December 12, 2011
Oakland plans second vaportecture stadium for A's
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, not content to have one A's stadium plan with no real idea how to pay for it, announced on Friday that "we are sending today a letter to Commissioner Selig to make it pretty clear that Oakland wants the A's, that we have two sites for the A's that are viable that could be delivered by 2014."
Site #2 is, in fact, the current site of the Oakland Coliseum (I can't be bothered to remember its latest corporate name — nice investment, whoever owns naming rights this week!), which would be replaced by a new A's baseball stadium, a new Raiders football stadium, and a new hotel under the latest plan. (Not-very-detailed renderings available at Newballpark.org.) This "Coliseum City" would be paid for by ... okay, Quan didn't actually mention that part, but the city has a Request For Proposals out for the project, which ... actually asks the developers to submit "a description of its approach to developing financing measures." Three guesses how many of the six developers who've reportedly responded to the RFP will be proposing to fund the whole project themselves?
Coliseum City, incidentally, would also include a renovated arena for the Golden State Warriors, which is significant because the Warriors owners last week met with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and Giants CEO Larry Baer to discuss a new arena near AT&T Park to open in 2017, the year the Warriors' lease at Oracle Arena — which was completely rebuilt in 1996 for $121 million — runs out.
One more item from the Quan news conference: She said that the Giants claim they can use legal measures to delay any A's move to San Jose for as much as ten years. Which is exactly what they would say, and exactly what she would say, but just passing it along.
May 10, 2011
Developer proposes $1.95B Vegas sports complex
Texas developer Chris Milam has bought the minor-league Las Vegas 51's baseball team, which wouldn't normally be notable here — except for what Milam insists he plans to do next:
Milam has labeled the privately financed $1.95 billion project the Las Vegas National Sports Center.
With a 9,000-seat ballpark for the 51s, the proposed center, which will be located on a 63-acre parcel, will feature a 17,500-seat arena designed to house an NBA basketball team and a 36,000-seat stadium for a Major League Soccer squad.
"It's the beginning of the greatest thing ever to happen for sports in this community," said 51s executive director Don Logan, who helped broker the sale of the Pacific Coast League franchise.
That's right, $1.95 billion for an MLS stadium, an NBA arena, and a minor-league baseball stadium — and all privately financed! Since typically all three of those items put together wouldn't cost more than $600 million tops, either Milam has something up his sleeve or he's completely insane, or both. Though to be fair, it's got to cost a lot to build stadiums out of liquid metal.
For those playing along at home, this looks to be the warmed-over Cordish plan, which hasn't been heard from in a couple of years, but stadium and arena plans never really die, especially in Vegas. The baseball stadium would be expandable to 36,000 seats to be MLB-ready if a team could be lured there; as Craig Calcaterra notes, Las Vegas' entirely tourist-based economy is a lousy fit for MLB, but as vaportecture goes, at least Milam is dreaming big.
November 30, 2010
In space, no one can hear you boo
Just when it was looking like a terminally slow news day: SPACE STADIUM!
Placed inside a half-kilometer crater, the Stadium of International Lunar Olympics would be round, with space for 100,000 spectators. It would use digital lighting to project field markers. On the tower, there would be a huge hotel, restaurants and a Jeff Bridges-lookalike in space suit, watching people killing each other.
No word yet on how much such a stadium would cost, what its marginal revenue impact would be on the lunar economy, or how long it will be before the Cincinnati Bengals demand their own algae-driven life-support system.