The Cubs’ swanky club
1914 Club at Wrigley Field’s windowless hideaway at new-car prices
CHICAGO — There’s no glass to press one’s nose against to see how the elite live it up in the Cubs’ long-anticipated, newly opened and windowless American Airlines 1914 Club at Wrigley Field.
You’ll just have to take our word for it.
It’s nice.
Nice enough, you may wonder, to justify shelling out between $32,400 and $56,295 per seat per season?
Alas, even after a guided tour Wednesday, I have no idea. I don’t have gubernatorial candidate money to throw around. For that price, my frame of reference is miles-per-gallon, payment plans and resale value.
Even with all-you-can-consume food and beverages included, your mileage may vary for the 1914 Club, the first, largest and most expensive of four planned Cubs premium clubs at Wrigley.
The other clubs are supposed to be ready next season. Meanwhile, the available 700 or so spots for the 1914 Club already have been snapped up, so you don’t have to feel tempted.
With dark wood, vintage bricks and soft lighting, this 7,500 square foot lair carved out below the stands behind home plate as part of the multiyear renovation of the ballpark aims to suggest a hotel lobby bar of a century ago.
Paper napkins, grab-and-go stations with sandwiches, chips and other snacks to eat upstairs in the stands and a few flatscreen TVs around the club are a tad anachronistic to that motif.
They are no more jarring, however, than other Wrigley updates to reap revenue since the Ricketts family acquired the Cubs, which some adore and others abhor.
Either way, clearly, it’s not 1914 anymore. It’s not even 2014, when the ballpark marked its 100th anniversary.
Ticket prices in the 1914 Club section, which include the first seven rows from relocated dugout to relocated dugout, are certainly cutting edge 21st century: They top out at $695 in the first row and $400 in row G. (There appear to be some relative bargains to be had in the resale market for some games this week, if $250 or so can be considered a bargain.)
If you break down the price, the biggest part of the investment has to be for the first-rate location of the seats, which have wooden arm rests and a bit of cushion.
Some of the price is for the soft drinks, craft beer, wine, premium liquor and food, which includes grill stations that offer freshly made artisan pizzas and other comestibles.
Some is for having a place to hang out if the weather gets ugly and maybe a bit is snob appeal, although, mercifully, there is no physical barrier separating club seats and non-club seats so often found in other ballparks.
It would be a mistake, though, to underestimate the perceived value of the club’s presumably oftscrubbed and likely uncrowded rest rooms not far from the wellheeled’s padded seats.
There are other amenities, to be sure.
Among them is a stand selling exclusive Cubs merchandise said to be available only in the club. There also are lockers to store that merchandise or a purse or charge a phone during the game.
But Colin Faulkner, the Cubs’ senior vice-president for sales and marketing, said surveys of potential customers prioritized maximizing time in their seats, which meant minimizing time spent waiting for concessions and, yes, rest rooms.
Faulkner said the reason there are only five big TVs and four smaller ones in the 1914 Club is because people said they wanted to enjoy their seats, not hang out in a sports bar.
Besides, there’s no sense incentivizing people to watch games in the club, exposing coveted seat locations empty on TV.
That said, for people or companies with even more to spend, however, there are a handful of private rooms within the club that come with eight primo seats. Bunker suites, they’re dubbed. Each has a private bar and a lot of TVs for use whether there’s a game going on or not.
Moving the dugouts down the line to accommodate the 1914 Club seating has required some adjustments elsewhere.
Some season ticket holders say the just-installed seats they got in the latest renovations are much narrower than before. The Tribune’s Paul Sullivan quoted one saying they seemed built for “middle school students.”
Carl Rice, the Cubs vice president overseeing the restoration and expansion of Wrigley Field, said there are seats of various widths throughout Wrigley Field, at least partly because of how different seating areas turn and bend as well as the location of aisles. Some are as narrow as 18 inches and others as wide as 20 inches.
“There was some reconfiguration of the seating bowl and we put some new seats in and some of those new seats might be slightly smaller,” Rice said.
“Maybe in that section the seats got a tad smaller,” Rice added.
“If anything, with the new plastic seats, they might have lost an inch, but they didn’t lose anything more than that. We have to take a look.”
If those fans’ counterparts in the 1914 Club ranks feel in any way squeezed, it’s not because of their seats and one can only assume they knew the price before signing up.