Home Sweet Dome
Barnes, John A.
Home Sweet Dome by John A. Barnes In the middle ages, cities that aspired to greatness built cathedrals. Today, the structure of choice is a domed stadium. Over the past decade, municipal...
...There's real grass on the field and the fans have the joy of watching Dan Marino throw those long, spiraling touchdown passes in fresh air and under Florida sunshine...
...Business would boom...
...Even a baseball team would follow...
...Never mind that the Redskins have sold out every home game since 1966 and the waiting list for season tickets is 20,000 long...
...But never mind about that, says Moon Landrieu, former mayor of New Orleans and a father figure to the stadium...
...It is the very building of it that is important, not how much of it is used or its economics...
...And the dome hasn't brought baseball to the Bayou State either...
...In fact, the dome seemed to have driven away a team...
...The T-shirt shop that did so-so business downtown has great luck over by the stadium...
...Before he left office in 1982, he had the honor of seeing the new home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team christened the Brendan T. Byrne arena...
...Sports is entertainment...
...Petersburg's hotels are already filled with vacationers during most of the convention season and that there is precious little room left for conventioneers...
...But instead of trying to con the city fathers into building a dome, he used private funds to construct a new stadium...
...The city government says it has been assured by its marketing consultants that they can book up to 100 convention days per year until a team is either created or enticed...
...If they find someone to play in it, that is...
...But Alamo Dome supporters fear that if they don't get on the stadium train now, it will leave without them...
...The We-Ain't-Got-A-Team-Yet-But-MaybeSomeday Dome: You can't blame cities for hoping that they can snag expansion teams or lure existing ones...
...If budgets are strained and you have to raise taxes, you're shooting yourself in the foot ." New Orleans, for example, has had to lay off police and firemen, in part, to pay for the Superdome...
...Surely one of these communities will call out: 'By all means come live with us, come be our neighbor,' " he said at a banquet, and recently added ominously, "If the District of Columbia fails to build what the Redskins fans deserve, I have no other choice than to go to one of the surrounding counties...
...But many economists, including Baade, attribute the downtown development that came to New Orleans in the late seventies to the oil boom, not the stadium...
...Stadiums usually do little to boost consumer demand, Baade says...
...He has faith that a dome is essential to the revival of a city left burned out by riots and Toyotas...
...pect either for football or baseball...
...It didn't happen without a fight...
...and there are fairly tight membership requirements for most players' unions...
...The roof deflates if more than a few doors are opened at a time...
...There are 81 home baseball games during a season, but only three domes have major league teams...
...The numbers can be molded like clay...
...d) all of the above...
...The study's authors, Stephen Vincent, a physician, and Thomas Hawkinson, an industrial hygienist, found that the Twins four-game sweep under the dome, while losing three outside in St...
...First, the city has announced plans to build its own $201 million dome complex and has set about aggressively courting a team...
...The But-I-Just-Want-One Dome: In most cities, spoiled owners threaten to pack up their teams and move if they don't get a new stadium, while government officials at least suggest that the old one is good enough...
...He then skulked off to Indiana in the middle of the night...
...On a starry night, Irsay descended into the (domeless) stadium in a helicopter, waving at the throng that had turned out in one of the biggest displays of civic involvement ever seen in the city...
...Is there any hope for the sports fan whose enthusiasm for the sound of jackhammers and jet engines is restrained, who likes to see football and baseball played on grass and outdoors, and who does not want to see his city bankrupted by the costs of a domed stadium...
...The 74-year-old Cooke has recently taken a time out from planning his newest divorce from his 31-year-old wife of six months, and begun venturing out from his 641-acre estate to the D.C...
...The attraction for team owners is easy to understand: they get a brand new arena at little or no cost...
...Colts owner Robert Irsay flirted with other cities, including Jacksonville, Florida, a city much-dated by NFL owners but never married...
...Petersburg, Florida broke ground for a projected $85 million baseball stadium despite a stern warning from Major League Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth not to expect an expansion team to fill it any time soon...
...As city fathers prepared to ask taxpayers to dig deep for a new stadium, Bidwell openly began shopping elsewhere...
...The New Orleans Jazz basketball team left town because it couldn't afford the rent at the cavernous complex...
...The city and sports officials who are the driving forces behind this building boom argue that it's a good investment...
...To be sure, stadiums can draw tourists, especially baseball, which is rarely sold out and is played during those summer, vacation-laden months...
...When the final cost was tallied, the Superdome checked in at a hefty $169 million, nearly four times the original estimate...
...Mayor Coleman Young is angling for state financing to build a dome of his own to house the Detroit Tigers...
...The Superdome is an exercise in optimism, a statement of faith," he said a few years ago...
...The politicians like them because they think domed stadiums possess the magical ability to cure (check one): a) rundown economies...
...If he doesn't get it, Young warns, the Tigers may leave town...
...Pilgrims would flock...
...When Houston touched off America's keep-up-with-the-Jones'sdome syndrome with the 1965 Astrodome, neighboring New Orleanians vowed to build one of their own that would make their rival city's structure look like "a peanut stand" (the first known case of Dome Envy...
...Louis, may have been "related to a fine motor and communication deficit that could have been caused by noise...
...As America becomes the Kingdom of Kingdomes, Metrodomes, Astrodomes, Hoosier Domes, Suncoast Domes, Georgia Domes, Alamo Domes, Silverdomes, and Superdomes, here's a few more to add to the list: ?The Panacea Dome: When the New Orleans Saints go marching into the Superdome, they're cheered...
...Besides, the seats at the top were so high up that fans couldn't tell a double dribble from a foul shot...
...But Tigers owner Tom Monaghan refused to read his lines in the script...
...Now Monaghan, too, seems mesmerized by the mantra and has said that it might not be such a bad idea for the city to give him a new stadium after all...
...Even if a stadium actually loses money on paper, they contend, it is more than made up for by the development it attracts, the jobs it creates, and the taxes it collects—the so-called multiplier effect...
...And whatever else they do, domes whip up enthusiasm among the mayor's fans— the backfield of lawyers, architects, realtors, analysts, concessionaires, and consultants that feed at the public trough...
...They had the Indy 500 and the Indianapolis Pacers...
...A glimmer...
...Why, it's a convention center, too...
...Stadiums don't create wealth, he says, they just redistribute it...
...And the jobs created by a stadium doth not an economy make...
...To be sure, some economic development did follow Landrieu's "exercise in optimism ." It made the city a regular host of Super Bowls and helped lure the Republican convention this summer...
...The high-paying construction John A. Barnes is deputy editorial page editor of The Detroit News...
...By and large, there aren't enough tractor pulls, booksellers conventions, and boat shows to make up for dome time spent dark and empty...
...But the stadium floor is too large for most conventions, the meeting rooms too small...
...It's either peanuts for the elephants at the zoo or peanuts for your kids at the ballpark...
...For a while it looked like it had a taker in Bill Bidwell, the owner of the St...
...c) an inferiority complex...
...Louis in general...
...But while the stadium has been good for football, it hasn't done as much for the city...
...Even the best pro football team will play only eight regular season games at home, with a few more thrown in during pre-season and, for the fortunate few, the playoffs...
...Baltimore thought it had him snagged, but Bidwell's now leaning towards Phoenix, where plans for some kind of a Cactusdome seem likely to bloom...
...And what will San Antonio do...
...If the economics are dubious, why rush to dot the landscape with domes...
...But there's a difference between hope and blind faith...
...One reason politicians feel safe putting their communities in dome debt is that they're usually not around to take the blame when the bills come due...
...Though Indianapolis residents are celebrating their ceiling and their team, other cities may be gambling a lot of money foolishly if they think they can do the same thing...
...The same can't be said of Brendan Byrne, the former governor of New Jersey...
...the oil economy is in a bit of a fix...
...Built in 1975, this first of the megadomes was meant to serve as the centerpiece of economic development...
...The city's football-starved fans filled the 70,000 seats of the Gator Bowl on a weeknight, just to show Irsay they could do it...
...Under the energetic leadership of William Hudnut, the city's mayor, the $88 million Hoosier Dome was built without a commitment for a major team to play in it...
...That development would have taken place anyway, they said...
...In 1980 the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce produced a much-quoted study that attributed $33 million of the city's annual economy to the presence of the Pirates baseball team and the Steelers football team...
...This is a make-or-break year," SADS executive director Jim Eskin told The Wall Street Journal...
...jobs are finished when the stadium is...
...Nonsense, says Robert Baade, a scholar who has also investigated the issue...
...Their days as the NFL's "Ain'ts" are over, for now at least...
...The domes may bring in some business, but offsetting that is the operating deficit," said Bruce Bingham, a consultant with Peat, Marwick and Mitchell Co...
...But the evidence is mixed...
...is not a toast of the rich and famous...
...In Detroit, it's been working the other way around...
...The jobs that are permanent and abundant aren't exactly lucrative...
...winds at their backs...
...Its seating capacity of 55,000 is not enough, he says, and it lacks the luxury sky boxes of more modern stadiums, where your true sports fan can lounge above the fray, isolated from the roar of the crowd but blessed with quadrophonic sound and a 25-inch Trinitron...
...Call them Porkdomes...
...Over the past decade, municipal leaders and sports teams owners have become afflicted with what might be called an edifice complex as at least 20 cities across the continent wager $100 million or more on the curative powers of new or improved stadiums, most of them domes...
...But that was just the downpayment...
...Once the dome was ready, Hudnut enticed (some Baltimoreans would say "stole") the Colts from Baltimore...
...San Antonio is a small market...
...Tack on annual operating losses of up to $12 million...
...Like most men of faith, the high priests of dome-side economics rely more on the will to believe than the earthly evidence...
...Louis Cardinals, who had been complaining about Busch Stadium in particular and St...
...He is the owner of the Miami Dolphins football team who did not like the Orange Bowl, where his team had played for years...
...Never mind that since acquiring the team Cooke's capital appreciation from its stock has amounted to more than $50 million...
...It's name is Joe Robbie...
...So many residents are fleeing that U-Haul has had to hire drivers to bring home the trucks from oneway trips out...
...Indianapolis was a great sports town and was well-known already," says Robert Bluthardt, chairman of the ballparks committee of the American Society for Baseball Research...
...And the pressure sends fans out the exits with 45-m.p.h...
...The noise, which was much louder—their report compared it to the sound of a jackhammer pounding concrete five feet away—when a Twin hit a ball than when a Cardinal did, meant that the skills of the Cardinal fielders were more likely to have been adversely affected by it...
...Last year the Minnesota Twins's winning percentage on the road was .358, but it was .740 in the Metrodome, where the noise level during the World Series, according to those decible meters flashing on the television screen, was higher than those beside jets at the Minneapolis airport...
...The money spent at sports events is often redirected from other fun...
...As the construction costs ballooned, city fathers began explaining that this was no mere stadium...
...The Hoosier Dome is a technological marvel with a fabric top kept aloft by columns of air...
...With the boom now bust, the city is hobbling along with an economic base_ as hapless as August is humid...
...The Win Dome: What may turn out to be the most persuasive argument of all is that a covered stadium can lead to victory on the field below...
...Not that there aren't a few kinks...
...Plans for the Suncoast Dome are complicated further by a sports complex going up just across the bay in Tampa...
...It opened a decade later and has lost money ever since...
...Jack Kent Cooke complains that Robert E.Kennedy Stadium is simply no longer adequate for his Redskins...
...A few years later, the city's big-thinking boosters began laying plans for a World's Fair that would leave behind a real convention center...
...Five years later, the University of Pennsylvania did its own study that attributed no less than $300 million in economic growth to Philadelphia's sports teams...
...Bad sports town" was how he characterized the team's home for 52 years...
...When asked if taxpayers should finance the stadium, Cooke said, "I think that's the proper procedure...
...A heavy hand on the snowmelt switch, according to Smithsonian magazine, can cost $250,000 by pushing electricity consumption to surge rate levels...
...You might call them other things too...
...Plus, they were just plain lucky to get the Colts ." IP' The Come-Back-Home Dome: Hungry for revenge, Baltimore is setting out to do exactly the same thing to another city that was done to them...
...There is a footrace to get teams and if we don't get cracking, we'll fall further behind ." to-The-P11-Move-If-You-Don't-Build-Me-A-Dome Dome: The threat of losing a major league team cannot be taken lightly by any city leader who knows what happened to Brooklyn after the Dodgers left and has to fear that the same loss of sense of community and identity might occur if a similar calamity befell his city...
...The case for the Win Dome is supported by scientific research recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association...
...A group called San Antonians for a Domed Stadium (SADS) is pushing hard for a structure that they see bringing jobs and tourism...
...b) boredom...
...This despite the fact that St...
...Building the stadium was almost as hard as luring the team...
...Though it looks like a flying saucer, at least he refrained from eponymously labeling it the Moondome...
...suburbs...
...But a number of domes lose money...
...It seems certain that Washington's mayor, Marion Barry, will respond by building the stadium in the District and putting the city further in debt...
...No wonder it seldom gets mentioned as an expansion pros...
...The state's unemployment statistics topped even West Virginia's, and New Orleans boasts some of the nation's highest crime and illiteracy rates...
...Then there's the snow...
...The I'll-Move-If-You-Do-Build-Me-A-Dome Dome: Or the Hoosier Dome, as residents of Indianapolis call it...
...The fact that the Silverdome sits 30 miles up the road in Pontiac losing money seems to make no impression on Young...
...He said he was perfectly willing to renovate Tiger Stadium at his own expense if only the city would sell it to him...
...Beeeeeer, heeeere...
...Which it did— after $120 million or so in losses...
Vol. 20 • February 1988 • No. 1
