Not the new one, the “Guaranteed Rate Field” with its awkward name and modern angles. I mean the old Comiskey—the one that lived from 1910 to 1990. The one that smelled of beer, bratwurst, and decades of dust kicked up by sliding cleats and working-class dreams. That cathedral of South Side baseball is gone now, replaced just across the street, but if you stand there long enough—where home plate once was—you can almost hear the echo: the crack of a bat, the roar of 52,000 strong, and Harry Caray before he switched sides of town.
It was built by Charles Comiskey, a player turned owner, a man as complicated as the city he called home. He brought dignity to baseball—some say—and also brought the penny-pinching cruelty that helped spark the Black Sox scandal of 1919. His team threw the World Series, but his name stayed on the building. That's Chicago for you: it remembers everything but forgives selectively.
I didn’t visit Comiskey as a child. My earliest ballparks were in Missouri. But I’ve long loved the mythology of it—this place where Babe Ruth hit his 500th home run, where Bill Veeck planted the exploding scoreboard, where disco died in 1979 under a hailstorm of vinyl records. Where the lights didn’t arrive until 1988, because tradition held the city hostage for as long as it could.
It’s strange how a building can be demolished and still remain. There’s a plaque now where home plate once was. Just a marker in a parking lot—lot B, to be exact. The White Sox honored the location with concrete and memory, but what remains isn't just the outline. It's in the stories people tell: of doubleheaders in the sun, of watching Fisk crouch behind the plate, of the way the upper deck shook when the crowd got loud enough.
I stood there and thought about the men who played under those lights—well, mostly under the sun. Shoeless Joe Jackson. Minnie Miñoso. Luis Aparicio. Frank Thomas caught the final innings of old Comiskey’s life before stepping into the new one, carrying the weight of two eras on his shoulders. The past and future sharing a uniform.
What does it mean to remember a place that no longer exists? Maybe it means you’re part of a lineage, not just a fanbase. A keeper of flame. A silent witness to the strange communion that happens between a city and a stadium.
And maybe that’s what the Sox have always been: the quieter side of town, the shadow twin to the Cubs’ sunny Wrigley. Rougher, rowdier, realer. The kind of loyalty passed down like a stubborn gene. You root for the Sox because your grandfather did, not because it's easy.
Old Comiskey is gone, but it never really left. It lives on in the parking lot plaque, the grainy footage, and the stories traded at bars on the South Side. It lives on in anyone who has ever shouted themselves hoarse in hope or heartbreak, who has ever felt the way a ballpark can become a second home.