This historic Minor League franchise's new ballpark is in 'the front door to the city' 

Benjamin Hill travels the nation collecting stories about what makes Minor League Baseball unique. This excerpt from the Baseball Traveler newsletter, presented by Circle K, is a mere taste of the smorgasbord of delights he offers every week. Read the full newsletter here, and subscribe to his newsletter here.

Beginning in 1885 and in nearly every year since, the city of Chattanooga has fielded a Minor League club named the Lookouts. The team's new home of Erlanger Park is a mix of the 19th century and the 21st, incorporating buildings from a former industrial site that predates the establishment of the Lookouts themselves.

Erlanger Park, which replaces the Double-A Cincinnati Reds affiliate's former home of AT&T Field, was built in a long-neglected area that had previously been home to the Wheland Foundry and the Chattanooga Foundry and Pipe Company. This history looms large at the Lookouts' new home, adding character and context not always found at new Minor League ballparks.

"The goal was very much to save as much as we could, to incorporate as much as we could," said Lookouts owner Jason Freier, who bought the Lookouts in 2015 and has overseen similar new ballpark projects in Columbia, S.C. and Fort Wayne, Ind. "It makes it something that resonates with people locally. It gives it an authenticity that you just can't get from building something from scratch."

The ballpark, located in southwest Chattanooga at what is now called The Foundries District, is, per Freier, "literally the front door to the city."

"If you're coming in from the west -- Nashville, Birmingham, Huntsville, any place like that -- on I-24 this is what you see before you get into downtown," he said. "Downtown got much nicer and this decaying industrial site was still at the front door. … It was described to me as 'Chattanooga's missing front teeth.'"

Erlanger Park, then, is a fresh set of dentures. Upon entering through the right-field gate, fans encounter the oldest building on the site: a red brick structure, erected in 1882, that is now a multi-level group area called the Powerhouse (so named because it originally provided the power to everything going on at the site). The Powerhouse, cut open at an angle to allow views of the field, is situated catty-corner to the Pattern Shop located down the first-base line.

"That was the building in which they stored all the old patterns for the pipe valve hydrant manufacturing that was on site. It's, give or take, 300 feet long," said Freier. "We knew we really wanted to reuse it. We also knew we couldn’t get the field right up to it without destroying the Powerhouse. So we built a large deck that connected the Pattern Shop to the field. That deck also serves to cover the concourse below. … The second floor of the Pattern Shop is set over 17,700 square feet of uninterrupted space, because there’s a steel truss roof. We built movable walls on wheels and decorated them with the old patterns that used to be stored there."

The front entrance opens onto a concourse pathway that runs between the Powerhouse and the team store. That mecca of Lookouts merch is another example of architectural creativity.

"You need the team store by one of your main entrances," said Freier. "What's on that side [of the concourse] is an enormous building they called 'The Shed.' … Making that structure habitable, even a small portion, was going to be close to impossible."

He continued, "New City [Properties], the folks we are working with who are master developing the site, came up with a very clever idea, which was to build a self-contained building and just slide it into this giant larger building."

The team store was constructed by Wind River Built, a Cleveland, Tenn.-based company that specializes in tiny homes. It was built in four separate segments, which were placed on rails and pushed with a tractor into their current location at the base of The Shed.

Erlanger Park's phalanx of repurposed industrial structures have a fitting backdrop: Lookout Mountain, the team's namesake, marking the first time in living memory that Lookout Mountain can be viewed while watching a Lookouts game. Minor League Baseball and mountain views will be a constant as the area around Erlanger Park continues to evolve.

Freier noted that there are 100 developable acres around the ballpark, and longer-term plans include apartments, office buildings and, taking inspiration from the team store, further development of The Shed.

"This is something that will definitely happen over time," said Freier. "We’re already seeing so much interest."