Tag: stadium

Categories
Opinion

Cheaper, Better, Sooner

1) Go to some football games at Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. Buy a ticket at the gate. Don’t use your parking pass. Haggle with the guys on East Parkway instead. Sit with the ordinary fans at a Conference USA game. Use the public bathrooms at least twice even if you don’t have to go. Buy something to eat and drink but don’t send someone else to get it. Walk all the way around the stadium from the inside and the outside.

2) Go to a special game that draws a bigger crowd. Sit in a skybox. Eat the food. Talk to the other people. Visit the locker room and the press box. Say hi to the poor, suffering reporters in their terribly cramped quarters and see if you can honestly generate one ounce of sympathy for them. Talk to the coach of the visiting team. If you are not a football fan and never go to games, that’s fine, but of course you don’t advertise that. Uh, right?

3) Watch a game on television, which is where most of the revenue comes from. Notice how the cameras are focused on the players and the field, not the empty seats, locker rooms, concessions, or bathrooms.

4) Go to a high school football playoff game at the field on Central Avenue in the Mid-South Fairgrounds. Stand in line for 20 minutes with 100 other people while a single ticket-seller in a cage behind a window collects your $6 and a single ticket-taker lets you through the single four-foot-wide gate that is open. Watch most of the first quarter through the fence behind the end zone while standing in this line. Imagine you rode three hours from Brentwood on a bus. Then ask yourself what the hell is wrong with this picture.

5) If you’re not going to football games, watch Trading Spaces on television. A designer and some carpenters with more creativity and energy than money ($1,000) turn an ordinary room in an ordinary house into a cool room. The owners cry when they see it. Usually they’re glad, sometimes they’re mortified, but either way, they get a makeover on the cheap.

6) Get the University of Memphis and promoter Fred Jones to choose half a dozen architects and designers to play Trading Spaces with the skyboxes. Give them each $10,000 and free publicity. Then get the U of M to hire half a dozen caterers to compete for the title of Best Caterer for the skyboxes. Give them each $1,000 and free publicity. Total outlay: $66,000.

7) Spend $1 million to buy up blighted property near the stadium. It’s a start. Hire a landscape architecture firm to demolish the old cattle stalls outside the stadium and replace them with something that looks nice. Now. Remember, it’s just a start. Then tear down the Coliseum, which has nothing to do with the stadium. This will take a little longer, but it’s worth it. Tell anyone who complains that they can have a free ticket to The Pyramid.

8) Instead of trashing it, try the adjectives “historic” and “different” on for size when describing the stadium and its graceful curves. At 41 years old, it’s younger than Soldier Field, the Big House in Ann Arbor, the Coliseum in L.A., the Rose Bowl, and thousands of perfectly good buildings and houses in Memphis. Think trash into treasure. Make sarcastic remarks about “cookie-cutter” stadiums built on the cheap. Then ask why this stadium isn’t just fine for eight or nine games a year against the likes of Chattanooga and Tulsa and Central Florida.

9) Imitate AutoZone Park and have too many concessions and staff people at games instead of too few.

10) After you do this, invite Memphians to come to the “New and Improved Liberty Bowl Game” and see the results for themselves and decide whether they really need a new stadium in the same location as the old one. Give everyone a free hot dog and a Coke to make them feel good. It worked for Boss Crump.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Royal Flush?

On December 28th, just three days before Memphis mayor Willie Herenton announced his plans for a new football stadium, a work crew began renovations on the old one. After a 2004 facilities analysis of the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium, the mayor and the City Council committed to $15 million in upgrades to the aging facility, including improvements to the sound system and restrooms and making it more Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant. The City Council appropriated $3.6 million last fall to pay for the first phase of those upgrades — a renovation and expansion of restroom facilities — and work began late December.

“Some of the facilities that are there now are 40 years old,” says city architect Mel Scheuerman. “The new restrooms were going to provide an additional 84 fixtures for women. We wanted to get the fixture count up to a more appropriate level.”

Unfortunately, the 84 toilets weren’t the only bowls in question.

During a New Year’s Day prayer breakfast, Herenton proposed building a brand-new stadium to replace the Liberty Bowl as the home the University of Memphis Tigers. The mayor said he would present financing details and the economic impact of such a stadium to the City Council in 45 days. The next day, the Liberty Bowl renovation project, in which supplies and equipment had already been ordered and contractors hired, was postponed while the administration decided what to do. Ultimately, however, the city couldn’t afford the time-out.

“I can’t stop the project for 45 or 60 days and get it done before football season,” says Scheuerman. “In a perfect world, we would stop and say, what are we going to do? But we have a timing issue. We need to have it ready by next fall.”

By the end of last week, work resumed at the Liberty Bowl. Because of the possibility for a new stadium, the administration eliminated the project’s 84 new toilets, deciding to only renovate the existing restrooms in the lower concourse.

“The restrooms haven’t had any true upgrades in many years. The money invested in them will make them more ADA compliant,” says Scheuerman. “It may take five or six years for a new stadium to be built, so it’s not a bad investment.”

But without vandalism or abuse, the fixtures have a lifespan of 10 to 20 years.

“We’re not going to get the full life out of the renovation, but there’s a lot of uncertainty with the new stadium,” says Scheuerman. “Since we had already started [the project], this was a good fall-back position.”

I don’t know if the city should build a new stadium or not. The 2004 study said the Liberty Bowl could use between $115 million and $148 million in upgrades. Though some work has already been done, it might make more sense to build something akin to the Papa John’s Stadium in Louisville, which cost $63 million. If we’re saving money by doing new construction, maybe we could even afford something a little nicer.

But I’m confused about how and when the mayor decided a stadium was what the city needs. In other goals for 2007, the mayor mentioned a cleaner city, a safer city, and a better-educated city. I think we can all agree that those would be beneficial, but somehow I can’t see a $100 million stadium having a positive impact on crime, sanitation, or education.

If the mayor wanted to present a solid case for a new stadium, shouldn’t the administration have done its 45 days of study before the mayor told everyone it was a good idea? How does Herenton know it’s a good idea if he doesn’t have the data to back it up?

And if Herenton knew that he was serious about building a new stadium a year ago — even if he knew it a month ago — why let the city go forward with building brand-new bathrooms in an old stadium?

It might be worth it to build a new stadium. It might be worth it to have renovated restrooms at the Liberty Bowl. But with Herenton pursuing an agenda counter to that of his staff, city money is being flushed down the toilets.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: A Staggering Weird Mayor

I was sitting at home on New Year’s Day, watching the evening news. Earlier that day, I’d posted John Branston’s dispatch from Mayor Herenton’s New Year’s Day prayer breakfast on the Flyer Web site. His story had left me dazed.

According to Branston, the mayor had built his speech around a biblical theme, “Nehemiah on the Wall.” Herenton repeatedly used the phrase “I’m on the wall” as a metaphor for his being on the job. He proposed plans to fight urban blight and add police officers, then dropped his bombshell: He wanted to build a new football stadium to replace the Liberty Bowl — a staggeringly weird idea.

At the end of his speech, the mayor asked the audience to stand up and chant: “Mayor, stay on the wall!” Apparently, most of those in attendance did just that.

The spectacle of a roomful of supposedly sentient adults standing up and shouting “Mayor, stay on the wall!” still boggles my mind. Sure, the guy fed them breakfast, but did they really listen to what he said? Or were the pancakes and sausage just that good?

Anyway, back to the evening news. The station was showing the mayor saying something about “all the haters out there.” Then he went on to disparage those who had a problem with his saying he was “called by God” to serve as mayor.

I can understand how a devout person might feel as though whatever they did in life was a result of being called by God. The thing is, you never hear, say, a plumber announcing proudly as he sticks his head under your sink, “I’ve been called by God to fix your leaks!” They couldn’t get away with it. You’d call another plumber next time just to keep that nutjob out of your house. No, it’s always those who’ve achieved some sort of notoriety — Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, George Bush — who publicly blather on about they’ve been called to serve. The problem is these folks usually manage to convince themselves that as a result of being “called,” anything they do is divinely ordained. And since God doesn’t make mistakes, whatever they want to do is right, whether it’s a new football stadium or an ill-considered war.

This megalomania is what makes “leaders” ask their supporters to chant, “Stay on the wall!” Which, come to think of it, is probably what Humpty Dumpty’s friends were saying.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com