It’s such a shame and I honestly wish that I could remember more about the times that I spent at Riverfront Stadium. I always had admired it as a crucial part of my city’s skyline, a beautiful piece of architecture. I have vague memories back when an aerial shot of Ft. Washington Way was a tangled, webbed mess of tar, and Riverfront was home to not one, but two of Cincinnati’s teams. At this age, baseball was just another sign of summer, another thing that just happened with the changing of the seasons.
I was the kind of kid who wanted to go to the games because of an obsession with ballpark food, and of course being smitten the players. I could understand what was happening around me, but it wasn’t that I had an interest in following and appreciating the game the way I do now.
A specific game I can remember going to was before the construction of Great American Ballpark started. This was during the era in which price ranges for seats at the park were designated by their color, and we had garden seats. Seeing as they were tables in centerfield, closest to the designated spot for GABP, they were the first to go. I had all the food I could eat, and I remember getting the biggest thrills from the announcer, with his elongated and over-pronounced style of introducing Barry Larkin and Aaron Boone. I think it was then that I fell in love with baseball. Not yet the game, as that would take many more years, but the ambiance, the feeling it gave me to have a group of people all coming together for one single purpose.
In 1996 I got my first taste of sponsorship in baseball in my hometown, when Riverfront Stadium was renamed Cinergy Field. That’s also when I started to realize I had become pretty nostalgic at the age of eight. I could never bring myself to call it Cinergy, and I still can’t. Something about the corporations being involved in every aspect of the game anymore kills a bit of the old-world charm, don’t you think?
As a fifth grader, I had the privilege of taking a field trip downtown, and being given a tour of the stadium. I saw the Reds clubhouse, I sat in the dugout and the announcer’s booth, I saw marks on the stadium where the flood lines in 1997 reached, and finally I got to roam around the field wherever I wanted. Ran, cartwheeled, typical of an 11-year-old girl. The field was set up for the Bengals’ season, as this was before the creation of Paul Brown Stadium, and I stood in one end zone and stared to the top row of seats. I felt tiny, and enormous all at the same time. I thought to myself, “Is this what they feel like?” It was the biggest adrenaline rush. It was one of those days that you’ll always remember what you were wearing, how everything smelled.
In the final moments of a Riverfront stadium that still stood, I think I had realized something about this pastime had caught hold of me. I woke up early on December 29, 2002 to see the institution that held my first and only memories of baseball crumble to the ground. I wanted so badly to be there, but it may have been good that I wasn’t. I still have the recording of the implosion, and even to this day, it brings a tear to my eye just the same as it did that morning. I was 14. Riverfront fell at a ripe young age of 35, still a mystery to this day why they felt the need to build a new stadium. Maybe I should research it.
As much as I love Great American Ballpark, and as much as it has become my summer home and I know the park inside and out, I do miss Riverfront Stadium. I loved the way it looked coming around the bend on I-75 through Kentucky, and I thought the stadium’s construction was just stunning. It is ingrained in my head, and in many of other Cincinnatians. Memories of World Series passed, and a Super Bowl-worthy NFL team still exists, and can’t be forgotten with the falling of bricks.
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