To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia 1909 - 1976 by Bruce Kuklick

To Every Thing a Season is a great book because it is as much about the A’s and Phillies teams of the Shibe Park era as it is about the neighborhood the ballpark transformed, and ultimately mirrored. Bruce Kuklick is a long time professor of history at the University of Penn, and has written several books on the philosophical and intellectual history in the United States. Books of this type are sometimes prone to an overly sentimental perspective, but Kuklick is successful at avoiding this pitfall, and instead takes a deep look at exactly what causes that type of mass nostalgia in addition to his historical recount.

The story itself is rather compelling. In the 70+ years from the park’s founding to its demolition, the neighborhood transformed from a collection of small farming villages, to a densely populated inner city on a steady decline. The park itself was considered a great technological achievement when it was built, but by 1971 it was heavily regarded as pro baseball’s worst stadium and famously likened to chicken shit by Richie Ashburn. Kuklick covers it all with great detail; closely examining the many local factors and national trends that shaped the area during that time, but also giving equal time to highlight the baseball personalities that made the area famous.

The location of Shibe Park was selected for its proximity to local trolley and regional rail lines. But by the 1940’s, it was a lack of automobile parking that had both the A’s and the Phillies pining for a new home. The section of the book that dealt with the respective team’s efforts to relocate and the city planning that eventually lead to the regrettable Veteran’s Stadium was particularly interesting. It’s a shame that most of the follies associated with that era of publicly funded stadiums still exist today, as politicians continue to falsely believe that a new stadium will benefit the city, when it usually only benefits the owners of the team that resides there. I would have love to have Kuklick’s thoughts on what lead up to the building Citizen’s Bank Park, but this book was published in 1994, at a time when public opinion of Veteran's Stadium had only begun to sour.

The closing of To Every Thing a Season was especially strong. It reminded of some of Milan Kundera’s writings as Kuklick uses Shibe Park to reflect on the nature of collective memories, which run both true and false. The author quotes local papers from the time of Shibe’s closing, and some remembered the neighborhood, stadium, and its teams as they were. But many were already looking back with rose tinted glasses, finally praising the very stadium they’d been lobbying against for the past 25 years.

This book is rich in detail, and the writing has a great flow to make for an enjoyable read. While much of its focus is on baseball, I’d recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in 20th century Philadelphia. Unfortunately, this book is not available in the Kindle store, so you’ll have to lug around a hard copy if you want to read it. Available on Amazon