Development
Michigan's football team became a major attraction after the success of coach Fielding H. Yost, and Regents Field with its 800-seat grandstand could not accommodate the paying crowds that sought to watch the team play. Michigan Athletic Director Charles A. Baird improved the university's athletic fields and "was responsible for the construction of Ferry Field to replace the outdated Regents Field." When Baird resigned as athletic director, one newspaper wrote: "Baird's greatest work for Michigan was planning and building Ferry field, which is the largest college athletic ground in the United States."
In 1902, Detroit businessman Dexter M. Ferry purchased and donated 20 acres (81,000 m2) north of Regents Field for use in constructing a new athletic facility. Baird began by constructing new bleacher seating for 6,000 adjacent to the existing grandstand. One thousand circus seats were also installed. In November 1902, a Thanksgiving Day game against the University of Minnesota was held at Ferry Field with 10,000 spectators in attendance.
By 1906, the new Ferry Field with seating for 18,000 spectators was opened. The facility included a brick wall and ornamental gate with ten ticket windows. The gateway was designed by Albert Kahn Architects of Detroit and constructed at a cost of over $10,000. In the 1890s, a $3.00 membership granted students admission to all athletic events. By 1904, a general admission ticket for a big game cost as much as $3.00. With a seating capacity of 18,000, Baird's athletic department could generate $50,000 in revenue from a single game. When Ferry Field was completed, Baird expressed his pride in the facility:
"Speaking of the field, Michigan today has the finest athletic grounds in the United States. With the completion of the operations we are making the total expenditure for permanent improvement of the field will cost $150,000. On it we have a gridiron for practice, another where the old field was, and the splendid new one, drained, leveled, sodded, surrounded by a concrete wall."
Read more about this topic: Ferry Field
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.”
—Laurent A. Daloz (20th century)
“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)