It’s not just awful that Governor Hochul wants to give away hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to the Buffalo Bills owner to build a new stadium simply because he has his own money and he already has a perfectly functional ballpark. It’s awful because that stadium is in the suburbs with no public transport access and nothing surrounding it but a giant parking lot, and the proposal is to replace it with the same damned thing.

The sports team I most despise is the Atlanta Braves and their odious fanbase’s racist tomahawk chop. Sure, I’m biased, I’m a New York Mets fan. But the Braves got a new ballpark in 1997. If it was a woman, it’d still be young enough to date Leo DiCaprio. Yet the owner, with taxpayer money, built and moved them in 2017 to Truist Park in the suburbs because, as he said, “that’s where our fans are.” Code for he’s catering to racist white people who don’t want to visit downtown Atlanta and see Black people.

Downtown ballparks and arenas are simply more aesthetically pleasing than suburban stadiums surrounded by giant parking lots. Sure, tailgating is fun, but when the game’s over, there’s nothing to do there. Contrast that with Wrigley Field and Fenway Park. There’s a liveliness and vitality to downtown ballparks, in neighborhoods, surrounded by apartments, restaurants, pubs, shops, and pedestrian friendly spaces.

And, sure, Wrigley and Fenway are over 110 years old, built before the ubiquity of cars, but Baltimore’s Camden Yards, opened in 1992, plus even newer Target Field in Minneapolis are downtown and walkable. Or hop over the border to Toronto. The baseball park and the hockey/basketball arena are by the waterfront, near each other and the train station, surrounded by an aquarium, an old railway museum, a brewery, and multiple apartments, hotels, and restaurants.

But but but! How do you drive downtown and park? Don’t know and don’t care. Take the train. Use public transport. Because in a well-designed community space, it’s available. Spaces made for people are better than spaces made for cars. Urban sprawl, and the collapse of walkable downtown spaces, is a choice Americans have made over the last century.

Perhaps we Americans wouldn’t whine so much when gas approaches $5 a gallon, which is low even in good times in other countries, if we weren’t forced to be so dependent on our cars.

Sean Pidgeon
Morristown