The Best Block in Baseball: An ode to Sheffield Avenue, a scenic street tucked beyond Wrigley Field’s ivy

CHICAGO – It’s 10 steps from the sidewalk outside of Wrigley Field’s right-field-to-center-field stretch to the sidewalk on the east side of Sheffield Avenue. Among other reasons, it’s that tantalizing proximity — that physical immediacy — that makes the 3600 block of Sheffield the Best Block in Baseball. 

Depending upon your standards and druthers, you may have a different answer to this implied question that probably no one is asking. Quite defensibly, Fenway would have its advocates, as would newer entries like PNC Park in Pittsburgh and Oracle Park and others. Yes, Camden Yards, of course. It says here, though, that the peculiarities of Sheffield Avenue just outside Wrigley, the long-gone history that lurks behind them, and the city-ness of it all conspire to make this the Best Block in Baseball. 

Specific to Wrigley, Waveland Avenue just beyond the left-field wall can no doubt muster a case, especially once you lay eyes on the Engine 78 firehouse so near at hand. It rings a bit too loudly of the familiar, though, what with all the home runs from right-handed batters that find the blacktop and all the rooftop venues and their 36stadium seating. Even the ballhawks don’t show up there much anymore. In some ways, Waveland between Seminary and Sheffield feels too much like an outgrowth of the ballpark. Waveland is a section of Wrigley that happens to be outside the walls. Sheffield is a friendly neighbor. Clark? It’s 20 steps. Addison? It’s even more. Not even a discussion. 

Inside the ballpark, Sheffield naturally draws the eyes. Sit in the aerie that is the 400 section along the third base line, especially toward home plate, and you can see Lake Michigan, which because of its breadth, waves, and blue hues in the summer might as well be an ocean. There’s also this trundling above the alley behind Sheffield: 

That’s of course, the “L.” In this case, it’s the elevated portion of the CTA Red Line, which ferries people to, among other destinations, the Addison stop just outside Wrigley. This one’s headed south. Two stops after Addison it will dip underground at Fullerton and not emerge again until Roosevelt south of downtown. Thirteen stops south of Addison, it’ll arrive at the White Sox’s ballpark, whatever they’re calling it these days. When you’re at a Cubs game facing east and it snakes by, it’s a reminder you’re watching baseball in a city, where the game at this level belongs. 

It’s really about that 10 steps outside the park, though. Bear witness: 

The north end of the block is home to Murphy’s Bleachers, a baseball bar in the most authentic sense of the term, the origins of which go back almost a century. At the south end of the block is Sports Corner, which has been around a “mere” half-century. In between on that tree-lined and leafy-for-most-of-the-year east side of the block, you have a stretch of apartments and homes, almost all of them Chicago’s signature greystone buildings that date back to the 19th century as an effort to “proof” the city after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

That those slivers of history mostly house Chicagoans rather than serve as low-slung bars or storefront souvenir peddlers makes a walk down Sheffield about as “neighborhoody” as it can be given that it’s, you know, 10 steps from Wrigley. 

That such a close relationship exists is a testament to how ballparks used to be built in this country. I explained the difference between then and now in a 2018 piece about the architect Philip Bess and his vision for a White Sox ballpark that lamentably never came to be: 

“When a team these days decides they want a new ballpark, they typically have a list of must-haves, be they practical or aesthetic in nature — spacious clubhouses, heated batting cages, a large video board, luxury suites, expanses of parking, and so on. In essence, here’s what we want; where can we fit it? Or, alternatively: What can we raze and relocate and eminent-domain out of the way in order to fit it? Newer parks tend to be, in Bess’ words, ‘program-driven,’ which means the team decides what it wants in its new park and then finds enough space to accommodate every desire. Thus the street grid-busting ‘superblocks’ on which so many modern ballparks sit. 

“Older parks, in contrast, were ‘site-driven,’ in that the architects started with the available plot of land and fit what they could into it. That’s why the dimensional idiosyncrasies — think of left field in Fenway or right field in the Baker Bowl — weren’t mere contrivances. Rather, they were essential design elements that allowed the park to fit into those existing city blocks. In the old way, park features grew out of a prioritizing, and that prioritizing was informed by the park’s necessarily limited physical footprint. The old parks were shaped by their neighborhoods.”

Wrigley is about as site-driven as a ballpark can be, and nowhere is that more acute than the 3600 block of Sheffield, where the ballpark casts shadows upon the homes — upon the swath of city neighborhood — that long preceded it. Such ballparks, which are built to accommodate the city around it and not the other way around — are so long-ago as to be quaint. But they are not extinct, as the 3600 block of Sheffield still says to us. 

It’s not unchanged, of course. The big scoreboard in right – the one Kyle Schwarber marooned a home-run ball upon in 2015 … 

… Now hulks over Sheffield and thwarts certain rooftop views. The “view” from the other side of Sheffield: 

The buildings that propped up on the old Torco billboard are now gone. But those are sparse exceptions. The history is still here. There’s the northeast corner of Sheffield and Waveland where in 1959 a mythic Roberto Clemente home run rolled to a stop. Stroll a bit north to the 4800 block of Sheffield, and you’ll find the edifice of the old Hotel Carlos: 

Shortstop Billy Jurges lived there for years in room 509, and on July 6, 1932, Jurges’ perhaps-jilted lover, a burlesque dancer named Violet Popovich, shot him with a .25-caliber handgun. He survived and later said she really meant to shoot Kiki Cuyler. 

Anyhow, Mr. Jurges might disagree that any stretch of Sheffield is the Best Block in Baseball, but perfect weather before a playoff game almost a century later says otherwise.