Dodger Stadium: The Influence of Janet Marie Smith

L to R: Mookie Betts, Janet Marie Smith, and David Price tour the outfield construction work at Dodger Stadium. (Photograph by Jon SooHoo / Los Angeles Dodgers)

 

Besides her work on the renovations of Dodger Stadium, Janet Marie Smith is well known for her work in building Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992 and the renovation of Fenway Park, a 10-year effort begun in 2002.

Smith was born in Mississippi, the daughter of Thomas Henry and Nellie S. Smith. Thomas was an architect for 56 years; most of his work was on civic buildings like schools and courthouses. Nellie was a medical records technician for a hospital and worked into her 80s. Janet has one sister, Susan Elliott.1

Smith grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. She earned a degree in architecture at Mississippi State University and a master’s degree in urban planning from the City College of New York.2 When asked how she chose her career path, Smith replied,”My dad’s love of architecture and public buildings and her mother’s work ethic guided me to succeed in my professional career.”

Her first venture into making the world a better place was as coordinator of architecture and design for the Battery Park City Authority in New York City. Smith said of the project, “The 92-acre site on the tip of lower Manhattan was slated for commercial and residential development. The first major success was the four-tower World Financial Center, and closely following that the first phase of the residential development, Rector Place. The signature feature of the site was the waterfront public esplanade and the parks and plazas that set the standard for the contextual development. The master plan departed from earlier efforts in that it was conceived to be an extension of Lower Manhattan rather than an isolated project. Following the New York City development, Smith moved to Los Angeles and worked on the renovation of historic Pershing Square. The project was part of a larger effort at downtown revitalization.”

In 1988 the Baltimore Orioles and the State of Maryland committed to build a new ballpark in downtown Baltimore on the site of the Camden railroad yards. It was the first time a baseball team had committed to be a part of an urban development in more than 50 years.3 Larry Lucchino, then working for Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams, had convinced the elected officials that separating baseball and football facilities would ensure long-term success. Under new owner Eli Jacobs, Lucchino became the Orioles’ president and CEO. He was concerned that the initial designs looked too much like the baseball version of the cookie-cutter stadiums of the 1960s and ’70s. Lucchino was especially adamant about building a baseball-only ballpark that would look like a park from the early 1900s. Lucchino saw Smith’s résumé and liked the idea that she was an architect and urban planner. He hired her as the club’s vice president of planning and development.

When Smith arrived for an interview, Lucchino quickly asked her one question: “Which league has the designated hitter?” She shot back, “I’m offended by that question.” She added that she loved baseball. Lucchino later said, “It was the best free-agent signing the Orioles had in 1989.4 Moreover, the two had an instant rapport and Lucchino felt confident that Smith could not only coordinate the needs of the baseball team and communicate them to HOK Sport, the architects for the Maryland Stadium Authority, but that she could help translate his vision of capturing the character of the “old fashioned ballpark” and work with the team to achieve a design that would set a new paradigm for major-league baseball.

Creating the ballpark included saving the historic 100-year-old B&O Warehouse. He also wanted an “inside the ballpark street” known as Eutaw Street, which with a row of vendors would be open to the public outside of game times. Smith’s success in carrying out Lucchino’s plans helped spawn a new generation of baseball parks in urban settings.

Jacobs said, “It was Janet Marie and I. It’s my basic vision and Janet Marie’s attention to detail – luck was shining on us the day she appeared on the scene. She’s just remarkable. The strategic part – the large part – is mine. The technical is hers.”5 Jacobs, Lucchino, and Smith all shared the same vision of wanting an old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities. “They all had one thing in common. They all loved old-fashioned, walkable cities, and the traditional baseball parks that were often a part of them,” said architectural writer Paul Goldberger.6

Stan Kasten, then president of the Atlanta Braves, toured Camden Yards and was so impressed with Smith that he hired her to lead the 1996 transformation of Olympic Stadium into Turner Field. Kasten said, “It was obvious she had a command of both the game and the business. She had a real passion for it.”7 Kasten, who was also president of the NBA Atlanta Hawks, made Smith responsible for the design and construction of the new Philips Arena in Atlanta. Philips Arena, known as State Farm Arena since 2018, has a unique design, with the upper deck 60 feet closer to the court than in any other modern arena.8 The Philips Arena was part of a larger Turner Broadcasting commitment to downtown Atlanta. Smith was president of Turner Sports and Entertainment Development and vice president of planning and development for the Braves from 1994 to 2000.

Lucchino, who had moved to the presidency of the San Diego Padres, got Smith to assist with the plans for Petco Park, which opened in 2004.9 Her primary contribution was siting the project near the historic Gaslamp district and helping to script the urban development that would take shape around Petco Park.

Lucchino, John Henry, and Tom Werner bought the Boston Red Sox after the team was put up for sale in 2001. Of the six groups interested in purchasing the ballclub, theirs was the only one interested in keeping Fenway Park. The 1912 ballpark had been declared too small and insufficient in structural integrity and modern amenities to renovate, and the ownership group had focused solely on a new Fenway Park, which failed to gain traction, leaving the door open for the rescue effort of Henry, Werner, and Lucchino.

Lucchino hired Smith to oversee the preservation, expansion, and remodeling of Fenway Park in 2002. She wanted to move food prep and other nonbaseball operations to adjacent buildings and open more concourse space and adding seats above the Green Monster, the 37-foot-high wall in left field. She said that the “renovations” were only part renovation and part expansion into adjacent buildings owned by the team but used for offices and parking.10 The renovations were done in offseasons from 2002 through 2012 and were completed in time for Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary.11 One of the particular challenges of this project was that all work had to be approved by the city, state, and the National Park Service. (The ballpark is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) Smith often cited the working relationship with these agencies as a collaborative, learning experience that made the ballpark better as a result of their input. Smith brought DAIQ Architects of Somerville, Massachusetts, to the Fenway Park project largely due to their work on reuse of older buildings.

She was back with the Orioles from 2009 to 2012 as vice president of planning and development under owner Peter Angelos and responsible for upgrading the earlier designs at Camden Yards, particularly focusing on the 20-year-old food and beverage locations and adding a bar and seating on top of the batters eye. She was also responsible for the renovations and expansion of the Orioles spring-training camp in Sarasota, Florida, at the Ed Smith Stadium and Buck O’Neil Complex.

In August 2012, Kasten, by then president of the Dodgers, hired Smith again, this time as senior vice president of planning and development. In her first eight months with the club, she oversaw a $100 million renovation of Dodger Stadium’s clubhouses and fan areas. The renovations continued during each successive offseason. The signature project of the 2.5-acre Center Field Plaza, “Dodger Stadium’s New Front Door,” as Stan Kasten calls it, was completed in 2020. Smith was also in charge of the expansion of the Dodgers’ Dominican Republic facility to include training, housing, and education for teenage players across Latin America. Campos Las Palmas was the first Major League Baseball facility in the Dominican Republic and the renovations coincided with the 40th anniversary of MLB’s presence.

In the press announcement for the Dodger Stadium renovation in 2012, Kasten said of Smith, “Dodger Stadium is one of the most iconic venues in sports and Janet Marie is one of the few people I would trust with its future. … She respects baseball’s tradition and knows how to retain a ballpark’s distinctive charms while providing fans with the amenities and comfort they’ve come to expect. Any fan that has walked through the gates at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the renovated Fenway Park, or Atlanta’s Turner Field has been a beneficiary of her understanding of what a ballpark means to its community.”12

In December 2020 Smith was promoted to executive vice president of planning and development for the Dodgers.13

In 2023 Smith and her business partner, Fran Weld, founded Canopy Team, a Baltimore-based, women-led, multi-disciplinary practice that partners with sports teams, education and training programs, and cultural and civic institutions to build facilities that transcend their primary purpose into community gathering points and civic treasures.14

(Weld had been the senior vice president of strategy development for the San Francisco Giants.) They work with organizations on large scale capital projects and developments to create sponsorship and seating concepts, graphics, colors, and artwork, added Smith.

With new ballpark designs as well as renovations, Smith strives to combine nostalgic aspects of classic ballparks with modern technology and comforts.

“I’ve always been an orchestra conductor. I don’t play any instruments. I just conduct the orchestra,” said Smith. “I always shudder when I read ‘she was the designer of something.’ I don’t feel like I’m ever actually the designer because I always have someone else who produces things. I don’t act as the architect. Often I put together a design team that I know will hear what I’m saying, but I don’t actually draw those things, I guide it.”15

Said Stan Kasten: “As a conductor, she knows the role of every single instrument. That’s what makes her so good at what she does.”16

Smith has worked on multiple ballpark projects with Younts Design Inc., an architectural firm in Baltimore. Ronnie Younts, founder of the firm, said of Smith, “In my opinion, the thing that makes her projects so successful and memorable is that she believes that these buildings have their own history and their own soul, that they need to be celebrated in their own way, separate from the teams that play there.” He added, “These buildings and these public spaces have a history, a life of their own. She truly knows the importance of finding the soul in every project. To me, this is what makes all of her projects so special.”17

Jacob Pomrenke, SABR’s director of editorial content, said, “The overall fan experience at every ballpark since Camden Yards has been enhanced by her work.” Pomrenke used Cincinnati’s Great American Ballpark as an example. “Look at the difference in Cincinnati, all those little touches like the homage to Crosley Field’s ‘Sun Deck’ and the open view of the Ohio River and the walking bridge and Power Stacks in right-center field,” he said. He added that similarities between Great American Ballpark and Camden Yards include how the city’s backdrops and skyline are included in the ballparks’ landscape and footprint. The thing that jumps out at me is how ‘cookie-cutter’ the old Riverfront Park and all of the parks built in that era (the 1960s and 1970s) were, and even the newer ballparks that she had nothing to do with were touched by her design ideas.”18

Said the baseball writer Rob Neyer, “Just about anything written on ballparks and ballpark construction in the last 20 to 30 years begins with a reference to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, with or without mentioning Smith by name.” He added, “She is a devotee of writer Jane Jacobs, who wrote about the life of a city and what it should be for its people. And that’s a big part of what Smith does. In some places, they tried to put these ‘retro-style’ ballparks in the suburbs, but if you don’t do it in the city, it’s not the same.”19

Writer George Will wrote of Smith’s accomplishments, “The three most important things that have happened in baseball since the Second World War were Jackie Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn in 1947, free agency arriving in 1975, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards opening in 1992.”20

Janet Marie Smith will go down in history as the person whose work replaced the cookie-cutter stadiums built in the 70s with the retro-style ballparks beginning with Oriole Park at Camden Yards and every ballpark built or renovated since then.

Smith was inducted into the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame in 2020 and was named one of the 30 Most Powerful Women in Sports by Adweek.com.21 She has received multiple honors from Sports Business Journal, including Class of Champions in 2017, Power Player in 2016, and the inaugural class of Game Changers in 2011. WISE named her one of their 2014 Women of Inspiration.

Smith and her husband, Bart Harvey, live in Baltimore and have three children – Bart IV, Nellie, and Jack.22 Bart is the former CEO of the Enterprise Community Partners.

BOB WEBSTER grew up in northwestern Indiana and has been a Cubs fan since 1963. After moving to Portland, Oregon, in 1980, Bob now spends his time working on baseball research and writing and is a contributor to quite a few SABR projects. He worked as a stats stringer on the MLB Gameday app for three years and is a member of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of SABR and the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, and is on the board of directors of the Old-Timers Baseball Association of Portland.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, information regarding family, architectural collaborations, and various projects was received from Janet Marie Smith through email correspondence in December 2023 and January 2024.

 

Notes

1 Thomas Henry Smith Obituary, Legacy.com, www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/clarionledger/name/thomas-smith-obituary?id=21091496.

2 Janet Smith, Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Inductee, https://msfame.com/inductees/janet-marie-smith/.

3 Email from Janet Marie Smith, December 2023.

4 Joe Mock, “Otherwordly Janet Marie Smith charts her own course,” Ballparks.com. Retrieved from: / https://baseballparks.com/essays/janet-marie-smith/

5 Peter Richmond, Ballpark: Camden Yards and the Building of an American Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 160.

6 Paul Goldberger, Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 210.

7 Mock.

8 Mock.

9 Mock.

10 Email from Janet Marie Smith, December 2023.

11 Sarah Tarbet and Sarah Laliberte, “Project Relevance: Collaborative Approaches to Contextual Integration. Discovering Mutual Benefits to the Renovation of Fenway Park,” https://issuu.com/neuarchitecture/docs/fenway_park_case_study_final.

12 Brenda Levin, “LA Dodgers Janet Marie Smith Views Sports as a Means for Urban Revitalization,” retrieved from: https://www.planningreport.com/2014/12/09/la-dodgers-janet-marie-smith-views-sports-means-urban-revitalization.

13 “Transactions,” Boston Globe, December 11, 2020: C7.

14 https://canopyteam.com/

15 Charlie Vascellaro, “Love That Retro Look of your Ballpark? Thank Janet Marie Smith,” Global Sport Matters, October 1, 2019, https://globalsportmatters.com/business/2019/10/01/love-that-retro-look-of-your-ballpark-thank-janet-marie-smith/.

16 Mock.

17 Vascellaro.

18 Vascellaro.

19 Vascellaro.

20 George F. Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side (New York: Crown Archetype, 2014), 167.

21 Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame; Vascellaro.

22 Andre F. Shashaty, “Industry Bids Fond Farewell to a Leader,” Affordable Housing Finance News, June 1, 2008, https://www.housingfinance.com/news/industry-bids-fond-farewell-to-a-leader_o