“We need to work together,” Charlotte Newfeld told a crowd of Wrigleyville neighbors that gathered at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church recently to discuss the Cubs’ plans for Wrigley Field. The agreement allowing the Cubs to play night games expires after the 2002 season, and the Tribune Company, which owns the team, wants to increase the annual number of such games from 18 to 30. At the same time, it’s proposing an $11 million makeover for the historic ballpark, with 2,100 more seats in the outfield, 200 to 250 more box seats behind home plate, a concession area behind center field where diners can watch the game through tinted glass, and a multilevel parking garage on the west side of Clark Street.
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But so far the team has released only an artist’s rendering of the new Wrigley Field, and without any blueprint or hard information about the plan–reportedly being submitted to City Hall this week–the Lake View Citizens’ Council (LVCC) has already begun to fragment. Newfeld, a longtime honcho of LVCC, chairs Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine (CUBS), which rounded up 150 neighbors for the meeting at the church. Two weeks earlier, Jim Murphy, president of the LVCC offshoot East Lakeview Neighbors (ELN), had hosted a meeting of 500 people at LeMoyne School to talk about the expansion.
Many in the CUBS camp think the WRA is playing footsie with the team, promising to quash neighborhood opposition to the added night games in exchange for preserving their views of the field. According to Newfeld, that’s why Murphy ran for president of ELN: “In March, Jim Murphy seemed to feel that he had to stack the election meeting and take over the organization. This happened in the context of me going around and signing everybody up on our CUBS mailing list, because we knew we would be having bargaining sessions with the Tribune Company.”
Meanwhile, the dispute over Wrigley Field renovation and the expanded night schedule agreement is shaping up as a real dogfight. “It is important for the Cubs organization to be competitive, with new revenue streams,” says John McDonough. At the same time, the city has suggested that Wrigley Field be named a historic landmark, which would further inhibit any renovations. The neighbors promise to be a factor as well–if they haven’t torn each other apart.
