The Coolest Ballpark in America

Urban With a Vengeance

When the Twins take the field for the first time April 2 and 3 for exhibition games against the St. Louis Cardinals, and again April 12 for the regular-season home opener against the Boston Red Sox, Twins President Dave St. Peter figures he will need extra security people inside the gate behind home plate just to keep the crowd moving. He expects that when fans walk a few paces through the gate—and find themselves not in a narrow concession tunnel, as they would upon entering the Metrodome, but on the stadium’s 360-degree open concourse, looking down at the diamond and straight back up Sixth Street as it seems to spill downtown Minneapolis smack dab into right field—their jaws will drop. Their eyeballs will spin. They will stop in their tracks and stare in delighted awe.

Newer Populous/HOK-designed ballparks in several cities—Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cleveland—offer views of urban skylines. So does the University of Minnesota’s new football stadium, also designed by Populous. But when the Twins call Target Field “the most urban ballpark in America,” they mean that fans aren’t just looking at downtown, they are downtown—and the design glories in the fact.

The writer to whom St. Peter makes his prediction about ticket buyers’ wowed reaction is in no position to argue. Five seconds into a late-September tour of the unfinished stadium (grass laid down, overhanging sun canopy up, many of the seats in place, but otherwise still a concrete shell), and despite having entered through a less dramatic Fifth Street gate overlooking center field, the writer’s journalistic objectivity got its butt kicked.

A further disclosure of bias: The writer’s only misgiving arises when St. Peter mentions the enormous scoreboard—57 feet high, 101 feet wide—as another element that will cause entering fans to stop and stare in joy. So enamored is the writer with the design and feeling of the structure that the idea of a huge screen belching up digital special effects seems repellent—a mere distraction from what is so very cool about this place. Same goes for the 625 LCD viewing screens that will show up in various locations in the stadium under a sponsorship deal with Richfield-based Best Buy Company.

All very state-of-the-art, no doubt, but this writer’s sentiment: Leave the multimedia glitz to the Yankees, or to the poor Dallas Cowboys, whose new football stadium looks like something Adolf Hitler would have built if it had occurred to him to enclose the venue for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. What we have at Target Field, by golly, is a ballpark.