the game, some of them spilling onto the field, such that an outfielder collided with a small boy in the seventh inning. “A hit into this crowd was good for two bases,” the reporter noted.
Before the game even started, a circus mood prevailed: Cincinnati Reds player-manager Buck Herzog was presented with a bunch of roses, a walking stick and an umbrella, in a ceremony that also included fireworks, a half-dozen marching bands, a live donkey brought in by local Democrats and an actual black bear cub who did tricks on home plate for a movie camera. A mile-long parade through the city carried box-seat guests along the field to their seats. The Cubbies won 7-6 in 11 innings.
The stadium on that day didn’t yet have its famous ivy, brick walls or scoreboard. It wasn’t even called Wrigley Field. But fans’ excitement for this spot on the corner of Clark and Addison Streets has scarcely waned in the past 109 years. “Wrigleyville,” as the whole neighborhood is now known, is the closest thing in the United States to a baseball amusement park, and among MLB stadiums, only Boston’s Fenway Park, opened in 1912, is older. It’s also the only major league stadium designated as a national historic landmark. Wrigley is where Babe Ruth famously “called his shot” in 1932, pointing to the outfield before hitting a home run, and where Kerry Wood threw 20 strikeouts in one 1998 game.
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This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazine
The story of this living monument begins with Charles Weeghman, a classic Chicago striver who could have stepped out of the pages of Saul Bellow or James T. Farrell. “He is a man who has made himself,” the Sporting News wrote of Weeghman in 1915, “having started as a waiter in a restaurant, and now he owns a dozen or so of his own.”
Weeghman made a foray into professional sports in 1914, as owner of the Chicago Federals, the city’s entrants in the new Federal League, an upstart challenger to the American and National leagues. The team originally played on the DePaul University field, but Weeghman wanted to set his team apart from the city’s South Side teams, and an open lot at Clark and Addison Streets had the added benefit of proximity to the streetcar and elevated lines.
Weeghman was a crowd-pleaser by nature: He let fans keep balls hit into the crowd and kept the bear cub outside the stadium for the entirety of 1916, greeting fans from a cage. He was also a promoter of women’s attendance at games, becoming the first stadium owner to demand that the stands be hosed down between contests, to keep refuse under control.
The Federal League folded after the 1915 season, and the National League’s Chicago Cubs, owned by Weeghman, moved from their home on the West Side into Weeghman Park the following year. Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. bought the franchise in 1921, when the stadium was known as Cubs Park. He took advantage of an obvious advertising opportunity in 1926, renaming it for his family, and thereafter his son, P.K. Wrigley, took an active interest. Wrigley Field underwent its most transformative change in 1937, under P.K.’s management, when a renovation brought the famous ivy and the brick wall, the hand-operated scoreboard that remains in use even today, plus upgraded bleachers that still stand—and which more than doubled the stadium’s original capacity, from 18,000 to 38,000. (The stadium has grown to accommodate 41,000 fans, but thanks to its limited acreage, it still qualifies for its longstanding nickname, “The Friendly Confines.”)
Having reached a sort of perfection, Wrigley for years remained deliberately unchanged. Cubs ownership finally installed permanent lights for night games in August 1988, a decision likely made in order to secure the All-Star Game, which Wrigley hosted in 1990. The lights illuminated many legendary Wrigley moments, including game six of the 2016 National League Championship Series. The Cubs won, securing the team’s first World Series appearance in 71 years; the Cubs would go on to win that series, ending a 108-year championship drought, the longest in all U.S. sports.
Yet the stadium has also made history in other sports. In 1933, Wrigley hosted a softball tourney, described in the Chicago American as “the largest and most comprehensive tournament ever held in the sport which has swept the country like wildfire,” and it led to the creation of formal rules and governance for softball. During World War II, P.K. Wrigley opened the stadium to the All-American Girls Softball League, so that fans could scratch their diamond-sports itch while baseball players fought overseas. In football, the Bears played at Wrigley for 50 years before moving to Soldier Field. And in the 1940s and ’50s, Wrigley hosted bustling rodeos with hundreds of participants.
Still, Wrigley is foremost a baseball shrine. For many fans, and not only of the Cubs, Wrigley’s close quarters, neighborhood location and ivy-and-brick motif represent the embodiment of baseball’s purest form—of the beautiful eccentricities and old-school charm that can’t be found in any other sport. It may not be exactly what your great-grandparents saw 110 years ago, but it’s likely closer than any other stadium can offer.