Ballparks and Our Changing City

What can New York’s ballparks—from the gone-but-not-forgotten Ebbets Field to today’s reimagined Yankee Stadium and Citi Field—tell us about the evolution of our city? Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, author of the new book Ballpark: Baseball in the American City, sits down with author Kevin Baker to discuss the connection between the physical transformation of New York’s ballparks and America’s changing attitudes toward cities and shared civic space, past and present.

This program accompanies our exhibition In the Dugout with Jackie Robinson An Intimate Portrait of a Baseball Legend (on view through September 22, 2019).

About the Speakers:

Paul Goldberger, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, began his career at The New York Times, where he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism for his writing on architecture. Later, and for 15 years, he was architecture critic for The New Yorker. He is the author of many books, most recently Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (May, 2019). Goldberger teaches at the New School and lectures widely around the country on architecture, design, historic preservation, and cities.

Kevin Baker is an award-winning novelist, historian, and journalist whose most recent book is America the Ingenious, How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants, and Tinkerers Changed the World (2016). His previous books include Becoming Mr. October: The Revealing Story of Reggie Jackson and the World Champion New York Yankees (2013) and Sometimes You See It Coming: A Novel (2003), which is based in part on the life of baseball legend Ty Cobb.