Cleveland Stadium - History

History

The impetus for Cleveland Stadium came from city manager William R. Hopkins, Cleveland Indians' president Ernest Barnard, real estate magnate and future Indians' president Alva Bradley, and the Van Sweringen brothers, who thought that the attraction of a stadium would benefit area commerce in general and their own commercial interests in downtown Cleveland in particular. However, some have incorrectly stated that it was built in a failed bid to attract the 1932 Summer Olympics, which had been awarded to Los Angeles in 1923, long before ground was broken on the stadium. Another common misconception is that Cleveland Stadium, was a Works Progress Administration project; in fact, the WPA was not created until 1935, four years after the stadium was built.

In November 1928, Cleveland voters passed by 112,448 to 76,975, a 59% passage rate, with 55% needed to pass, "a $2.5 million levy for a fireproof stadium on the Lakefront." Actual construction costs overran that amount by $500,000.

Read more about this topic:  Cleveland Stadium

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The whole history of civilisation is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    False history gets made all day, any day,
    the truth of the new is never on the news
    False history gets written every day
    ...
    the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
    sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
    asking the clay all questions but her own.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.
    Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)