A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred

Overview
George Will uses Wrigley Field’s centennial to tell a compact history of a ballpark that became bigger than its chronically unlucky tenant. The narrative braids architectural change, team lore, neighborhood politics, economics, and the rituals of fandom to show how a specific place on Chicago’s North Side shaped national ideas about baseball, failure, and continuity. Will’s theme is constancy: in a sport obsessed with numbers and novelty, Wrigley’s stubborn particulars, ivy, bricks, a hand-operated scoreboard, daylight, have created a civic memory machine that outlasts pennant droughts.

Origins and Architecture
The story begins with the short-lived Federal League, when restaurateur Charles Weeghman built Weeghman Park in 1914 and moved the Cubs there in 1916. William Wrigley Jr., the gum magnate, consolidated control, and the stadium took his name, an early marriage of commerce and culture that paradoxically produced a public good: a neighborhood ballpark with human scale. The 1937 renovation, under P. K. Wrigley with a young Bill Veeck’s flair, added the sweeping bleachers, the now-iconic ivy clinging to unforgiving brick, and the manual scoreboard that still resists the clockwork of modern spectacle. Will lingers on textures, the chalk that hangs in the air, wind patterns off the lake, the peculiar acoustics of a crowd on Sheffield, because the park’s physicality is the plot.

Myths, Loss, and the Cubs Identity
Wrigley’s charm is inseparable from the ache of the Cubs, and Will parses the mythology without surrendering to it. The Billy Goat curse becomes a folk tale about urban life and entrepreneurial moxie more than a causal force. The collapses, 1969’s black cat, 1984’s heartbreak in San Diego, 2003’s Bartman game, are read as human episodes amplified by a setting that makes memory durable. He is skeptical of supernatural explanations, favoring front-office decisions, roster construction, and the cold arithmetic of runs scored and prevented. Yet he admits the park’s atmosphere can feel like fate: day games that wilt pitchers, April winds that turn routine flies into parables.

Characters and Culture
Personalities animate the place. Ernie Banks christens it the friendly confines and makes optimism into a local ethic. Ron Santo, Ryne Sandberg, and other stars are sketched as artisans framed by a stage that dignifies routine. Harry Caray’s exuberant seventh-inning choruses stitched strangers into a congregation, while the bleacher bums embodied a certain Chicago rowdiness that over decades mellowed into affectionate tradition. Will delights in durable quirks, the W flag, the standings spelled in pennants, the quiet choreography of the scoreboard crew, because they constitute a grammar of belonging.

Politics, Commerce, and the Neighborhood
Wrigley is a ballpark embedded in a city, so zoning fights, rooftop rights, and ownership changes matter. Will recounts the long resistance to lights and their eventual arrival in 1988, complete with the rainout that delayed the official debut by a day, as a compromise between modern revenue streams and a devotion to daylight. He follows the line of stewardship from the Wrigley family to the Tribune Company and on to the Ricketts era, noting how each regime negotiated the tension between preservation and monetization. Rooftop entrepreneurs, aldermen, and tavern keepers become supporting characters in a civic drama about who owns a view and what a public pastime owes its neighbors.

Legacy at One Hundred
By the centennial, Wrigley Field stands as an argument about limits: that certain inefficiencies, awkward sightlines, fickle weather, a scoreboard without pixels, create intimacy and meaning. Will’s verdict is affectionate but not sentimental. The ballpark did not curse the Cubs; it sustained their fans through long interludes between hopes. A century of afternoons and a few carefully measured nights added up to a place where memory feels tangible. Winning, he suggests, is glorious; enduring together is a deeper good. Wrigley Field made that endurance visible.