Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark

Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites: Democracy and Division at the Twentieth-Century Ballpark

Tannenbaum, Seth S.

Paperback

Series: Sport and Society

Baseball & SoftballSports General20th Century United States History

ISBN10: 0252089251
ISBN13: 9780252089251
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: Mar 31 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.35
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.15 Depth: 9.22
Language: English
Celebrated as a democratic space for all Americans, the major league ballpark in fact privileged the middle- and upper-class white male fan while tacitly marginalizing poor urban residents and people of color. Seth S. Tannenbaum examines how the game's economically and socially stratified system reflected changing understandings of urban space, inclusion, and the body politic.

Major League Baseball owners and executives masked exclusion and division by touting the game's accessibility and instituting few overtly discriminatory policies. Affluent white males enjoyed a comfortable, safe space that reinforced their status as the prototypical American citizen. At the same time, ballparks relocated in response to how these favored fans felt about cities. Tannenbaum traces this journey from the urban locales of the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium through the suburban-oriented Dodger Stadium and Houston Astrodome to the cloistered fantasy of city life offered by Camden Yards. As he shows, owners' pursuit of greater profits incorporated existing barriers that helped shape the structure of modern parks.

A revealing social history, Bleacher Seats and Luxury Suites revises the persistent myth of the ballpark as an egalitarian melting pot.

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