Quote:
Originally Posted by silvam14
Love the neighborhood. I was thinking of trying to recreate that for my Crosley stadiums.
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Yeah, I think part of the beauty of the older parks was how they fit into neighborhoods they were a part of. It's fun to build them out so it feels more like the actual stadium, but they can take a lot of time to create. So it's definitely a cost benefit analysis - and this one may have had too much of a cost. Welcome to Shibe Park.
I lived in North Philadelphia for two years (2008-2010, so I was there for the World Series) and knew the neighborhood Shibe Park was in, so it was really fun to spend some time re-creating a stadium set in an area I have been to. Fortunately there was a sketchup model for row homes, which made it easy to make most of the surrounding nieghborhood.
If you've ever seen any pictures of Shibe Park, you know that the front facade was one of the more beautiful ones that were built at the turn of the century:
As they built additions around it they didn't maintain the original facade, so I decided to do a "whatif" where the renovations include extending the facade around the whole of the park. It was, again, probably too much work, but it looked great in the model:
The original park was surrounded by a residential neighborhood. The houses on the right field side could see into the field (much like Wrigley) until the 1930s - at the height of the depression the Athletics built a wall to increase the number of paying customers. I would assume (if the Phillies, the second and last tenants) had stayed put, they would have eventually developed the surrounding area (like Wrigley, or like what Temple has been doing in North Philly) so I added a building in right that imitated the facade. Since there aren't any houses in right any more, I also decided to lower the wall and add some arches.
I decided to bring in some elements of Citizen's Bank Park, including the iron frames on the lights and the scoreboard (including a Rights to Ricky Sanchez shout out #ttp.)
I also brought in the LED Liberty Bell which lights up at night.
The stadium was pretty deep, with 430 to center, so you'll get a lot of doubles and not a lot of home runs. Ryan Howard (amongst others) would have had a very different career if they played here.
Zip file can be found here
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