EDITOR’S NOTE: Spacing will be eventually heading out west with the launch of Spacing Vancouver. We still don’t have a set date yet, but it’ll be soon, we promise. In the meantime, Spacing’s editors thought it would be good to acquaint our Toronto readers with some Vancouver urban issues news. Spacing contributor Liam Lahey recently relocated to Vancouver and filed this post.
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The Canadian Football League’s (CFL) B.C. Lions are going back to their roots for the coming season by returning to the site on which historic Empire Stadium once stood in Hastings Park in East Vancouver. It’s just too bad the Lions have called for building a drab, uninspiring structure to discourage their fans from becoming emotionally attached to the outdoor field.
The original Empire Stadium, built in 1954 for the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, was the reason Vancouver landed a CFL franchise in the same year. At one time, it was Vancouver’s premiere outdoor amphitheatre. Among its many highlights: it was the site of the first televised sports event broadcast live to all of North America (The Miracle Mile) and The Beatles played there in August 1964. After the Lions and the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer club moved to BC Place in 1983, Empire Stadium was without tenants and it was demolished 10 years later.
The Leos’ move back to Empire Stadium was necessitated by the forthcoming installation of a retractable roof at the cavernous BC Place stadium in downtown Vancouver. The Whitecaps will also play at Empire Stadium this summer as a result of the renovations.
BC Place is a horrible place to witness a football match or any game for that matter. It can accommodate 60,000 fans but it usually lacks enough people to form even a modest-sized crowd, which might speak more to the state of the CFL than the building itself. The situation is akin to how Torontonians are quick to dismiss SkyDome (a.k.a. Rogers Centre) as a wretched place to see sports that should be played outdoors (thousands of empty seats, pain in the butt to access, uninspiring surroundings). Like Toronto’s SkyDome, BC Place provides about as much atmosphere as a concrete slab possibly can (read: none at all).
As outlined in a recent Vancouver Sun article, due to stringent building and seismic codes, the temporary 27,500-seat coliseum being built on Empire Stadium’s grounds will have a steel-framed, metal-clad roof able to withstand wind and snow loads for many years to come. But in November 2011, it will be dismantled.
Reportedly, the Lions specifically told the structure’s builders to ensure it’s as dull as can be, lest fans realize watching a CFL or soccer game outdoors with a glorious view of the North Shore’s mountains beats the bejeezus out of trying to stay awake inside ugly, stale, barren BC Place.
“They want it to look utilitarian and deliberately low-key,” the co-owner of Clearbrook Iron Works, the Fraser Valley steel fabricating company assembling the structure, told the Sun.
If the Lions and Whitecaps are keeners to return to BC Place in 2011 to play their games, let them! But the teams’ fans ought to encourage other Vancouverites to collectively rally behind permanently resurrecting Empire Stadium and restoring it to its former glory.
Photo from Vancouver Archives
17 comments
Stadiums like the Skydome and BC Place kill CFL crowds. The CFL is best enjoyed outdoors.
This article fails to mention that the Whitecaps ownership are working on getting a purpose-built waterfront stadium approved and built, possibly for 2015. Easy to see why– MLS will not draw CFL numbers (at least after the initial hype) and so will look completely ridiculous in BC Place. So while the Lions will continue to play in BC Place, the Whitecaps are hoping to move to more friendly confines.
I agree with scottd, the best place to see a CFL game is outdoors. I imagine that stadiums like SkyDome and BC Place were conceived in order to have revenue certainty (no rainouts discouraging walk-up fans). Unfortunately, the only certainty they created is that revenue will be LOWER because the atmosphere sucks.
Why the photo of Chicago’s soldier field?
There was a ski jumping event held at Empire in Vancouver I’m told and here’s a link to a Van Sun story by Gary Kingston http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?p=3698489
Hey Liam,
Thanks for the article. About the new Spacing Vancouver… are there any thoughts on expanding it to Spacing Pacific much like Halifax’s Spacing Atlantic? VibrantVictoria.ca is doing some great stuff in that city and I’d hate to see it get left off the map of a nationwide urban-affairs blog, as Spacing is now becoming.
Hi Addhum:
Spacing Vancouver will certainly contain lots of stuf about Victoria, the same way Spacing Toronto deals with stuff from the surrounding GTA region.
If possible, we’d love to have Spacing Victoria too.
@Scottd: The CFL is best enjoyed outdoors.
I think you meant “The CFL is best enjoy outdoors… dry”!!!!
I grew up in Vancouver and have very fond memories of walking the 3.5 km (thank you GM) from/to my Westlawn Dr. North Burnaby home to the open-to-the-elements (save the 2 small covered grandstands) Empire Stadium to cheer on my BC Lions’ Joe Kapp, Willie Fleming, Nub Beamer and the Claridge brothers: Pat & Bruce et al in the early 60’s/70’s; along with my best friend Richard Claridge & 32,000 Lion-mad Vancouverites.
I can assure you despite these fond memories I still hate sitting outdoors getting soaking wet in the rain, watching a CFL football game despite the view of rain falling on Grouse Mountain cedars or of late piercing Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne’ smoggy skies while watching my beloved Lions play CFL football.
It’s too bad we couldn’t have the choice of venue based on weather!
As a Victoria resident, I am glad to see Spacing come west and coming to Victoria would be a nice bonus. As for VibrantVictoria, it is sadly currently largely dominated by about a dozen people and needs to work on broadening its reach.
The closest equivalent of the “surrounding GTA region” for Vancouver is probably the Lower Mainland, which does not include Victoria. I can see why Addhum suggested the “Spacing Pacific” name instead.
I know there are formal definitions – but sometimes we include Hamilton in the GTA and sometimes we don’t. Victoria the same way, perhaps? Distance is farther and the Georgia Straight presents a psycho-physical barrier.
Personally, I would rather watch any game outdoors, but only if it was sunny and warm. I do not want to watch football when it is raining, the wind blowing, and chilly temperatures. They should open the SkyDome (a.k.a. Rogers Centre) whenever it is sunny with little wind. They do tend to close it too soon in the cooler weather.
Skydome’s surroundings are anything but uninspiring: there’s the always breathtaking CN Tower and the stunning skyline. Bremner’s streetscape is rather dull though. A grand park and pedestrianization scheme to create an effect similar to the surroundings of the Eiffel Tower would be a logical improvement.
With the roof closed,SkyDome is little more than a mall with a large annoying television – in which sporting events occur that get sparsely attended.
With the roof open, it at least feels as if you’re at a park (ballpark/stadium), and the empty seats are a little less noticeable, – perhaps even a breeze off the lake to remind you that you are indeed outside (and not in your own living room , scrambling for the mute button for that giant & loud advertisement on the scoreboard)… Problem is, they rarely open it. If there’s even a remote chance of rain within the next 12 hour forecast, they keep the lid closed. What bothers me more, is the fact that the dome looks bloody awful from the outside – especially when the roof is closed. With the roof peeled back, I think it looks kinda neat, even somewhat innovative and exciting ( that’s relative of course ) – at least more so than when it is closed. Not only do I think they should have it open for more games, I wish they’d open the lid on all sunny days ( April to October ) whether there’s a game/event or not. It far more appealing and inviting.
If you went to Blue Jays games in the Dome from ’89 to ’93 you remember the place rocking with 50,000 fans every single game. It was awesome — no one minded the architecture back then.
Nonetheless, those sorts of crowds are unsustainable except for NFL teams in the US (which also requires a different football culture than Canada has).
I was surprised to hear that BC Place was being re-roofed for the Lions rather than simply retained for occasional big events but not regular games. If Molson Park/Big O can coexist in Montreal, why not Empire/BC Place in Vancouver?
If you want to see the latest in North American outdoor all-weather small-stadium design, check out the new palace built for NY Red Bull – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_Arena_(Harrison)
Toronto’s Skydome was at one time considered an engineering (if not architectual) triumph – it was for a short while the epitome of sport stadium design with the retractable roof, the hotel, the multiple bars in the outfield. The mega-dome was popular from Seattle to Houston to Pontiac, and Toronto’s example was the magnum opus.
But it didn’t last long as Baltimore (remember Baltimore? They even had a Grey Cup-winning CFL team who mattered for as long as the city was NFL-deprived) came up with the next best thing, Orioles Park at Camden Yards, a post-modern, traditionalist stadium built into the historic B&O yard warehouses downtown. Cleveland and Detroit (replacing its real historic ballpark) followed suit, going against the bigger-is-better ideology.
Suddenly, the 1994 baseball strike (which hurt the attendance MLB-wide afterwards) and the neo-traditional stadiums coming on line combined to make Skydome a relic only a few years after opening.
I’m not much of a baseball (or football) fan, but Skydome indeed had a great atmosphere in the early years when you could fill 80-100% of the seats every night. Today, it can attract crowds in the 30,000-34,000 range, which is still impressive enough – that would almost fill a post-Camden Yards ballpark, but that’s still a lot of empty seats, and when the dome is closed, it can leave one wanting.
Places like Chicago, Boston, Cleveland and Detroit have similar climates to us. I wonder what would have been if we left our stadium ambitions a bit later?
Torontonians have short memories. The continual whining about the atmosphere omits, as iSkyscraper notes, the effect of a full house with a crowd not composed of bigshots and their clients (see ACC).
The Roma vs Celtic game a couple of years ago was reported to have had a tremendous atmosphere – but it was sold out. I expect the forthcoming Manchester United game there to be the same.
I am disappointed that the original downtown Whitecaps proposal (build over the rail lands) didn’t happen or the creation of a soccer specific stadium at Empire. Whitecaps are the ones bucking the trend of teams like New York and Toronto who are going soccer specific in New York’s case and grass surface in Toronto’s case. The Province had to justify the obscene cost of retrofitting BC Place somehow, and thus the Whitecaps were rammed in.
It would be nice to see Empire made a stadium similar to Allan Lamport with a 10,000 capacity, a grass surface and an athletics track to host events too small for BC Place, but unfortunately finding the money would probably be the stumbling block.
I think the influence of Seattle countered the trend in the rest of the league and set a bad precedent for how to put an MLS team into a half-empty football staidum and somehow still be wildly successful. Had the Sounders not done so well despite only using the lower bowl of Qwest, Vancouver probably could not have gotten away with being awarded a franchise despite no soccer stadium plan in hand.
I’m quite sure that a season at Empire will cause such a ruckus, rudimentary bleachers or not, that both teams will soon be out of BC Place except for playoffs. The Alouettes played in Molson Stadium due to a booking conflict with U2 and simply never left. Lions ownership is playing with fire here.
apologies to @iSkyscraper et al
If you want to see the latest in North American outdoor/indoor retractable roof all-weather BIG-stadium design, check out the new palace built for Indianapolis Colts: Lucas Oil Stadium home to Monday’s CBS televised NCAA Basketball championship: http://www.lucasoilstadium.com/
The estimated stadium cost is US$715.4million-$719.6million or ~US$575 in 1989 $kyDome (~C$570M Wikipedia, I thought it was higher ~C$625M).
I almost fell off my chair when they said 72,000 were watching college BB!