R.I.P.: Tiger Stadium

[BloodAtFirstBite]

Legendary Tiger Stadium is finally going to be demolished for homes & shopping. Bits of the stadium will be incorporated into the new devolpment. They're keeping the field as part of a little league park.

[NJTank]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It could have remained a movie studio for old baseball movies to be filemd there

[TBGKon]

This is reason #1,094,520 to despise Mayor Kilpatrick

[scooter13]

This is reason #1,094,520 to despise Mayor Kilpatrick

There is only 1,094,520 reasons so far? Seems low to me.

Such a shame, but I am not sure what else they could have done with it. It was a great place to see a ballgame though.

[marlinfan]

Tear down Tiger Stadium, Detroit mayor says

DETROIT (AP) ? Tiger Stadium will come down, but the playing field will be preserved, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick says.

The city plans to demolish the landmark former home of the Detroit Tigers and replace it with shops and housing, Kilpatrick said Thursday. The playing field itself would be retained as a park and ball diamond, he said.

The plan also would retain a small part of the stadium itself. It has been largely vacant since the Tigers moved out in 1999.

Kilpatrick told the Detroit Free Press that the plan offers the best chance to improve the nearby Corktown neighborhood and to save the baseball field.

The Tigers began playing at the site near downtown late in the 19th century and moved into Tiger Stadium in 1912. The American League club now plays at the new, downtown Comerica Park.

Kilpatrick's announcement follows years of debate over what to do with Tiger Stadium. City officials generally have spoken about demolishing it and putting something new at the site, while some preservationists have talked about finding new uses for it.

"We joined in partnership with the Corktown community to take the necessary steps to move our city forward," the mayor said. "The decision meets our goals of increasing economic development while maintaining the integrity of the neighborhood.

"The future of the Michigan and Trumbull site will honor and preserve the memory of Tiger Stadium."

The cost of the project has not been determined. The city will seek developers to build the housing and stores, George Jackson, president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and a top aide to Kilpatrick, told The Detroit News.

"Yes, the stadium will be demolished, but we will have respect for the historical significance of the site," Jackson said.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/al...r-stadium_x.htm

[goalieboy82]

Taps will be played when Tiger Stadium goes. RIP.

[fiasco!]

the death of my favorite place on earth.... :censored:ing sad.

here's a story that was in the Free Press the week before the final game, accompanied by a photo of me that was on the front page, something i will cherish my whole life.

From the rightfield upper deck, Joel Hurst, 26, of Ferndale, clad in the jersey of his second-favorite Tiger, Juan Encarnacion, had a great view of the sunset -- and of the Tigers' loss to Cleveland on Tuesday night.

Generations of memories

September 24, 1999

BY BILL McGRAW

FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

We parked as usual on Perry Street near the Teamster halls, knowing no sane person would mess with a car there.

With stomachs churning, we hurried down Trumbull, swept up in the crowd that was marching toward the glowing, green fortress on the corner.

It was Sept. 17, 1968. All summer long, victory by blood-tingling victory, the Tigers had inflamed Detroit's baseball passion and cemented their lead until they needed just one more victory for their first American League pennant since 1945. Odds were they would clinch it that night, against the hated Yankees.

We bounded up the ramp and took our seats in leftfield. The crowd screeched maniacally even before the first pitch, and the noise built to an almost scary level as each inning passed. There was an ominous edge, too: People several rows below us were shaking the leftfield fence, and it was only a matter of time before it would come down. Given that the continuum of Detroit fan behavior runs from exuberance to criminal, it was uncertain how this evening would end.

More than just baseball

Like Dodge Main, Olympia, J.L. Hudson's, Stroh's brewery and the Boblo boats, Tiger Stadium soon will be history.

By Monday night, the stadium will become another abandoned piece of Detroit, like all those skyscrapers, bungalows, apartments, fire stations, bowling alleys, factories, fish stores, tool-and-die shops, libraries, churches and Dom Polski halls.

At least the Tigers are remaining in the city. They'll move next season to Comerica Park, a combination theme park and ballpark that is part of the renaissance Detroit boosters have been proclaiming for 30 years, and which finally might be taking root, at least downtown.

You needn't have hugged the stadium during the long effort to save it to feel moved by its passing. Tiger Stadium in many ways transcends baseball. While there were countless thrills on the field, the stadium also has served as a city crossroads, a rollicking fun house and a people-watching paradise, even if some people some of the time spilled beer on your shoe or yelled cusswords in your ear.

In hundreds of games as a fan and reporter, I saw some great moments in baseball. But I remember more vividly the trips to the park with friends, other fans and the often wacky activity in the stands. Tiger Stadium is the place where I first drank beer, smelled marijuana and watched adults beat each other bloody. It's also where I received a rudimentary sex education, not to mention numerous lessons in the psychology of crowds.

Rambling and gray on the outside; gracious, cozy and vibrant on the inside, the stadium could be simultaneously immense and intimate in the way its 50,000 seats wrapped tightly around the emerald-colored diamond.

Michigan and Trumbull is the nation's oldest piece of baseball real estate. They have played pro ball at the site since 1896, so the stadium has served as a rare link to the 19th Century in a nearly 300-year-old city whose idea of building preservation has been unplanned obsolescence. No matter how much life has changed in Detroit during the past 103 years, one thing that remained was people going to the near west side to watch baseball. Tiger Stadium was rowdy and funky and has seemed old for 40 years. It was very Detroit.

As in all deathwatches, there is a tendency to romanticize the soon-to-be dearly departed. As great as the baseball-watching might have been, it should not be forgotten that sitting through a game at the stadium could be exasperating, and not only because the Tigers were losers more often than they were winners.

The Detroit Baseball Club, especially before Mike Ilitch became owner in 1992, was one of the city's least friendly firms. In the Tigers front office, fans often finished last, but its most significant long-term blunder was alienating a huge source of potential customers, black Detroiters.

Decades of memories

Reggie Jackson's home run off the light tower in the 1971 All-Star game and Kirk Gibson's 1984 blast that iced the World Series were superb moments. But I mostly cherish the small things, such as sitting through Sunday doubleheaders in the 1960s, smelling the stale beer and the pungent cigars and marveling at the super fans, the guys with pocket protectors and tiny transistor radios who could identify the anonymous umpires and who kept score in homemade scorebooks even in the final innings of the nightcap while listening to Ernie Harwell do play-by-play.

The first time I sat by myself at the stadium was Nov. 22, 1963. The fact that John F. Kennedy had been shot to death that day intensifies the memory. The event was the annual Goodfellow game, the old football championship between the city's top Catholic and public high schools.

I was 12. My neighbor, one of the game's officials, brought me, and I sat in the lower-deck bleachers, shivering from the events of the day and from the cold rain, which looked like crystals falling past the immense light towers as it mixed with smoke that drifted up from the stands to form a strange fog.

A priest led the crowd in prayers for JFK at halftime, but many of the high school kids sitting around me had trouble praying because they were engaged in marathon make-out sessions. A greaser couple sat in front of me. He had black shoes with lethal toes. She wore her hair in a low-rise beehive. When they embraced, their heads bent backward, inches from my lap, giving me an up-close-and-personal view of something I had heard about on the playground, that when big people kiss, there is often more involved than just lips.

After the game, big cops riding skittish horses with their nostrils flaring took positions in front of the stands, but the older kids rushed onto the field to tear down a goalpost. The stadium announcer pleaded with them to "respect the memory of your late president" and return to their seats, but they ignored him, too.

As a college student in the early 1970s, I sat in the bleachers when they were as fragrant with marijuana as Amsterdam on a Saturday night. This was before the bleachers veered out of control a decade later, but that didn't mean things were dull. The temperature on opening day 1974 was 38 degrees, not counting windchill, but dozens of young men cavorted naked in the upper deck. The bleacher streakers ran down the aisles, slid down the railings (sidesaddle) and swung to and fro while hanging from the bottom of the scoreboard. It was my date's first opening day. It also was her last.

As an adult, I reported to the stadium for work many summer days as a Free Press sportswriter. I loved arriving hours before the fans, walking in through a backdoor out of bright sunlight into the damp, cave-like hallways under the stands, where Polish ladies were plumping hot dogs and TV guys were running cable to their trucks, and the only loud noise was the crack of bats during practice. When I left the stadium two hours after games, the ballpark would be dark and still and a little ghostly, and you would walk out into the hot, noisy world, and trash would be blowing into your face and old Checker Cabs would be rattling up Trumbull and you realized what a separate world the stadium was.

On a hazy Sunday night in October 1984, Gibson hit his great home run, danced around the bases, and the Tigers won the World Series. An hour later, I stood on the stadium's roof in the rain with sports writers from around the country and watched the police cars burn after thousands of people, many of them young and suburban, had rioted.

Like obstructed-view seats and red hots, hooliganism has been a fact of life at the stadium since club President Frank Navin worried about bottle-throwing during the Ty Cobb era. As a reporter, I found myself in the middle of the infamous bleacher food fights and beach-ball tossing of the 1980s. Sitting among several thousand young people screaming obscene chants is a unique experience, as is watching hand-to-hand combat between drunken teenagers and poorly trained security guards.

Working during a game in August 1983, I ducked thrown garbage and stood by as guards tried to drag a man through the chanting crowd. It was uncertain what he had done. From the top of the bleachers sailed a small bottle that bounced off the prisoner and shattered on the ground, cutting a bystander and a youngster with flying glass. Police arrested five fans that night, ticketed six others and ejected six more. For that era, it was a typical night.

Clueless management

In the early 1980s, with fan interest growing as the Tigers evolved into a winning team, reporters would ask club officials why they didn't do some of the things other major-league teams had done, such as install TV monitors above the concession stands seats and pipe in the radio broadcast to the hallways -- rest rooms -- or just install additional phone lines, so customers who called the park would get through.

The answer was often the same: It's an old park. It would be physically impossible. In recent years, however, many of those improvements were made.

The pre-Ilitch Tiger management could be sourpusses. While the club's aversion to such modern stadium touches as attractive young women shagging foul balls and dancing mascots could be refreshing, front-office conservatism tended to contaminate the club's approach to the public.

It was hardly management's fault the aisles were narrow and the posts were thick, but the people running the Tigers didn't understand why modern consumers expected them to discount obstructed-view seats; why people thought ticket sellers should sell good seats without receiving a tip; why it wasn't fun to stand in line for two innings at a concession stand when nearby stands were closed. In contrast to Detroit, master showman Bill Veeck marketed the Comiskey Park bleachers in Chicago as fun and even installed a shower. The White Sox did not have the Tigers' bleacher problems.

"I'm a baseball man, not a stage-show manager," longtime club executive Jim Campbell complained in 1984, and that was exactly the problem. Campbell refused to accept that baseball is entertainment. Even ballplayers have long referred to the major leagues as "the show." But Campbell and his top lieutenants, who fretted constantly about modern developments such as free agents and their brassy lawyers, tried to prevent the real world from intruding at Michigan and Trumbull, and it just didn't work.

In 1981, the Tigers front office caused a ticket snafu for the last game of the season that left several thousand fans unable to enter the mostly empty stadium until the third inning. So they blocked traffic on Trumbull and chanted "Jim Campbell sucks."

Even before Campbell, though, the Tigers appeared to be allergic to change. They were the next-to-last major league club to install lights. And they were next-to-last to integrate.

That happened in 1958, more than a decade after Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color barrier. Many older black Detroiters say longtime owner Walter Briggs vowed never to put a black player in the lineup while he owned the team. In any case, Briggs had been dead for six years when a black player, Ozzie Virgil, cracked the lineup.

Long after Briggs, the club was less than sensitive to black Detroiters. Sometimes it was subtle. The first music played at opening day 1986 was a paean to segregated society titled, "Darktown Strutters Ball." Sometimes it was overt. Windsor residents, Lutherans and Shriners had annual special nights at the stadium, but African Americans did not. Club officials told organizers they didn't sell enough tickets to warrant a regular night.

A family tradition

Like many Tigers fans, my links to Michigan and Trumbull stretch to the early days.

The first person in my family who attended games there was my grandfather, James Carey, a long-dead Irish-Canadian immigrant who took streetcars to games as a young man in the 1890s. He played in the minor leagues in the early 1900s, though his mother, grandmother and a sister, who was a nun, prayed he would quit because baseball then had an unsavory reputation. Throughout his life, Carey went to countless games at the stadium and would forbid his family from talking at dinner while broadcaster Ty Tyson was doing the postgame radio show.

His descendants recalled those stories recently when we gathered for a party after attending one of the final games at the stadium. We passed around a faded photo that showed two other cousins, Jim and Bob Handloser, posing with teammates next to the Tigers dugout in 1944.

Playing on the velveteen field at Briggs Stadium was a fantasy come true for Detroit kids. The Handlosers' east-side team of 11- and 12-year-olds, Stellwagen, lost the Billy Rogell League city championship that day to a west-side team.

Jim Handloser, now 66, said their usual field on East Outer Drive had a tree in right-center and a sidewalk across rightfield.

"We didn't have benches, let alone a dugout, so playing at Tiger Stadium was pretty heady stuff for kids. The stadium seemed so big. The grass was long, since the Tigers had been out of town. We wondered if anyone would hit the ball out of the infield. There were no fans in the stadium, so it seemed to echo."

Pandemonium, redemption

The leftfield fence withstood the onslaught for nine innings of the pennant-clinching game Sept. 17, 1968.

There were 46,000 fans at the stadium that night, all dreaming of the World Series. Detroit was entering Year Two of the civic psychosis brought on by the 1967 riot, and the Tigers had blown the pennant on the final day of the 1967 season. So 1968 was seen as a restorative for the town and redemption for the team. People painted their bodies with tiger stripes and the ubiquitous pep song proclaimed:

"We're all behind our baseball team,

Go get 'em, Tigers!

World Series-bound and picking up steam,

Go get 'em, Tigers!"

The stadium shuddered when Don Wert singled home Al Kaline in the bottom of the ninth. The Tigers were champs. "Let's listen to the bedlam here at Tiger Stadium," Ernie Harwell told listeners when, as if on cue, a huge firecracker detonated loudly in the stands.

People poured onto the field from every direction. The mob finally ripped down the leftfield fence, and we leaped onto the warning track and joined the phalanxes of young people chasing the Yankees outfielders toward their dugout. Then we converged on the infield, where fans ripped up sod for souvenirs.

Detroit might have crackled with racial tension, but at the stadium that night, the vibe was peace and love. People invoked the name of the hometown hero and asked for racial healing.

"Willie Horton, unite our city," they yelled. On the pitcher's mound, black guys danced impromptu polkas with white guys. Strangers hugged and kissed. Zealots dug in the dirt with their fingers at deeply anchored home plate, trying to dislodge it.

I have nothing against change, and I realize I might like Comerica Park. It will develop its own history, and someday my future grandchildren might reminisce about the good old days watching the team and riding the new park's Ferris wheel. But that doesn't mean we can't mourn the old stadium, marvel at its place in our lives and rejoice that it lasted this long.

i went to over 300 games at that place, and baseball hasn't been the same for me since it closed. one thing i always look forward to when i go back to Detroit is a drive by my old friend, and now that'll be gone. it really sucks.

[spyboy1]

May the angry ghost of Ty Cobb visit those responsible on a nightly basis.

[The_Admiral]

It's sad to see it go, but the place is so far gone, they have no choice.

[Gary]

I had the honor of going there 5 times, and every time it was like walking into history. I'll never forget my time there and it's a shame i'll never be able to go back! Great times.

[Swiss]

What a very very sad time for me.

And what a pity that there is no tech yet like "beaming away" (like Star Trek) the Tiger Stadium moving it to a place people may need it too much or to Hollywood as NJTank suggested.

Bye bye dearest brother of Fenway Park!

[STL FANATIC]

I wonder if what the Cardinals ended up doing--tearing down the old stadium because the new one overlapped--wasn't the best thing that could have happened to prevent a situation like this.

I mean, there was tons of sadness about seeing Busch II go to make room for Busch III. There was a small sentiment that Busch III was totally unnecessary and they should stay in Busch II and not tear it down, but really, the fact that people knew the old stadium had to come down for the new one to go up kept back struggles to try and save Busch II.

As a result, there was a lot more sadness and a lot less anger than their could have been. People wrote all over Busch II sharing their memories, and their was an all around general somber mood watching it come down, but the anger wasn't there. It was probably for the best that people had to say goodbye to the old one in order to say hello the new one.

I can imagine a lot more anger would come through in a case like Tiger Stadium where it's being torn down for commerical and residential purposes, and to make things worse, that just let it sit there for 7 years as if it might always be there.

[VitaminD]

I feel that much luckier today for altering my itinerary to hit Detroit on my summer adventure around the Great Lakes in 1999. I still have the ticket stub and the souvenir cup from the Tigers' last season at Michigan and Trumbull. Caught an interleague game v. McGwire and the Cards from the lower deck RF bleachers. What a unique perspective that was. (And just for Joel: I wore my Tigers' orange-billed cap with the cat walking through the "D" to the game. Still have it, although it's a tad too small. )

[IronChefShark]

it needs to come down, the place has been abandoned for too long now.

its probably infested with rats, cockroaches, spiders, a hornets nest or two, and lord knows what else

[BJ Sands]

it needs to come down, the place has been abandoned for too long now.

its probably infested with rats, cockroaches, spiders, a hornets nest or two, and lord knows what else

Agreed. Nostalgia only goes so far.

[fiasco!]

I feel that much luckier today for altering my itinerary to hit Detroit on my summer adventure around the Great Lakes in 1999. I still have the ticket stub and the souvenir cup from the Tigers' last season at Michigan and Trumbull. Caught an interleague game v. McGwire and the Cards from the lower deck RF bleachers. What a unique perspective that was. (And just for Joel: I wore my Tigers' orange-billed cap with the cat walking through the "D" to the game. Still have it, although it's a tad too small. )

dude, i guarantee i was sitting almost directly above you that game. my season tix for years was in the 4th row on the "short porch" in right. and yes, i hate that hat, but i still have mine too...sweatstains and all!

[logodawg]

Yes, I'm sad to see it go, but I ask the people expressing anger over this final decision, can you really expect the city to keep it standing forever? You need to give credit to the city on this one. It's not like they had a road map to follow on this one as no one has successfully converted a old baseball stadium to something useful before. We should be glad it will remain in someway. And I think it's fitting that it goes back to what it originally was, a simple ballfield in a neighborhood.

Here's an article that goes more in depth.