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Bleacher Bugs and Fifty-Centers: The Social Stratification of Baseball Fans through Stadium Design, 1880–1920
Between 1860 and 1920, Americans grappled with the demographic and political changes of modernization. American baseball-team owners used furniture selection and arrangement to invite upper- and middle-class native-born white men and women to the center of spectatorship and to marginalize nonwhite,...
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Published in: | Buildings & landscapes 2021-03, Vol.28 (1), p.5-29 |
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Main Author: | |
Format: | Article |
Language: | English |
Subjects: | |
Online Access: | Get full text |
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Summary: | Between 1860 and 1920, Americans grappled with the demographic and political
changes of modernization. American baseball-team owners used furniture selection
and arrangement to invite upper- and middle-class native-born white men and
women to the center of spectatorship and to marginalize nonwhite, immigrant, and
working-class fans. Owners installed a new type of seating, the opera chair, to
tame rowdy male audiences and protect the bodies of white women who attended
frequent ladies’ days. In newspapers, owners and sportswriters stereotyped
spectators by seating section. Fans embraced, and at times resisted, the status
imposed upon them through stadium design. A close reading of the interior
landscape recorded in newspaper descriptions and photographs reveals spaces
divided into hierarchical groups designed to assuage the anxieties of bourgeois
white audiences. Professional baseball teams invited all into communal
spectatorship to watch the national game, but segregated fans in pursuit of
profit. |
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ISSN: | 1936-0886 1934-6832 |
DOI: | 10.5749/BUILDLAND.28.1.0005 |