Article published June 17, 2006
DETROIT
Tiger Stadium is out of time; beloved ballpark will be torn down
Tiger Stadium, which sits empty along I-75 in Detroit, is to be demolished to make room for shops and housing, but the playing field will be preserved.
(
ASSOCIATED PRESS
)
|
By MARK ZABORNEY
BLADE STAFF WRITER
The sights, the smells, the roar of summer days and nights flooded back yesterday as area residents learned that a slice of Americana - their slice - is about to meet the wrecking ball.
Tiger Stadium at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull is being demolished to make way for homes and stores under a plan that will save parts of the historic baseball venue, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick announced.
It opened as Navin Field on April 12, 1912, three days before the Titanic sank. Also formerly known as Briggs Stadium, it was home to Detroit's major league baseball and professional football teams for much of the 20th century.
The last Tiger game at the stadium was Sept. 27, 1999. The hulk, mostly vacant and idle since, fell into disrepair in recent years.
But the first thoughts yesterday were of family times, of meeting with friends, of fathers and sons and daughters taking in a Sunday afternoon doubleheader.
"My dad taught me about baseball there. He taught me how to keep score," said Dan Arend of Toledo, who grew up in Archbold, Ohio, and went to his first Tiger game in 1967 with his father, Patrick.The memories were of World Series and All-Star games; of bone-chilling Thanksgiving Day Lions games; of Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline; of Hopalong Cassidy and Night Train Lane.
The fare was simple and the choices limited: hot dogs, Stroh's, peanuts, popcorn. Hailing a vendor when seated midway between two aisles beat a struggle to the concession stand.
That meant "10 people handled your hot dog before you got it," recalled Ron Spann of Waterville, who went to his first Tigers game in the late 1950s or early 1960s with his father, Hurshell. Al Kaline was in right field, and the Tigers lost to the Orioles, 1-0, he said.
"You'd sit in the stands and listen to Ernie Harwell on the transistor," Mr. Spann said.
You wouldn't sit in padded comfort - not in the old wood-slat box seats and grandstand seats or on the benches in the centerfield bleachers.
But it was cozy.
"You could sit by anybody, and it was like you were neighbors all your life," said Patrick Arend, Dan's father.
Obstructed view seats placed some patrons behind pillars. "You'd hope you wouldn't get those seats," Dan Arend said.
But get a good seat, and "it was like you were right on top of the game," he said.
Mr. Spann wouldn't save the stadium based on nostalgia. "It's a relic. A lot of memories, but it's old school," he said.
Among the memories is that first view of the field, after the busy city corner and the trek through the bowels of the stadium. "As you walked down the aisle, all of a sudden you saw the greenery of the field. It was breathtaking," Mr. Spann said. "But the rest of [the stadium] really was a dump."
Demolishing the ballpark will cost anywhere from $2 million to $6 million, said Peter Zeiler, an aide to the president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp.
The expense will be offset by the value of the stadium as scrap and as a treasure chest of sports memorabilia, which could include seats and signs. "A lot of people want a lot of things out of there," Mr. Zeiler said.
He said the city of Detroit hopes to find a salvage contractor familiar with marketing sports memorabilia that can begin offering pieces of the stadium to the public by October.
The decision to demolish the stadium follows years of intense efforts to find a developer who would refurbish it or convert it to other uses. "Nobody was interested in the site with a stadium on it," Mayor Kilpatrick said.
The city will put out bids for architectural designs within several weeks and seek bids from developers by October or November, said George Jackson, president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and a top development aide to the mayor.
The project will include 150 to 300 homes and 20,000 to 40,000 square feet of retail space, Mr. Jackson said. The playing field will be maintained as a park and baseball field.
Jeff Mielcarek, baseball coach the last 20 years of Toledo's Central Catholic High School, said, "If you can't have the stadium, at least have the field and some kinds of memorabilia so kids will always know where it was.''
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Contact Mark Zaborney at:
mzaborney@theblade.com
or 419-724-6182.
Permanent Link
|
|
 |
|
Search
advertisement
