Dodger Stadium renovation aims to get fans to arrive early and leave late
Since buying the Dodgers in 2004, Frank McCourt has faced a tricky balancing act in dealing with the team's stadium, the fourth-oldest in the major leagues.
Most big-league owners are architectural amnesiacs, and for good reason. As their ballparks hit middle age, they make plans to build new venues, often with generous public subsidy. But 46-year-old Dodger Stadium, even in a city that doesn't typically have much affection for old buildings, is an unquestioned landmark. For McCourt and his ownership group, suggesting a brand-new stadium in Chavez Ravine, even a design showpiece by Frank Gehry or Thom Mayne, would have been public-relations suicide.
Understanding the ballpark's place in the city's literal and psychic landscape but also keen to wring more revenue from it, the owner has moved methodically -- with purpose but with caution, and generating a bit of controversy -- in his attempts to update it. He rolled out changes to the most expensive box seats two years ago, to the parking lots last spring and to concession stands along the lower concourse this season.
That was all prelude, it turns out, to a grander architectural vision, unveiled at a news conference Thursday. Produced by Los Angeles firm Johnson Fain, along with HKS Architects and Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the plan calls for a pair of low-slung pavilions outside the stadium: one beyond center field, framing a new grand entrance through which the team expects most fans would pass, the other south of home plate.
It also includes a "green necklace" of new landscape elements and twin nine-story parking structures buried into the hillside -- along with terrifically vague ideas about connecting the stadium to public transit. The budget is $500 million, and it's scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2012, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the stadium's opening.
The additions are all connected to a single goal: to extend the amount of time a typical visitor spends at the stadium. McCourt wants Dodger fans to arrive at the park earlier, to stay later and maybe even to drop by on days when no game is scheduled.
The success of the plan, then, won't be hard to gauge. If there are scores of Angelenos milling around the stadium grounds on, say, a Saturday afternoon in January 2013, snapping up foam fingers and Russell Martin jerseys, then McCourt's ideas for updating the landmark will look prescient. If Dodger fans bolster their reputation for showing up in the third inning and beginning the walk to their cars in the eighth -- and not even thinking about the stadium during the winter months -- we'll be justified in wondering whether that $500 million was worth it.
