title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Subsets of the multipurpose stadiums were the so-called "cookie-cutter stadiums" or "concrete donuts" which were all very similar in design. They featured a completely circular or nearly circular design, and accommodated both baseball and football by rotating sections of the box seat areas to fit the respective playing fields. These fields often used artificial turf, as it could withstand the reconfiguration process more easily, or be removed for nonsporting events. Furthermore, many of these stadiums were either enclosed domes (where natural grass could not grow without sunlight) and/or located in cold-weather cities (where undersoil heating was expensive and unreliable), and prior to the development of hybrid grass and improved natural grass cultivation techniques, artificial turf was the best solution at the time.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The first of these "cookie-cutter" or "concrete donut" stadiums was Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1961; it was followed during the 1960s and 1970s by Shea Stadium in 1964, Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium and the Astrodome in 1965, Busch Memorial Stadium and Oakland Coliseum in 1966, San Diego Stadium in 1967, Riverfront Stadium and Three Rivers Stadium in 1970, Veterans Stadium in 1971, and the Kingdome


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Eight of these eleven stadiums have been since demolished, with Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium demolished in 1997, the Kingdome in 2000, Three Rivers Stadium in 2001, Riverfront Stadium in 2002, Veterans Stadium in 2004, Busch Memorial Stadium in 2005, Shea Stadium in 2009, and San Diego Stadium in 2021. Further, the Astrodome has been vacant since 2008 due to it failing to meet current fire and building code requirements, while RFK Stadium has been vacant since 2017, when the DC United soccer club moved out, with its demolition being slated for 2022.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Thus, only the Oakland Coliseum (now known as RingCentral Coliseum) remains in use, while the Athletics are now the sole tenants of RingCentral Coliseum as the Oakland Raiders relocated to Las Vegas in 2020.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was unusual as one of the few air-supported dome stadiums that was multipurpose in practice, being convertible between football and baseball. Home of the Minnesota Vikings through the 2013 season, it was also home to the Minnesota Twins until 2009 and the Minnesota Golden Gophers football team (NCAA) until 2008 as well as the Minnesota Golden Gophers baseball team (NCAA) until 2012. The Metrodome has been demolished, with U.S. Bank Stadium, built mainly for professional football but able to convert to a college baseball stadium, now sitting on its former site. Most other inflatable domes, such as the Hoosier Dome and Pontiac Silverdome, were football-only stadiums although both stadiums hosted basketball; the later-RCA Dome hosted the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament many times and hosted the Final Four multiple times while the Silverdome was the home arena for the Detroit Pistons for most of the 1980s. The Carrier Dome was another such air-supported, multipurpose stadium, although it was built to accommodate outdoor sports such as football and indoor sports such as basketball. The Carrier Dome remains in use, although its air-supported roof is scheduled to be replaced by a fixed roof in 2020. Air-supported domes fell out of favor in the 21st century after notable weather-related collapses in Minnesota and Pontiac exposed the drawbacks of air-supported domes in snowy locales.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: During the height of the multipurpose stadium construction era of the 1960s and 1970s, three baseball-only stadiums were constructed: Candlestick Park (1960), Dodger Stadium (1962), and Royals Stadium (1973; now Kauffman Stadium). Anaheim Stadium (now known as Angel Stadium), although designed primarily for baseball, opened in 1966 with a press box in the upper tier on the third-base line oriented specifically for football, along with space beyond right field for a movable grandstand to accommodate an additional 13,000 fans for a future pro football franchise. This additional grandstand was indeed added to Anaheim Stadium in 1980 to accommodate the Los Angeles Rams' move from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Anaheim Stadium was renovated to a baseball-only facility in 1997, three years after the Rams' departure for St. Louis. Similarly, Candlestick Park was renovated into a multipurpose stadium in 1970 to accommodate the San Francisco 49ers' move from Kezar Stadium and converted to football only after the San Francisco Giants moved to their new ballpark in 2000. Candlestick Park was demolished in 2015. Another baseball stadium, Denver's Mile High Stadium, was also renovated with additional seating, including a 4,500-ton, three-tier movable grandstand to accommodate both baseball and football configurations. Mile High Stadium was home to the AFL/NFL Denver Broncos and the MLB Colorado Rockies franchises.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) built Centennial Olympic Stadium in a way that it could be converted to a new baseball stadium, and ACOG paid for the conversion. This was considered a good agreement for both the Olympic Committee and the Braves, because no demand existed for a permanent 85,000-seat track and field stadium in downtown Atlanta, as the 71,000-seat Georgia Dome had been completed four years earlier by the state. Furthermore, the Braves had already been exploring opportunities for a new venue to replace Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium. The southwest corner of the Olympic Stadium was built to accommodate the future baseball infield and seating. This is observable in aerial views and plans of the stadium in its Olympic configuration, where the seats are not placed next to the oval running track. The southwest part of the stadium also had four tiers of seats, luxury boxes, a facade facing the street, and a roof, whereas the northern half of the stadium used a simpler two-tiered seating configuration. During reconstruction, the athletics track was removed, and the north half of the stadium was demolished, reducing the capacity to 49,000 when it reopened as Turner Field. Because of the former track area, the field of play, particularly foul territory, although not large by historical standards, was still larger than most MLB stadiums of its era. After the 2016 season, the Braves moved to the new SunTrust Park, and Georgia State University purchased Turner Field and surrounding parking lots for a major campus expansion project. As part of this project, Turner Field was reconfigured as Georgia State Stadium, a downsized rectangular venue that is now home to the university's football team.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, like Olympic Stadium in Montreal, was built initially for a multiple-sport event, but is now used mostly for professional sports.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In Canada, several large multisport stadiums were built during this style's heyday. However, unlike in the United States, an NFL team has never been based primarily in Canada (though the Buffalo Bills played some home games in Toronto between 2008 and 2013) and only two MLB teams have been based there, so teams from these leagues have not been the major impetus behind stadium construction (with the notable exception of Toronto). Instead, stadiums were built primarily for Canadian Football League teams and to host multiple-sport events, such as the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, and Pan American Games.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Three of Canada's largest stadiums from this era and type feature domed or retractable roofs, namely BC Place in Vancouver, SkyDome/Rogers Centre in Toronto, and Olympic Stadium in Montreal.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: BC Place is capable of hosting baseball, but has been primarily a football venue. Rogers Centre was built to accommodate baseball (MLB's Toronto Blue Jays play there), but was a football venue until the CFL's Toronto Argonauts moved to BMO Field after the 2015 CFL season. Montreal's Olympic Stadium was built primarily for a multisport event (the 1976 Summer Olympics, during which it hosted the track and field events and the football (soccer) final) rather than for professional team sports, but it later became the home of the Montreal Alouettes football team and the Montreal Expos baseball team, and began serving as an alternate home to the Montreal Impact when that team entered Major League Soccer in 2012. Similarly, the open-air Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton was constructed for the 1978 Commonwealth Games, but has also become home of the Edmonton Elks of the CFL. It has also hosted many association football events, as well as the 2003 Heritage Classic, the first major outdoor ice hockey event in Canada. Tim Hortons Field, which opened in 2014, was built both as a venue for the 2015 Pan American Games and as the new home of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats football team; its predecessor, Ivor Wynne Stadium, was originally built for the first Commonwealth Games.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Other Canadian cities never expressed interest in building a venue for Major League Baseball or the Summer Olympics, and felt no need to replace their smaller, open-air stadiums used mostly for Canadian football. For example, Calgary's open-air McMahon Stadium dates from 1960 and has been used only for Canadian football, the 1988 Winter Olympics, and an outdoor ice hockey event (the 2011 Heritage Classic). Similar situations hold in Ottawa, Winnipeg, Hamilton, and Regina. No large stadiums of any kind are in cities such as Quebec City, London, or Saskatoon, or in Atlantic Canada; in those places (with the exception of Saskatoon), smaller stadiums (less than 13,000 seats) exist that can be augmented with temporary seating to bring their capacities close to that of the smaller CFL stadiums.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The idea of a sharp difference between a multipurpose stadium and a single-sport stadium is less important outside of North America, since in most countries stadiums that are constructed with football in mind are easily able to accommodate rugby, track and field, or other sports with a similar-sized playing field. For example, any large stadium in most of Latin America, part of Asia, most of Africa, or continental Europe is likely to be used mostly for association football. The majority of the largest stadiums in the world were built for either association football or American football.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The regions where other outdoor sports can draw numbers comparable to association football or American football are limited. They include: baseball in Japan and the Spanish Caribbean; cricket in England, Australia, the Anglophone Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent; rugby (union or league) in Wales, England, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Fiji, the country of Georgia, and parts of Australia and France; Australian rules football in Australia; bandy in Russia and Scandinavia; and Gaelic games in Ireland.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: However, even in these areas, the amount of compromise needed to accommodate multiple sports varies considerably. Most outdoor team sports have a rectangular playing field, but cricket and Australian-rules fields are rounded, while baseball is played in a diamond. This makes them much harder to accommodate within a rectangular-shaped stadium. Likewise, accommodating athletics (track and field), such as for a Summer Olympics, means constructing a rounded 400-m track around the infield. This often means the sports simply find it easier to play in separate stadiums.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In the case of Ireland, grounds built for Gaelic games are physically capable of hosting association football and the rugby codes without changing the seating configuration. Because the Gaelic games' pitch is rectangular and also longer and wider than that of football or either rugby code, the only changes required are the physical goals and field markings. However, opposition to those sports within large parts of the Gaelic games community, most notably manifested in GAA Rule 42, means that football and rugby clubs have generally had to play in separate grounds.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: True multisport facilities, where teams from a variety of sports use the same stadium as their home ground, exist outside North America in a few cases, most of those smaller stadiums. A handful are notable for having 60,000 seats or more. Melbourne Cricket Ground hosts cricket, Australian rules football, and association football. ANZ Stadium can host cricket and Australian rules football, as well as both rugby codes and association football. Wembley Stadium in London, Stade de France near Paris, and Millennium Stadium in Cardiff are not the permanent homes to any club teams, but are used primarily for international competitions and major tournament finals, mostly for association football and rugby (though Wembley has regularly hosted American football fixtures). In South Africa, Soccer City and Ellis Park Stadium have hosted rugby union and football, while Moses Mabhida Stadium has hosted football and cricket. Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, Kochi in India hosts cricket and football. Eden Park in New Zealand hosts rugby union and cricket. Westpac Stadium in Wellington, New Zealand, has hosted both rugby codes, cricket, association football, and Australian rules.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The architects Arup cited history that a rarely-used athletics track does not work with association football, as these multi-purpose stadiums substantially lengthen the viewing distance for spectators, as compared to football-specific stadiums. Notable unsuccessful past examples, of football matches played within athletics stadiums include the Stadio delle Alpi and the Munich Olympic Stadium, with both Juventus and Bayern Munich moving to new stadiums less than 40 years after inheriting them. The delle Alpi's design was criticized, as it left spectators exposed to the elements, and the long distance between the stands and the pitch resulted in poor visibility. This was because the athletics track, which was seldom used, was constructed around the outside of the pitch, while views from the lower tier were also restricted due to the positioning of advertising boardings. These factors contributed to low attendances; only 237 spectators showed up for the Coppa Italia home match against Sampdoria in the 2001–02 season, while in the 2005–06 season, the average attendance was 35,880. Manchester City Council wished to avoid creating a white elephant, so to give the stadium long-term financial viability, extensive work was carried out to convert the City of Manchester Stadium from a field and track arena to a football stadium. The old Estádio da Luz was demolished so that the football-specific replacement could be built on the site as part of Portugal's bid to host Euro 2004. German stadiums such as the AWD-Arena, Commerzbank-Arena, Gottlieb-Daimler-Stadion, RheinEnergieStadion, AOL Arena, and Zentralstadion also underwent reconstruction/renovation by removing the running track to become football-only venues; several of these projects were done in preparation for the 2006 FIFA World Cup.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: A different take on the multipurpose concept can be seen in the Saitama Super Arena in Japan and Paris La Défense Arena in the inner suburbs of Paris. Both venues are similar to the Carrier Dome in that they are fully enclosed stadiums (though with fixed roofs instead of the Carrier Dome's original air-supported roof) that can accommodate field and indoor court sports. However, they differ from the Carrier Dome in the specific way they accommodate court sports. Both the Super Arena (used mainly for basketball, volleyball, mixed martial arts, and professional wrestling events) and Paris La Défense Arena (home of rugby union's Racing 92) feature movable seating blocks that allow each facility to serve as an appropriately sized venue for either field or court sports.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In 2014, Singapore's new National Stadium was opened. It has the ability to convert between an oval for cricket, rectangle for rugby & association football and a running track for athletics.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Most multipurpose stadiums that existed in North America overlaid one sideline of the football field along one of the baseball foul lines, with one corner of the football field being located where home plate would be. Because the length of a regulation American football field is 360 feet, longer than the roughly 330-foot average for foul lines in Major League Baseball, this requires an unusually long distance from the home plate to the fence along the foul line on which the football field is constructed, part of the football field to be constructed in foul territory (and the size of said territory to be increased accordingly), or a temporary wall. The Oakland Coliseum uses a configuration such that its football sideline runs along a line drawn from first base to third base (the former Atlanta–Fulton County Stadium also used this configuration). This was done presumably to make the same coveted seats behind home plate at a baseball game also coveted 50-yard line seats at a football game, and also so the stadium would need only one press box. Different stadiums have different angles between the left- and right-field seats.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In stadiums that were primarily football stadiums converted to baseball stadiums, the stands were at nearly right angles. This allowed the football field to be squared within the bleachers, but left the baseball configuration with many undesirable views farther away from home plate or facing away from the diamond, such as at the Kingdome, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, and the venue now known as Hard Rock Stadium. For stadiums such as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the Los Angeles Dodgers played their home games from 1958 through 1961 while awaiting completion of Dodger Stadium, this also had the undesirable effect of having unusually short foul lines, making it easier to hit so-called "Chinese home runs". Baseball stadiums that converted to football stadiums had more of an obtuse angle between the stands. This made the football viewing farther away, and in some cases partially obscured as in Candlestick Park.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In the case of Qualcomm Stadium, it was constructed with half of the field-level seating permanent (built of concrete, in the southern quadrant of the stadium), and the other half portable (modular construction using aluminum or steel framing). When the stadium was configured for baseball, the portable sections would be placed in the western quadrant of the stadium and serve as the third-base half of the infield. In the football configuration, these are placed in the northern quadrant of the stadium (covering what is used as left field in the baseball configuration) to allow for the football field to be laid out east-west. This had the advantage of improving sightlines for both sports while keeping the baseball dimensions roughly symmetrical. Qualcomm Stadium's square-circle "octorad" layout was considered an improvement over the other cookie cutter stadiums of the time, and it was the last of the old multi-purpose stadiums to host a Super Bowl (Super Bowl XXXVII).


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: More modern multi-purpose stadiums have used more elaborate methods to accommodate multiple sports; Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, for example, uses two sets of turfs, one a movable natural grass surface for soccer, and the other a synthetic turf surface for gridiron. To accommodate the different sightlines preferred in each sport, the soccer surface is positioned several feet above the gridiron, so that the seats are closer to the field in its soccer configuration and elevated above the sidelines and coaches in its gridiron configuration.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In the 2010s, some football-specific stadiums (either enclosed domes like the Georgia Dome or open-air Bank of America Stadium) have been or may be replaced by multipurpose stadiums with a retractable roof (such as Mercedes-Benz Stadium) where NFL football remains the primary tenant but which can also accommodate soccer, concerts, major conventions, and NCAA Final Four basketball, although not baseball as that demands radically different field dimensions.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: While multipurpose stadiums were intended to easily accommodate both American football and baseball (and in some cases, association football), the fundamentally different sizes and shapes of the playing fields made them inadequate for either sport. When used for baseball, the lower-level boxes were usually set back much farther from the field than comparable seats in baseball-only parks because they swiveled into position for American football and association football. In the case of stadiums that hosted both baseball and Canadian football, the lower boxes were set even farther back than their American counterparts, because Canadian football fields are 30 yards longer and considerably wider than their American counterparts. Likewise, attempts to build stadiums without support columns to obstruct spectators' views, as was the case with sport-specific "jewel box" stadiums, resulted in upper decks being placed very high above the field—as far as 600 feet away in some cases. Several teams closed off sections of the upper level and only sold them during the playoffs, as they were too far away to be of any use during the regular season. For football, the seats nearest the field were set farther back than at football-only stadiums to accommodate the larger baseball field. In some cases, the seats closest to the field, normally prime seats for baseball, were almost at field level for football. In general, spectator sightlines were not optimized for either sport, i.e., seats were angled towards the center of the field rather than towards the logical center of the game action (home plate for baseball and the 50-yard line for football).


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In the baseball configuration, most had symmetrical field dimensions. This detracted from the unique, individual identity enjoyed by the sport-specific "jewel box" stadiums with odd or asymmetrical field dimensions, and further supported the "cookie cutter stadium" nickname.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The large capacities of multipurpose stadiums were usually more than adequate for football. However, baseball crowds tend to be much smaller than football crowds, resulting in baseball games at these stadiums being swallowed up in the environment. This was especially true if a baseball team were not doing particularly well either on the field or in the box office. This was another reason some baseball teams closed sections of the upper level during the regular season.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Many multipurpose stadiums also had artificial turf playing surfaces, to ease the transition from baseball field to football field and vice versa. Most early installations of artificial turf such as the original AstroTurf was nothing more than carpet on top of concrete with little padding material that was easy to apply and remove. Such types of removable artificial turf caused frequent injuries to players, and eventually made free agents wary of signing with teams whose home field had artificial turf. During the first month of the football season, the playing field included the infield soil that is harder than the grass and is also a significant injury risk. Baseball purists disliked artificial turf, though the Cincinnati Reds took advantage of this on Riverfront Stadium's artificial turf; on offense by recruiting players who combined power and speed and encouraging line drive hitting that could produce doubles, triples and high-bouncing infield hits; while for defense the fast surface and virtually dirtless infield rewarded range and quickness by both outfielders and infielders, like shortstop Dave Concepción who used the turf to bounce many of his long throws to first.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The concrete or painted concrete façades of many stadiums of that era (multipurpose or sport-specific) were criticized by architects as uninviting. Most such stadiums were built in the relatively plain brutalist and international styles popular at the time, which fell out of fashion in the 1980s. Furthermore the "concrete donut" design made the stadium feel too enclosed and cut off panoramic views of the stadium's aesthetic surroundings (waterfront, skyline, mountains).


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The suburban locales of many multipurpose stadiums (as well as other sport-specific stadiums also built there) were also a focal point for criticism. Choosing a suburb over a city core was meant to take advantage of lower land values and new freeways. Suburbs were often poorly serviced by public transit, and when coupled with the trend of personal transportation shifting from public transit to private cars in the mid-20th century, meant that many of the stadiums of that period (multipurpose or sport-specific) were surrounded by large parking lots. In some in suburban locales, hospitality, entertainment, and shopping facilities were often non-existent due to lacking the supporting population or municipality zoning restrictions. Suburban stadiums fell out of favor by the 1990s, in light of the growing trend of "walkable urbanism" as teams sought to return to the city core where they could develop or take advantage of existing hospitality in order to grow their fanbase. Many teams also relocated to where they could control mixed-use development around their new stadium; in a reversal of the above trend of teams moving away from suburbs, the Atlanta Braves left Turner Field for SunTrust Park.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Often the suburban stadium was often not located in the municipality that the team purportedly represented, and in some cases the stadium were built across a state border. An instance of this was Giants Stadium, which primarily hosted football, but was also an association football stadium at times; its primary tenants (New York Giants and New York Jets were nominally based in New York City, but Giants Stadium was neither in New York City or even New York State, instead being built in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford, New Jersey. As a result then-Governor Mario Cuomo would not attend any games at Giants Stadium (instead choosing to attend the home games of the Buffalo Bills as they were "New York State's only team" in the NFL). A similar criticism applied to Giants Stadium's replacement, MetLife Stadium.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Association football was perceived as an especially bad fit for this type of stadium because, in the United States, the sport does not draw as many fans to games as American football or baseball (with the exceptions of Atlanta and Seattle), resulting in the stadium being filled to only a fraction of its capacity. This, combined with a desire for more compact, intimate stadiums akin to those of European football clubs, led to the soccer-specific stadium movement. As of 2020, 18 of Major League Soccer's 26 clubs play in their own, soccer-specific stadiums, and two of the exceptions (FC Cincinnati and Nashville SC) are currently building their own soccer-specific stadiums. In addition, three of the four teams that will join MLS in 2021 and 2022 plan to open soccer-specific stadiums in time for their MLS debuts.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Scheduling was also a big issue, since the MLB postseason overlaps with the NFL regular season. If a baseball team advances in the postseason to the point where it is scheduled to play a postseason game on the same day the football team plays a home game, adjustments had to be made, such as having the game moved to Monday night or – if a division opponent were scheduled – have the game sites switched, putting the upcoming meeting on the road and playing the home game during the latter meeting. An example of the former happening was in 1997 when the Florida Marlins played game 7 of the World Series at home on Sunday, Oct. 26, which moved the Miami Dolphins game against the Chicago Bears to Monday night. An example of the latter happening was in 1989 when the San Francisco Giants hosted a postseason game on Sunday, Oct. 8, against the Chicago Cubs, the same day the San Francisco 49ers were scheduled to host their division rival New Orleans Saints. The Oct. 8 game was moved to New Orleans and the Nov. 6 game was moved to San Francisco.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In Australia, most major stadiums which can hold over 50,000, such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Adelaide Oval, are circular or oval-shaped venues which – while suitable for cricket and Australian rules football – pose the same sight-line problems for football, rugby league, and rugby union as an athletics venue would. Playing sports with rectangle-shaped pitches on larger ovals often means fans can be as much as 30 m or more from the sidelines. Both Stadium Australia in Sydney and the Docklands Stadium in Melbourne have retractable seating to be able to change from an oval to rectangle shape and bring fans closer to the action if needed. Lang Park in Brisbane is currently (as of 2020) the only purpose-built rectangle stadium in Australia (with fixed seating) with a capacity exceeding 50,000.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The first real departure from the multipurpose stadium design occurred in 1972, when the Jackson County Sports Authority in Kansas City, Missouri, opened the Truman Sports Complex, which houses Kauffman Stadium (named Royals Stadium at the time of opening) and Arrowhead Stadium. The Truman Sports Complex was the first example of multiple stadiums being built for specific sports at the same time. The designers, Kivett and Myers, were then absorbed by Kansas City architecture firm Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum to become HOK Sport + Venue + Event (now the independent firm Populous), which went on to design many professional sports venues in the United States. Though hailed as revolutionary at the time, the Truman Sports Complex model of stadium design was widely ignored for the next 20 years, though the influence of both Arrowhead and Kauffman Stadiums were easily seen in venues such as Giants Stadium.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The true end of the multipurpose era began in 1987, when Buffalo's Pilot Field, a stadium built for the Buffalo Bisons minor league baseball team and a potential MLB expansion franchise, opened. Pilot Field replaced the long-obsolete War Memorial Stadium, which had been designed mainly for football, but had been (awkwardly) fit for baseball after the city's baseball park, Offermann Stadium, was torn down in 1960. During the 1990s and 2000s, most of the multipurpose stadiums used for MLB in the United States were replaced (most of those replaced have been demolished) by "retro- style" ballparks. These parks were built in two varieties: "retro-classic" parks, which combine the interior and exterior design of the "classic" ballparks with the amenities of newer facilities; and "retro-modern" parks, which have modern amenities and "retro" interiors, but have modern exterior designs. The first "retro-classic" park in MLB was Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, which opened in 1992 and was based mostly on the Pilot Field design. (The second Comiskey Park, now Guaranteed Rate Field, had opened a year earlier in Chicago, but it was very modernist in its design and had little in common with the later retro-classic parks. However, due to extensive renovations over the years, Comiskey Park now enjoys many of the same amenities.) The "retro-modern" park made its first appearance in with the opening of Jacobs Field, now known as Progressive Field, in Cleveland. Many football teams that shared a stadium with a baseball team had their stadiums converted into football-only facilities shortly after the baseball tenant left (e.g., Qualcomm Stadium), while other football teams followed their baseball counterparts and had new football-only stadiums constructed.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The widespread adoption of FieldTurf and similar modern artificial turfs beginning in the early 2000s also has had a role in the decline of the multipurpose stadium. While first-generation, short-pile turfs such as AstroTurf lent themselves well to multiple sports (one could have a turf for football, roll it up and replace it with one for baseball, association football, or lacrosse), this was not the case with FieldTurf and its competitors. Modern artificial turf requires a more permanent installation, including sand and rubber base and/or infill that is not easily removed, thus does not lend itself well to multipurpose stadiums. Because of such turfs' superiority in other features compared to the earlier turfs, it has been seen as easier to build new stadiums for each sport rather than attempt to share an inflexible turf installation among multiple sports. Some 21st-century multi-purpose stadiums, such as Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and State Farm Stadium, have developed a more elaborate method of placing an entire playing surface, such as a grass surface for association football and an artificial turf one for gridiron football, on one or more slabs (one at State Farm, three at Tottenham Hotspur) and towing the slab(s) in and out of place for each sport. Because of the expense of using this method, it is generally only used for the highest-level professional sports.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: The Miami Marlins, which changed their name from the original Florida Marlins in November 2011, moved to Marlins Park, a new retractable-roof stadium in Miami, in 2012. Sun Life Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium) was then renovated to eliminate its baseball functionality, making it a football-only stadium. With the Marlins' relocation, the Oakland Athletics were the last team in the U.S. still sharing a stadium with an NFL team (the Oakland Raiders), the Oakland Coliseum (now RingCentral Coliseum). This arrangement ended once the Raiders settled into the new Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, Nevada by 2020, giving each NFL franchise and MLB franchise its own stadium. The Athletics are currently seeking a new home; they are currently exploring plans to build Oakland Ballpark. Before announcing their move to Las Vegas, the Raiders suggested a move back to Los Angeles, where they played from 1982 to 1994, and also actively explored a move to the Alamodome in San Antonio; other parties suggested that the Raiders share the new Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara with the 49ers.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Currently, North America's main soccer league, Major League Soccer, nominally requires soccer-specific stadiums, although it has allowed several teams that share ownership with other major professional teams to use existing stadiums built either for American football (such as Lumen Field in Seattle and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta) or baseball (the current Yankee Stadium). Additionally, it allows teams to use multi-purpose stadiums as temporary homes while they build new stadiums, with examples including Yankee Stadium, Nippert Stadium in Cincinnati, and Nissan Stadium in Nashville. The now-defunct North American Soccer League had a similar requirement. The current second level, the USL Championship, has nominally required soccer-specific stadiums, but like MLS has allowed multiple teams to share stadiums originally built for either American football or baseball.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: In Canada, smaller, more specialized stadiums have generally become more popular, but none of the major multiple-use stadiums of the 1970s and 1980s have been demolished . The Toronto Blue Jays shared Rogers Centre with the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL before the Argonauts moved to BMO Field after the 2015 season, and shared the facility on a part-time basis with the Buffalo Bills of the NFL for several years beginning in 2008. Before their 2015–16 move, the Argonauts had publicly announced plans to leave Rogers Centre twice, only to end up staying; during that time, the originally soccer-specific BMO Field (built on the site of multi-purpose Exhibition Stadium) was built by Toronto FC. The Blue Jays presently do not have any plans to leave Rogers Centre; the Argonauts had proposed renovating BMO Field so they could share it with Toronto FC (which they did in 2016), and the Bills sought to end their sharing agreement with the Rogers Centre and return to playing all of its games in Buffalo and ultimately did so after the 2013 season. BC Place in Vancouver is still used by the BC Lions and was also the Olympic Stadium for the 2010 Winter Olympics; the Lions played their 2010 season at the temporary Empire Field while BC Place was being renovated to replace the original air-supported roof with a retractable roof. The Vancouver Whitecaps, which entered Major League Soccer in 2011, shared Empire Field and are sharing the renovated BC Place with the Lions. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement until the MLS team could build their own Whitecaps Stadium, but local opposition to the planned stadium led the Whitecaps to make BC Place a long-term home. The Montreal Expos' owners often cited the inadequacy of Olympic Stadium as a reason for the team's financial troubles, which eventually led to relocation to Washington, D.C.. The Montreal Alouettes, who had folded twice before in Olympic Stadium, moved out of Olympic Stadium in its third incarnation to Molson Stadium. In soccer, the original Montreal Impact built the smaller Saputo Stadium, which was expanded to accommodate the team's 2012 entry into MLS. Both the Alouettes and Impact continue to use Olympic Stadium for playoff games and other special events when extra capacity is needed. Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton received major upgrades to host the 2001 World Championships in Athletics, and continues to host the Edmonton Elks, but has only hosted the city's soccer team, FC Edmonton, for three matches in Canada's national cup competition, the Canadian Championship.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: An added benefit of single-sport stadiums that was impossible with the "concrete donut" design of the multipurpose stadiums is improved panoramic views of areas outside the stadium, such as mountains, bodies of water, or city skylines. Examples include Lumen Field and T-Mobile Park, which replaced the Kingdome in Seattle, and Heinz Field and PNC Park, which replaced Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Still, several modern baseball-specific stadiums are able to be (and have been) converted for football use. In addition to the aforementioned T-Mobile Park, which has hosted occasional college football games, San Francisco's Oracle Park (which hosted the San Francisco Demons of the original XFL, hosted the college bowl game now known as the Redbox Bowl from 2002 to 2013, and also hosted California Golden Bears football games in the 2011 season while that team's stadium was being renovated), Phoenix's Chase Field (which hosted the game now known as the Cheez-It Bowl from 2000 to 2005), and St. Petersburg's Tropicana Field (which hosted the St. Petersburg Bowl from 2008 to 2017) have all been used to host professional and college games since they were built; Tropicana Field, being an indoor stadium, has also hosted the Tampa Bay Lightning ice hockey team for a time. (Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., was to be the original host of the EagleBank Bowl before that game was moved, first to RFK Stadium and eventually to Navy–Marine Corps Memorial Stadium in Annapolis, Maryland.) Yankee Stadium hosts the Pinstripe Bowl, New York City FC association football (among other neutral-site matches), and various other high-profile college football games.


title: Multi-purpose stadium

text: Furthermore, some teams in the United Football League played their home schedule at a baseball-specific stadium. The California Redwoods played their home games at the aforementioned Oracle Park; though they moved to a football stadium in Sacramento (Sacramento Mountain Lions) in 2010 and 2011, they moved back to a baseball park (this time Raley Field) for 2012. Although their home field was the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, the Florida Tuskers played one 2009 home game at Tropicana Field. The team has since moved to the Hampton Roads area as the Virginia Destroyers and played its last two seasons at a stadium designed for association football, the Virginia Beach Sportsplex. The Omaha Nighthawks played their inaugural 2010 season at a baseball park, Rosenblatt Stadium, and played in Rosenblatt's replacement, TD Ameritrade Park Omaha (a stadium built mainly for baseball's College World Series, but with a round field more reminiscent of the multipurpose stadiums to maintain continuity with Rosenblatt), until the league's demise. The New York Sentinels originally planned to play their games at Citi Field, the home of baseball's New York Mets; budget issues prompted the team to play all of its games in other stadiums. The Stars Football League, one of the "de facto" second-tier professional football leagues that filled the void of the UFL's departure, played all of its 2013 games at Central Broward Regional Park, a stadium designed for cricket. The Fall Experimental Football League had two of its teams play in baseball parks: the Omaha Mammoths at TD Ameritrade Park and the Brooklyn Bolts at MCU Park; for its 2015 season, the league went further and put all of its teams in baseball parks (franchises were given to minor league baseball franchises so they could use their ballparks after the end of the baseball season).


title: David Heinemeier Hansson

text: David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer, and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp.


title: David Heinemeier Hansson

text: Hansson co-wrote "Agile Web Development with Rails" with Dave Thomas in 2005 as part of The Facets of Ruby Series. He also co-wrote "Getting Real", "Rework", "Remote", and "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work" with Jason Fried.


title: David Heinemeier Hansson

text: In 1999, Hansson founded and built a Danish online gaming news website and community called Daily Rush, which he ran until 2001. After attracting the attention of Jason Fried by offering him help with PHP coding, Hansson was hired by Fried to build a web-based project management tool, which ultimately became 37signals' Basecamp software as a service product. To aid the development process, Hansson used the then-relatively obscure Ruby programming language to develop a custom web framework. He released the framework separately from the project management tool in 2004 as the open source project Ruby on Rails. In 2005, Hansson was recognized by Google and O'Reilly with the "Hacker of the Year" award for his creation of Ruby on Rails. After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School and receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005.


title: David Heinemeier Hansson

text: David Heinemeier Hansson lists photography and race car driving amongst his many hobbies. He took part in the 2012 24 Hours of Le Mans driving for OAK Racing. He also drove a Morgan-Nissan P2 car for Conquest Racing in the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), winning two races in the season. Heinemeier Hansson joined OAK Racing full-time in 2013, taking five 2nd-place finishes to finish 2nd in the Trophy for LMP2 Drivers. During the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans post-race technical checks, certain irregularities were detected on the Vaillante Rebellion team's #13 Oreca 07-Gibson, resulting in the car's disqualification. In July 2010 it was revealed that Heinemeier Hansson was the person that had commissioned the one-off Pagani Zonda HH supercar. He also commissioned the Koenigsegg Agera HH, which was sold in 2022 to Houston Crosta, a YouTube video creator in Las Vegas. Heinemeier Hansson also purchased an Aston Martin Valkyrie.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: The Subtle Knife is a young-adult fantasy novel published in 1997 and the second book in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. The novel continues the adventures of Lyra Belacqua (now known as Lyra Silvertongue) recounted in the first novel, "Northern Lights", as she investigates the mysterious phenomenon of Dust. Will Parry is introduced as a companion to Lyra, and together they explore new worlds in the search for Will's father.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: The main setting is a universe dominated by the Magisterium, an international theocracy which actively suppresses heresy. In Lyra's world, humans' souls naturally exist outside of their bodies in the form of sentient "dæmons" in animal form which accompany, aid, and comfort their humans. An important plot device is the alethiometer, a truth-telling symbol reader. By setting the alethiometer's hands to point to symbols around a dial a skilled practitioner can pose questions, which are answered by the movement round the dial of a further hand. The Subtle Knife of the book's title is a knife that is capable of cutting windows between worlds.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Twelve-year-old Will Parry lives in Oxford, where he cares for his mother who has mental health problems. After accidentally killing an intruder, Will escapes via a portal into another world and finds himself in the city of Cittàgazze where he meets Lyra and her dæmon Pantalaimon, who have arrived from her world via the opening in the sky created by her father, Lord Asriel (in "Northern Lights").


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Mrs Coulter, Lyra's mother, tortures a witch for a prophecy said to concern her daughter. Before the victim can reveal the details she is killed by the witch Serafina Pekkala. Realising Lyra's importance, Serafina Pekkala sets off in search of her. Meanwhile the aeronaut Lee Scoresby searches for Stanislaus Grumman, previously believed dead, who is rumoured to have knowledge of a powerful object that could protect Lyra.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Will returns to his world to seek information about his father, who went missing years earlier on an expedition. Lyra, who has come with him, wants to learn about Dust—mysterious particles connected to consciousness. On the advice of her alethiometer Lyra visits the physicist Dr Mary Malone, who has a computer that can communicate with dark matter. Lyra realises that dark matter seems to correspond with what she knows as Dust.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: After accepting a lift from an elderly man introducing himself as Sir Charles Latrom, Lyra realises he has stolen her alethiometer. Sir Charles promises to return the instrument in return for a powerful knife that he covets, now in Cittàgazze. Will defeats a youth who has taken the knife from its holder, Giacomo Paradisi, but loses two fingers in the fight. Paradisi explains that this is a sign that Will is the knife's new bearer, and he explains its power: the ability to cut through any material, even the fabric between worlds. Will and Lyra learn that Cittàgazze is haunted by soul-eating spectres, which prey on adolescents and adults but ignore children.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Will uses the knife to cut a window into Sir Charles's home where he overhears a conversation with Mrs Coulter. Lyra realises that Sir Charles is Lord Boreal, originally from her own world, and Will hears news of his father, who had disappeared after discovering a window between the worlds. Will and Lyra escape back to Cittàgazze with the alethiometer and are rescued from marauding children by Serafina Pekkala. She attempts unsuccessfully to heal Will's injured hand.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Sir Charles visits Dr Malone and offers to fund her research if she will follow his directions. She refuses. At Lyra's suggestion, she uses her computer to communicate with the consciousness of dark matter. It instructs her to destroy the computer and to travel through the same window between worlds used by Will and Lyra, explaining that her role is to "play the serpent".


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Lee Scoresby finds Grumman living as a shaman known as Jopari (a corruption of his original name John Parry): Will's father. Grumman has summoned Scoresby to take him to the bearer of the knife and to assist Lord Asriel, who is assembling an army to rebel against an ancient angel called the Authority. They set off in Scoresby's hot air balloon but are forced to land by soldiers of the Church. The soldiers attack, and Scoresby calls Serafina for help. She leaves Lyra to follow his call, but arrives too late. Scoresby has died holding off the soldiers so that Grumman can complete his task.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Mrs Coulter tricks Sir Charles into revealing the secret of the knife, and poisons him. She uses the spectres, which she has learned to control, to torture a witch into revealing the prophecy: that Lyra is the second Eve. Mrs Coulter plans to destroy her daughter rather than risk a second Fall.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Leaving Lyra asleep at their overnight camp, Will walks on alone and finds his father, who staunches his bleeding and tells him to join Lord Asriel's forces. Grumman is killed by a vengeful witch whose love he had once spurned. Will returns to find a pair of angels waiting to guide him to Asriel. He goes to awaken Lyra, but finds that she is missing and that her guardian witches' souls have been drained by spectres.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: "The Subtle Knife" won Parents' Choice Gold Book Award; American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults; Booklist Editors' Choice; Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; "Horn Book" Fanfare Honor Book; "Bulletin" Blue Ribbon Book; "Book Links" Best Book of the Year; and "American Bookseller" Pick of the Lists.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: Before the release of "The Golden Compass", a film adaptation of the first book in the series, on 7 December 2007, New Line Cinema said that an adaptation of "The Subtle Knife" would go into production only if the first film was a success. "The Golden Compass" made over twice its budget worldwide but was a disappointment in the United States, leaving the fate of its sequel unclear. The international rights were also originally sold to provide financing for the first film, thus amounting to a significant disappointment for New Line Cinema. Producer Deborah Forte, however, was adamant that she would finish the trilogy, saying, "I believe there are enough people who see what a viable and successful franchise we have." However, Philip Pullman later remarked at the British Humanist Association annual conference in 2011 that due to the first film's disappointing sales in the United States, there would not be any sequels made.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: As the second novel of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the book has also formed part of a radio drama on BBC Radio 4, starring Terence Stamp as Lord Asriel and Lulu Popplewell as Lyra, and as a two-part, six-hour performance for London's Royal National Theatre in December 2003, running until March 2004, and starring Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyra, Dominic Cooper as Will, Timothy Dalton as Lord Asriel and Patricia Hodge as Mrs Coulter, and a second run between November 2004 and April 2005.


title: The Subtle Knife

text: The second series of the joint BBC-HBO television adaptation of "His Dark Materials", approved in September 2018, covers "The Subtle Knife", with introductions to the book's central characters beginning in the first season.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Julia Margaret Cameron ("née" Pattle; 11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and women, for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity, and literature, and for sensitive portraits of men, women and children.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: After establishing herself first among Calcutta's Anglo-Indian upper-class and then among London's cultural elite, Cameron formed her own salon frequented by distinguished Victorians at the seaside village of Freshwater, Isle of Wight.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: After showing a keen interest in photography for many years, Cameron took up the practice at the relatively late age of 48, after her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of work capturing the genius, beauty, and innocence of the men, women, and children who visited her studio at Freshwater, and created unique allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and the work of her creative contemporaries. Her photography career was short but productive; she made around 900 photographs over a 12-year period.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's work was contentious in her own time. Critics derided her softly focused and unrefined images, and considered her illustrative photographs amateurish and hammy. However, her portraits of respected men (such as Henry Taylor, Charles Darwin, and Sir John Herschel) have been consistently praised, both in her own life and in reviews of her work since. Her images have been described as "extraordinarily powerful" and "wholly original", and she has been credited with producing the first close-ups in the history of the medium.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle on 11 June 1815, at Garden Reach, Calcutta, India, to Adeline Marie and James Peter Pattle.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: James Pattle was a successful official from England who worked in India for the East India Company. His family had been involved with the East India Company for many years, though he traced his line to a 17th-century ancestor living in Chancery Lane, London. Her mother was a French aristocrat and the daughter of Chevalier Ambrose Pierre Antoine de l'Etang, who had been a page to Marie Antoinette and an officer in the Garde du Corps of King Louis XVI. When he died he was shipped back to London in a barrel of rum for burial in Camberwell.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Julia was the fourth of her parents' children. Three of her parents' children died in infancy. Julia and the six of her six sisters who survived into adulthood had inherited some Bengali blood through their maternal grandmother, Thérèse Josephe Blin de Grincourt. The seven sisters were known for their "charm, wit and beauty" and for being close, outspoken, and unconventional in behaviour and dress. They favoured Indian silks and shawls rather than the demure Victorian attire of other colonial woman.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: All of the sisters were sent to France as children to be educated, Julia living there with her maternal grandmother in Versaille from 1818 to 1834, after which she returned to India.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Julia's sisters all made advantageous matches, Adeline marrying a military man who became a General, Sophia marrying a baronet, Louisa, a High Court Judge while Maria married the distinguished Dr John Jackson, with among their descendants being Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Sara married Henry Prinsep an administrator with the East India Company, and made their home at Little Holland House in Kensington, England an important intellectual centre. Among their children was Julia's godchild Julia Stephen. Virginia Pattle married Lord Charles Eastnor, later the third Earl Somers. Their eldest daughter was Lady Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks, the temperance leader, while the younger, Lady Adeline Marie became the Duchess of Bedford.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1835, after suffering several illnesses, Julia visited the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa with her parents to recover. It was common for Europeans living in India to visit South Africa to convalesce after an illness.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: While there, she met the British astronomer and photochemist Sir John Herschel, who was observing the southern celestial hemisphere. She also met Charles Hay Cameron, twenty years her senior and a reformer of Indian law and education who later invested in coffee plantations in what is now Sri Lanka. Charles Hay was also there to convalesce, likely from a virulent malarial fever which often spread during the Indian monsoon season. The illness he suffered caused recurring kidney trouble and diarrhœa for the rest of his life.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: They were married in Calcutta on 1 February 1838, two years after meeting. In December of that same year, Julia gave birth to their first child; Sir John Herschel was the godfather. Between 1839 and 1852, they had six children, one of whom was adopted. In all, the Camerons raised 11 children, five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and an Irish girl named Mary Ryan whom they found begging on Putney Heath and whom Cameron used as a model in her photographs. Their son, Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, would also become a photographer.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Through the early 1840s—as the organiser of social engagements for the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge—Cameron became a prominent hostess in Anglo-Indian society. During this time she also corresponded with Herschel about the latest developments in photographic technology. In 1839, Herschel informed Cameron about the invention of photography. In 1842, he sent her two dozen calotypes and daguerreotypes, the first photographs she ever saw.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Perhaps to be closer to their two children, the Camerons retired to England in 1845, where they took part in London's artistic and cultural scene. Julia often visited Little Holland House in Kensington, London, where her sister, Sara Prinsep, oversaw a literary and artistic salon "of Pre-Raphaelite painters, poets, and aristocrats with artistic pretensions". Here, she met many of the well-known subjects of her later portraits, including Henry Taylor and Alfred Tennyson.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Daphne du Maurier describes the scene:The nobilitee, the gentree, the litherathure, polithics and art of the counthree, by jasus! It's a nest of proraphaelites, where Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Watts, Leighton etc, Tennyson, the Brownings and Thackeray etc and tutti quanti receive dinners and incense, and cups of tea handed to them by these women almost kneeling.Benjamin Jowett echoed this when describing Cameron's reverence to these creative personalities after a later visit to the same salon-like atmosphere at Freshwater, "She is a sort of hero-worshipper, and the hero is not Mr Tennyson — he only occupies second place — but Henry Taylor."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1847, she was writing poetry, had started a novel, and published a translation of Gottfried August Bürger's "Leonora".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1848, Charles Cameron retired fully and invested in coffee and rubber plantations in Ceylon, becoming one of the island's largest landowners. The Camerons settled down in England, first in Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where they were neighbours of Taylor, then to East Sheen in 1850. During this time, Cameron became a member of a society for art education and appreciation and George Frederic Watts started working on a painting of Cameron (which is now in the National Portrait Gallery).


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1860, after an extended visit to Alfred Tennyson at the seaside village of Freshwater, on the Isle of Wight, Cameron hastily purchased a property next door to Tennyson. The family moved there, naming the property "Dimbola" after one of the coffee plantations in Ceylon. A private gate connected the residences and the two families soon started entertaining well-known personalities with music, poetry readings, and amateur plays, creating an artistic scene much as what was previously found at Little Holland House. She lived there until 1875.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron showed an interest in photography in the late 1850s and there are indications that she experimented with making photographs in the early 1860s. Around 1863, her daughter and her son-in-law gave her her first camera (a sliding-box camera) as a Christmas present. The gift was meant to provide a diversion while her husband was in Ceylon tending to his coffee plantations. Of the gift, her daughter stated "It may amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: After receiving the camera, she cleared out a chicken coop and converted it into studio space. Later, in an unfinished autobiographical manuscript titled "Annals of my Glasshouse", Cameron wrote:I turned my coal-house into my dark room, and a glazed fowl house I had given my children became my glass house. The hens were liberated, I hope and believe not eaten. The profit of my boys upon new laid eggs was stopped, and all hands and hearts sympathised in my new labour, since the society of hens and chickens was soon changed for that of poets, prophets, painters and lovely maidens, who all in turn have immortalized the humble little farm erection. [...] I began with no knowledge of the art... I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first picture I effaced to my consternation by rubbing my hand over the filmy side of the glass.On 29 January 1864 she photographed nine‐year‐old Annie Philpot, an image she described as her "first success". She sent the photograph to the subject's father with the note:My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best & fairest sitter. This Photograph was taken by me at 1 p.m. Friday Jan. 29th. Printed—Toned—fixed and framed all by me & given as it is now by 8 p.m. this same day.That same year, she compiled albums of her images for Watts and Herschel, registered her work and prepared it for exhibition and sale, and was elected to the Photographic Society of London, of which she remained a member until her death and where she displayed work at yearly exhibitions.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Though Cameron took up photography as an amateur and considered herself an artist, and despite never making commissioned portraits nor establishing a commercial studio, she thought of her photographic activity as a professional endeavour, actively copyrighting, publishing, and marketing her work. Her family did not see substantial profits from their coffee plantations in Ceylon and Cameron may have been looking to bring in some money with her photography. The portraits of celebrities and the high volume of her photographic output also suggest commercial aspirations.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1865, she became a member of the Photographic Society of Scotland and arranged to have her prints sold through the London dealers P. & D. Colnaghi. She presented a series of photographs, "The Fruits of the Spirit", to the British Museum, and held her first solo exhibition in November 1865. Her prints generated robust demand and she showed her work throughout Europe, securing awards in Berlin in 1865 and 1866, and an honourable mention in Dublin.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Her photographic activity was supported by her husband. Cameron wrote: "My husband from first to last has watched every picture with delight, and it is my daily habit to run to him with every glass upon which a fresh glory is newly stamped, and to listen to his enthusiastic applause."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In August 1865, the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, purchased 80 of her photographs. Three years later, the museum offered her two rooms to use as a portrait studio, essentially making her the museum's first artist-in-residence.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: She produced images of Thomas Carlyle and John Herschel in 1867. By 1868, she was generating sales through P. & D. Colnaghi and a second London agent, William Spooner. In 1869, she created "The Kiss of Peace", which she considered her finest work.In the early 1870s, Cameron's work matured. Her elaborate illustrative tableauxs involving religious, literary, and classical figures peaked in a series of images for Tennyson's "Idylls of the King", published in 1874 and 1875, evidently at her expense. During this time, she also wrote "Annals of my Glass House", an unfinished memoir recounting her photographic career.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In October 1873, her daughter died in childbirth. Two years later, because of her husband's ill health, because of the lower cost of living, and to be nearer to their sons who were managing the family coffee plantations (which had been badly harmed by a fungus), Cameron and her husband left Freshwater for Ceylon with "a cow, Cameron's photographic equipment, and two coffins, in case such items should not be available in the East".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Henry Taylor recounts the departure:Mr. and Mrs. Cameron have taken their departure for Ceylon, there to live and die. He had bought an estate there some thirty years ago when he was serving the Crown there and elsewhere in the East, and he had a passionate love for the island, to which he had rendered an important service in providing it with a code of procedure . . . he never ceased to yearn after the island as his place of abode, and thither in his eighty-first year he has betaken himself, with a strange joy. The design was kept secret, — I believe even from their dearest relatives.V.C. Scott O'Connor later wrote about the absence at their vacated home in Freshwater:The house is silent now and tenantless. All its old feverish life and bustle are stilled as is the heart which beat here in true sympathy with every living creature that came within its reach needing such succor. Her pretty maids, her scholars, her poets, her philosophers, astronomers, and divines, all those men of genius who came and sat willingly to her while in a fever of artistic emotion she plied the instruments of her art, — they have all gone, and silence is the only tenant left at Dimbola.The move effectively marked the end of Cameron's photography career; she took few photographs afterwards, mostly of Tamil servants and workers. Fewer than 30 images survive from this period. Cameron's output may have dropped in part because of the difficulty working with collodion in the insect-friendly heat where fresh water was less available for washing prints. The botanical painter and biologist Marianne North recounted her time visiting Cameron In Ceylon:The walls of the room were covered with magnificent photographs; others were tumbling about the tables, chairs, and floors with quantities of damp books, all untidy and picturesque; the lady herself with a lace veil on her head and flowing draperies. Her oddities were most refreshing . . . She also made some studies of natives while I was there, and took such a fancy to the back of one of them (which she said was absolutely superb) that she insisted on her son retaining him as her gardener, though she had no garden and he did not know even the meaning of the word. In February 1876, "Macmillan's Magazine" published her poem, "On a Portrait". The following year, her image "The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere" appeared on the cover "Harper's Weekly" as a wood engraving.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: After a short visit to England six months earlier, Cameron fell ill with a dangerous chill and died on 26 January 1879 at the Glencairn estate in Ceylon. It is often reported that her last word was "Beauty" or "Beautiful".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron was an educated and cultured woman; she was a Christian thinker familiar with medieval art, the Renaissance, and the Pre-Raphaelites. She may also have been influenced by the contemporary interest in phrenology, the study of the human physiognomy as a sign of a person's character. The Old Masters also informed her work. Her compositions and use of light have been connected to Raphael, Rembrandt, and Titian.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: John Herschel, who relayed to Cameron the news of the inventions of photography by Talbot and Daguerre, was an important influence on technique and the practicalities of the medium, as indicated in a letter Cameron wrote to the astronomer, "You were my first teacher and to you I owe all the first experience and insights."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: It is likely that Cameron saw Reginald Southey photographing on the Isle of Wight during a holiday in 1857 when he visited the Camerons and photographed their children and the children of her neighbour, Alfred Tennyson, before Cameron took up the medium in earnest.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Perhaps the most important photographer to influence Cameron's work was David Wilkie Wynfield. Cameron's style of close-up portraits resembling Titian may well have been learned from Wynfield, since she took a lesson from him and later wrote "I consult him in correspondence whenever I am in difficulty". Much like Cameron, Wynfield published an album of soft-focus portraits of friends dressed up as characters from history or literature. The press compared their photographic work and noted the similarities in style and their consideration of the medium as fine art. She later wrote that "to my feeling about his beautiful photography I owed all my attempts and indeed consequently all my success".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's portraits are partly the product of her intimacy and regard for the subject, but also intend to capture "particular qualities or essences—typically, genius in men and beauty in women". Mike Weaver, a scholar who wrote about Cameron's photography in work published in 1984, framed her idea of genius and beauty "within a specifically Christian framework, as indicative of the sublime and the sacred". Weaver supposes that Cameron's myriad influences informed her concept of beauty: "the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare's plays, and Tennyson's poems were fused into a single vision of ideal beauty."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron herself indicated her desire to capture beauty. She wrote, "I longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied" and "My aspirations are to ennoble Photography and to secure for it the character and uses of High Art by combining the real & Ideal & sacrificing nothing of Truth by all possible devotion to poetry and beauty."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Her female subjects were typically chosen for their beauty, particularly the "long-necked, long-haired, immature beauty familiar in Pre-Raphaelite paintings". In Virginia Woolf's farcical play "Freshwater", which described the cultural scene at Freshwater, Cameron's character comically expresses her commitment to beauty:I have sought the beautiful in the most unlikely places. I have searched the police force at Freshwater, and not a man have I found with calves worthy of Sir Galahad. But, as I said to the Chief Constable, "Without beauty, constable, what is order? Without life, what is law?" Why should I continue to have my silver protected by a race of men whose legs are aesthetically abhorrent to me? If a burgler came and he were beautiful, I should say to him: Take my fish knives! Take my cruets, my bread baskets and my soup tureens. What you take is nothing to what you give, your calves, your beautiful calves.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's photographs are generally placed into three categories: distinguished portraits of men, delicate portraits of women, and illustrative allegories based on religious and literary works.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's portraits of men were a kind of hero-worship. To Thomas Carlyle, Cameron wrote "When I have had such men before my camera my whole soul has endeavoured to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Most of these men are well-known scientists, writers, or clergymen of the Victorian era. Cameron turned to Old Master paintings and the contemporary idea — based in phrenology — of the ideal "type" to capture the greatness that she perceived in these eminent Victorian individuals. Her aspiration to record this greatness resulted in powerful images displaying a masterly command of chiaroscuro that resulted in "the finest and most revealing gallery of eminent Victorians in existence".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Janet Malcom notes the attention Cameron paid to hair as an expressive element in her portraits, writing that "Her closeups of Tennyson, Carlyle, Darwin, Longfellow, Taylor, Watts, and Charles Cameron are as much celebrations of beards as of Victorian eminence."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Her images of women are decidedly softer than those of men. With less dramatic lighting and a more typical distance between the sitter and the camera, these images are less dynamic and more conventional than her images of men.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron almost exclusively photographed younger women, never making a portrait even of her neighbour and good friend Emily Tennyson. According to a biographer of Charles Darwin, Cameron refused to take a picture of Darwin's wife, saying that "no woman must be photographed between the ages of eighteen and seventy."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Her mature photographs of women are noted for their subtle but suggestive representation of the obscurity and malleability of female identity. Many of her images of young women obscure their individuality and represent their identity as multifaceted and changeable by showing them "in pairs, or reflected in a mirror... frequently expressive of a deep ambiguity and anxiety."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Janet Malcolm again notes Cameron's attention to the hair of her subjects, writing that "Like the little girls whose hair was mussed to rid it of its prim nursery look, the bigger girls were made to undo their buns and chignons so that their hair would poetically stream or flow or twist around their faces".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Children — her own children, those of relatives, and young locals — were often models for Cameron. Children were popular subjects in the Victorian era and Cameron kept with the prevailing notion of them as innocent, kind, and noble. She regularly depicted them as angels or as children from Bible stories.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: The children in her images were not always cooperative, and her attempts to cast them as allegorical figures were often frustrated by the children's boredom, indignation, distraction — moods which are often evidenced in her images.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron may have found these illustrative group portraits more challenging than her other images. With more people in the image, the chances were greater that someone would move during the long exposures, so more light was needed to shorten the exposure time and arrest the motion. More sitters also meant a greater depth of field was necessary to put everyone in focus, further complicating the compositions.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's narrative portraits of women were influenced by tableaux vivants and amateur theatre. The women in her images are typically depicted in the idealised Victorian roles of mother and wife.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron made over 50 images representing the Madonna, often played by her household servant Mary Hillier. These images present "an ideal of femininity that combines wholesomeness with qualities of sensuality and vulnerability". She represented the Virgin Mary in various scenes from the Bible, such as the Annunciation and the Salutation, but also created a number of images illustrating more obscure religious figures.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron took literature as inspiration for her illustrative photographs, representing characters from Shakespeare, Elizabethan poems, novels, plays, and the work of her contemporaries: Alfred Tennyson, Henry Taylor, Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, and George Eliot.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 1874, Alfred Tennyson asked Cameron to create illustrations for a new edition of his "Idylls of the King", a popular series of poems about Arthurian legends. Cameron worked on this commission for three months, capturing several images in her notable soft focus style. She was unhappy with the final publication, and complained that the small size of her images depleted their significance. This prompted Cameron to issue a deluxe version of the "Idylls of the King" which featured a series of twelve photographs as full-size prints. This series of images, influenced in part by Watts, was her last large-scale project and is considered the peak of her illustrative work.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In her own time, Cameron's photographs found a contentious audience, with many criticising her use of soft focus and her unretouched prints.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Mrs. Cameron exhibits her series of out-of-focus portraits of celebrities. We must give this lady credit for daring originality, but at the expense of all other photographic qualities. A true artist would employ all the resources at his disposal, in whatever branch of art he might practise. In these pictures, all that is good in photography has been neglected and the shortcomings of the art are prominently exhibited. We are sorry to have to speak thus severely on the works of a lady, but we feel compelled to do so in the interest of the art."The Photographic News" echoed this sentiment:


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: What in the name of all the nitrate of silver that ever turned white into black have these pictures in common with good photography? Smudged, torn, dirty, undefined, and in some cases almost unreadable, there is hardly one of them that ought not to have been washed off the plate as soon as it appeared We cannot but think that this lady's highly imaginative and artistic efforts might be supplemented by the judicious employment of a small boy with a wash leather, and a lens screwed a trifle less out of accurate definition.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: "The Illustrated London News" provided an alternative perspective, writing that her images were "the nearest approach to art, or rather the most bold and successful applications of the principles of fine-art to photography".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Cameron's niece Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; 1846–1895) wrote a biography of Cameron that appeared in the first edition of the "Dictionary of National Biography", 1886.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: A few years later, George Bernard Shaw reviewed a posthumous exhibition of Cameron's, writing:While the portraits of Herschel, Tennyson and Carlyle beat hollow anything I have ever seen, right on the same wall, and virtually in the same frame, there are photographs of children with no clothes on, or else the underclothes by way of propriety, with palpably paper wings, most inartistically grouped and artlessly labelled as angels, saints or fairies. No-one would imagine that the artist who produced the marvellous Carlyle would have produced such childish trivialities.Virginia Woolf wrote a comic portrayal of the "Freshwater circle" in her only play "Freshwater". Later, in collaboration with Roger Fry, Woolf also edited the first major collection of Cameron's photographs, "Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women," published in 1926. In the introduction to this collection, Fry wrote that Cameron's allegorical photographs "must all be judged as failures from an aesthetic viewpoint". He was more charitable toward her other work, writing that she had "a wonderful perception of character as it is expressed in form" and that her work was superior to the portraits of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and George Frederic Watts.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Helmut Gernsheim, after seeing photographs that Cameron had donated to a railway station in Hampshire hanging in the waiting room of the station, published a book on her work that helped establish her reputation. Gernsheim's review of Cameron's work echoed the earlier sentiments of George Bernard Shaw and Roger Fry, criticising her allegorical and illustrative photos while praising her more straightforward portraits:If the majority of Mrs. Cameron's subject pictures seem to us affected, ludicrous and amateurish, and appear in our opinion to be failures, how masterly, on the other hand, are her straightforward, truthful portraits, which are entirely free from false sentiment, and which compensate for the errors of taste in her studies.In 1984, Mike Weaver disputed this analysis in his book "Julia Margaret Cameron 1815–1879", where he elevated Cameron's tableauxs as sincere religious interpretations. Weaver also criticised the characterisations of Cameron's personality that focused on her supposed eccentricities.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: Colin Ford, in the "Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography" calls her images "extraordinarily powerful" and "arguably the first 'close-up' photographs in history". He continues:Her visualisations of poetry are different in style and achievement from those of any other photographer of the time. Her contemporaries decorated books of poetry by Burns, Gray, Milton, Scott, Shakespeare and others with picturesque landscapes, occasionally peopling these with attractively disposed figures in the scenery, but rarely illustrating actual characters or incidents from the story.For the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History", Malcolm Daniel writes:Her artistic goals for photography, informed by the outward appearance and spiritual content of fifteenth-century Italian painting, were wholly original in her medium. She aimed for neither the finish and formalized poses common in the commercial portrait studios, nor for the elaborate narratives of other Victorian "high art" photographers such as H. P. Robinson and O. G. Rejlander.Janet Malcolm, in "The Genius of the Glass House" writes that "Cameron's compositions have more connection to the family album pictures of recalcitrant relatives who have been herded together for the obligatory group picture than they do to the masterpieces of Western painting" but that "The beauty that Cameron found, and in a surprising number of cases was able to arrest, among the aging and aged men of the Victorian literary and art establishment is a cornerstone of her achievement".


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 2003, the J. Paul Getty Museum published a complete catalogue of Cameron's known surviving photographs. One caption of a portrait of Alice Liddell (whom Cameron photographed as Alethea, Pomona, Ceres, and St. Agnes in 1872) claims that "Cameron's photographic portraits are considered among the finest in the early history of photography".In 2018, "The Norman Album" was deemed by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art to be of "outstanding aesthetic importance and significance to the study of the history of photography and, in particular, the work of Julia Margaret Cameron—one of the most significant photographers of the 19th century."


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curated an exhibition of Cameron's work, which garnered significant reviews.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: In 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London drew on their extensive collection of her work for a 200th anniversary retrospective of Cameron's career that also travelled to Sydney, Australia.


title: Julia Margaret Cameron

text: An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London in March 2018 placed her work in relationship to the work of her Victorian contemporaries, Lady Clementina Hawarden, Oscar Rejlander, and Lewis Carroll.


title: The Magic Whip

text: The Magic Whip (stylised in Chinese text) is the eighth studio album by English rock band Blur. It was recorded in Hong Kong and London, and released by Parlophone on 27 April 2015 and Warner Bros. Records on 28 April 2015. It was the band's first studio album in 12 years since "Think Tank" (2003), marking the longest gap between studio albums in Blur's career, and the first in 16 years since "13" (1999) to have featured the original line-up (Coxon featuring on only one song on "Think Tank"). The album also marks the return of the band's longtime producer Stephen Street following "Blur" (1997).


title: The Magic Whip

text: The album received acclaim from music critics. It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, marking Blur's sixth UK number-one album. It has been certified Gold by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for sales of over 100,000 copies. It is the first album by the band in North America under Warner Bros., after Blur were transferred from Virgin Records in 2013, following the purchase of EMI and its assets by the Universal Music Group in 2012.


title: The Magic Whip

text: In May 2013, Blur were set to play Japan's Tokyo Rocks Music festival. However, the entire festival was canceled for unknown reasons, leaving the band stranded in Hong Kong for an extra five days. In an attempt to distract themselves, they worked on new material in Avon Studios, as announced by lead singer Damon Albarn during the gig at AsiaWorld–Expo, Chek Lap Kok. Albarn later stated he was unsure whether the resulting music would ever be released. In July 2014, he commented, "There are about 15 songs...the annoying thing is, if I'd been able to write the lyrics there and then about being there, we'd have finished the record. But sometimes, if you can't do it all at once, it dissipates really and I don't know what I'd sing about now with that record. There's some great tunes on there, but it may just be one of those records that never comes out."


title: The Magic Whip

text: In November 2014, Graham Coxon started to work further on the recordings with producer Stephen Street, while Albarn was touring his solo album, "Everyday Robots" (2014). Coxon commented "I kept thinking about the recordings we had made in Hong Kong and remembering how good it felt. I wouldn't have forgiven myself if I hadn't had another look". Coxon would secretly invite Alex James and Dave Rowntree to further recording sessions to build upon the material. Once nearing completion, Coxon presented the music to Albarn to see if it was worthy of an album. On the way back from his tour of Australia in December, Albarn stopped in Hong Kong once more for lyrical inspiration. Vocals were completed towards the end of January 2015 and the album's mastering was finished on 18 February 2015, the day before the album was announced to the press in London's Chinatown.


title: The Magic Whip

text: The album cover artwork has the words "blur" and "magic whip" written in Chinese surrounding an ice cream cone, all rendered in neon-lit fashion. Art director Tony Hung, who created the lyric video for "Go Out", the first track to be released from the album, met with frontman Damon Albarn in early 2015 to discuss the album artwork and was shown photos and ephemera from the singer's travels in Hong Kong. "The album title, "The Magic Whip" [Albarn] explained, was multifaceted," says Hung. "An ice cream in the UK, a firework in China and a 'whip' in a political sense. These extremes would reflect the different textures, breadth, and depth of the album." Hung says that the band wanted a cover that touched on those themes and that also had a "rawer feel" to give a sense of how the record came together in Hong Kong (the band recorded quickly, in a small studio in the city).


title: The Magic Whip

text: The video for "Go Out" was uploaded to YouTube on 19 February 2015. Videos for "There Are Too Many of Us", "Lonesome Street", "Ong Ong", and "I Broadcast" followed on 20 March, 2 April, 3 June, and 8 September 2015, respectively. "Ong Ong", along with "My Terracotta Heart" and "I Broadcast" were previously made available shortly before the album's release as promotional singles, and their official audios were uploaded to YouTube on 18, 21 and 23 April 2015, respectively. "Y'all Doomed", the bonus track on the Japanese edition, was released as a 7-inch single on 27 April 2015. "Ghost Ship", alongside a re-release of "I Broadcast", were later released as promotional singles on 23 October 2015.


title: The Magic Whip

text: At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 81, indicating "universal acclaim", based on 35 reviews.


title: The Magic Whip

text: Helen Brown of "The Telegraph" stated that the album "turns out to be a triumphant comeback", and noted that "it retains the band's core identity while allowing ideas they'd fermented separately over the past decade to infuse their sound with mature and peculiar new flavour combinations."


title: The Magic Whip

text: "Spin" writer Andrew Unterberger gave the album an 8/10 rating and said, ""Magic Whip" is a fun album, nearly as much as any Gorillaz LPs," adding, ""Magic Whip" finds enough majesty and intrigue in the band's more meditative days to remain worthy company to any of the band's classic LPs."


title: The Magic Whip

text: Writing for the "Rolling Stone" magazine and giving the album four out of five stars, David Fricke called the album "A dark, seductive set that cements a legacy", stating that "Blur have returned with inspiration to spare."


title: John McGraw

text: John Joseph McGraw (April 7, 1873 – February 25, 1934) was an American Major League Baseball (MLB) player and manager who was for almost thirty years manager of the New York Giants. He was also the third baseman of the pennant-winning 1890s Baltimore Orioles teams, noted for their innovative, aggressive play.


title: John McGraw

text: McGraw was born into poverty in Truxton, New York. He found an escape from his hometown and a bad family situation through baseball, beginning a quick rise through the minor leagues that led him to the Orioles at the age of 18. Under the tutelage of manager Ned Hanlon, the Orioles of the 1890s won three National League (NL) pennants; McGraw was one of the stalwarts of the team alongside Wee Willie Keeler, Hughie Jennings, and Wilbert Robinson. The Orioles perfected the hit and run play and popularized the Baltimore chop; they also sought to win by intimidating the opposing team and the umpire.


title: John McGraw

text: The instability in MLB at the turn of the 20th century led to McGraw becoming manager of the Orioles at age 26 in 1899, and he was lauded for his leadership. The National League Orioles were dissolved after 1899, and McGraw spent one season with the St. Louis Cardinals before returning to Baltimore as player/manager of the new of the American League (AL). He quarreled with AL president Ban Johnson and jumped to the Giants in 1902, taking several Orioles players with him.


title: John McGraw

text: Through his just-short of thirty years managing the Giants, McGraw exerted control on players and team, and saw great success, winning ten pennants (matched only by Casey Stengel, who played for and learned from him) and three World Series. His 2,763 victories as an MLB manager ranks third overall behind only Connie Mack and Tony La Russa; he holds the NL record with 31 seasons managed. McGraw is widely held to be one of the greatest managers in baseball history. He retired, ill, in 1932 and died less than two years later after making a final appearance in 1933 as NL manager in the first All-Star Game.


title: John McGraw

text: McGraw's father (also named John) emigrated from Ireland in 1856. He arrived before the Civil War, and served in the Union Army. He married, but his first wife soon died, leaving him with a young daughter, and he moved to Truxton, New York, in 1871, where he became a railroad worker. There, he married young Ellen Comerfort. The younger John McGraw, her first child, was born in Truxton on April 7, 1873.


title: John McGraw

text: The family was poor, with eight children, and there was no public assistance available. Young John had a love of baseball from an early age. By doing odd jobs, he was able to save a dollar and send off for one of the Spalding company's cheaper baseballs, which he used to practice his pitching.


title: John McGraw

text: Tragedy struck the family in the winter of 1885, when there was a diphtheria epidemic in the area. The disease killed Ellen McGraw and four of the McGraw children, including John's older half-sister. John Sr. never fully recovered from the trauma of the deaths. Father and son argued over the time young John spent on baseball, especially since the father had to pay for windows the son broke while playing. Later in 1885, after young John broke another window, the father became abusive, and the son ran away to a neighbor, Mary Goddard, who ran the local hotel. She persuaded John Sr. to let his son stay in her care.


title: John McGraw

text: During his time in Goddard's household, John attended school and took on several jobs that allowed him to save money to buy baseballs and the Spalding magazines that documented the rule changes in the rival major leagues of baseball, the National League and the American Association. He quickly became the best player on his school team. Shortly after his 16th birthday, he began playing for his town's team, the Truxton Grays, making a favorable impression on their manager, Albert "Bert" Kenney. While he could play any position, his ability to throw a big curveball made him the star pitcher. McGraw's relationship with Kenney precipitated his professional playing career.


title: John McGraw

text: In 1890, Kenney bought a portion of the new professional baseball franchise in Olean, New York. The team was to play in the newly formed New York–Pennsylvania League. In return for this investment, he was named Olean's player/manager, responsible for selecting and signing players. When approached by McGraw, Kenney doubted the boy's curveball would fool professional ballplayers. Persuaded by the assurance McGraw could play any position, Kenney signed him to a contract on April 1, 1890. McGraw would never return to live in Truxton, the place of his birth.


title: John McGraw

text: Olean was from Truxton, and this was the farthest the youngster had ever traveled from his hometown. He began the season on the bench. After two days, Kenney inserted him into the starting lineup at third base. McGraw later described his first professional game:


title: John McGraw

text: [F]or the life of me, I could not run to get it. It seemed like an age before I could get the ball in my hands and then, as I looked over to first, it seemed like the longest throw I ever had to make. The first baseman was the tallest in the league, but I threw the ball far over his head.


title: John McGraw

text: Seven more errors in nine more chances followed that day. Both the team and McGraw remained ineffective, and he was fired by Kenney after six games, though the captain gave him $70, , and wished him luck. He signed with a team in Wellsville, New York, who played in the Western New York League. The level of baseball played there was the lowest of the minor leagues, and McGraw still struggled with his fielding. But during the 24 games he appeared in for the club, he hit with a batting average of .365, a glimpse of his later hitting prowess.


title: John McGraw

text: After that first season, McGraw caught on with the offseason team of promoter Alfred Lawson. McGraw joined the team in Ocala, Florida, and the team sailed from Tampa to Havana, Cuba, where they played the local teams in what was then a Spanish colony. McGraw, who played shortstop, became a favorite of local fans, who dubbed him ""el mono amarillo"" (the yellow monkey), referring to his speed, his diminutive size, and the color of his team's uniforms. McGraw fell in love with Cuba and returned there many times in later years.


title: John McGraw

text: Lawson took his team to Gainesville, Florida, in February 1891, and persuaded the National League Cleveland Spiders to play his team. McGraw hit three doubles in five times at bat, playing errorless ball at shortstop, and the reports of that game led several minor league teams to seek to sign him. Lawson acted as the boy's agent, and advised him to request $125 monthly and a $75 advance. The manager of the Cedar Rapids club in the Illinois–Iowa League was the first to wire the money, and McGraw signed with them. Other teams claimed that McGraw had also taken advance money from them (though McGraw maintained he returned it) and one even threatened legal action. This came to nothing, allowing McGraw to play with Cedar Rapids.


title: John McGraw

text: By August, the league had financial woes but McGraw was hitting .275 and had become known as a tough shortstop. Billy Barnie, manager of the American Association's Baltimore Orioles, had heard about McGraw, and wrote to the Rockford team's Bill Gleason, a former Oriole, for a recommendation, which according to McGraw biographer Charles C. Alexander must have been favorable, as Barnie then wired Hank Smith, another former Oriole who was playing for Cedar Rapids, asking if there was any chance Baltimore could acquire McGraw. Cedar Rapids agreed to give McGraw his release, and he left by rail for Baltimore. McGraw arrived at Camden Station in Baltimore on August 24, 1891, still only 18 years old, but now a major-league baseball player. McGraw described his new home upon his arrival as "a dirty, dreary, ramshackle sort of place." Barnie was unimpressed by the short stature of the player he had recruited unseen, but McGraw assured him, "I'm bigger than I look."