It was no surprise to most of us (especially Doc, who called this one a mile away), to find out that the Ricketts have already sauntered pretty far down the road to getting renovations to Wrigley Field approved. Now that the Ricketts have given up the idea that the State of Illinois and City of Chicago (which can’t pay people’s pensions or keep heat in their public schools, respectively) should pay hundreds of millions of dollars to renovate property that they purchased, own, and make money from, everyone seems a lot more willing to negotiate. Funny how that works:
Wrigleyville’s alderman says a recent proposal by Chicago Cubs owners to pay for renovations at Wrigley Field by relaxing advertising restrictions and other rules at the landmark ballpark is just one of many ideas being floated to pay for the work.
But Ald. Tom Tunney, 44th, did not rule out easing city landmark rules that make it difficult for the team to erect lucrative billboards, a key component in the proposal by team CEO Tom Ricketts to foot the bill for the entire $300 million rehab without going to taxpayers. The previous plan to tap public amusement tax revenue was greeted coolly by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“I think a lot of balloons are being floated,” Tunney said Monday. “A lot of what they said has not been presented to the community.”
He said Cubs officials would need to negotiate with the owners of rooftop clubs overlooking Wrigley, who gave an icy reception Monday to the idea of new signs that could block their views.
You know who else gives a frosty reception to signs that could block the views of the rooftops? Me.
I’ll admit it. Over the course of the last few seasons, I’ve become particularly fond of taking in the game from the off rooftop. The seats are more comfortable, the garbage cans aren’t swarming with bees, the food and drinks are plentiful and easy to obtain, and I don’t have miss two innings standing in line for the ladies room. Because there are no lines! Anywhere!
Did I mention that, for $75 to $100, I not only get admission (including heat/air conditioning as the weather requires), but all my food and drinks? And a bunch of flat screens? That sometimes show OTHER games that I’m interested in? Like the Blackhawks? Did I mention there are no lines for the bathrooms?
Duuuude. Don’t block the rooftops. Please.
“The rooftops are a fabric of the experience at Wrigley Field,” Beth Murphy, a member of the Wrigleyville Rooftop Association and owner of the bar Murphy’s Bleachers, said in a statement. “Any relaxation of the landmark ordinance that blocks our views violates our current 20-year contract with the Cubs and would jeopardize the tremendous economic contribution rooftops make to Chicago as businesses, taxpayers and members of the community.”
Yeah . . what that chick said.
What do you guys think? If Wrigley is more comfortable, do you care about the rooftops?
Fuck the rooftops.
No…I’m serious. What, exactly, benefits the Cubs (not the fans) from continuing to cater to these people?
IIRC they get a 17% cut of their profits. But yeah, I agree with you. The Cubs don’t really have much obligation to play nice with them.
That 17% is chump change compare to what the could get by putting up a sign or two or (even better) a video board.
Which is exactly what they should do.
THEN WHERE AM I SUPPOSED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM?!?!?1
In your beer cup…just like the rest of the civilized world.
Same color…uh,No.1 that is.
Agreed! Their monetary contributions are chicken scratch in the grand scheme of things.
I honestly don’t know how much I care bout the rooftops, partly because some of them are pretty ugly. But I’d rather look at ugly rooftops than an ginormous billboard wall behind the bleachers, so I guess it depends on what the actual thinking is
I do like to scoreboard watch from the patio at Sports Corner though, and i like that you can even see the scoreboard while walking down the street
The Cubs make a whopping 3.5 million from the rooftop owners. That’s chicken scratch, the rooftop owners will be made to sit down and stfu I’m assuming.
If this is the difference between the Cubs landing a let’s say 6ft 7in #1 FA Starter that will no longer hit his head in the tunnels etc, I’m all for it.
I’m still in the camp that thinks its dumb as hell to be spending this much money on Wrigley but I can support this.
Clearly, none of you people have ever spent any TIME on the rooftops.
The only rooftop I have ever been on was the rooftop of my building for an earthquake drill. I did not like it one bit….
Nothing that special about it.
THAT’S NOT THE POINT!
Yes, the rooftops provide the fans with a nice alternative to going to the game inside of the stadium…especially for large private parties or corporate entities not wanting to rent a luxury suite.
But they provide little benefit to the Cubs.
Also? They are a nice alternative for people who have to use the bathroom.
But it’s the rooftop owners that preventing the Cubs from being able to raise the money needed to:
a) Provide better food services inside the ballpark
b) A more comfortable seating bowl for fans
c) Better bathrooms
At this point, the rooftop owner not only don’t want the Cubs to take their views of the playing field away, they don’t want the ballpark renovated in any way that makes the experience inside Wrigley as good or better than the experience on a rooftop.
It’s plain and simple. The rooftop owners couldn’t care less about the fact Wrifley Field is deteriorating to the point of being a joke. All that matters to them is that they can continue to steal the product that they’ve been stealing for the last 29 years and that the Cubs remain in that ballpark.
What proves even more that these people are completely self centered boobs that can’t really see the big picture on things is the fact that it actually is in their best interest to let the team get this renovation done and get it done quickly. If the last 3 years should have taught them one important lesson…Wrigley Field isn’t the draw it once was and that people will not blindly come out to the games regardless if the team is good or bad. This team needs a renovation of the ballpark to help them be competitive on a yearly basis. They need the better player amenities. They need the better fan amenities to help generate revenue. They need expanded marketing avenues that should be available within the ballpark.
All the rooftop owners do is continuously hinder the process to allow the Rickettses to move forward and fix these problems.
So I’ll say it again…
FUCK THE ROOFTOPS.
That’s a pretty big jump. I doubt the rooftop owners are the ONLY thing keeping the Cubs from being able to get the money they want. Seriously.
No…they haven’t been the ONLY thing keeping the Cubs from doing what they want…but they are always, and I do mean always, the last obstacle.
Maybe one of the new bathrooms could be for Julie. Hey! Some of the bathrooms could be sold like the the suites, per each game. Maybe even per every 3 innings.
I don’t think they should add or renovate any of the women’s bathrooms. Besides, women don’t really care for going to baseball games anyway.
Just curious, why don’t they just stick the huge billboards around the stadium? And while, they are at it, stick billboards in the bathrooms? They have signage in both the ladies rooms at Anaheim Stadium, as well as Dodger Stadium. Of course,both Anaheim and Dodger stadium have those annoying animated billboards that run the horizon of the stadium,that run quizes,etc. that have nothing to do with the game…
People from Fenway are assuring us that their bathrooms got a lot better after the renovation, which is nice to hear.
they are better? um, wow, glad I didn’t go in the 90s
the area under the “bleachers” is nice, its wide open, kind of like a food court and those bathrooms are pretty big. And there is a decent spot over near the 3rd baseline, but the original concourse, aside from the museum type area at the gates, has areas that are maybe 12 feet across, and the bathrooms in those are not any nicer than the concourse bathrooms at Wrigley
unrelated, but the main grandstand area at Fenway also has the smallest seats I’ve ever sat on, the wood ones belong in an elementary school.
The seats at Fenway are horrid.
All the seats (outside of the additional ones added during the renovation) are about the same size as the ones you find in the upper deck at Wrigley. There are even more obstructed views than Wrigley has. And on top of all that, the angles the seats face in many parts of the ballpark are horrible. (In the game I last went to there, I had a neck ache for 2 days afterwards.)
After almost a decade of renovations, Fenway Park supposedly has a new lease on life. They added around 5000 new seats. That added new restaurants and bathrooms. They widened the concourses under the grandstands. They updated their scoreboards.
One thing they didn’t do is resolve any of the problems I stated earlier…small seats, obstructed views and poor viewing angles.
And now, with the renovations having been complete for a few years now, fans are starting to gripe about those things that were neglected.
And the Ricketts family should take note because Wrigley suffers from some of these same issues. Unless they remedy the fact that the main seating bowl was designed to only hold 15,000 people comfortably, 2 or 3 years after the renovations are over, people will start to complain again.
Everything I’ve heard the Ricketts family say about what they want to do with the ballpark doesn’t address these issues…and that’s a problem because if they don’t, the idea of making Wrigley viable for another 50 years is going to crumble quickly.
the reason they didn’t change the seats out is because they would have had to replace them with up to date seats, aka larger by a few inches, and they would have lost a lot of seats, in a ballpark that already doesn’t hold that many.
the sight lines really are terrible, its much better to sit in the bleachers than the grandstand if you are not in the infield area, past 1st & 3rd you face forward, not angled towards the diamond. But to change this would have been a serious overhaul of the bones of the building
the areas that were renovated were done nicely, but there are some things that they really could have done on a larger scale
Yes…that is the problem with redoing the seating bowl…reduced capacity…which is something that I mentioned in my blog yesterday. But not resolving those problems will bite them, I believe.
Looking at the renovation renderings for the lower deck, I don’t see how they logistically are going to put in a significant number of new bathrooms in without the triangle building in place to move some of these clubs, restaurants and shops into.
I say have the team buy up all the rooftops. Given the shot at renting a “luxury box” or a rooftop, I’d take the rooftop every day of the week. Then the Cubs can put up signage behind the rooftop seating for no obstructed views.
Or just put the screens up until one by one the existing people on the rooftops go out of business and the Cubs can secure long term leases on the rooftops and then take down the screens. enterprising rooftop owners will get projectors and project the game onto the screens, cause if you can’t see through them, just project what you want to see onto them. Simple optics.
I believe the Ricketts family has been carefully watching the situation with the rooftops and will, when the opportunity presents itself, attempt to purchase any building within a block of Wrigley Field, including the rooftops.
The rooftops are an experience unique to Wrigleyville. I get that. There are certainly positives for the fans, which is appealing from our standpoint. But they really don’t help the Cubs one bit. The restrictions the Cubs are under are ridiculous. I understand that residents (and their representation) should be able to dictate the conditions in their neighborhood.
But the Cubs made Wrigleyville. Wrigleyville didn’t make the Cubs. The Cubs are the reason property values and business opportunities for locals are among the most desirable in the city. Not the other way around. It blows my mind that the Cubs are under the restrictions with which they have to contend.
And putting billboards in the bathrooms aren’t worth near as much as billboards that make it on national television. Unless Todd does Undercover Boss again. And not even then.
And those who say that billboards take away from the traditionalism: billboards are a part of the fabric of baseball. Hit the Abe Stark sign in Ebbets and win a free suit. Ballantine — it’s a blast!
Close off the streets, put up some signs, and get rolling.
You’ve tried everything else.
I would like to see the streets around Wrigley closed off and cobble-stoned.
Waveland and Sheffield are already closed off to traffic.
The neighborhood has been up in arms about the idea of doing stuff to Sheffield on game days because “it would disrupt traffic”…that’s a load of shit that has, once again, been led by the rooftop owners (and some local bar owners too) because they don’t want the Cubs to set up their own concessions and activities while potentially taking away some of their business. Yet many of these establishments are allowed to close off sidewalks and use the space for their own benefit.
The city already closes the streets…so let the Cubs benefit from it.
Fuck the rooftops.
FTR!!!!
I get and accept everyone’s arguments that the rooftops don’t help the Cubs, but that isn’t the real point here.
People who own the buildings with rooftop views don’t have any *right* to that view. The Cubs own what happens inside the stadium, and the rooftop owners seem to cite nothing but tradition as their rationale for getting to, essentially, steal and re-market a product the Cubs own and pay for. The rooftop owners have no right to what happens in the stadium! I don’t give a single flying fuck what their opinion of the situation is. They didn’t buy a slice of Wrigley when they bought the stadium.
My last place here in DC had a view of the Capitol. It was beautiful. Then they built another building right in front and I had a view of an apartment building. I didn’t sue the city because that view wasn’t my legal right.
I’m sure attending a game on the rooftop is a LOT more enjoyable than attending a game inside the dump that is Wrigley Field. But that’s completely and totally irrelevant. If the Ricketts family wants to make a bubble out of opaque bags to cover the stadium from aerial views, that’s their right.
They do have an agreement with the owners though
If I remember correctly, their agreement was about taking the black sheets down that intentionally obstructed the views. It still doesn’t give them a right to the view.
It’s a little more complicated than that, I would think. When you buy property, especially property like a rooftop, you have a “reasonable expectation” that you’ll be able to use the property for the purpose you bought it for.
The issues here is whether, having had people watching from the rooftops for almost a century, the owners of the rooftop buildings have a “reasonable expecation” of that view continuing. My guess is that they probably do.
At the same time, they are profitting off a product that isn’t theirs and hindering their neighbor’s ability to run their business effectively…a business that has been there longer than many of those rooftops have been.
And mine is that they do not. The Ricketts also bought that big trash heap of a stadium with the reasonable expectation that they would be the ones to profit from what happens within its gross, disgusting walls. When comparing who gets the rights to show off the miserable failures happening inside, I think it belongs to the people who actually own the garbage.
Then again, I only have a GED in law and you have what I believe to be a real law degree, so.
Chris Carpenter designated for assignment.
I’m assuming you are referring to the “other” Chris Carpenter….in which case I just have to laugh.
Finally able to get onto MLBTR…it is the “other” Chris Carpenter. HA!!!
I think the Cubs should claim him off waivers.