Staff Photo Courtesy of the San Diego Times-Union
Today, ballparks are built to be the centerpiece of a burgeoning district or neighborhood, a venue that will bring people together for more of a social event than just a ballgame. A new ballpark aims to raise the bar for the ultimate social experience and modern amenities every few years.
There was one such ballpark built in San Diego over 65 years ago that was ahead of its time in both modern comfort and style, however, the forward progress of the city in obtaining major league status would ultimately prove to be the death knell for Westgate Park.
Westgate Park would be the home to the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League from 1958 to 1967; it has been overlooked by many in terms of sentiment; it featured many current amenities and standards for today’s stadiums.
Banker C. Arnholt Smith purchased the minor league Padres in 1955 and kept the team in the town after former owner Bill Starr fell into financial problems. The club was playing at Lane Field, an old WPA stadium that according to Smith was “slapped together with old lumber and falling apart”. The stadium was pretty “punk” and infested with termites eating away at the wooden structure providing it with its nickname “termite village”.
“We bought the team for about $300,000. Of course, after we bought it, then everybody started screaming that we needed a new stadium!,” said Smith in a 1992 interview in the San Diego Reader.
After being advised, Smith picked the pastoral land of the undeveloped Mission Valley to erect his new building. At the time, the area was known for its vast farmland, miles away from downtown. However, there must have been a vision of the area’s potential since the city council voted in June 1958 to rezone 90 acres of farmland along I-8 near where the Padres new stadium would be erected.
Smith, who also owned the Westgate-California Tuna Packing Co., financed the $1 million stadium out of his pockets and was seen as a baseball savior in San Diego. Attendance at Padres games and ballparks around the country was fleeting due to television and broadcasts of major league baseball games in numerous markets coast to coast.
Westgate Park's electronic scoreboard with the two giant tuna cans to promote the company. (CBS 8 San Diego)
Westgate Park would be a state-of-the-art facility that would be the envy of not only the PCL but the rest of the baseball world. The 8,268-seat ballpark featured theater-style seating with armrests and a steel roof that shaded a majority of the grandstand. Four light towers on the roof leaned forward at about a 60-degree angle.
Smith even gave his ballpark a corporate name after his tuna company. San Diego Union Times Sports Editor Jack Murphy, whose name would grace a future stadium, wondered if there would be resentment in the “commercialization of the name”, but proclaimed it the finest stadium in minor-league baseball.
“Not even Yankee Stadium or Boston’s Fenway Park can surpass the comforts and conveniences of the Padres’ new home on Friars Road.”
There were no outfield bleachers; the area was made of grass seating for fans to lay out in the sun to watch the game. The seating sloped down to field level behind the outfield fence. Photos of the ballpark show a similar setup that would be incorporated into various ballparks, roughly 35 years later.
Accenting the ballpark was an array of trees, shrubs, flowers, and tropical plants throughout the ballpark's exterior and interior. Perhaps the most exotic of all these trees and plants were the eucalyptus trees planted on both sides of the scoreboard in left field.
“It was well-engineered. We dug it down so as you walked in, you were about halfway up in the seating area and the field was below you, added Smith. “It brought the audience right up close to the team’s activity. You could hear the players swearing and yelling at each other.”
Westgate (L-R) had slanted towers, a storage room for peanuts, multiple ticket booths, and theater-style chairs. (CBS 8 San Diego)
When it came to concessions, the stadium provided vast kitchens with walk-in coolers for both beer and soda. There was a heat-control storage room for peanuts set to 120 degrees and reportedly held up to 10,000 bags at a time.
Another unusual concept of the era, but very common today, was different and outrageous menu options. The park sold a tubed-shaped item called “tunies” made out of fish, a fish hot dog. They were originally created in in 1941 as a meat substitute for Catholics on Fridays. Smith produced them at his cannery and loved how the skinless tuna hot dog tasted. He said they looked and tasted better than a hot dog.
What is even more bizarre is that it appeared that regular pork or beef hot dogs were not sold, but after a little while the “tunies” were scrapped in favor of the more traditional ballpark staple. Other concessions included hamburgers, popcorn, potato chips, ice cream sandwiches, beer, Pepsi and 7Up prodicts, and cigars.
Westgate had a carnival-like atmosphere with circuses, concerts, and zoo animals entertaining fans. These acts would soon relocate to the San Diego Sports Arena, now Valley View Casino Center, in 1966. The next year the San Diego Rockets of the NBA began operations; the times were changing rapidly, and America’s Finest City was fast becoming a major league town.
When the Major Leagues expanded in 1961 and 1962, San Diego was optimistic about landing a team sometime soon. That feeling only heightened when 9,000 fans watched an exhibition game between the Milwaukee Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers in April 1962 at Westgate Park.
Westgate's outfield walls feature no billboard ads and plenty of green lawn seating behind the chainlink fence. (CBS 8 San Diego)
The next year the Braves flirted with relocation to San Diego and blueprints were developed that added a second deck to Westgate to increase capacity to 43,000. However, the Braves stayed in Milwaukee until announcing it would relocate to Atlanta for the 1966 season. The next year a bid was put up to move the Cincinnati Reds to town, but they were sold to a local group that kept the franchise in Ohio.
Around the same time, the San Diego Chargers of the American Football League were threatening to relocate up the road to Anaheim if the antiquated Balboa Stadium, built in 1914, was not replaced. Soon there was a push, headed by Murphy, for a brand new 50,000-seat dual-purpose stadium.
One would only have to look at the team’s 1966 official program that featured the city skyline and a small banner on the cover that proclaimed San Diego as a city in motion. A few months later on November 2, 1965, a $27 million bond was passed allowing for the construction of a multipurpose stadium that would fit 50,000-60,000 people.
Westgate is featured heavily on its game-day programs, notice by 1966 that the team was pushing away from Gateway Park imagery
By the time San Diego Stadium’s was completed in time for the 1967 football season for the Chargers, Westgate Park had already hosted its last game. The Padres final year in the PCL would be played at the massive stadium that would serve as the home to the major league Padres from 1969 to 2003.
“So after we moved the team to San Diego Stadium, we said, what the hell are we going to do with Westgate?” Smith asked himself.
Ernie Hanh, the Director of the US National Bank, came up with the idea of building a shopping center on the site. It was centrally located and everybody could get there by car. And with that decision, Westgate Park was torn down and replaced with the Fashion Valley Mall. The successful mall opened in 1969 becoming the leading shopping center in the San Diego area, boasting 1.7 million square feet of floor area.
The Padres were the top affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies during its last three seasons and were relocated to Eugene, Oregon. The theater-style seats and lighting poles would be sold to its new home at Civic Stadium which had to be renovated to be up to minor league standards of the day. The 800 seats would remain at its new home until 1986 when plastic blue, plastic seats replaced them.
Westgate Park's demise came from San Diego’s aggressive progress in professional sports. When it opened in 1957, the city did not have a major league club, 13-years-later it had teams in the NFL, MLB, and NBA. The City in Motion was no longer a minor league town.
The forward-thinking design of grass outfield seating, a sunken bowl, attention to aesthetics, a corporate name, and detail to concessions would become hallmarks of minor league baseball clubs decades later in the 1990s and early 21st century. It was a stadium that was ahead of its time.
One last nod to Westgate’s legacy is in Kissimmee, Florida, where the blueprints were utilized in designing a new Spring Training park for the Houston Astros Osceola County Stadium in 1985.
Had any of these things worked out differently: 1) the stadium issue doesn’t get past, 2) the Chargers relocate to Anaheim, or 3) Buffalo is awarded an expansion team in the N.L.--Westgate Park would have hosted baseball for a longer period and perhaps become much more cherished by San Diegoians and ballpark lovers alike.
----
Follow all of Marc’s stadium journeys on Twitter @ballparkhunter and his YouTube channel. Email at Marc.Viquez@stadiumjourney.com
Comments