Multi-purpose Stadium - History in The United States

History in The United States

Several stadiums hosted multiple sports teams prior to the advent of multi-purpose stadiums. In New York City, the Polo Grounds hosted football teams early on, and although the stadium was ostensibly designed for polo, its rectangular nature lent itself well to football and was also, with somewhat less of a fit, used for baseball. The original configuration of Yankee Stadium was specifically designed to accommodate football as well as track and field (it was Yankee Stadium that popularized the warning track, originally designed as a running track, around baseball fields), in addition to its primary usage for baseball. Wrigley Field, while originally built for baseball, also hosted the Chicago Bears, just as Comiskey Park hosted the Chicago Cardinals and Tiger Stadium hosted the Detroit Lions. Later venues such as Cleveland Stadium and Baltimore Memorial Stadium were built to accommodate both baseball and football.

In the 1960s, multi-purpose stadiums began replacing their baseball-only and football-only predecessors, now known as "Classics" or "Jewel Box" parks. The advantage to a multi-purpose stadium is that a singular infrastructure and piece of real estate can support both teams in terms of transportation and playing area, and money (often public money) that would have been spent to support infrastructure for two stadiums could be spent elsewhere. Also playing into the advent of the multi-purpose stadium was Americans' growing use of automobiles as a form of transportation, and therefore the need for professional sports stadiums to accommodate parking. As most cities lacked the space to construct the stadiums with necessary parking lots near their city centers, most multi-purpose stadiums were built in suburbs, away from the city centers but near freeways or highways.

A subset of the multipurpose stadiums were the so-called "cookie-cutter stadiums" or "concrete donuts" which were all very similar in design. They featured a completely circular or nearly circular design, and accommodated both baseball and football by rotating sections of the box seat areas to fit the respective playing fields. These fields often used artificial turf, as it could withstand the reconfiguration process more easily or be removed for non-sporting events, plus it could be used in domes, which many of these stadiums were. The first of these stadiums was RFK Stadium. It was followed during the 1960s and 1970s by Shea Stadium, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum (now O.co Colisem), the Astrodome, San Diego Stadium (now Qualcomm Stadium), Riverfront Stadium, Busch Memorial Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium, Veterans Stadium and the Kingdome. Seven of these eleven stadiums have been demolished, most often by implosion; only RFK, Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, and San Diego remain in use; the Astrodome, while still standing, has been disused since 2008 because of fire code violations.

The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was unique in that it was one of the few air-supported dome stadiums that was multi-purpose in practice, being convertible between football and baseball. Still home of the Minnesota Vikings, it was also home to the Minnesota Twins until 2009 and the Minnesota Golden Gophers baseball team (NCAA, although repairs forced the team out for the 2011 season). Most other inflatable domes, like the Hoosier Dome and Pontiac Silverdome, were football-only stadiums.

During the height of the multi-purpose stadium construction era of the 1960s and 1970s, four baseball-only stadiums were constructed: Candlestick Park (1960), Dodger Stadium (1962), Anaheim Stadium (1966; now Angel Stadium of Anaheim), and Royals Stadium (1973; now Kauffman Stadium). Anaheim Stadium was, however, renovated into a multi-purpose stadium in 1980 to accommodate the Los Angeles Rams' move from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and renovated back into a baseball-only facility in 1997, three years after the Rams' departure for St. Louis. Similarly, Candlestick Park was renovated into a multi-purpose stadium in 1970 to accommodate the San Francisco 49ers' move from Kezar Stadium and converted to football only after the San Francisco Giants moved to their new ballpark in 2000.

The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG) built Centennial Olympic Stadium in a way that it could be converted to a new baseball stadium, and ACOG paid for the conversion. This was considered a good agreement for both the Olympic Committee and the Braves, because there would be no use for a permanent 85,000 seat track and field stadium in Downtown Atlanta, as the 71,000 seat Georgia Dome had been completed 4 years earlier by the state of Georgia. Furthermore, the Braves had already been exploring opportunities for a new venue to replace Atlanta Fulton County Stadium. The southwest corner of the Olympic Stadium was built to accommodate the future baseball infield and seating. This is easily seen in aerial views and diagrams of the stadium in its Olympic configuration, where the seats are not placed next to the oval running track. The southwest part of the stadium also had four tiers of seats, luxury boxes, a facade facing the street, and a roof, whereas the north half of the stadium used a simpler two-tiered seating configuration. During reconstruction, the athletics track was removed, and the north half of the stadium was demolished, reducing the capacity to 49,000 when it reopened as Turner Field. Because of the need to fit a track within the stadium in its earlier incarnation, the field of play, particularly foul territory, while not large by historical standards, is still larger than most new MLB stadiums.

As of April 2012, Oakland's O.co Coliseum is the last multi-purpose stadium to serve as a full-time home to both an MLB team and an NFL team.