Wrigley Field

Wrigley Field opened on April 23, 1914, as Weeghman Park, home to the Chicago Whales of the upstart Federal League. Built by restaurateur Charles Weeghman on a plot of land at the corner of Clark and Addison Streets on Chicago's North Side, the ballpark was designed by architect Zachary Taylor Davis, who had also designed the White Sox's Comiskey Park. When the Federal League folded after two seasons, Weeghman purchased the Cubs and moved them into his park. The chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. later acquired the team and renamed the ballpark in his own honor in 1926. The name stuck, and so did the ballpark — more than a century later, Wrigley Field stands as the second-oldest active ballpark in Major League Baseball, younger only than Fenway Park.

The ivy-covered outfield walls, planted by future Hall of Famer and legendary impresario Bill Veeck in 1937, are Wrigley's most iconic visual signature. The lush carpet of Boston ivy and Japanese bittersweet transforms the brick outfield walls into a living, seasonal canvas — green and dense in summer, bare and skeletal by October. A ball lost in the ivy is ruled a ground-rule double, one of baseball's most charmingly idiosyncratic rules, and a reminder that Wrigley operates under its own set of aesthetic and practical principles. The hand-operated scoreboard atop the centerfield bleachers, installed in 1937, remains in daily use and is a designated city landmark.

For most of its existence, Wrigley Field was defined by lovable futility. The Cubs did not win a World Series from 1908 to 2016, a drought of 108 years that became the longest in professional sports history. The ballpark became a monument to beautiful losing — a place where the sunshine, the rooftop views, the neighborhood bars on Sheffield and Waveland Avenues, and the general experience of being at Wrigley were sufficient compensation for the losing on the field. Day baseball was the norm until 1988, when lights were finally installed over fierce community opposition, and the daytime games remain a defining feature of the Wrigley experience. The park was the last in the majors to host a night game, a distinction its loyalists wore as a badge of honor.

The 2016 World Series championship shattered the drought and transformed Wrigley from a temple of romantic suffering into a shrine of ultimate triumph. The Cubs' seven-game victory over the Cleveland Indians, capped by a rain-delayed Game 7 that may have been the greatest baseball game ever played, unleashed a century of pent-up emotion. The celebrations at Wrigley and throughout the North Side neighborhood of Wrigleyville were cathartic on a scale rarely seen in American sports. The park, which had spent a lifetime as the beautiful backdrop to heartbreak, became the setting for the most dramatic happy ending in the game's history.

The 1060 Project, a massive renovation and expansion effort launched by the Ricketts family ownership group, modernized Wrigley's infrastructure while preserving its character. New clubhouses, expanded concourses, video boards, and the open-air plaza beyond the left-field wall brought Wrigley into the twenty-first century without erasing its twentieth-century soul. The rooftop buildings across Waveland and Sheffield, once independent businesses that profited from unobstructed views into the park, were integrated into the franchise's ecosystem through a combination of acquisition and legal settlement. Wrigley Field endures as the Friendly Confines — a place where baseball is played in a setting so beautiful that winning, for most of its history, was merely a bonus.