Abstract
Since the 1990s, cities and professional sports franchises have engaged in a frenzied competition to maintain or lure teams, build modern amenity-laden venues, and revitalize underdeveloped or underperforming downtown areas. This article argues that the case of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (1982) in Minneapolis is instructive for understanding the current context and prevailing trends in stadium redevelopment. To secure a move of baseball and football operations from suburban Bloomington to the city of Minneapolis, boosters and city officials lauded the prospects for downtown revitalization the stadium would bring. Leverage of a stadium’s “intangibles” was particularly alluring to municipal and business leadership in the 1970s as cities like Minneapolis wrestled with population loss and a post-industrial reality. Despite promises unfulfilled, threats of franchise loss and the prospect for downtown revitalization in contemporary stadium development games remain a lasting legacy of Minneapolis’s dome debate.
A domed stadium is the most persuasive badge of Big League standing, and the prominent businessmen who control other people’s bond money in American cities tend to consider life incomplete without the reassurance that they live in a Big League Town.
1
“I don’t know how many of you have ever had the opportunity to wrestle an alligator,” quipped Harvey B. Mackay at a meeting of the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce in June 1974, “[but] attempting to get a handle on the stadium problem has proved to be a similar challenge.” The local paper magnate, and later author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive (1988) and other entrepreneurial self-help texts, had recently been tapped to chair the Chamber’s Stadium Task Force, a diverse consortium of metropolitan interests and stakeholders. 2 The Chamber had mobilized following the doomed attempt to bring a domed professional sports stadium to downtown Minneapolis’s blighted warehouse district in 1973. The task force’s charge was to address the pressing concern that Minnesota’s recently procured baseball and football franchises would depart for sunnier climes without partnered investment in modern accommodations. Mackay’s metaphor was apt. The Twin Cities’s “stadium problem” pitted suburb versus city, community versus community, franchise versus franchise, college athletes versus professionals, public versus private interests, and so on. How do you satisfy such varied constituencies? “You don’t!” Mackay responded, “you try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number and let the chips fall where they may.” 3
While the decision to build the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (1982) in downtown Minneapolis’s “obsolescent” Industry Square neighborhood was over four years away, Mackay’s speech telegraphed the direction of the task force’s dreams and desires. He spoke of a “domed stadium” as the desired end, despite the fact that various designs—single-sport and multi-use; covered and uncovered—would be on the table through the end of 1978. Raising the stadium dilemma with the Minneapolis Chamber was also instructive. It was their Stadium Task Force for sure, but professional sports in Minnesota was a metropolitan affair. Teams were named for the state rather than cities, and the franchises played their games in suburban Bloomington, directly to the south of both Minneapolis and St. Paul. But it was the 1970s and like comparable midwestern cities, Minneapolis navigated economic crises and population loss. 4 The former mill city and industrial powerhouse was muddling through a massive twenty-year urban renewal program downtown with limited return. Here were two professional franchises (Major League Baseball’s [MLB] Minnesota Twins and the National Football League’s [NFL] Minnesota Vikings) that not only made Minneapolis “a major league community” but whose “multiplier effect is awesome.” “Could we lose our major league sports?” Mackay asked rhetorically. “We could, and if that day comes we would be on our way to becoming a COLD OMAHA!” (or the “cold, wintry wasteland, remote from civilization” that “all too many people in other parts of our country think of Minnesota”). A new multipurpose stadium—deemed financially prudent and less wasteful, indicative of the constraints within which boosters operated in the 1970s—could solve the twin crises of franchise loss and status loss. If sited in downtown Minneapolis, it could serve as a post-industrial anchor and stimulate ancillary economic development. Ultimately, it would serve as the centerpiece of Minneapolis’s post-urban renewal downtown redevelopment program. As Mackay noted, “think of the impact on employment if a major new stadium should be built in our area! Construction work, equipment, supplies, services, insurance, real estate, taxes . . . the list is endless.” 5
Oddly enough, the audience that June evening had overseen the metropolitan area’s previous speculative stadium venture. Two decades earlier, after observing Milwaukee County Stadium’s (1953) successful luring of MLB’s Boston Braves franchise, Minneapolis Chamber boosters selected a site south of the city in the undeveloped suburban expanse of Bloomington. There, Metropolitan Stadium (the Met) rose in 1956 amid the empty fields and surrounding parking swath. 6 Cheap land and current and future highway access made the site attractive to planners and local leaders who steered the development. As a burgeoning bedroom community, Bloomington lacked the financial capital to undertake such a project, so with a touch of regional planning, Minneapolis actively promoted suburban growth, serving as executor on the development and backing the bonds with its own credit. Once open, Minneapolis owned and operated Bloomington’s stadium. The boosters’ vision panned out in 1961, enticing Calvin Griffith to relocate his Washington Senators to play baseball in the Met. The NFL granted the metropolitan area an expansion franchise that same year. Almost from the beginning, the relationship between the teams and the Met was tenuous if not unsettled. Complaints about its suitability fueled by envy of ever newer stadia and amenities fed threats of franchise relocation. Such overtures worried local boosters now wedded to the “big league status” teams brought to the cities and the metropolitan community. It was clear that at least one new stadium was needed (the Met was particularly unkind to football alongside the new coliseums hosting the ascendant league) to salve those threats and concerns. The area around the Met still had plenty of space to accommodate a single-purpose stadium, and in fact, it had added the Met Center (1967) hockey arena to host the Minnesota North Stars, enhancing the growing suburb’s hold on Minnesota’s professional sports. Yet, as the failed 1973 bid for a downtown Minneapolis stadium and the task force’s subsequent formation suggested, Mackay and other Minneapolis boosters saw the region’s stadium needs as a chance to rectify the perhaps hasty decision to build and maintain in Bloomington what could and should have been within the city itself.
The rise and decline of the Metrodome has served as the source for a number of lengthy studies. Minnesota senator and recent presidential hopeful, Amy Klobuchar—whose father Jim Klobuchar was a popular Minneapolis newspaper columnist that occasionally opined on and pined for the Metrodome in the 1970s—wrote her Yale senior thesis on the political machinations behind the stadium debate, which was eventually published in book form as Uncovering the Dome (1986). 7 Jim Klobuchar’s colleague, Jon Weiner, later published Stadium Games (2000), a reporter’s analysis of Twin Cities stadium development from the Met to the Metrodome and the push by Twins owner Carl Polhad, to secure public funding or financing for a baseball-only stadium in the 1990s. 8 Architectural historian Kristin M. Anderson’s comprehensive examination of the Metrodome situates its plan and design within the broader context of stadium development trends, arguing that the much-maligned structure was doomed by the political necessity to be frugal. The “last of the cookie-cutter stadiums” was an “economy version of those buildings,” a flawed attempt “to appease everyone while satisfying no one.” 9
While these wide-ranging studies explore critical components of the Metrodome’s story, particularly its rich political and structural dimensions, each is limited in its examination of the role the Minneapolis’s growth machine—boosters, city officials, and their hired-hands—imagined the stadium would play within Minneapolis’s evolving downtown redevelopment scheme and vision. 10 The Metrodome constituted a significant public investment in private economic development, with no guaranteed return. When compared to the other stadium sites and types under consideration, however, it did—to borrow a couple of sports clichés—possess tremendous upside and desired economic development intangibles in a post-industrial urban context anxious for growth. That narrative framing was essential to selling the public on the possibility and necessity of the move from Bloomington to the Industry Square neighborhood, where it would eventually rise. The story of the Metrodome, then, is also the story of ascendant urban economic development trends coming out of the 1970s into the 1980s. The boosters argued that it had to be built to maintain the city’s status in a troubling economic climate, to stave off the frightening future of irrelevance encapsulated in Mackay’s “Cold Omaha” threat. That rhetoric, combined with the desire for a post-industrial anchor and the Metrodome’s short-lived tenure, illuminates the integration of professional sports stadiums into the broader forces of urban redevelopment in the last forty years. 11
Speculative Stadiums, Franchise Mobility, and the Lure of the Major Leagues
Metropolitan Stadium, completed in 1956, was part of the second golden age of professional sports stadium construction, typically traced to Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium (1932), where multipurpose exurban or suburban stadia reigned. Municipal Stadium also marked the beginning of the shift from stadium development paid for by the professional franchises themselves to a model that saw stadia as public goods requiring municipal funding or financing. 12 In the early 1950s, Milwaukee County Stadium perfected a public funding mechanism and an outward migration in stadium development that immediately lured MLB’s Braves franchise from Boston, delivering the city of Milwaukee coveted big league status. 13 Learning from its Wisconsin neighbors, Minneapolis boosters, business leaders, and city officials facilitated the development of the Met beginning in 1953, the same year County Stadium opened its gates to professional baseball. As there, the Met was initially built to host the local minor league baseball team, the Minneapolis Millers, but it was expressly constructed with the intent to host a major league club. 14
Plans brought the stadium out into the suburban hinterland south of Minneapolis. Aerial photographs of the Met in its infancy highlight a stark barren landscape dotted by the stadium itself and its surrounding parking lot. 15 Despite its lonely visage, the development of the stadium in Bloomington had some strategic intent. Minneapolis and St. Paul had yet to engage in large-scale slum clearance so central city land was sparse, although the shared, exurban Midway area received some consideration for new stadium construction. 16 The thrust of immediate postwar development clearly favored suburban expansion, and Bloomington was primed for growth. Its population had increased tenfold since 1940 to approximately 50,000 residents by 1960, and it was adjacent not only to both cities but near the region’s major airport. 17 Minneapolis business leaders steered the Met’s planning process and Bloomington welcomed them with open arms. In the end, the future Metrodome antagonists were Met allies, reaching a compromise that built the stadium on Bloomington land while its funding, insurance, and ownership rested with the city of Minneapolis. In this sense, the vision was truly metropolitan: Bloomington obtained a cornerstone development at low risk; Minneapolis leveraged its credit on revenue from future rents and gate receipts; and fans received a stadium with perceived convenience and accessibility.
After five years, what first seemed a gamble appeared a clever investment. Following the 1960 season, Clark Griffith announced he was moving the Washington Senators to the Met where they would play as the Minnesota Twins, a name befitting the ascendant metropolitan and state-wide impulses of fan identity. Griffith was drawn to the Met as a wholly modern venue with few equals in MLB. The move was also motivated by Griffith’s racism, admitting in private that the region’s mostly white demography lured him away from D.C. 18 That same year, the NFL awarded the stadium the Minnesota Vikings franchise, playing off the state’s Scandinavian white-settler heritage and owned by the appropriately named Max Winter. The Vikings name too seemed to fit as Bloomington was now home to the northern-most stadium in a league whose full season ran September to January. The combination of climate with an open, mostly single-use design never provided the Vikings the comfort they required in the evolving and expanding league. In this sense, the Met’s fate was almost written in its sudden success after five years of lying in wait. The teams delivered the coveted big league status the stadium’s boosters so desired, and the city earned revenue from the Met throughout its tenure. Nonetheless, the once modern stadium was swiftly upstaged by glistening new competition.
City of Minneapolis, Metropolitan Stadium. 1963.
Within a context of rapid facility modernization and franchise hypermobility, the fear of losing its new franchises and status animated Minneapolis’s stadium debate in the 1970s. No sooner had the teams completed their inaugural seasons when the once fresh Met was rendered obsolete by a new stadium template. In late 1961, the first of the “concrete donuts,” District of Columbia Stadium, was completed for Washington’s NFL franchise and the replacement Senators, offering the prototype for fully enclosed multipurpose stadium design and commencing the construction boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Features like moveable grandstands made D.C. Stadium truly multipurpose, a stark contrast to the Met’s slapdash expansion and modifications. Four years later, the Houston Astrodome, the first covered professional baseball stadium, would similarly shake-up the world of stadium design and force the hand of local boosters and desirous owners spying inhospitable yet potentially profitable climates. Viable domed stadia suddenly made professional baseball attractive in burgeoning Sunbelt metropolitan areas and football more comfortable for northern audiences. The Astrodome included a host of new stadium amenities as well as a neighboring entertainment complex featuring an amusement park, hotel, and convention center. Built on the undeveloped outskirts of the city, the Astrodome’s holistic planning scheme suggested that stadia could and should anchor related businesses. 19
A fortified modern design template facilitated a burst of stadium speculation and construction that contributed to an era of significant big league expansion. Between 1964 and 1971, seven new multipurpose professional sports stadiums opened for play in New York City, Atlanta, Oakland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Built by municipalities, often as part of extensive urban renewal projects, the stadiums fell under city, county, or quasi-public stadium authority ownership. These structures tended to share a fully enclosed austere concrete and steel image, multi-deck interiors, and artificial playing surfaces that allowed for derisive mocking of their remarkable sameness. 20 At the time, however, the new digs proved alluring to the mobile and malleable ownership regimes, as Atlanta’s and Oakland’s speculative ventures poached the Braves and Athletics franchises, respectively, after only thirteen seasons in Milwaukee and Kansas City. Even without new stadia in the offering, franchises were willingly mobile. Washington lost the Senators again in 1971 in a move to Dallas-Fort Worth. The Seattle Pilots’s first season bankruptcy and relocation to Milwaukee highlighted the fragility of MLB franchise ownership heading into the 1970s. Given the franchise frenzy, new stadia kept professional baseball tethered to several cities where teams might have otherwise played the field. 21
While multipurpose functionality defined the age of the concrete coliseum, similar concerns sparked a building boom for professional football stadia, particularly in regions where multi-use facilities did not make financial or strategic sense in the short term. Notably, suburban single-use stadiums were built for the Buffalo Bills, Boston/New England Patriots, New York Giants, and Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s. 22 The Pontiac Silverdome (1975) was a unique experiment in stadium design, if not a cautionary tale for single-use stadium development as an economic incubator. Home to the NFL’s Detroit Lions, the Silverdome’s exurban siting and football-only design severely limited the potential for annual use. Following the expansion of the regular season to sixteen games in 1976, NFL teams could only guarantee ten home dates each year (two pre-season and eight regular season contests). While professional soccer franchises and even National Basketball Association (NBA) teams might play in football-only indoor stadia—as was the case with the Detroit Pistons—and special events and sport spectaculars might express interest, a ten-date guaranteed slate proved a risky venture for Pontiac investors. 23 Although celebrated as the largest NFL venue and serving as a model for cold-weather teams, the dome’s expected trickle-down development never arrived in Pontiac and the Lions stayed just over twenty years. 24 As the cases of renewal stadia and suburban domes suggest, franchise preservation and attraction, public financing and management, and multi-use venues that might stimulate ancillary development defined this intense wave of stadium construction in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Business Community Coalesces Around the Preservation of Big League Status
Stadium speculation and team mobility weighed heavily on Twin Cities’s pro-sports boosters as they looked out upon the Met’s hastily assembled accommodations. After twelve years of Twins and Vikings play amid a flurry of construction and relocation, the Metropolitan Council—an organization composed of local corporate leaders and power brokers—noted the “danger of losing these valuable franchises” and the big league status they credited with concurrent economic development. 25 Their worst fear was that franchise loss would relegate Minneapolis to a “Cold Omaha,” as Mackay’s phrasing stuck and defined the parameters of the stadium push. 26 The narrative suggested that the Twins and Vikings provided much needed panache to an otherwise remote region, despite the vibrant cultural life and recreational opportunities Minnesotans had long carved out for themselves. It was also an admission that the Metropolitan Council and their constituents had become dependent on professional sports as a publicity machine. After all, a Twins or Vikings playoff game or a Time profile of Rod Carew or a Sports Illustrated feature on Fran Tarkenton reached a broader audience than coverage of a Guthrie Theater production, Minnesota Orchestra season, or other high-class galas and affairs. The teams’ mutual success on the field in the 1960s and 1970s also situated the region in the national sports consciousness. 27 Winning, however, was not necessarily enough to placate leering team ownership. Just as public as the teams’ victories were their respective displeasure with the Met.
With big league status imperiled by freewheeling franchise mobility and the Met itself, boosters, team owners, and media personalities played a mutually reinforcing game imploring stadium renovation or replacement. As task forces, councils, and chambers of commerce reiterated the need, the local press suggested that franchise departure in the absence of facility upgrades was not “a threat but a fact.” 28 Meanwhile, team owners hinted at their willingness to move and made overtures to stoke fear and spur action. Max Winter traveled to Los Angeles to scope out the recently vacated Olympic Memorial Stadium following the Rams move to Anaheim, a power play echoing the Minneapolis Lakers’s migration in 1960. On the sports page, renowned columnist and stadium booster Sid Hartman captured Vikings’s Head Coach Bud Grant’s assessment of the moment. “If we don’t build a stadium we won’t be big league very long,” Grant told Hartman. “The issue is not whether we want to build a stadium. The issue is do we want to stay big league.” 29 Heightened concerns about status and a frigid future of obscurity compelled various Minneapolis stakeholders to act.
As early as 1971—ten years after the Twins’s arrival—boosters and business leaders proposed a new covered stadium sited in Minneapolis’s blighted downtown warehouse district. The Minneapolis press buoyed the new stadium’s prospects by running feature-length reporting on the stadia that inspired it in cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Atlanta, and Houston. Serial analysis combined a critique of public funding and financing vis-à-vis construction and operation costs with accolades for the intangible benefits associated with stadium development in suffering city centers. Pittsburgh’s long-time urban renewal director credited Three Rivers Stadium (1970) with preserving the Pirates and Steelers franchises. 30 A Cincinnati city councilor said, “we were struggling to save downtown” when the opportunity to build Riverfront Stadium (1970) presented itself. “The stadium is a great asset . . . we counted on it for our revival.” 31 For the communities involved, publicly financed stadium development was explicitly an attempt to preserve or create, as was the case with Atlanta, their “big-league image.” 32
By 1971, Minneapolis was twenty-five years into its own downtown renewal project, the comprehensive “Gateway” clearance and redevelopment plan. Initially envisioned in 1945 by Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey as a way to clear the city’s Lower Loop—“an economic and social liability” and series of “skid row flophouses,” “dilapidated industrial structures,” “taverns and pawnshops,” “rat-infested bottle-lined alleys,” and general “tax blight” lining downtown’s main arteries—the proposal awaited the favorable slum clearance policies coming after World War II. 33 Once Title I of the 1949 Housing Act was amended to allow business development in 1954, Gateway began to move forward, with wide-scale clearance commencing in 1958. In the previous twenty years, no major buildings had risen in Minneapolis’s downtown, so Gateway sought to provide the central business district with a modern facelift, spur private development, and allow the city to compete with the burgeoning suburbs of the expanding metropolitan area like Bloomington. Residents eventually displaced by clearance – derided in the planners’ literature and an afterthought to city officials– migrated to nearby residential districts like Elliot Park. Slum clearance was swift, but redevelopment was slow, leaving the downtown cluttered with ample surface parking and un- and underdeveloped lots. There were some impressive feats, including major works by modernist architects like Minoru Yamasaki (The Northwestern National Life Building, 1965) and Philip Johnson (IDS Center, 1972), but it was 1978 before all of the cleared plots sold. The 1970s and its financial woes proved particularly harsh on Minneapolis redevelopment—other than the IDS Center, the only other major downtown building to rise that decade, the Hennepin County Government Center, was publicly funded. 34
It was in this milieu that Minneapolis boosters and architect Richard Cerny lobbied for another massive public structure within the redeveloping downtown. Combining the stadium/urban renewal strategy of Minneapolis’s deindustrializing counterparts with the wonder of Houston’s Astrodome, Cerny developed the design for a multipurpose domed stadium that would accommodate up to 65,000 spectators. Renderings added a unique touch to Minneapolis’s version of the standardized plan: a ten-level parking ramp that encircled the stadium, with room for over 5,000 automobiles. This massive parking ring would be fed by smooth traffic flows from nearby Interstate 94 and freeways serving the west metro area, a clear attempt to stave off concerns that a downtown stadium could not provide the highway and parking convenience of suburban Bloomington. 35 The city and the Vikings enthusiastically supported the initial dome proposal, but the project stalled amid perceived public dissatisfaction, the noted opposition of St. Paul and Bloomington power brokers, and infighting among Minneapolis politicians. 36
After the initial downtown dome plan collapsed in 1973, the Greater Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce created their stadium task force to steer a new process and reach the desired outcome of the teams and business community. With the Minneapolis Chamber’s involvement and the leadership of Harvey Mackay, the task force’s origins and make-up denoted that any new stadium would be expected to preserve the metropolitan area’s big league status. It also alluded to the necessity of fostering financial investment and economic development in the city and surrounding region. The Chamber had appointed this task force in part “to recognize which factors contribute to the economic development of the total community.” 37 Such language codified the critical place of professional sports in the metropolitan power structure, and the Chamber’s regularly published pamphlet, “Downtown Stadium Report” (1973-1978), persistently boosted the connection between big league image and economic growth through profiles and testimonies of the city’s business establishment, including Mackay, the Dayton family, and John Cowles Jr. of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Company. 38
As the fate of the Twins and Vikings became stand-ins for corporate retention in an era of suburban and regional migration, other booster and business groups like the Metropolitan Council and the Minneapolis Downtown Council joined the stadium fray. The Met Council successfully lobbied for the formation of a Metropolitan Sports Commission to study a range of proposals, from the renovation of the Met to the construction of a new multipurpose or football-only stadium. The Council’s recommendation for the commission echoed commentators fearful of losing the Twins and Vikings as well as the beneficiaries of new stadia elsewhere. “Most people,” they wrote, “agree that having major sports teams are a public asset.” 39 As the Met Council focused on the broader questions of stadium siting and funding feasibility, the Minneapolis Downtown Council aligned itself with the Chamber and the city of Minneapolis to promote the teams’ relocation to the downtown area. Each organization funded feasibility studies and research endeavors that, operating under the guise of objectivity, favored the construction of a stadium in Minneapolis over Met renovation or new Bloomington development.
Specifically, the assembled task forces and commissions engaged the Real Estate Research Corporation (RERC), a Midwest entity with extensive experience in the sporting field, to study stadium possibilities. In late 1974, RERC released an initial report signaling the financial viability of a multipurpose dome in the metropolitan area. It had analyzed a multitude of comparable stadia of recent vintage and explored five possible outcomes: doming the University of Minnesota’s Memorial Stadium in Minneapolis, enlarging and covering the Met, an open football stadium, a domed football stadium, and a multipurpose dome. Notably, RERC did not consider any specific locations other than the existing structures in Bloomington and on campus. Underscoring its purported objective view, the RERC informed stakeholders that the report should not be read as a recommendation for one option over others. Rather, their primary duties were to “consider the economic impact of a new stadium complex on the local economy” and to “suggest specific criteria to be used in the future selection of a site for the stadium facilities.” 40
The RERC’s study combined quantitative financial analysis of the alternatives with discussions of qualitative “intangible” outcomes to assess stadium viability. Renovation alternatives were all but eliminated from contention as “only the three new alternatives stadiums would be able to feasibly support themselves financially.” Even these, however, “fall sort of being able to meet the debt service requirements at their estimated development costs.” Deciding on a stadium type would require extensive stakeholder collaboration and should consider potential indirect outcomes. According to the researchers, these “social and emotional” benefits “may be of greater importance to the community than the tangible economic impact” as they are linked to “strengthening the appeal of the area” for visitors, enhancing the “desirability of residing in a community” for workers and firms, and “raising the morale within the community.” 41 In other words, RERC reinforced the significance of a community’s big league status, linking it with facilities more so than the franchises themselves.
Among viable alternatives, a multipurpose dome emerged as the only affordable option worth the expected financial risk. Estimated costs ranged from $30 million for an open football stadium to $50 million for the multipurpose dome, with domed football priced in between. RERC calculated renovations of Memorial and Met Stadiums at $33 and $39 million, respectively. Disparity in construction costs, however, was matched with inverse “financial performance estimates” or the yearly revenue available for bond retirement. Here, the multipurpose dome’s projected $3.878 million/year far outperformed the football open stadium ($1.623 million/year) and the domed football stadium ($2.625 million/year). If the primary goals were franchise and big league retention, “there is no doubt that the construction of a new multipurpose domed stadium would provide the best possible solution to accommodating major sports in the Twin Cities area,” and with climate controls, “a new multi-purpose domed stadium would generate the maximum range of event programming and . . . maximum attendance.” It would be a far more attractive venue for sporting extravaganzas like the Super Bowl as well as quasi-sporting events (rodeo, monster truck rallies, wrestling), conventions, rallies, and revivals than an open stadium. “Furthermore,” the RERC was quick to note, “a multi-purpose domed stadium would provide more intangible and public relations value for the Twin Cities than could be gained from other alternatives.” In other words, it could inflate the metro area’s existing big league status far more than the Met alone. Only site selection remained, which “should be the result of careful evaluation of all the factors which will affect stadium performance and economic impact.” Contentious and subjective, RERC refused to broach the question, despite highlighting “assemblage problems” in downtown Minneapolis due to available space. 42 RERC’s clients—the task forces—underscored the suggestion that “the indirect benefits of major league sports to this area cannot be easily measured, but they may be more important than the direct benefits.” 43 In their view, the “IMMEDIATE AND URGENT NEED” was clear and that “a new domed multi-purpose stadium is the type of facility this area needs.” 44
A Promising Post-Industrial Site Emerges
The stadium’s intangibles, or potential for indirect economic development, had been central to the boosters’ calculus since the first proposal for a downtown venue appeared in the early 1970s. By that time, a competitive ethos and rivalry among municipalities, driven by two decades of urban decline and suburban growth, had replaced the collaborative regional thinking that wrought the Met in the 1950s. Minneapolis might have underwritten the Met and in the process attracted professional sport franchises, but business leaders soon felt something was missing. As a 1971 editorial put it, “at least part of the reason for the advocacy for a Downtown site is the feeling that if Minneapolis must underwrite the greater part of the stadium revenue bonds, the city should get the economic benefits.” 45 Task force members were increasingly drawn to a new site to the east of the Gateway project and its possibility of providing “a business boost to downtown Minneapolis.” 46 The Minneapolis press flanked boosters and stadium committee members with a growing chorus of support for the ascendant site. “We believe,” wrote the Minneapolis Star in December 1975, “that the best site for a new stadium may be Minneapolis’s Industry Square” due to its proximity to downtown and potential “to stimulate business and development there.” 47
The specific site, also deemed blighted and underdeveloped by stadium supporters, sat where the central business district blended with the residential neighborhood of Elliot Park, a major landing spot for residents displaced by Gateway clearance. The University of Minnesota’s West Bank addition as well as the partially redeveloped Cedar-Riverside neighborhood were also nearby. Importantly, Industry Square was located near the junction of the Interstates 94 and 35W, with a host of on-and-off ramps connecting it with St. Paul and beyond. A conceptual proposal prepared by several architectural firms and presented to the state legislature’s Sports Facilities Subcommittee in early 1976 outlined Industry Square’s advantages. It was described as “the heart of the metropolitan area” yet with “few structures of recent construction; much obsolescence.” The site, they argued, required minimum disruption to the community as it contained “few property owners affected” and “no residents to relocate.” Ultimately, a dome in Industry Square provided an “accessible” “one-stadium solution” that “requires minimum land” and “solves many problems.” “It would also help spur the redevelopment of other portions of the Industry Square renewal area,” the authors concluded. 48
A year later, the city, its Chamber, and the Downtown Council released a report that effectively claimed a large swath of the Industry Square neighborhood for the future multipurpose dome, arguing that it would have significant benefits to the metropolitan area as a whole. At the neighborhood level, the development “stimulates new building growth,” and it would create “650 jobs for inner city people at the stadium,” an allusion to lower class, minority residents of Elliot Park and a major rhetorical flourish in the promotion of Industry Square. A Minneapolis dome also promised “$16-25 million in business generated by the stadium goer.” Speaking to indifferent citizens and the broader Twin Cities community, the report argued that a strong and vibrant downtown is important not only to city residents, but to the entire metropolitan area. The core of the city is the heart of any metropolis and without a viable core there cannot be a viable, well-integrated metropolis.
49
As the city suggested, the stadium emerged as a cornerstone of a massive post-industrial renewal program that would complement not only the residential and education uses near Industry Square but the “planned recreational uses of the river, hospital and health care delivery complex to the south and the growing urban core to the north.” 50 A serious, well-planned site proposal backed by the city’s power brokers positioned Minneapolis well for the looming site determination.
Industry Square in the 1970s, however, was not a vacant wasteland. A number of diverse concerns housed in an aging industrial urban form populated the commercial neighborhood, running the gamut of metal- and wood-working, printing and graphic design, electrical, and retail establishments. 51 These were viable entities active in the community marketplace, but they did not conform to the image of the new economy that tantalized planners and power brokers as clearance and redevelopment remained the dominant paradigm in Minneapolis. As such, Industry Square was deemed a renewal area by the city, overseen by its Housing and Redevelopment Authority. The proposed stadium site also housed a juvenile detention facility, a locally unwanted land use that the city would happily relocate for public investment that could stimulate economic development rather than stunt it. Directly adjacent were two untouchable anchor institutions, the Metropolitan Medical Center and the Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co., whose figurehead, publisher John C. Cowles, played an outsized role in the dome debate, heading the Industry Square Development Corporation and fundraising a pledge of $14.5 million from downtown business interests allowing for the purchase and donation of some of the land cleared for the stadium. 52
Robert Moffitt, Downtown East Buildings. ca. 1980.
Cowles and the Tribune Co. not only had a vested interest in the fate of Industry Square, they also subscribed to and fed the big league status narrative that defined the debate. 53 The Tribune’s and Star’s stable of sports columnists, in particular, provided persistent echoes of pro-downtown support. Whereas reportage on the stadium debate worked to feign objectivity on the topic, columnists operated alongside editorial boards to push Minneapolis’s agenda and relegate Bloomington to the margins. The renowned and relentless sports reporter Sid Hartman, at the time a Bloomington resident, was nonetheless an active booster of facility replacement and a supporter of the city’s efforts to host the dome. While Hartman shrouded commentary in sports reportage, critics of Cowles and Tribune’s role in the stadium debate cited his subtle boostering as critical to the downtown dome’s fruition. He provided a space for threats around the loss of franchises and the big league image without disclosing its obvious connection to his livelihood and power. Hartman allegedly killed colleagues’ stories on the new stadium’s potential tax burden and broke the news that neither the Twins nor Vikings would sign a long-term lease without a downtown dome in the offering. 54
In addition to columnist cheerleading, Tribune trotted out local luminaries to opine on the problems of the Met versus the prospect of a downtown dome. Owners Griffith and Winter often rhetorically condemned the Met, but it was in their personal financial interests to be handed a new or renovated stadium by bondholders and/or taxpayers from which they could profit. When Fran Tarkenton, aging star quarterback of the Vikings, took to the Star to write that “the stadium that we have used for the past 18 years is the worst facility in professional sports,” the die was cast. 55 For him, a domed stadium made obvious sense for Minnesota. Tarkenton admitted a preference to playing December and January playoff games away from the Met, a shocking refutation of coveted homefield advantage. Beyond his personal comfort, a dome’s collective intangibles made it a worthy community investment. “Sports give us a rallying point . . . something to be for and cheer for.” 56 If the metropolitan area wanted to preserve its professional sports franchises, it needed to improve and modernize, Tarkenton argued. Together, they wrought benefits “that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.” 57 Published in Industry Square, Cowles’s papers offered a space for catalyzing fears about franchise loss as well as speculation on the stadium’s potential indirect benefits of urban renewal and economic revitalization and ultimately cloaked Cowles’s and sports columnists’ financial and professional self-interest in the guise of community benefit.
Yet not everyone within the Industry Square community and its orbit was as sanguine about a downtown dome’s prospects as Cowles, Hartman, and Tarkenton. Ad hoc groups such as “Save the Met” and “Minnesotans Against the Downtown Dome” (MADD), like the city of Bloomington, fought an uphill battle against boosters, business leaders, and the press, failing to muster even a pyrrhic victory. Whereas “Save the Met” focused on the aesthetics of sport—arguing that the baseball and football were at their most pure played outdoors on real grass—MADD advocated on behalf of the nearby Elliot Park and Cedar-Riverside neighborhoods and other downtown residents and interests concerned about displacement associated with dome construction. 58 In 1979, the group filed a complaint with the Minnesota Press Council against Cowles’s Star and Tribune citing biased coverage of the stadium issue. MADD’s formal grievance noted “a broad pattern of biased and inadequate coverage caused in part by an obvious conflict of interest on the part of the managing corporation.” 59 Referencing curated Tribune and Star articles ranging from 1971 to 1979, the bias charges included a “lack of coverage of potential problems resulting from construction of the downtown stadium, opposition arguments and organized opposition activities” as well as “coverage of the stadium issue in a way which promotes construction of a downtown domed stadium.” 60
Although the complaint was ultimately dismissed by editors and the Minnesota Press Council alike, Star and Tribune staff echoed MADD’s sentiments privately and publicly within the pages of their own papers. 61 “If any other corporation was involved with this issue as much as the Star and Tribune Co., we would be doing a major story raising questions about it,” noted an anonymous Tribune reporter. 62 Many feared their reputation had been tarnished by Cowles’s high-profile support of a downtown stadium and its echoes in the sports pages. On March 1, 1979, Tribune staff members placed an ad in their own newspaper critiquing Cowles’s role in the venture and offering concern about biased coverage of the project. 63 For local residents reading articles on the dome proposal, it appeared the fix was in on the Metrodome. In the words of Brian Coyle of MADD, “here you are, trying to build your own community. Suddenly outside forces with enormous resources and power try to build this vast project—ironically, underwritten with public money—destroying everything you’re working for.” 64
Just south of Industry Square, residents of the Elliot Park Neighborhood organized to protect their community from potentially damaging ancillary development. Recognizing the momentum behind the stadium in their midst, Elliot Park Neighborhood, Inc. (EPNI) lobbied for concessions from the proposed plan, particularly the promise of full-time living-wage employment for many underemployed minority residents that called the neighborhood home. Dome advocates and their research consultants had in fact used that promise as leverage for the Industry Square site, but as EPNI swiftly found out, much of the high-wage, full-time stadium management and maintenance positions would simply carry over from the Met. The remaining part-time scraps did not come with the promise of economic security sought by the community. Moreover, if the boosters’ promise of rebirth and rippling redevelopment came to pass, Elliot Park would likely be the first adjacent neighborhood caught in the wake of overt or passive displacement, a phenomenon all too familiar for the community’s Gateway migrants. As such, EPNI took a variety of proactive steps to regulate Industry Square redevelopment in the late 1970s and early 1980s that preserved the residential character of the community. These included negotiating an agreement with the city to ensure housing rehabilitation and maintenance in conjunction with the Metrodome development, litigating for a new environmental impact statement for the dome (ultimately denied), and challenging in the court of public opinion flawed community planning measures around the stadium development. Although the Metrodome itself could not be stopped, problematic building schemes that sought to piggyback off its process were ripe for the plucking by well-organized communities.
Consultants Find Downtown Upside
As Industry Square tenants and Elliot Park residents wrestled with the prospective stadium, state and local officials and their consultants worked to ensure that momentum did not stall as it had in 1973. The Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission (MSFC), established by the legislature at the behest of the Metropolitan Council, solicited proposals for stadium plans and locations upon its creation in 1977. Seven proposals arrived of varying substance, including one for St. Paul’s Midway district and an ill-conceived suggestion for a stadium straddling the border of both Twin Cities. In addition to these urban plans, the suburban communities of Bloomington, Eagan, Coon Rapids, and Brooklyn Center also submitted proposals. 65 Minneapolis’s formal submission echoed previous claims, arguing that Industry Square is “the best place, from the public’s viewpoint, to locate a stadium.” It would serve local businessmen and families, as well as “the lady who has a group of friends she wants to entertain” due to the interplay of riverfront recreational opportunities, cultural venues, and convention space. 66 The city concluded with a forceful commitment to see the stadium through in Industry Square and a promise that it would spur further development. “The two ideals working together will make Minneapolis a vital, fun, interesting city in which to work and live,” the promoters wrote. “It will strengthen all cities in the metropolitan area because the core is strong . . . and if it is strong it presents a strong image for all of Minnesota.” 67 In July, MSFC selected three finalists: Minneapolis, Bloomington, and Eagan, an outer-ring suburb directly to the east of Bloomington. When Eagan removed itself from contention just four months later, the matchup between the Met’s original partnership was set. With no competition from St. Paul, Minneapolis was free to leverage the post-industrial renewal narrative against its suburban counterpart. Given the two choices, Cowles’s Star wondered aloud about “how much consideration should be given in stadium site selection to anticipated side benefits such as the generation nearby of new private development of business.” 68
To build their case, Minneapolis and its task force swiftly turned to RERC for research into the potential financial returns of a new downtown stadium. RERC recognized the magnitude of the forthcoming site selection, noting that “there are very few opportunities for a single governmental decision to be made that can have a far-reaching impact on the economic development of an urban area.”
69
This subtle warning highlighted the tremendous risk and potential reward of a new stadium for a city and/or metropolitan area—a decision that communities could ill afford to botch. As they put it, the investment of a government entity in a mass assembly facility can have a major impact on both the shape and rate of growth of the metropolitan area in which it is located, and as such it can have a major impact on the economic health of the community.
70
In “The Stadium Industry: Its Economic and Related Impacts” (April 1978), RERC analyzed four types of stadium developments: suburban open design, suburban covered, central business district (CBD) open, and CBD covered. There were lessons gleaned from the outcomes of recent sports infrastructure investments within each category. The suburban stadia tended to have minimum economic impact on the surrounding communities. They were built to solve the immediate problem of holding franchises at bay, without much thought to ancillary economic development. The Silverdome, for instance, came with the promise of relief to the city of Pontiac amid auto industry instability and served as a “focal point for community enthusiasm and pride.” In the end, however, it spurred little adjacent growth. One official suggested that “if the Pontiac stadium was in a CBD of a major metropolitan area, that would help sell the h— out of it with all kinds of events [sic].” Even the lauded Astrodome struggled to seed or attract development that went beyond the convention center, hotels, and amusement park that accompanied its original plan. “As such, like Pontiac, the lack of surrounding infrastructure of activities reduces the ability of the facility to synergistically act with its surroundings and create the kind of inter-action and mutual support with surrounding facilities.” 71
Such interaction and mutual support were evident in the CBD stadia, however. Products of slum clearance and renewal efforts like Busch Stadium in St. Louis served as a catalyst for downtown development, resulting in a “boom in new construction.” Three Rivers Stadium “unquestionably contributed greatly to the revitalization of the downtown area” in Pittsburgh, operating in conjunction with entertainment and retail industries and carving a path out of the city’s steel-focused past. Seattle’s Kingdome, constructed in a former railroad yard and warehouse district, was cited for its considerable impact on the community. Having once lost an MLB franchise, the Kingdome “insured that Seattle and Washington State have a place in the ‘Big League’ cities” by attracting new professional baseball, football, and soccer franchises. CBD stadia in general featured the added bonus of “greater attendance levels at regular events like baseball, as well as special events and a larger number of special events than their suburban and rural counterparts.” 72
Such findings confirmed the assumptions of the Minneapolis task force and downtown dome boosters. As with nearly each CBD example, Industry Square proponents hoped to transform an obsolescent former industrial area into a thriving post-industrial entertainment complex. They also hoped to encourage economic and population growth in the surrounding downtown environs. RERC concluded their analysis by noting “it would appear that stadium alternatives of type and location can have a significant impact for a metropolitan area, particularly if enclosed, truly multi-purpose, and properly located.” 73 It was a verbose endorsement of the task force’s vision—a downtown dome just might work.
Likewise, Minneapolis asked RERC for an economic analysis of the Twin Cities alternatives, and resulting findings salved any remaining concerns about large-scale stadium investment. According to the report, synergy with the Minneapolis Convention Center and Auditorium as well as other downtown cultural venues and retail establishments ensured that a CBD domed stadium would attract investment in ways an isolated suburban stadium would not. In addition to franchise home games, Minneapolis could expect “a minimum of three major exhibition events” plus one “large national gathering” each year. 74 Even the Super Bowl, once reserved for fair weather stadia and an unrivaled boon for hosts, would be a possibility for frigid Minneapolis and the metropolitan area. To attract such extracurricular events, however, the dome required supporting businesses, which were absent in suburban locations. RERC put it bluntly: “this would not be possible under the Bloomington alternative.” 75
Bloomington’s Metropolitan Stadium may have lured the Twins and Vikings and, with the addition of the Met Center, attracted a National Hockey League franchise, but it faced an uphill financial and rhetorical battle with Minneapolis. The stadium complex’s isolation did not foster the development of an adjacent entertainment or hospitality district that now seemed imperative for success in the new stadium marketplace. While several Bloomington options received serious consideration in the selection process, the deck was stacked against it almost in spite of its past success. Ultimately, Bloomington lacked the financial, political, and cultural capital to compete with Minneapolis as the rules of the stadium game changed. The city after all had been the beneficiary of Bloomington’s profitable stadium, which enhanced its substantial coffers. With Minneapolis’s sincere and provocative interest in building a new stadium, the competition, though shrouded in good sportsmanship, made for a lopsided affair. As boosters tethered new stadium development to the intangibles of neighborhood renewal and indirect economic benefits in Industry Square, Bloomington struggled to develop a persuasive counternarrative. 76 Mayor James H. Lindau argued that “if it’s an economic decision, [Bloomington] can’t lose,” but it lacked the research arm to support the claim. Lindau’s frugal proclamation simply did not jibe with the aura of redevelopment and future growth now fused to the stadium’s prospects. 77 The Bloomington Stadium Committee even took out a full-page anti-Minneapolis advertisement meant to highlight “Why a downtown stadium doesn’t make sense,” caricaturing an impending traffic disaster in Industry Square, but to no avail. 78 The work of RERC and other consultants on behalf of Minneapolis marginalized suburban alternatives.
Compared with the sparse, open environment of the Bloomington stadium complex, a downtown stadium offered the opportunity for renewal in a previously developed area. Relying on a computer program (SIMLAB) for urban economic analysis developed at the University of Minnesota and borrowing from Harvey Mackay’s earlier language, RERC illustrated that a CBD stadium had greater multiplier effects, that is, indirect and induced economic outcomes, than its suburban counterparts. As St. Louis and other cases suggested, “the development of a downtown stadium facility can have a major impact on surrounding land uses if it is properly located with respect to the downtown.” As such, the introduction of the stadium (covered or uncovered) adds a new dimension to the urban landscape which can be used by the community as a means of cleaning up the urban environment in the district . . . thus making it attractive for the location of new facilities, both stadium oriented and general downtown oriented.
79
Although suburban stadia had been built since the Met, RERC’s findings suggested improper or no market research occurred—a self-serving conclusion for sure. Nonetheless, suburban venues produced weak economic or cultural benefits for municipal funders.
To researchers and boosters alike, a multipurpose dome possessed the potential to redefine Minneapolis’s image and become the key source of economic growth in the post-industrial city. As Amy Klobuchar noted, “a stadium becomes a symbol that the city is willing to undertake ambitious projects.”
80
In RERC’s words, such a project stimulates the local economy just as a manufacturing plant that ships to the outside world, a locally headquartered insurance firm that caters to a national or international clientele, or a raw materials industry in the local economy that ships its products throughout the nation or the world.
81
The multipurpose stadium had been but one component of the broader slum clearance/renewal agenda in communities like St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Holistic renewal, officials argued, would enhance a city’s image, draw reinvestment in downtown, and lure workers back to residential districts. In the 1960s, stabilizing potentially mobile franchises was merely an added bonus and helped preserve big league status. By the 1970s, RERC suggested that a stadium alone could not just anchor the teams but anchor ancillary development as well. Their “economic analysis” thus concluded, the enclosed-CBD alternative offers the maximum opportunity for the City, the Metropolitan Area, and the State to meet the football, baseball, and soccer professional sports needs of the area in an efficient manner, and also to add substantially to the economic base of the area and generates jobs, payroll, and business activity that would not be here in its absence.
82
The MSFC agreed, officially selecting Industry Square as its site on December 1, 1978.
Still, the matter was not fully settled as logistics, costs, and finances in this challenging economic milieu were ironed out. The Minneapolis business community’s effective organizing to purchase and donate the Industry Square property necessary for dome construction eliminated several million dollars from the bottom line. Subsequent analyses by the architectural firm of Skidmore Owings and Merrill (November 1978) and consultants Coopers and Lybrand (January 1979) bolstered the pro-dome financial argument, respectively, suggesting that the construction costs for a multipurpose dome in Minneapolis came in lower than the Bloomington alternatives and that “anticipated revenue from operation” of the domed stadium “will be sufficient to pay all debt service.” 83 Boosters and local columnists could now argue that the downtown dome had the better economic upside and that it was the more affordable option on its own. The city, metropolitan area, and the state would be foolish not to act on it. In the words of Max Nichols, a Star columnist initially cool to the downtown dome proposal, “if this stadium actually can be built for $55 million and the politicians throw it away, Minnesota will get ripped off, not the ball clubs.” 84 In the end, an environmental impact statement for the site confirmed RERC’s successive findings: “particularly in marginal areas with no strong development identity and weak investor confidence, a new stadium could become a land use anchor that would alter the attitude toward and confidence in the future of the area,” the hired consultants wrote. “The stadium could have an effect in changing the image of the Industry Square area.” 85
An Anchor Adrift
With only a few legislative hurdles remaining, the city and the Industry Square Development Corp. commenced a public–private partnership aimed at encouraging ancillary development around the Metrodome anchor. A who’s-who list of local business leaders—a roster that included key stadium boosters—coalesced within a new development group called City Venture Corporation. 86 In 1979, City Venture unveiled their “Urban East” project which would redevelop seventy acres adjacent to the stadium and Elliot Park, projecting a $3 million influx of capital investment and the creation of 3,000 jobs in near-downtown Minneapolis. A new headquarters for Control Data Corporation, an emerging leader in computing technology already connected with the city, was the project’s centerpiece. Indicative of the changing urban redevelopment winds, Control Data’s CEO William Norris liked to quip: “we must view social problems as profit-making opportunities.” 87 Such Reagan-era business-friendly pronouncements did not necessarily sit well with people and places assumed to be “profit-making opportunities” like residents of Elliot Park. 88
City Venture’s own promotional literature echoed Norris’s conviction, signaling Minneapolis’s intention to move away from the perceived failure of the public sector’s Gateway project by transitioning to corporate-driven redevelopment schemes supported by public funds or incentives, even if the Metrodome’s development process appeared more of the latter than the former. City Venture hoped to “demonstrate that the building and rebuilding of American cities is a growth industry providing opportunities for private enterprise to realize reasonable, long-term return on investments.” Several features, they argued, distinguished City Venture from “other efforts to attack urban problems” including its private-sector approach to “magnif[ying] the impact of federal resources.” They also suggested that their willingness to focus only on large-scale projects of 50 acres or more was a unique attribute. In the end, City Venture claimed to offer “proven, profit-oriented and effective programs . . . for the development of economic self-sufficiency within depressed urban neighborhoods and new communities.”
At the time, the city’s agreement with City Venture “constitute[d] urban development powers vast and apparently unprecedented in the United States.” 89 The authority to remake the city “shifted from officials responsible for protecting the public interest to corporate officers responsible only to their stockholders – without public scrutiny or discussion of the ramifications of such a move.” 90 Publicly, City Venture expressed a sincere interest in delivering the kind of economic development that would bring employment and services to underserved and underemployed residents of Elliot Park. Yet, when those same residents asked for a seat at the table, that is, the ability to participate in the process of planning and redevelopment in the area, the deal began to fall apart and the “inner city” became a convenient scapegoat for the corrupt inner workings of the partnership’s private arm. 91
While Minneapolis had played a significant and successful fiscal and fiduciary role in the development of the Met and later the Metrodome, the city was seduced by the ascendant tendency to privatize the development and operations around public goods. That these problems—and with them the impending doom of the boosters’ primary trope for bringing the stadium downtown—were exposed in a fourteen-month Star investigation published as the dome neared completion was an ironic twist that left a bittersweet aftertaste. 92 After the collapse of City Venture and Control Data’s plans, Minneapolis’s vision for Industry Square simply shifted to the next new development trend, christening the large swath of land adjacent to the Metrodome, the Minnesota Technology Corridor. 93 Wishing to mimic the burgeoning success of Silicon Valley, Route 128 near Boston, and the North Carolina Research Triangle, the city hoped to leverage its nascent information technology sector and its talent at the University of Minnesota, not to mention the land conveniently located between the two, to foster economic development. Given its inspiration and local ingredients, the Minnesota Technology Corridor might have been cited by growth proponent and creative class icon Richard Florida two decades later—if it had been successful. 94 The proposal’s promotional materials did not even mention its neighbor, the Metrodome, much less attempt to use it as a magnet for potential partners and tenants.
City of Minneapolis, Cedar-Riverside and Downtown Skyline. 1988.
When it was all said and done and the Twins took the AstroTurf field in 1982, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome came in at a final price tag of $75 million, somewhat overbudget yet still comparatively frugal. As the fifth covered stadium constructed for professional sports, it was both the last multipurpose dome and multipurpose stadium in general built for existing franchises in the United States (Toronto’s SkyDome, introducing viable retractable roof technology, did come almost a decade later). A few speculative stadia of the Metrodome ilk were built in Indianapolis, St. Louis, and St. Petersburg, FL, but only for NFL (Colts and Rams) and MLB (Tampa Bay Devil Rays) teams, respectively. The unoccupied dome in St. Petersburg dome emerged as a popular point of leverage for MLB teams seeking new publicly financed or funded stadiums in their existing locations. Among them were the Twins whose ownership swiftly turned on the Metrodome, fighting a public relations and policy battle beginning in the 1990s and continuing until the open-air baseball-only Target Field opened in 2010. Carl Polhad, who purchased the Twins from the Griffith family, just wanted to follow the new trends. 95 Although a Metrodome-related environmental impact statement claimed that there were few community benefits in single-sport facilities, separate stadiums for separate teams soon became the norm. 96 In the last fifteen years, each of the Metrodome’s primary tenants has received a new separate facility, two of which are located in the heart of downtown, so has the local Major League Soccer franchise.
Between 1982 and 2014, the Metrodome anchored the Twins, Vikings, and football Gophers and hosted a Super Bowl, a MLB All-Star Game, NBA games, the NCAA men’s basketball finals, two historic World Series, quasi-sport exhibitions, scholastic tournaments, and several midnight amateur baseball games, among countless other events. And while the city once prophesized that “major changes are imminent in this long dormant portion of the city” due to the Metrodome, it never lived up to the promise of a post-industrial economic development driver for Industry Square and the surrounding area. 97 A few bars and souvenir shops popped up throughout the years, but beyond those concerns, the stadium was not the catalyst for growth that its boosters once claimed it would be. 98 For much of its tenure, the area remained objectively underdeveloped, eventually witnessing a surge of dense mixed-use construction beginning in the 2000s as the city accommodated broader metropolitan area population growth. 99 Given the lag, east downtown saw significant development in spite of the Metrodome, not because of it. By then, developers merely adapted to Minneapolis’s burgeoning growth-related urban trends, including substantial rehabilitation and subsequent gentrification in downtown’s Warehouse District, once condemned as blighted and slated for the Metrodome’s never-built prototype. In contrast, and running counter to RERC’s assumptions, Bloomington witnessed significant economic development where the Met used to stand. A decade after the teams departed, the land transformed into the Mall of America (1992). The Mall, the world’s largest indoor shopping center when it opened, delivered another kind of big league status for Bloomington and spurred ancillary commercial development in ways the Met never did.
In the center of Minneapolis, the legacy of multipurpose modern efficiency intersected with an emerging migration of capital and population back into the post-industrial city. Even if the boosters’ indirect hopes and dreams of post-industrial fertilization never materialized, the Metrodome portended the current trend of comprehensive stadium district planning and franchise development corporations that leverage team status and the current landscape of fandom for urban growth and owner profit. 100 The Minnesota franchises’ move from suburb to downtown proved prophetic for stadium development going forward. Team owners and municipal boosters seized on municipal desires for revitalization and growth and baseball towns got caught up in the nostalgic, publicly funded stadium craze fostered by Baltimore’s Oriole Park and Camden Yards (1991), notably an ancillary piece of city’s celebrated Inner Harbor scheme rather than the anchor of a new redevelopment vision. Single-use stadia have reigned since, as in Minneapolis and St. Paul, offering the illusion of even greater downtown growth and development to foster indirect investment in central cities at still greater cost. Franchises are once again hypermobile, and current power brokers regularly recycle Metrodome-era language around stadium development to preserve franchises and predict private growth to secure public funds and financing for new state-of-the-art facilities. 101 For the citizens of these big league cities, professional sports and their coliseums seem to be at best a diversion, but for boosters and growth-conscious officials, professional sports stadium development remains one of the biggest games in town.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is indebted to the contribution and support of several research librarians at the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul and the James K. Hosmer Special Collections at the Hennepin County Library in Minneapolis. The author would also like to thank the peer reviewers for their helpful comments and editing suggestions that shaped the revision of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
