Frank's Place: Empty warehouse all that remains of Baker Bowl's visual appeal

A century after it opened as a Ford assembly plant, 29 years after it was abandoned, the distinctive triangular building looms lonely at the seedy intersection of Broad and Lehigh, like the last vestige of a once-thriving forest.

But while automobiles, military helmets, and men's suits were manufactured there during its 72-year working existence, the strikingly beautiful structure's lasting legacy may be as a backdrop to local sports history.

Anyone who's ever seen photos of Baker Bowl, the Phillies stadium that stood just across Lehigh Avenue, has seen the factory. Its solidity, shape, and size, so prominent in contrast to the mundane, ramshackle ballpark, immediately drew your eyes.

If Baker Bowl had a spine and a soul, it was the neighboring Ford Building.

In the early 1990s, the architects of Orioles Park at Camden Yards recognized that North Philadelphia marriage of pastime and production. It clearly inspired their planning of Baltimore's retro-revolutionary ballpark with a factory just beyond its right-field wall.

In every Baker Bowl photo, the ballpark is enhanced by the adjacent building. With its rooftop American flags waving and its rows of oversize windows gleaming, the sturdy structure lends permanence and heft to a stadium, and a team, that lacked both.

In its splendid isolation now, the Ford Building reminds us of the fundamental difference between new and old ballparks.

For all their admirable amenities and nostalgic pretensions, those that arise in parking lots are essentially baseball's big-box stores. Meanwhile, those built amid thriving cities tended to infuse their surroundings with a vitality that the ballparks in turn fed off.

Any ballpark's real appeal, aside from the games played there, is the visual and visceral experience it creates. And for Baker Bowl, the Ford Building improved it.

Too young to have seen that Phillies stadium, when I visualize it now, the factory is always there, a brick-and-mortar exclamation point on an otherwise unremarkable scene.

While no one planned it that way, Baker Bowl and the factory formed a visually pleasing alliance. With apologies to architecture critic Inga Saffron, for me the high-and-low tandem brings to mind the Trylon and Perisphere, the familiar symbols of New York's 1939 World's Fair.

In the Broad Street factory's heyday, a worker on one of its top floors would have had the best vantage point in Philadelphia sports.

From there, he could have peered down at a Phillies game, turned to his right and seen Shibe Park, the American League Athletics' stadium just six blocks north on Lehigh.

Had he gazed east to the neoclassical North Broad Street Station, he might have spotted Phillies and A's opponents arriving here. Close by to the north, he could have seen crowds gathering for a Blue Horizon boxing card.

Baker Bowl staked out the intersection first, the Phillies having played there since 1887. They still hadn't captured a pennant in 1914, when the Ford Motor Co. opened an assembly plant just beyond the center-field wall.

It wasn't baseball that attracted the world's largest car company, but rather North Philadelphia's rail access and ready-made neighborhood workforce. Plus, North Broad Street was becoming the city's automotive district. Three years earlier the rival Packard Motor Car Co. had opened a large showroom and storage facility several blocks south.

As season after Phillies season passed, more than 150 cars a day were assembled in the 500,000-square-foot Ford plant designed by Alfred Kahn (no relation to famed Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn). The vehicles were loaded onto Reading Railroad cars along 440 feet of underground siding, the resulting rumble a familiar sound to Baker Bowl spectators.

During World War I, when the Phils fell from second place to last, Ford manufactured 2,749,600 steel helmets and thousands of military vehicles there.

It returned to auto production in 1919, but by 1925, when the Phillies finished in seventh place and drew only 304,000 fans, the business had outgrown the building.

Ford sold it for $1.75 million - ironically, the same price it would fetch in 1989 - and moved to Chester.

The 1930s weren't a good decade for either building or baseball. The Phils finished last eight times, and the oddly shaped factory devolved into a lightly staffed warehouse for the Army and Sears & Roebuck.

The Phillies finally abandoned their Broad Street home in 1938. Baker Bowl hung on until 1950, when, while in nearby Shibe Park the team was capturing its first pennant in 35 years, it was razed.

That same year, according to an article on Hidden City Philadelphia's website, Joseph Cohen bought the factory and operated a clothing business there. In 1972, it became Botany 500. For a time, Botany employed nearly 2,000.

But changing economics doomed both business and building. Abandoned in 1986, the factory has been empty since. Now the only indication of its vanished neighbor is a historical marker outside a car wash that occupies part of Baker Bowl's footprint.

In a particularly appealing 1931 aerial view of the ballpark, it's squeezed on all sides by the symbols of a thriving Industrial Age city - busy rail yards, smokestacks, water towers, and rowhouses.

And there at the photo's center, seemingly aware that it would withstand the storms that reshaped American industry, North Philadelphia, and baseball, the Ford Building stands tall, proud, and forever.

@philafitz