History
The park was built in six weeks in 1914 at a cost of about $250,000 ($5.3 million in 2011 dollars) by the Chicago lunchroom magnate Charles Weeghman, who owned the Federal League Whales. (The club signed a 55-year lease to use the park for approximately $18,000 per year.) It was designed by the architect Zachary Taylor Davis (who four years earlier had designed Comiskey Park for the Chicago White Sox), incorporating the new "fireproof" building codes recently enacted by the city. According to some sources, when it opened for the 1914 Federal League season, Weeghman Park had a seating capacity of 14,000. According to another source, the original seating capacity was 20,000.
In late 1915 the Federal League folded. The resourceful Weeghman formed a syndicate including the chewing gum manufacturer William Wrigley Jr. to buy the Chicago Cubs from Charles P. Taft for about $500,000. Weeghman immediately moved the Cubs from the dilapidated West Side Grounds to his two-year-old park. In 1918 Wrigley acquired the controlling interest in the club. In November 1926, he renamed the park "Wrigley Field."
In 1927 an upper deck was added, and in 1937, Bill Veeck, the son of the club president, planted ivy vines against the outfield walls.
Although Wrigley Field has been the home of the Cubs since 1916, it has yet to see the Cubs win a World Series, even though it has hosted several (1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945, the last time the Cubs appeared in a World Series), the last World Series win by the Cubs (1908) happened while the Cubs called West Side Park home.
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“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)