It’s a full slate this week, so let’s do this!
- The proposed $180 million (or so) in public subsidies for upgrades to the Seattle Mariners‘ stadium would go to pay for such things as “new artwork, more club-level seating and a 175-seat brewpub that’s open to the outside with special access to the park for ticket holders and Diamond Club patrons,” according to Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat. He focuses on the brewpub, but at that price tag, I’m more worried about what artwork they’re considering.
- If you’ve been wanting to read an article that argues that a 76-year-old stadium is “old, a remnant from another era,” by comparing it unfavorably to a 106-year-old stadium, Bill Reynolds of the Providence Journal has you covered. Then he throws in a threat that the Pawtucket Red Sox could move to Worcester without a stadium at the end, either because he knew his main argument that McCoy Stadium is too old, not like Fenway, which is the good kind of old was kind of weird, or because he hadn’t written all the way to the bottom of the page yet.
- If you’ve been wanting an article about how small the carbon footprint is of modern stadiums without taking into account the carbon footprint of building another new stadium every 20 years, Ken Belson of the New York Times has you covered, because of course he does.
- And if you’ve been wanting an article arguing that Calgary shouldn’t foot the bill for a new Flames arena, This magazine has you covered, which is kind of cool because I wrote an article for This about how the SkyDome was a money suck for Toronto way back in 1999, though I think the only surviving online version of it is this strangely formatted one on some vestigial backwater of my own website.
- Actual Associated Press headline from this week about the old and new Milwaukee Bucks arenas: “Bradley Center closure to eliminate 650 jobs; new arena to support 620 jobs.” I can’t tell if this is intentional or unintentional irony, but at least it’s honest.
- The Buffalo Bills owners may not be super-psyched about building a new stadium, but everyone else seems to want them to, including not just NFL commissioner Roger Goodell but also the Buffalo News, which editorialized that “it has to get done eventually to secure the long-term viability of the Bills in Western New York.” Because otherwise the team could move, like the owners have absolutely not threatened to do in any way! Feel the urgency, already, people!
- Russia has built a bunch of soccer stadiums nobody really needs for the World Cup, just like Brazil did before them, but when it was Brazil the New York Times didn’t include a discussion of what Immanuel Kant would think of it.
- Finally, a news story that’s not about the news coverage itself! Nashville is proposing to swap out which state fairgrounds land would be handed over to Nashville S.C. for new private development alongside a new soccer stadium for land that would be kept as fairgrounds, while one city councilmember thinks maybe it’s kind of a dumb idea to give a pro soccer team’s owners free land and they shouldn’t do that at all. Three guesses which proposal is more likely to get voted on next Tuesday.
- The Atlanta Falcons‘s broken retractable roof may finally be in operation tomorrow for an Atlanta United match. So if you wanted a reason to watch an Atlanta United match other than the fact that the team is in first place, yeah, you’re apparently like most U.S. soccer fans.
- A Suffolk County legislative committee has endorsed building a $1.1 billion arena complex in Ronkonkoma, almost certainly because somebody told them, “Nah, that seems more like a Shelbyville idea.”
- MLS commissioner Don Garber took time out during his announcement that F.C. Cincinnati would be the league’s 9,813th team (all numbers approximate) to throw shade at the proposed Detroit expansion team for proposing to play in a football stadium, ew, instead of a soccer-only stadium. “They can talk about what those ideas might be, but they were really front runners when they were looking at the jail site,” sighed the commissioner, gazing off wistfully into the distance (all narrative descriptions approximate).
- The Pawtucket Red Sox owners haven’t yet said whether they’ll back House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s new stadium financing plan, either because they’re afraid they’ll somehow be on the hook for paying for their own stadium or just because they’re just playing hard to get.
- And finally, here’s a $70 million high school football stadium in Texas whose opening has been delayed because its concrete is cracking, because it’s been a few years since we had one of those. Happy June, everybody!
Any stadium space used on art is lost revenue. There could just as easily be a revenue producing Schlitz Malt Liquor sign where that Picasso hangs.
All of this shit infuriates me, but the public subsidy to help a perfectly profitable business with a perfectly fine facility install a 175 seat Brew Pub really makes me want to just right off our society as a failure and start over.
And what’s in it for the non team affiliated brew pubs in the area?
The only way they could make this more offensive is if the brew pub was not open to fans or members of the public at all but existed solely for the use of members of the owner’s family (with the taxpayers paying the operating and staffing costs, of course).
I hope there will be some sort of announcement when the revolution starts?
It’ll be on Facebook Live.
The Revolution will not be livestreamed
For Seattle, with it’s past political and public harangues against taxpayer subsidies for stadiums and billionaire team owners, it’s surprising that there hasn’t been a peep about the Safeco subsidy among the citizenry and the political class. The indifference may be due to the public being primarily occupied with the issue of tax dollars subsidizing housing for the increasing homeless population, e.g., proposed head tax on business which has resulted in broad opposition from business and some of the public.
I have no idea who Steve Smith of Ronkonkoma is but his failure to acknowledge the LI Ducks & Bethpage Park’s existence saddens me.
Indeed. Now if they could just bring back the Commack Arena…
Enjoyed the SkyDome redux Neil.
As I suspect you know, after the Jays ‘negotiated’ lease concessions worth the $72m, driving the new stadium ownership group into bankruptcy (SportCo followed the Provincially funded StadCo down the drain, I believe), the stadium was put up for sale again and was purchase for around $25m by… you guessed it, the team’s new owners…
So the $600m+ (I know some people who’ve looked at the actual numbers have suggested the “true” total construction and debt servicing costs up to the point that Ontario Gov’t pulled the ‘chute’ was closer to $800m, though that may have been C$) stadium was first sold for $151m, then knocked down to $25m.
It takes a special kind of stupid to do something like this… but at least the team now owns the building and all obligations thereof.
Did you ever find out if they stadium did get some kind of property tax abatement? I know that the Canadiens complained about their $10m annual property tax bill at the (then) Molson centre (and eventually got some form of relief)… so $12m for SkyDome seems a tad light in the first place. Both buildings are in relatively high rent districts…
In rocket science they talk about Big Dumb Boosters, BDBs. After spending a fortune on deluxe, reusable shuttles, they came to realize simple, disposable, boosters were more cost efficient. Canada needs to get over it’s crazy fixation with retractable domes, lowering roofs, baseball/track, and football/hockey megaplexes. They should build single use, smaller, dumber stadiums. SDSs. Come one it’s not rocket science.
Great story about the Skydome. Since it was built, Toronto’s condo boom
has had the Skydome surrounded by tall generic skyscrapers give it a more
iconic look than ever before. Too bad not great place to watch a baseball game or any other sporting event.
Will be going to the former SkyDome for the first time in two years next month. Hope the viewing is acceptable to watch The Foo Fighters.
If you adjust for different sizes of the countries there was this year a 4th level German Soccer promotion game (Regionalliga champions trying to get a 3.BL spot) that had more viewers than any of the MLS playoff games in the last 10 years.
MLS does get generally good attendance by international standards but that interest seems thin when you take in the consistently poor TV numbers.