PART TWO: DOUBLEDAY FIELD
3rd-Base Work Scaled Back
To Preserve Historic Ambience
By JIM KEVLIN • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com
COOPERSTOWN – Future brides, if you dreamed of taking your vows overlooking Doubleday Field and dancing in air-conditioned comfort until the sun comes up, set those dreams aside.
A picnic might be more like it, Mayor Ellen Tillapaugh Kuch suggested this evening at a public hearing on $5.8 million in improvements to Doubleday scheduled to begin this spring.
Plans for a two-story building on the third-base line have been scaled back from a venue for weddings and celebrations to a more modest pavilion that echoes the architecture of the historic 1939 grandstand, the mayor told 30 attendees at the second of two public hearings in the Village Hall Ballroom.
The original plan, with its elegant glassed in reception area, was set aside in the back and forth between the village and the state Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation, the mayor said. "We're really excited about it," she added.
Granted, from the time the first grant for the project was announced on May 21, 2018, the mayor had predicted the final design would be much different, and it is.
