It was a glorious day, the stadium was brand-spanking new, the seats were comfortable, its cut-away view of downtown made St. Louis look like a great city, Albert Pujols knocked a ball out of the park with the grace of a great dancer and the home team won. What more could you want?

Everything worked well. It took me all of 30 seconds to get in, the concourses were broad and spacious, there were plenty of food stalls and restrooms. More importantly, the sightlines I sampled during a two-hour prowl - even from the nosebleed seats and standing room - were clear and unimpeded.

So what was wrong? If you felt as if you'd been here before you must be very, very old - considerably over 100. But probably everybody, at some level, felt a sense of deja vu.

What the stadium more accurately represents, with its halfhearted historical references, is not a new, revived St. Louis but a frightened city that can only look back to its putative glory days 100 years ago: the World's Fair, "Meet Me in St. Louis" and all that. A city that continues to tear down buildings that were built honestly during a period the new Busch dishonestly tries to replicate.

If the historical references fail to be convincing, perhaps it's because the field's chief designer, Jim Chibnall of HOK Sport Venue Event, admitted that his greatest challenge was the Cardinals' mandate that the stadium be designed in a traditional style.

A modernist at heart, Chibnall did what he was paid for to the best of his ability. But real architects can't just turn out what clients want if it is against their inner beliefs. If he feels that he met the challenge, he is wrong. Stylistically, if not functionally, the stadium is a clinker.

Chibnall and HOK Sport, a Kansas City-based subsidiary of the St. Louis-based architectural behemoth Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, the go-to firm for stadium design, make all the right points. The design defers to the Cupples warehouse complex a few blocks away. If you look west down Clark Avenue, you see how the stadium's towers line up with the Cupples buildings - a nice touch.

And it reverently cites both Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building and the Eads Bridge, neither of which is visible from the stadium, as reference points.

But the Wainwright Building, an example of early skyscraper design built in 1890, was a forward-looking building of its time, as was the Eads Bridge. To honor those two structures, to embrace their spirit, does not mean simply building with panels of brick veneer and arches. It means challenging the prevailing ideas, looking to the future rather than the past.

How exciting it would have been for the new St. Louis if a truly contemporary stadium had been built here. Like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain; Rem Koolhaas' Central Library in Seattle; or Chicago's Millennium Park, it would have said to the world that St. Louis was a city of ambition and worthy of attention, as it was when it commissioned Eero Saarinen to build the great Arch that defines the city and continues to shame its current timidity.

Ironically, contemporary-style stadiums are being built all over the world, including in the United States, to great popular appeal. The age of the retro stadium is over.

OK, the Cardinals didn't build a contemporary-style ballpark, and with a $365 million construction cost, they aren't going to soon tear down the new Busch and start over. We're going to have to live with it for the next 30 years.

Peter Eisenman, a resolute modernist who has worked for HOK Sport in cities more progressive than St. Louis, such as Phoenix, has acknowledged that most stadiums don't survive 30 years of use. That's just the way it is.

It's time now for admirers of the old Busch to hang up their tear-stained towels. It lived out its 30 years - and then some - with dignity and love.

And let me remind old Busch partisans that its architect, Edward Durell Stone, was considered one of the most egregious kitschmeisters of mid-20th century design, a Morris Lapidus without the vulgar joy. His embassies for the United States were considered embarrassments, and his Kennedy Center in Washington is one of the most tasteless concert halls on the face of the Earth. Ada Louise Huxtable compared its columns to Bic pens.

Stone's Busch Stadium was a product of its time. A UFO from god-knows-where, it seemed to have landed in downtown without any concern for its place. It could just as easily have been built without alteration in Cincinnati or Atlanta. A - granted, elegant - thing unto itself, the old stadium turned its back on the city, the world. If downtown St. Louis died in part because of its inhospitality to everyday human life, the old stadium contributed to its slow demise.

The saving grace of new Busch is that it is of the city. Even committed modernists admit that modernism's greatest failure was indifference, if not hostility, to its context, acting on the arrogant belief that the context would change because of its example.

Moving the stadium up against the ugly wall of Highway 40 was a brilliant move of urban planning. There is little chance that the highway, a mistake from the start, will be put underground as was done in Boston. Walling it off from the city is the best solution.

What's more, moving the stadium south releases two large blocks of space immediately adjacent to downtown for redevelopment. The Cardinals have proposed Ballpark Village there.

This could be good from an urbanistic point of view, but initial sketches show the shops, restaurants and dwelling spaces to be in a generic style that is a cliche of pseudo-urban contemporary design. Think the Boulevard in Brentwood.

However, three glass high-rise condominium buildings are proposed, which is promising. Perhaps Pritzker Prize-winning architect Richard Meier, who has become New York City's most sought-after condo designer, should be contacted.

Beyond that, however, Ballpark Village developers should look at the larger context for the rest of the complex. Nearby buildings are all late-20th century modernist structures, either glass-clad or poured concrete. A block away is Gyo Obata's elegant stainless-steel American Zinc Building, one of St. Louis' great post-war modernist buildings.

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