Rooftop Views of Wrigley May Be Going, Going . . .

In an era of sparkling new baseball parks with corporate monikers and $7 microbrews, you’d think a team could add a couple of thousand cheap seats and maybe even score some points with the fans in doing it.

On this city’s north side, you’d be not only wrong, but likely in for a long, stern lecture on the sanctity of Wrigley Field. And, in the Wrigley-adjacent bars, maybe a slap upside your head. Bring you to your senses. Ya commie.

The Cubs recently released plans for several changes to the venerable ballpark, the most notable being the addition of 2,100 bleacher seats. The problem is, those new bleachers would obscure the view both of, and from, the rooftops just beyond the outfield walls, where fans have gathered for generations to watch the games without a ticket.

“It’s not just a losing team that makes Wrigley Wrigley,” said Jim Murphy, who owns a building behind right-center field, from which he has been watching the Cubs lose for years. He’s been watching them win this year--they are in first place--but he is confident they will resume their losing ways.

“It’s the losing team, it’s the ivy, it’s the rooftops--it’s the whole deal.”

The Cubs are so steeped in tradition that they didn’t install lights for night games until 1988, when more than one fan shed tears. The Cubs have gone to great lengths to present the plan as good for the team and respectful of the “Friendly Confines.”

Indeed, the proposal is billed as creating “friendlier confines,” with more concession stands, more restrooms and a restaurant in dead-center field displacing a patch of juniper bushes. The money raised from sales of the additional $20 bleacher tickets, about $3.4 million, Cubs officials suggest, can be nothing but good for a team that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908.

There would also be 200 new choice seats behind home plate and, eventually, a new parking garage and a Cubs Hall of Fame.

At the same time, the team, which is owned by Tribune Co., also owner of The Times, has made it quite clear that other scenarios exist, ones that could give an already jittery fan night sweats.

With just 39,059 seats, Wrigley is one of the smallest stadiums in the major leagues. It has fewer and smaller lucrative sky boxes than many parks. And that ivy doesn’t generate advertising revenue like the billboards on other outfield walls.

“We’re trying very hard not to move from Wrigley Field,” said Cubs Vice President Mark McGuire.

Holy cow!

From the rooftop of 1010 Waveland Ave. on Tuesday afternoon, Jamie Purcell could see the swing of Ricky Guitierrez’s bat a good half-second before he could hear the crack, the hit that would rally the Cubs to a 7-4 victory over the Kansas City Royals.

But the “ka-ching” of cash registers was audible instantly.

For decades, the rooftops were the domain of the building owners, tenants and their baseball buddies, and in convivial groups they’d set up the lawn chairs, light the barbecue and watch the game while sipping a reasonably priced beer.

In recent years, however, the rooftops have turned into actual restaurants and bars, with the city voting in 1998 to regulate and tax them like every other business in the city.

“That’s an insurance company, I think,” said Purcell, the owner of 1010 Waveland, as he gestured toward several dozen people on his roof Tuesday afternoon.

They were seated not on lawn chairs but on heavy-duty steel risers, erected on a reinforced concrete roof, and got up occasionally to visit the bartender, the woman grilling the bratwurst, the permanent restrooms. One floor below were two more bars, another kitchen and air-conditioning aplenty.

The owners understand this commercialization has cost them much of their underdog clout in fighting Cub management. They cater not to neighborhood kids without ticket money but to major corporations, which rent out the space for as much as $100 a head.

And so they are scrambling to negotiate. The team’s initial proposals would raise the stadium’s outfield walls to the equivalent of three to four stories, cutting off the view from the three-story-high rooftop buildings.

The owners have hired a public relations firm, surveyors and architects, all of whom suggest a little tinkering with the plans could give the team its seats and still allow for rooftop views.

Mayor Richard M. Daley has not objected to the expansion, but he has ordered the Cubs to hold public hearings on the matter, the first of which involved considerable booing of McGuire, the team vice president.

The new bleachers would not quite “obliterate” the view of the cheerful rooftop crowds by paying fans inside the stadium, he said. The view from the rooftops, well, that would not be so good.

If the fight is no longer a David vs. Goliath tale, the owners--and the overwhelming majority of fans, it seems--are hoping tradition, even one sullied a bit by money, will win the day.

It turns out Purcell was right--it was an insurance company on his roof Tuesday. And as far as USI Midwest Chief Executive Tom Ealy could tell, every one of his 80 employees showed up for the company outing.

“You deliver a losing team year after year, and still we come back,” he said of the Cubs owners. “What more do you want? These people love this. Everybody loves this. To ruin it for 2,100 seats just seems uncivic to me.”