Beauty, it is said, is in the eye of the beholder.
Unfortunately the eye of the beholder is often also fickle.
When SkyDome was conceived on architect Rod Robbie’s drafting board and given birth in 1989 it was regarded with awe — one of the world’s man-made wonders alongside the pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower, or Julia Roberts.
That may seem exaggerated now. But people came merely to gawk as the 11,000-ton roof — the only one like it in the world — slowly cracked open the lid of the neon palace to the sky. In those early weeks fans actually applauded the opening of the roof or waited around after events to see it close. Visiting players would stop in batting practice to watch. The huge scoreboard was television at its most bodacious and when Jose Canseco or Mark McGwire launched balls off the glass of Windows Restaurant, it’s tables were filled with actual patrons ducking into their soup.
At the time, Robbie described his design as “a social place, a place similar to a cathedral, a place where people meet, a place with activity. We can build something that will be here for 100 years. We will build a secular cathedral. This building will be a signature for the city, the province, the country.”
It is, and has been, all of those things.
It has also in its reincarnation as the Rogers Centre, been called the biggest white elephant west of Montreal’s Olympic Oops. The stadium has been called bland and spiritless, with concessions and service described in one internet chat room after a Blue
Jays’ home game as “craptacular”.
It’s been called too big for baseball and too small for football. It’s about the only place anywhere 60,000 fans could revel at the sound of U2. Indoors. In comfort. And, at the same time contrarily, be described as an acoustical echo-chamber.
When Robbie was given his mandate to build a structure for all seasons, to please everyone, he may have wound up pleasing nobody in entirety. The result is that every year the on-again, off-again debate about whether Toronto should invest in a new baseball stadium resurfaces.
Nothing official. The idea doesn’t have political proponents and it doesn’t have any backing from management or ownership of the Blue Jays. Mostly it is heard on sports radio talk shows. It is the topic of bloggers and of bar-stool lotharios and baseball traditionalists who believe real baseball only happens on real grass in the open air. And, with Blue Jays’ attendance sagging along with the team’s place in the American League East standings since the early 1990s, the size that once made this baseball’s record-setting palace of pandemonium now gives it a soul-less, empty atmosphere. Or, so say those baseball fans who look covetously at the monuments to nostalgia that have risen in places like Cleveland, Detroit and Baltimore.
“It’s bull****. Toronto does not need a new ball park. I don’t say that because I worked on the one they have now,” says Robbie, now 82, and not the least bit apologetic about what has alternately been called an engineering marvel — or a $500 million Edsel.
“What have we done wrong? Nothing. Except that it doesn’t look like the other so-called retroish parks. We got it right; everybody else has got it wrong. They build too many venues. You don’t need to build a separate stadium to play eight football games a year, another one for a concert because they need green rooms or whatever to wait in, and another one to play a dozen soccer games a year.
“Sooner or later as a society we have to decide how much money we want to spend on sports facilities. Not being a prude but it seems irrational to even consider building another baseball stadium when you’ve got a perfectly good place with all the facilities.”
If Toronto were to build a new baseball-only stadium it would be for one reason only. That, he said, will be to satisfy our collective ego. It wouldn’t improve either team performance or attendance. At least, not over the long haul.
“If the players are no good, the franchise is no good, the games are no good. All we’re providing (as architects) is a box in which for them to play. Essentially we’re trying to make customers comfortable. It’s a mirage to think it makes any difference to the performance of the team.
“The Maple Leafs had the Gardens which for years was a pretty good venue and some years they were a great team and some years they were god-awful. They moved to an even nicer place and they’re mostly god-awful. As an architect I’ve never been under any illusion that we’re the great changer of people’s lives.”
It wouldn’t be cheap either. Estimates to build a baseball-only park in Toronto range anywhere from $300 to $500 million. Nobody has piggy-banks that rich anymore.
Meantime, Robbie says the whining about SkyDome (he still refers to it by its original name) is reflective of a society that needs instant gratification for every desire. He recalls growing up in England and supporting the local soccer club. “These days ... people believe they have a right to be pleased in every aspect. I remember soccer games in England and we had to stand up — the guy behind you was peeing on you because there were so many people you couldn’t get out of the way. But it didn’t have any effect on the crowd coming to the games. They were really keen on their team and they would be there and it didn’t matter if it had been an open field.”
At least in Toronto people have the decency to dump the beer on you before they drink it. This is called etiquette.
Paul Beeston, the Blue Jays president, presides over a team searching to reclaim its identity and its fan base. He has been around long enough to remember when the Rogers Centre was the “in” place to be. Politicians hung out in private boxes and were regular visitors to the post-game locker room. Presidents and prime ministers dropped in. Performers such as Geddy Lee were regular visitors with the likes of Dave Stieb.
Beeston says blaming the stadium for the club’s attendance, or performance, is too simplistic. “It doesn’t stop us from winning. We have to put the right product on the field. If we do that people will come. If people come the atmosphere will be there and that all leads to success.
“As a citizen of Toronto I think we’re fortunate to have this place. I’ve been here too many times when its been electric so I know it doesn’t kill the atmosphere.”
Beeston admits the Blue Jays in a perfect world would like to play on grass. And, the size of the stadium is a detriment. And, yes, personally he likes the retro-style parks that have sprung up.
”Are there better baseball stadiums anywhere than Camden Yards and Pittsburgh, where there’s great leg room, 37,000 seats and it looks over the skyline of the city? No. It’s a baseball park. It has all the nuances.
“On the other hand, this was a great stadium when we were filling it from 1989, when we went to the playoffs, to ‘92 and ‘93 when we won the World Series. I’ve been in here with the sun shining and the blue sky; and I’ve been in here when it’s snowing outside and with the perfect conditions in here you wouldn’t even know it.”
It is a comfort level not found in Cleveland where a wicked wind blows off the lake, or in Baltimore which is alternately suffocating under a blanket of humidity or shivering in the coastal breezes.
People have forgotten what it was like to sit in the open at Exhibition Stadium on an April or September night. “I always thought the 2.7 million people we put in there in 1988 was a more astounding record than the record 4 million we put in here because it was arguably not just the worst stadium in baseball but the worst stadium in sports,” said Beeston. “It was cold, it was damp, we had a game that was cancelled with wind.”
And, let’s face it, while Canadians pride themselves on their hardy northern temperament it is equally evident from what happens at Canadian Football League games in most cities, that when the snow, rain and sleet start, the seats empty and last man to Timmy’s gets stuck with a dried out chocolate walnut brickette.
“I’ve always thought (Rogers Centre) was special and too much maligned. It’s easy to pick on ... people just take it for granted,” said Beeston.
There is a public perception that a new ballpark equals success, if not on the field at least at the box office. This is largely a fallacy.
Cleveland saw a upsurge in attendance in 1994 with the completion of Jacobs Field. But, it coincided with an improved team. Since then, the team’s fortunes have slipped on the field and this season the average attendance is a league low 17,499. Pittsburgh, with its new ballyard, is 26th in the league in attendance. Even Baltimore’s Camden Yards, the shrine of all baseball’s nouveau-traditionalists, is less than half full, averaging 22,261 fans — 24th in major league baseball.
“If we had a retro park, and it was new and we were bad, people might come once to see it but if the team isn’t performing, they ain’t coming back. It wouldn’t matter what kind of park we had,” said Beeston.
In Washington, for example, a $611 million ballpark which opened in 2008 sits with a bad team and 22nd in attendance. Meantime, some of baseball’s most successful and popular franchises have the most ancient facilities. Any architect trying to pass off Fenway Park (built in 1912) as a major league facility today would get laughed out of the commissioner’s office. Wrigley Field predates commercial airlines and is so old they’ve got weeds growing up the outfield wall. the Dodgers and Angels have stadiums built in the early ’60s but consistently rank among the top 10 in attendance.
What baseball is discovering with new stadiums is that people come for the first year or so to check out the surroundings. But, attendance declines if the team struggles.
The Blue Jays set the all-timeattendance record four years in a row, from 1990-93 at the Rogers Centre. People didn’t stop coming because the hot dogs were lousy or because they wanted to see starlight. They stopped coming because the team was lousy and the stars they were seeing weren’t wearing Blue Jays’ logos.
Blame management. Blame fate. Blame ownership. Don’t blame the venue. “In the case of Skydome we had a very specific mandate: To design a baseball stadium that worked equally as well as a football stadium that could then be used for concerts and other things,” says Robbie. “We had to invent multi-use and they also wanted a retractable roof which nobody had ever done before. We were up to our neck in stuff nobody knew how to do.” But they figured it out well enough that SkyDome was selected as Stadium of the Year from 1990-’93 by Billboard Magazine.
So, how does a facility go from being the marvel of not only the baseball, but the engineering and architectural world, to a maligned, under-loved concrete mausoleum in little more than two decades?
It doesn’t surprise Robbie. In fact, he predicted it. “I told (developer and Stadco president Chuck Magwood) you won’t believe how popular this building will be. People will be knocking down the doors to get in. And, then, all of sudden (the public) will get sick of it because someone will write something about this being old hat ... that it’s a blight, we need to do something different.”
The public is fickle, notes Robbie: “All of these big public buildings, not just SkyDome, fall out of popularity for 10, 15 maybe even 20 years. Then just as suddenly someone says wait a minute; this is our heritage, we’re going to lose it. It’s falling apart we have to fix it.”
He uses St. Pancras Station, the London terminus for the English Channel tunnel as an example. The great single span structure was built in 1864 but had fallen into disrepair. “People moan and when it’s gone, then they regret it,” said Robbie. “People suddenly realized this was a great building and eight years ago they spent $1.2 billion (to retrofit it).
“This is the reality of the public when it comes to public buildings. SkyDome has come through part of that bad period and it will recover. We built a building that could still be an asset to this city 250 years from now. It works for everything from baseball and conventions to the Ladies’ Aid Society.
“We tried to build something that wouldn’t fall apart; something that would be part of history. We live in a disposable society which is wrong. If we have a disposable society we end up with a disposable history. And, we won’t have any history.”
bill.lankhof@sunmedia.ca
