Urban geography

Whole Earth Review, Fall, 1988 by Bonnie Loyd

My friend Blair pointed out the other day that baseball is the only sport in which fans develop such great affection for the parks. Baseball fans love to talk about ball parks almost as much as they like to talk about games. Everyone has a favorite Dodger Stadium, Wrigley Field - and they discuss statistics like the height of the left-field wall or the length of the power alleys.

The ball park isn't just a neutral setting for nine innings of play, it's part of the game. Managers work out strategies to suit the field. At Fenway, they might load the lineup with right-handed hitters for the lopsided outfield and keep left-handed pitchers on the bench.

Baseball is odd in that way, because for most other sports the field of combat is standardized. Sure, aficionados may fuss over variations in playing surfaces, but the basic dimensions - the length of the court, the height of the net - they're all specified. But in baseball, especially in the grand, old parks, each field has its own shape and personality.

Most of the classic baseball parks were built between 1902 and 1923. They were shoehorned into crowded cities, so the fields were shaped by the surrounding street plans. In Philadelphia, for instance, the founder, William Penn, laid out an orderly grid for the streets, so decades later when Shibe Park was built, it turned out square.

" Fenway Park in Boston has a cranky, meandering outfield wall, dictated by the maze of streets that presses up against it.

But it wasn't only real estate that fashioned the famous baseball fields. Brian Neilson, who wrote about the classic ball parks in Landscape magazine, Each playing field had its peculiar geometry and dimensions. . . . Yankee Stadium's asymmetrical field was a product not only of its odd-shaped plot, but also of the decision to tailor it to the strengths of one player. Babe Ruth was the first of a succession of left-handed Yankee batters to press a territorial claim on the near right-field seats. "The House That Ruth Built" objectified the heroic age of the sport in which one personality might alter the dimensions of the game. Other clubs altered the field to accommodate particular players or strategies. The owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates pulled in the left-field fence to create a "home run garden" for two right-handed sluggers. Unlike football fields, baseball fields of the era obeyed no abstract, Euclidean imperatives."*

Well, Brian Neilson might call it geometry, but it seems to me, baseball parks are a wonderful place to study urban geography.

What's new at the junkyard? You know the scene: battered hulks of cars stacked up in heaps, teenage boys and do-it-yourself mechanics rooting around for parts to fix up their own cars. When's the last time you actually visited a junkyard? The closest I usually get to one is on television or in the movies. They're great locations for shootouts: the bad guys are ducking behind gutted Buicks, while ominously in the background the big crusher just keeps squashing BMWs.

I've done some snooping around, and I feel a bit disillusioned, because Hollywood has even managed to make the junkyard a cliche.

First, the name. Junkyard. No, no, no. People in the business refer to this as "auto wrecking" or "auto dismantling," maybe "automobile salvage," but my favorite is "after-market body parts."

Second, the look of the junkyard. I've been driving around San Francisco near Third and Evans and in the East Bay near San Pablo Avenue, and I discovered that junkyards are quite discreet. City zoning departments require that they have a fence of solid metal panels, painted a neutral color, a few trees in front, and a subtle sign. Some dismantlers don't even have an outdoor yard; everything is inside a warehouse. You could easily drive by without realizing you had passed a junkyard.

Then, there are the economics of the business. In 1983 there were 11,200 auto wrecking companies in the U.S. with 80,000 employees and $4 billion in annual sales, figures from Arthur D. Little, Inc. But business has been tough in the past two or three years and at least ten percent of these companies have gone out of business. It turns out that many operators are being undercut by importers who sell new fenders, grilles, and other parts made in Taiwan, Mexico, Italy, and other countries for less than junkyards charge for second-hand parts. Also, prices for scrap metal have dropped, and many new automobiles are longer-lasting and harder for amateurs to fix.

You may have noticed a lot of old cars rusting on the city streets. That's the effect of the hard times in the junkyard business.

What about those big crushing machines that star in the movies? The ones that turn a whole Chevy into a mere wafer of metal? One guy in the Bay Area does own a portable loader/crusher, but I was disappointed to learn that nobody here actually has one in their yard. So much for Hollywood.

This is Richard Wiswall of Cate Form in Plainfield, Vermont. He raises organic vegetables on 61/2 acres of bottom-land next to the Winqoski River. He has a pair of tractors for field preparation, transplanting and cultivating. For hand Labor tasks he welded up this contraption out of two old bicycles. It straddles his wide rows and eliminates stooping and backoches. It has backpacker foam to lie on and a strap to support the forehead. The T-shaped lever at the back works like a leg machine at a gym. Raising it cranks the pedal via rope and pulleys. When that's not enough, a spin of the front wheels moves it forward in soft dirt. Richard also has a novel (to me) trick for keeping deer out of his apples: he gets good results by slicing bars of Dial soap into chunks and hanging them from his trees.