If the Cubs had won the National League Championship Series, they’d have hosted Game 3 Friday night and Game 4 Saturday night. Temperatures were in the 30s Friday night and won’t be much warmer Saturday evening, and a few specks of snow were in the air when I arrived at Wrigley Field Saturday to see what was happening in the construction project.
We’d certainly have taken that kind of cold weather for the Cubs in the World Series.
Instead, there were trucks and construction workers and scaffolds around Wrigley Field as the team enters its fourth year of the renovation/restoration project.
Between Wednesday, when I was last at the park, and Saturday morning, crews power-washed all the chalk messages off the bleacher walls. There are also tarps up underneath the video board in left field and the porch in right field, so some work must be going on in those areas, not visible from outside the park.
The batter/ball-strike/out panels had been removed during the week, as I noted in the previous update. Now the spaces where those panels had been are boarded up. That system, as I had mentioned, had malfunctioned on a number of occasions during the season and I assume the removal is for refurbishment and repair of the 80-year-old mechanism.
The biggest change from Wednesday is all the scaffolding and boards near the marquee and Gate F, as you can see in photos 14-20. Again, much of the work isn’t visible, but you can see some brickwork exposed on the Addison Street side windows in photos 14 and 15.
Quite a bit of brickwork had been added to the Hotel Zachary project over the past few days and it would appear to me that work could be finished well before the end of the year. I’m not quite sure exactly when in 2018 the hotel is scheduled to open, though according to the email sent to season-ticket holders by Tom Ricketts Friday, “early 2018” is the target date.
I’ll have another update here sometime next week.