Wrigley Field

Where it sits. Wrigley Field occupies a single city block at 1060 West Addison Street in Lakeview, on Chicago's North Side, wedged between Clark Street, Addison, Waveland Avenue and Sheffield Avenue. It has no parking apron, no moat of asphalt and no plaza — the outfield wall is the property line, and three-flat apartment buildings stand directly across the street from it, close enough that their rooftops have been fitted with bleachers and sell tickets of their own. The elevated Red Line runs a block west and drops passengers almost at the gate. The neighbourhood that grew up around the park is now named after it, which is an unusual reversal, and on a game day the surrounding six blocks function as an outdoor annexe of the stadium.

How it came to be. The park opened on 23 April 1914 as Weeghman Park, built by the restaurateur Charles Weeghman for the Chicago Federals of the short-lived Federal League, to a design by Zachary Taylor Davis, who had also drawn Comiskey Park on the South Side. The Federal League collapsed after 1915, Weeghman bought the Cubs and moved them in for the 1916 season, and the chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. gradually took control and gave the park his name in 1927. The upper deck went on in 1927 and 1928. The features that define it now arrived in 1937 under the young Bill Veeck: the hand-operated centre-field scoreboard, the enlarged bleachers, and the Boston ivy and bittersweet planted against the outfield brick, which turns the wall green by early summer and blood red in September.

On screen. Two very different films made the address famous. In The Blues Brothers (1980), Elwood's driving licence gives his home address as 1060 West Addison — which is the ballpark — and the Illinois Nazis dutifully drive there to find him, a joke that only works if you know the number. In Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), the truants take in a Cubs game here, and John Hughes cut in genuine footage of a Cubs-Braves afternoon; Ferris catches a foul ball in the stands while, elsewhere in the film, Principal Rooney watches the same game in a pizza parlour and fails to notice him on the screen. Rookie of the Year (1993) was filmed at the park more extensively than either, using the field, the dugouts and the clubhouse.

What to look for once you are inside. The scoreboard above centre field has been operated by hand since 1937 and has never been struck by a batted ball; a golf ball hit by Sam Snead from home plate in 1951 came closest. Flags flown above it after each game — a white W or a blue L — signal the result to the neighbourhood, a habit from the years before the park had lights. Those lights only arrived in 1988: the first scheduled night game, on 8 August, was rained out after three and a half innings, so the first completed one was played the following evening. The red marquee over the Clark and Addison entrance dates from 1934 and is the most photographed object in the building. The bleachers are a separate social world, and the basket that angles out from the top of the outfield wall was added in 1970 to stop people climbing onto the field.

The rooftops and the streets. The apartment rooftops on Waveland and Sheffield began as neighbours with deckchairs and are now licensed businesses with grandstands, a share of ticket revenue and their own concession licences. Below them on Waveland, a group of regulars known as ball hawks wait through every game for home runs to clear the wall, and the etiquette of who chases what is well established. Since the 1060 Project renovation ran from 2014 to 2019, the surrounding blocks have added a hotel, a plaza used for outdoor screenings and winter ice skating, and a good deal more corporate polish than the old bars had.

Getting there and timing. Take the Red Line to Addison; the station exit faces the marquee, and driving here is a genuinely poor idea, since residential permit parking covers the whole district. The season runs from late March or early April to the end of September, with the weather at its most treacherous in April, when the wind off the lake makes an afternoon in the upper deck a serious test of clothing. Wind direction changes the game itself: blowing out towards the lake it becomes a home-run park, blowing in it becomes a pitcher's. Ninety-minute tours run on most non-game days and get into the dugout, the press box and the visitors' clubhouse, which is the only realistic way to see the interior of the building without buying a ticket to a game.