So, let's say these rumours are true. The rumours that say the SkyDome soon will be sold, possibly to Rogers Communications, owner of the Blue Jays. Rogers has made it clear in the past it would like to get its hands on the stadium. A story that a deal was in the works was reported in these pages a few weeks back, and there's plenty of smoke there.
Then what? Most people connected with the stadium, and all of us who drive into the city along the Gardiner Expressway, look upon the much-maligned, under-loved concrete mausoleum and agree that it needs the Joan Rivers of facelifts. Blue or green lighting across the top of the retractable roof during nighttime is a nice touch but that ain't gonna cut it.
If Rogers is able acquire it from the present owner, Sportsco International LP (which paid $110 million for the SkyDome out of bankruptcy court in 1999), what can be done to jazz it up, give the place some atmosphere, intimacy, more of a baseball feel?
Like it or not, the SkyDome is where the Jays will nest for the foreseeable future, being mindful that the stadium still needs to serve as an all-purpose entertainment facility as well.
"Look, the biggest magnet for fans is a winning club," Jays president Paul Godfrey said.
Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi, a Massachusetts native, agreed, adding, "the Bruins and Celtics played in the Boston Garden for years, and that wasn't the greatest facility in the world. When they won, people came."
That's true, and if there was a heyday in the SkyDome's relatively short lifespan, the World Series years of 1992 and '93 would be it. There is no question 50,000 sports fans give you all the intimacy you need.
"A stadium is the deadest place you can go without people in them," the SkyDome's original architect, Rod Robbie, said.
But's there lies a two-edged sword. The Jays are the only team in baseball that doesn't own, or at least manage, its stadium, and not having control of the in-game experience sticks in their bird craw -- not being able to maximize revenue sources such as sponsorships, concessions, parking. Only 8 1/2 minutes of advertising time between innings throughout the whole game belongs to the Jays, according to senior vice-president Rob Godfrey.
"It makes no sense that the situation exists in this manner," Paul Godfrey said in an interview with The Toronto Sun in August.
The Jays, if they can't own the place, want new turf and a new scoreboard, at the very least, to help build on an attendance figure that hit 1.9 million this past season. Sportsco, on the other hand, longs for a more competitive Jays team to bring more people into the facility. The Jays had 94 losses in 2004, out of first place by a moonshot.
"Content drives everything," Silvio D'Addario, chief operating officer of the SkyDome, said. "People are not going to come to the facility if we put new tiles in the concourse, or change the look of the concession stands, if the product is not something they want to come to watch. You can't have one without the other."
But the SkyDome has grown tired and sterile, even more so as attendance for the Jays has waned since the 1994 strike. People in this town love to dump all over it.
"If I got upset by all (the criticism) I'd have a short life," Robbie said. "Some of the criticism, you feel a little sickened by. You're only human. Some of it is mindless and some of it is downright vicious. But also a great deal of it is sincere."
Major League Baseball's stadium building boom during the 1990s and into 2000, 16 stadiums in total, including the "retro" stadiums that modelled themselves after some of the ballparks of old, also incorporated a lot of the SkyDome, in some cases retractable roofs. Robbie's company, Robbie, Young and Wright Architects Inc., was hired by the owners of the New York Mets in 2000 to design a new stadium for the team, modelled after old Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers in their day. The $400-million US stadium would have had a retractable roof and a field modelled in many ways after the SkyDome. It was to be financed by private and government sources, but the deal fell apart.
What people in baseball discovered with new stadiums was that people came for the first year or so, curious about the new surroundings, then attendance declined if the team struggled. Glittering new parks or refitted parks are no substitute for on-field success.
However, Godfrey talks about the need to warm up the SkyDome. "A lot of 15-year-old buildings need a makeover," he said.
Others would like to see the concrete look diminished, making the stadium smaller, perhaps by limiting the seating capacity and better using the upper bowl and the outfield for other purposes, perhaps cafes, restaurants, even adding the Muskoka-type wooden chairs the Chicago White Sox have at Comiskey.
Robbie makes no excuses and has pride in the facility he designed. In his view, the design isn't the problem.
"I think the level of maintenance could have been better," he said. "You look at Maple Leaf Gardens, the building itself didn't have much merit, inside or outside, but it had a massive amount of atmosphere. It was loved. Memorabilia was attached to it. I think the main thing with the SkyDome is the neglect in creating a tradition, giving it some persona."
More baseball memorabilia, more acknowledgement of Jays teams and accomplishments of the past would be good, he said. Robbie also talked about the original plans for items such as decorative floor finish, privately donated sculptures lining the top of the building, a high-grade decorated finish that would have clad the stadium, all stripped away to save money.
Then there's the concourse.
"There are a lot of cheap concessions," Robbie said. "The older the building gets, the worse the design of the concessions gets. That's one thing I would clean up. The junk that's in there is amazing. The lack of quality in design. The only thing that seems to matter is the low bidder. I should be able to walk around the concourse and see pictures of great players making great plays. Instead you're looking at a Lexus car or somebody's cheeseburger."
The Sun interviewed a number of prominent Toronto architects to get a sense of what they would do to jazz up the building. The overwhelming consensus was for the new owners, if they're willing to spend the bucks, to open it up more so people can see activity inside the stadium, while those inside can take advantage of the stunning city views the location provides.
"In fact, what's probably wrong with the SkyDome is that there weren't enough architects involved," Mitchell Hall of KPMB said. "It's more about engineering and not enough about architecture."
In that vein, Robbie said the advantages of the dome -- a working retractable roof -- seem to have become lost amid the criticism.
But turning the SkyDome into an episode of The Swan, with elaborate and expensive makeovers, is probably dreaming on our part. Nonetheless, babysteps. The current owners say the old AstroTurf and the outdated JumboTron will be changed in 2005 or 2006. Real grass would be nice, like what they used for soccer exhibitions at the stadium this past July. But no one would deny that the age of FieldTurf brings a more esthetically appealing, warming atmosphere live and on TV.
That's if Sportsco is able to keep it. Calls to the Chicago office of Harvey Walken, one of Sportsco's managing partners, were fruitless. The other managing partner, Alan Cohen of New York, died in August at the age of 73, raising questions about the financial viability of the partnership. D'Addario says Sportsco is an entity comprised of a number of investors, the identity of whom he isn't even aware of.
Many of the people The Sun talked to said the ideal scenario was for a team and its facility to be owned locally.
"My view is the best thing in the world that can happen is that the Blue Jays get ownership of that building," Robbie said.
"And start making it truly into their home."
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FACTS, FIGURES AND FIRSTS ...
BROKE GROUND: Oct. 3, 1986
OPENED: June 5, 1989
OWNER: Sportsco International, LP
ARCHITECTS: Rod Robbie and Michael Allen
CONSTRUCTION COST: $570 million
JUMBOTRON: $17 million
SURFACE: AstroTurf
BASEBALL SEATING: 50,516
FOOTBALL CAPACITY: 53,506
ROOF: 11,000 tons; three moveable panels and one stationary panel; roof operates on a system of steel tracks and 54 drive mechanisms called "bogies" and is powered by a series of DC motors that generate over 750 horsepower.
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PROFESSIONAL ADVICE ...
- JOSEPH BOGDAN, OF JOSEPH BOGDAN ASSOCIATES
"There's no sense of daylight. There's no sense of its location in the city. It might as well be in Downsview. One of the interesting new roof parks in baseball is the one in Houston, which has a glass wall. So even if it rains you have a sense of location in the city and daylight. It's more than adding windows. Perhaps you knock out the whole upper wall, and glaze it, doing something more than just a small token. Perhaps on the outside, create a new exterior wall, a transparent, glowing wall, by building a new layer of floors, maybe 50-60 feet deep, trying to build in as much glass as possible. Then maybe you take out some of the upper seats and open all that up to glass."
- BABAK ESLAHJOU, OF CORE ARCHITECTS INC.
"First of all you have to deal with the area around it, have it become more a fabric of the city. What you need to see is some commercial activity related to the 'Dome, that it engages people from the outside in, rather than the inside in. Cover the railway lines, create a very interesting public plaza. If you're going to take your kids to the game, you're going to want to do things before and after as well, especially if you're coming in from the suburbs. You need restaurants, you need music, art."
- MITCHELL HALL, OF KUWABARA PAYNE MCKENNA BLUMBERG
"I took a poll around the office, and opinions ranged from tearing it down, to various other suggestions, but what we kind of all agreed on is there is a lack of openness. It's too much like a fortress. Open it between the frames, making it more permeable and visible. If you think about the (Roman) Coliseum, it had a number of archways, openings that allowed fresh air, view and light, so it works from both the inside and outside. If you're inside you don't feel completely enclosed. From the outside looking in, it becomes less of a big monument."
- DAVID MILLER, OF MACLENNAN, JAUNKALNS, MILLER
"It's got a great location. Opening it up, especially on the concourse, would be good, an open concourse where you can watch people walking through. Plus having the thing glow at night would be pretty good, through the open side."
