San Diego Padres

A Ballpark and a Bus Depot

Hank Garfield
The author at a recent Dodgers-Padres game in San Diego

I wish I’d kept the comment on the Bangor Daily News website about my piece last December extolling the new Bangor Transit Center. The commentator predicted that the place would be trashed within a month and turn Pickering Square into an eyesore.

Six months later, the station looks as good as the day it opened. There’s barely a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. There are, to be sure, cameras and “No Loitering” signs – and, importantly, staff presence during operating hours and periodic police attention around the clock. But the functional beauty of the station doesn’t seem forced. It works, because people want it to work.

Last month I left Maine for the first time since Covid to visit San Diego, where I spent the Eighties and Nineties raising children and following Tony Gwynn’s baseball career. In 1998 the city held a referendum on construction of a new baseball stadium for the Padres, who until then had been playing their home games in a football stadium with all the soul of a barracks.

Along with 59% of my fellow San Diegans, I voted Yes, because I thought the plan for the new park was visionary, especially for car-obsessed Southern California. Petco Park is right on the trolley line, walking distance from the waterfront, hotels, and restaurants. I finally got to see a game there this spring. The Dodgers beat the Padres, 2-1.

What do a baseball stadium and a bus station, in two cities of vastly different size at opposite ends of the country, have in common?

More than you might think. But I want to focus on two primary themes: Both ballpark and bus depot contribute toward curbing the ubiquity of the car in American transportation. And they each validate the idea that ordinary citizens can achieve real results through representative democracy.

In 1983 when I arrived in San Diego, the football Chargers ruled the sports landscape. The Padres were an afterthought, an expansion team (born 1969) that was never any good. They had to play in the Chargers’ stadium, in Mission Valley, surrounded by freeways and asphalt expanses suited to tailgating but not to a day at the ballpark. Now the Chargers are in Los Angeles, and the Padres are the only game in town. 

The newspapers and television stations were playing it up: the first visit by the Dodgers since the Padres bounced them from the playoffs last year. But I didn’t expect to see a sea of Dodger blue marching through the Gaslamp Quarter an hour before the ballgame with horns and flags and all. A railroad rivalry has evolved since the new ballpark opened. Petco Park is a short walk from the Santa Fe Depot, and hundreds of Dodger fans ride the regular Amtrak trains down from Orange County and LA to see a game, or a weekend series. That didn’t happen in Mission Valley. It was all cars.

The ballpark has transformed the Gaslamp Quarter. The hours before the game reminded me of Kenmore Square in Boston. San Diego has always been a city of neighborhoods. Now it has the neighborhood ballpark it deserves.

Bangor, despite its small size, is a hub. It’s a service center for outlying towns. Traffic arteries lead outward to become roads: Hammond Street to Hermon, Union Street to Levant, Broadway to Dover-Foxcroft, State Street to Old Town. At the center of the hub lies Pickering Square. It’s clearly the logical place for a bus depot. As I wrote in December, the central location is not only most convenient, it sends a powerful signal about the centrality of public transportation in the area.

But not everyone wanted it there. Several people with influence in the community spoke out against it. City Council meetings were packed with people on both side of the issue. The final vote was a 5-4 cliffhanger.

Nonetheless, today there is a bus station. It’s clean, warm, and well-lit, and after years as a dream and six months as reality, it’s a success story about citizen involvement. We elected people to the City Council who supported public transportation; we presented the case for a central bus station to the full Council, and a majority determined that we had the stronger argument. Isn’t that exactly how the process is supposed to work?

Not everybody in San Diego wanted the city to spend tax dollars to build a new ballpark for the Padres, either. But I would argue that it has already paid for itself several times over. It’s the centerpiece of a bustling business area that isn’t dominated by cars. That by itself is worth the price of admission. The sunset and the breeze off the bay are just bonuses.

And I’m tired of hearing about the elitist, out-of-touch “they” who purportedly control our democratic institutions. Ballpark and bus depot reveal this as a lie. Both are shining examples of what “we” citizens can do, using the mechanisms of politics.

 If I walk by the Bangor Transit Center and see a rare piece of litter, I’ll pick it up and put it in a trash can. I suspect a lot of other people who attended those meetings do the same. We may have each played a small part, but we all feel some pride of ownership. At the game in San Diego, I felt something of the same thing.

Bangor’s new bus depot

The Fading Glow of Baseball

Hank Garfield

It’s that time of year when I write the second of my semi-annual baseball pieces: one for Opening Day, one for the World Series. This year’s entrants will be determined in the coming days. I was born and spent my first nine years in Philadelphia, and I lived 16 years in and around San Diego, so it’s a safe bet I’ll be rooting for the National League team. 

But I probably won’t watch much of it. I’ve followed the World Series since at least 1965, but in the past few years I’ve drifted away from baseball. The last time the Red Sox won, in 2018, I was in Bulgaria, and had to content myself with following it on the Internet. I watched the Nationals-Astros Series in 2019, when the visiting team won every game. It was a great Series. But I haven’t watched a minute of a Series since.

Covid-19 was part of the reason. We lost two-thirds of a season. And we freed our household from cable television, of which sports are an expensive and exasperating part. Baseball’s better on the radio, anyway. If I really want to watch a game, I can walk to a bar.

In the United States we blow sports all out of proportion, of course. A quarterback’s divorce gets more attention than the meltdown of a British prime minister. Former athletes run for, and frequently win, political office, with no more qualification than their trophies. Television revenue, owner profits, player salaries and ticket prices are all astronomical. The sports industry, like the automobile industry, is a colossus.

They’re both subsidized, too. Cities are built for cars, and city officials spend tax money to build venues for their teams so they won’t move to another city. I have some qualms about using public money to boost hugely profitable businesses. Nonetheless, in 1998 I voted Yes, along with 59.5% of my fellow San Diegans, on the referendum that created Petco Park.

The ballpark is something of a miracle. Formerly, the Padres played their home games in a soulless football stadium amid an asphalt jungle of freeways and parking lots. But at the turn of the millennium, in car-crazed Southern California, we built a ballpark for pedestrians and public transportation. Petco Park is downtown, served by the trolley and buses, in a walking neighborhood next to the bay. It opened in 2004, the year of the Red Sox redemption. By that time I had moved Back East. I’ve never attended a game there, but I’m still proud of my vote.

Sadly, though, I can’t muster the enthusiasm for baseball that I once had. Four Red Sox championships have taken the angst out of the equation, but I continued to watch for entertainment. Then managers started removing pitchers from shutouts in the sixth inning, and every mediocre hitter started swinging for the fences.

I didn’t see the marathon game between Houston and Seattle, won finally by the Astros, 1-0 in 18 innings. I read some of the comments afterward. The Mariners were the home team, which meant that if they scored, they won. Inning after inning, players took turns trying to hit the heroic, game-ending, walk-off homer – when all they needed was a Maury Wills run: a bunt single, a stolen base, a productive out to the first-base side, and a sacrifice fly. 

But I’m getting into the weeds here. It’s sad that big league baseball has degenerated into a slugging contest. A game critics have always derided as boring has become, in fact, boring. 

Worse, it has become unessential.

In 2004, the Red Sox surged into the World Series, and George W. Bush went up for re-election against John Kerry. Like many of my friends, I wanted the Red Sox to win and Bush to lose. What if only one of those things could happen? This was an earnest debate, and not a few of us picked the Red Sox. They hadn’t won in 86 years. Bush would be gone in four.

That sentiment, though widely shared, was a luxury we don’t have today. Another election is coming up, and it’s way more important than who wins the World Series.