Weekend Interview: Camden Yards Planner Janet Marie Smith On The Future Of Stadium Development

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If Janet Marie Smith walked away from stadium planning in 1992 when Oriole Park at Camden Yards opened, she would have left a legacy few in her field could match.

Since the ballpark's debut, fans, sports media, baseball executives and design critics have hailed Camden Yards as a triumph. They praised the ballpark for embracing the game’s past by echoing the famed ballparks before it while simultaneously ushering in a new era by celebrating its urban surroundings. 

In short, Smith's contributions in planning and designing Oriole Park helped create an urban masterpiece. But the Jackson, Mississippi, native, who still possesses a hint of a Southern accent, wasn’t finished.   

Smith, a Baltimore resident, went on to work on some of the most high-profile and effusively praised stadium projects, creating new and reimagining existing sports venues all over the globe. 

Those projects range from upgrades to Dodger Stadium — Smith is now the Los Angeles Dodgers' executive vice president for planning and development — to working with English Premier League's Chelsea FC on the next iteration if its home pitch at Stamford Bridge.      

She spoke with Bisnow about those projects and shared her views on the latest trends in stadium development and how the sports venues of the future will look. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bisnow: You're an urban planner by training. What attracted you to that field initially? 

Smith:  My first degree is in architecture. But I always liked working at a larger scale. I like the issues of cities. I like managing more than just the buildings — the spaces between them and how people use public areas. 

I enjoy working with the government, the private sector and managing a big team. Early in my career, I figured out I was more of a project person than a traditional designer and ended up getting a degree in urban planning. 

What I loved about it was we studied cities, and Baltimore was one of the cities I studied when I was in school in New York. At that time, in the mid-'80s, Baltimore was well respected across the nation for having reinvented itself. 

When I learned Baltimore was going to build a new baseball park and put it right in the heart of downtown, I thought it was an amazing statement. 

Bisnow: You've done other projects but developed a reputation around working on stadium planning. How do you perceive the role of these venues in urban settings, and how do they influence cities?

Smith: What I like about sports is they bring people together. In our increasingly fractured society, having something we can all root for is an important part of a city. I enjoy the way that Camden Yards has set the pace, not only for baseball but for football to be part of the urban fabric, that it just enhances the whole vibe of the city, being able to sort of spiritually come together, whether you're physically in the building or whether you're just basking in the aura of it. It's just a nice way of celebrating civic pride.

Bisnow: We've seen the rise of the concept of sporting venues as not just for a club's season. Teams are developing 24/7/365 districts around them. What do you think about how the stadiums are now generating that development? How do stadiums interact with that kind of development?

Smith: Well, I'm delighted to see it, even though it seems like old news because Camden Yards happened so long ago. The fact Eutaw Street was kept open 363 days a year as an extension of Baltimore's waterfront promenade … that was all very strategic on the part of the Orioles' Larry Lucchino, who was president of the club at the time. 

It's important in an urban environment that [a stadium] not go dark. I feel strongly about that. That was an Achilles heel of the multipurpose stadiums, [which] we find ourselves bashing today as “multipurposeless.” They didn't serve baseball or football very well. They were too big for baseball and too small for football. The sight lines weren't oriented correctly. 

But almost more importantly, they just weren't good urban buildings. The public sector generally owned them, and they closed when there was no sporting event there. There were no other components to the building that would attract someone to take a leisurely walk down the street. 

Bisnow: Do you think these developments are the next step in stadium planning?

Smith: Yes, it's a logical evolution. … As the public sector has done less to fund the actual sporting venue, teams have looked to both capture the value that they're creating and to be able to channel that back into the setting. That's the nature of real estate. 

So, it does seem like a natural evolution. One of the most impressive examples is San Diego. Sitting here in Baltimore, it seems so far off that we never put the spotlight on it. But when Petco Park opened in the early 2000s, San Diego gave them the right and the obligation to develop the area around it. 

Today, when you go to San Diego and look at that robust environment around Petco … it's hard to remember those were surface parking lots a mere 25 years ago. People were saying, “Who will live downtown when you can live at the beach?”

Yet it's been wildly successful because of that energy. It's fantastic seeing that the original impetus for putting these parks downtown has come to be part of the expected formula.

Bisnow: You've worked with the Dodgers since 2012. Since then, you've worked on significant stadium updates, such as the Centerfield Plaza, which the team called the stadium's first “front door.” Tell me a bit about the work done in LA and how those upgrades have helped move Dodger Stadium — now the third-oldest park in baseball — into the 21st century.

Smith: Well, that building is so crazy. 

It’s the only sports venue with midcentury modern architecture with crazy seat colors that look like the rainbow, this very '60s vibe and a beautiful view across the outfield. We are surrounded by one of the largest urban parks in America, Elysian Park. This green pastoral setting, especially in the middle of the city, is even more unusual. 

The Dodgers wanted to capitalize on the uniqueness of Dodger Stadium, [which] is not only the third oldest but also the largest in baseball. 

Instead of having traditional concourses at every entrance … because it's carved into the hillside, on the upper deck you enter at grade, and 100 feet down at center field, you enter at grade. 

These entrances have new concessions, kids' areas, retail stores and big landscaped plazas. We've not only put a plaza at each entrance, we've connected them with escalators, stairs and bridges to give Dodger fans a 360 [view] around a park that wasn't designed for that.  

Part of our mandate is asking ourselves, “How do we create an environment where people want to be?” You make it feel welcoming to all generations so you can bring grandma, the kids, and everybody's got something to do. 

You won't find things segregated at Dodger Stadium. We have kids' play areas right smack in the middle of our big plazas so that families can enjoy the game and kids can get some of their energy out at the same time. 

Bisnow: What's next for your work with the Dodgers? 

Smith: Well, probably back-of-house things that aren't nearly as sexy, but one of the things that our owners cared about was making certain that we put fans first. 

So we've made a real concentrated effort to think of it that way. Our chairman, Mark Walter, was the first to say, “I don't want fans standing in line for the bathroom.” Our president, Stan Kasten, advocated this new front door. 

We thought it would take several years for [the changes] to catch on. It took a few games, and people got it. So, we'll want to continue to build on that. 

One thing you realize is you may cut the ribbon on a building, but it never stops changing. You're always thinking of how to respond to fans' changing interests, the different technologies available to your concessionaires and your retailers, and how ticketing is done differently. 

Bisnow: Chelsea FC has brought you on to help in planning to replace its stadium, Stamford Bridge. What have you learned about ballparks in America that transitions to football in England?

Smith: Todd Boehly, who's part of the Dodgers ownership, brought me in, and we wanted to take a look, even as they are planning a long-term future for Stamford Bridge, what can be done in the short term just to make it feel less dusty, a little more current. 

They often asked me the same thing in London: What does family experience mean? Because, especially at Chelsea, which is only 42,000 seats and tickets are sold years in advance, it's not as though there can be a spontaneous choice like, “Let's buy extra seats and bring the kids.”

I describe family-friendly as a euphemism to mean clean [and] engaging. It doesn't mean you have to bring grandma and the kids. It means a welcoming, not so crowded, congested and uncomfortable environment.

Much of our work there has been looking at what we've done at American venues to add more elasticity to the current setup.

Bisnow: How relieved are you that the state and the Orioles at least have a memorandum of understanding to keep the team at Camden Yards for another 30 years?

Smith: It's great for Baltimore, great for Maryland, great for the Orioles. … Not that I have any inside knowledge of it, but I can't imagine the Orioles and the governor would have entered into this MOU without every intention to finish that. 

Bisnow: Give me a bold prediction about the future of stadium development in America.

Smith: We're watching it in real time. The buildings are becoming more finished from a design perspective. 

It used to be if you had seats, a sound system, a scoreboard and a playing field, you had a stadium. Today, there's so much more because of the complexity of the buildings and the investment. 

I love seeing [stadiums] used for more things. I hope that continues to be a trend, because sports bring us together nonjudgmentally, allowing us to be enthusiastic about something that oozes civic pride. 

I'm also bullish on cities. 

Even though Covid accelerated [changes to] our use of the workplace to something that's a little more blended with our lives than it used to be, it makes us as a society even more eager to be together and to have camaraderie. 

Working remotely is great until you're bored out of your mind and have cabin fever, and that can set in, in about two hours for me. It's great to be where you can drop down to the sidewalk, get a cup of coffee and just enjoy the the energy of other people around you. 

Bisnow: Finally, since this is an interview for our weekend series, what is your weekend routine? And what are your favorite weekend activities?

Smith: One of the things I love about working in sports is that weekends can be like every other day — for the good. And for this particular weekend, I certainly hoped to be watching Dodger baseball, but that's out the window. 

Now, I have time to edit some reports, forecasts and spreadsheets and do other things that may be less exciting. But, like every other American, I enjoy doing something active on the weekends and something passive, and sometimes that something passive is watching games too.