History
The park was built in six weeks in 1914 at a cost of about $250,000 ($5.3 million in 2011 dollars) by the Chicago lunchroom magnate Charles Weeghman, who owned the Federal League Whales. (The club signed a 55-year lease to use the park for approximately $18,000 per year.) It was designed by the architect Zachary Taylor Davis (who four years earlier had designed Comiskey Park for the Chicago White Sox), incorporating the new "fireproof" building codes recently enacted by the city. According to some sources, when it opened for the 1914 Federal League season, Weeghman Park had a seating capacity of 14,000. According to another source, the original seating capacity was 20,000.
In late 1915 the Federal League folded. The resourceful Weeghman formed a syndicate including the chewing gum manufacturer William Wrigley Jr. to buy the Chicago Cubs from Charles P. Taft for about $500,000. Weeghman immediately moved the Cubs from the dilapidated West Side Grounds to his two-year-old park. In 1918 Wrigley acquired the controlling interest in the club. In November 1926, he renamed the park "Wrigley Field."
In 1927 an upper deck was added, and in 1937, Bill Veeck, the son of the club president, planted ivy vines against the outfield walls.
Although Wrigley Field has been the home of the Cubs since 1916, it has yet to see the Cubs win a World Series, even though it has hosted several (1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945, the last time the Cubs appeared in a World Series), the last World Series win by the Cubs (1908) happened while the Cubs called West Side Park home.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)