By ADAM I. ECOM
Some teams are built in boardrooms. The Cubs were built in a city that could not stop arguing with itself.
Chicago was never going to be a one-town town. The city was too big, too divided, too proud of its neighborhoods to let one franchise claim all of it. The North Side and the South Side had different rhythms, different loyalties, different ideas about what baseball was supposed to feel like. That divide did not create the Cubs, but it shaped everything about what they became.
In 1870, the Cubs of today formed as the Chicago Base Ball Club. Unofficially, but often they were dubbed the White Stockings and played their inaugural game on April 29, 1870, operating as a top-flight independent professional association.
In 1871, they joined the National Association, which is not to be confused with today's National League. The two are unrelated.
Following the 'Great Chicago Fire' in October of that year, the franchise was forced to suspend operations over the following two seasons, 1872 and 1873. They helped the city rebuild before returning to the field for the 1874 and 1875 seasons.
As the team reemerged to move past the darkness they had just endured, they received more life altering news, though this news was among the most positive news imaginable. Indeed, this was news that every single player on the team is likely to have dreamed about, not once, nor twice, but regularly. The team from Chicago had been informed of their invitation into the National League of baseball as one of its eight charter members. Needless to say, they accepted.
It was on February 2, 1876, when it was made official, when the future Cubs were officially inked to the National League, as were seven other organizations. Today, only two of those original eight remain active and staples in the National League. They are the Cubs of Chicago and the Braves of Atlanta.
Those teams, by those names, from those cities, without question, or among the most recognized in and beyond the entire sport. Though this recognition did not take hold overnight. In fact, in many ways, it has taken generations for each to forge their identity.
their the decades that followed their initial-our the decades to follow, as rosters turned over and the managers came and went, the names changed along with them.
Colts. Orphans. And finally, by the early 1900s, Cubs — a name that stuck not because anyone chose it deliberately. Instead, it fit.
No dramatic founding. No rival pushed aside. Just a franchise evolving until it found itself. The discovery accidentally came to fruition.
As the Cubs settled into the city's northern half, the team moved into a home actually constructed for another team that competed in an entirely different league. Long story short, that league folded, paving the way for the team that would eventually become known as the Lovable Losers to inherit a place known then, and much more so now, as Wrigley Field. The situation was less than ideal, though at least the team inherited their home, and the surrounding neighborhoods. Both came to define the Cubs more than any roster or any season ever could.
Raised in Broad Daylight
For most of their existence, the Cubs played every single home game in the sun. No lights. No night games. Just afternoon baseball on the North Side, season after season, decade after decade. It was not just a scheduling quirk. It became identity. The ivy. The hand-turned scoreboard. The bleachers full on a Tuesday afternoon. Wrigley during daylight was a specific thing — and the Cubs were shaped by it.
When the Lights Came On — And Why It Took a War to Get There
What should have been a simple infrastructure upgrade became one of the most contentious battles in the history of professional sports facility management. The Cubs wanted lights. The neighborhood did not.
This was not a polite disagreement. Residents of Lakeview organized, lobbied, and litigated. The argument was not merely about inconvenience — it was about the character of the neighborhood, about noise and traffic and the fear that night games would transform a community into something it did not want to become. The city of Chicago backed the residents. Ordinances were passed. For years, the lights simply could not go in.
The Cubs fought back through political channels, through the courts, and eventually through a compromise that limited the number of night games per season — a restriction that remained in place for years after the lights were finally installed in 1988. Even then, the first scheduled night game was rained out before a single pitch was thrown, as if the baseball gods themselves were acknowledging the weight of the moment. The lights came on the following night. The neighborhood exhaled. And then, slowly, adjusted.
What the fight over the lights actually revealed was something deeper about Wrigley and its relationship with the surrounding community. This was not a stadium that existed apart from its neighborhood. It was embedded in it — surrounded by residential buildings, rooftops, and streets that functioned as an extension of the ballpark itself. That proximity was the source of the conflict and also the source of everything that made Wrigleyville unlike any other baseball destination in the country.
The Rooftops, the Renovation, and the War for the View
Before the renovation, Wrigley Field was falling apart. That is not hyperbole — it is the honest assessment of a structure that had been patched, repaired, and held together through decades of deferred maintenance. The upper deck had structural concerns. The bathrooms were an experience no travel guide would recommend. The concourses were cramped, the sightlines in certain sections were genuinely problematic, and the overall condition of the facility was a quiet embarrassment for a franchise playing in one of the sport's most storied venues.
The Ricketts family ownership group committed to a comprehensive renovation that stretched across multiple years and reshaped virtually every corner of the park while preserving its essential character. New bleachers. Expanded concourses. Modernized clubhouses. And a spring training home to match — Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, opened in 2014 as one of the premier Cactus League facilities in the desert, giving the organization a modern base of operations that finally matched the ambition of the big league renovation happening back in Chicago.
Then came the video boards — and the war that followed. The rooftop building owners directly across Waveland and Sheffield Avenue had built legitimate businesses around an unobstructed view of the field. A revenue-sharing agreement dating back to around 2004 had formalized that arrangement, giving the rooftop operators a degree of legal protection they assumed would hold. It did not hold.
When the new video boards went up and blocked those sightlines, the rooftop owners sued. What followed was years of legal maneuvering that the Cubs ultimately won — not just in court, but through time. The revenue-sharing agreement expired. It was not renewed. The video boards stayed. The view was gone. Some rooftop operations pivoted to other entertainment models. Others simply lost the product that had made them valuable in the first place.
The honest assessment is straightforward: if the rooftop owners had anticipated this outcome, they would have negotiated better protections into their original agreement. They did not. The Cubs outmaneuvered them legally, outlasted them financially, and used their own renovation as the instrument. The neighborhood and the stadium had been negotiating the terms of their coexistence for decades — and in this round, the stadium won decisively.
The renovation ultimately transformed Wrigley into a modern facility that 4 enough of its historic identity to remain one of the most visited ballparks in the country — not just by Cubs fans, but by baseball tourists who want to see the ivy and the hand-turned scoreboard before they see anything else.
2003 and the Weight of Almost
There are near-misses and then there is 2003.
The Cubs were five outs away from the World Series. Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins. Mark Prior on the mound. One out in the eighth inning with a three-run lead. A foul ball drifted toward the left field seats along the first base line and a fan named Steve Bartman reached for it — along with several other fans in the same section — and deflected it away from Cubs left fielder Moises Alou.
What followed was a complete unraveling. The Marlins scored eight runs in the inning. The Cubs lost the game and then lost Game 7 the following night. The World Series that the city had been waiting nearly a century for disappeared in the span of forty-five minutes.
The response from the Chicago fanbase was disproportionate in ways that said more about ninety-five years of accumulated heartbreak than about one play in one game. Bartman received death threats. He had to be escorted from the stadium under police protection. He disappeared from public life entirely for years. The Cubs eventually destroyed the ball in a public ceremony. When the 2016 championship finally arrived, the organization sent Bartman a ring — a gesture that acknowledged, quietly and officially, that one fan in the seats was never the reason the Cubs hadn't won.
What often gets lost in the Bartman narrative is how that series penetrated the national consciousness far beyond Chicago. Fans were flying to Miami for Games 6 and 7 because tickets in Florida were cheaper than what the secondary market was charging at Wrigley. That is the measure of how much was at stake — people were booking last-minute flights to watch the Cubs in another team's ballpark because they could not get into their own. The 2003 NLCS was not a regular season loss or a first-round exit. It was a cultural event, and it deserves to be treated as one.
The Neighborhood: Wrigleyville, Boys Town, and an Uneasy Peace
Wrigley Field sits at the northern edge of Lakeview — and directly adjacent to the section of that neighborhood known as Boys Town, one of the most established and recognized LGBTQ+ communities in the United States. The rainbow pylons on Halsted Street are blocks from the stadium. The bars along that stretch serve a clientele that has called this neighborhood home for decades.
When eighty-one home games worth of baseball crowds pour through those same streets, the cultural overlap is not always smooth. There have been documented tensions over the years — incidents involving Cubs fans whose behavior in the neighborhood reflected attitudes that the community found hostile, and a broader friction between the transient baseball crowd and the residents who live there year-round. The neighborhood did not ask for the stadium. The stadium did not choose its neighbors. Both have had to learn to coexist.
What has emerged over time is something more complicated than either conflict or harmony. The bars along Clark Street and Sheffield Avenue serve everyone during game days without much ceremony. The neighborhood has become a destination in its own right, drawing visitors who are there for Wrigley and visitors who are there for Halsted and visitors who are there for both. The lines have blurred in ways that would have been difficult to predict decades ago.
What has not changed is the awareness, on both sides, that this particular corner of Chicago contains multitudes — and that a baseball stadium and a landmark LGBTQ+ neighborhood sharing the same blocks creates a dynamic that no other ballpark in America can claim. It is part of what makes Wrigleyville genuinely distinct, and any honest account of the North Side baseball experience has to acknowledge it.
The Icons of the North Side
Before the 2016 championship arrived, the Cubs built their identity on players who gave everything to a franchise that rarely gave them a ring in return.
Ernie Banks is where it starts. Mr. Cub. The man who wanted to play two. He arrived on the North Side in 1953 and spent his entire career there — nineteen seasons, two MVP awards, and a Hall of Fame plaque that barely captures what he meant to the city. Banks played with a joy that felt almost defiant given how many losing seasons surrounded him. That joy became the emotional blueprint for how Cubs fans learned to love a team that kept breaking their hearts.
Ron Santo stood at third base for thirteen years and fought for this franchise publicly and privately — and was denied the Hall of Fame long enough that he never lived to see his induction. The Cubs retired his number. The city named a stretch of Michigan Avenue after him. Some players outlast their statistics. Santo is one of them.
Ryne Sandberg redefined what a middle infielder could be — power, defense, and a quiet professionalism that made him the standard by which second basemen across the league were measured for a generation. His 1984 season, capped by a nationally televised game against the Cardinals where he hit two home runs off Bruce Sutter, announced to the country that the Cubs were real.
Kerry Wood walked into Wrigley Field in May of 1998 and struck out twenty Houston Astros in his fifth major league start. Twenty. In a game that defined what pure electric stuff looks like on a baseball mound, Wood announced himself to the sport in a way that almost no pitcher ever has. The injuries that followed made the career shorter than it deserved to be. The moment has never left.
A Heavyweight City
This is Chicago. The city that gave the world Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. The Blackhawks, who play with a kind of controlled aggression that feels distinctly Midwestern — quiet until it is no longer. A city that does not just follow its teams, but holds them to higher standards. Chicago fans are tough. They're loud. They know the difference between a rebuild and an excuse. They'll boo you, and they'll love you, and sometimes they'll do both in the same inning. They bleed their colors and they expect something back for it.
The question of what kind of fan fills Wrigley on any given afternoon has always been complicated. The Cubs ahave more casual tourists in their seats than almost any franchise in baseball — people who are there for the experience of Wrigley as much as for the game itself. That is not an insult. It is the reality of operating the second-oldest ballpark in the country in one of America's great tourist cities. But mixed in with the tourists are lifelong fans who have been in those seats for forty years and know the lineup card cold. The two groups coexist in a way that is specific to Wrigley — and the hardcores have learned to live with the fact that the person next to them might be checking the score on their phone while they are tracking the pitch count.
The World Series
By the time 2016 arrived, the Cubs were a built team, in a rebuilt park, in a city that had been waiting 108 years and knew exactly what it was watching. When the final out of Game 7 settled into Anthony Rizzo's glove in Cleveland, the longest curse in sports was finally broken, and a generation of lifelong heartbreak melted away into an all-night celebration at Clark and Addison. This truly was the miracle the Cubs faithful had been praying for with increasing frequency and intensity for over a full century.
Then came the rebuild again. The core broke up. The roster turned over. And in 2023, they were back in the playoffs — young, hungry, and reminding the league that the North Side isn't done.
The rebuild is real. Whether this is the year or the year before the year, Chicago knows what a contender looks like — and they're watching closely.
Chicago - Wrigleyville Memorabilia
The Cubs have produced Hall of Famers, heartbreakers, and some of the most collectible cards in the hobby. THE BASEMALL regularly presents authenticated memorabilia and graded cards from across the full arc of North Side baseball — from the early legends to the 2016 champions.
Shop the Chicago Cubs Collection →thebasemall.com/collections/basemall-chicago-cubs
The 2026 Season
The 2026 Cubs finished right on the edge of contention — close enough to keep the conversation going all summer, not close enough to settle it in October. The young core that made 2023 feel like a preview is still developing, and the front office has made clear it believes the window is opening rather than closing. Wrigley sold out. The rooftops stayed full. Clark and Addison stayed loud. On the North Side, that is what patience looks like — not blind faith, but informed belief in what is being built.
The argument continues next season.
Next time we are back in Wrigleyville, we are counting down the top moments, the top players, and the memorabilia that tells the story. Coming soon.
But first, we are visiting three more cities. Here is where they began:
Cincinnati — where professional baseball began before anyone else had thought to organize it.
Cleveland — where a franchise carried a city's heartbreak for decades before finally breaking through.
Detroit — where the Tigers built one of the most feared lineups in the history of the American League.
— ADAM I. ECOM, Founder and Commissioner, THE BASEMALL
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