When did state and local governments start subsidizing the construction and/or refurbishing of sports parks? Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field were built entirely with private funds. My hypothesis is that subsidizing the owners of athletic franchises is something that’s happened in the last 30-40 years. It’s corrupt.
Camden Yards maybe was the first. It was certainly marketed as a public good.
It’s complicated because the government built and owned a lot of the early stadiums. Presumptively, any stadium named Memorial, Veteran’s or Soldier’s was probably a public construction, built in the spirit of reconciliation from the Civil War.
So I assume Dave is getting at public funding for private profit, but an initial question is why were stadiums public facilities and then became private? It might be important to know when sports became big business.
Wonder if Drusus and DeobaldTheGaul discussed this while waiting their turn in the Coliseum.
Soldier Field (originally Grant Park Municipal Stadium) opened in 1924 and was renamed shortly thereafter to honor those killed in World War I. I have no idea why it was built in the first place. It wasn’t for football. The Bears played in Wrigley Field for 50 years.
Wouldn’t Deobald have been a Goth rather than a Gaul?
The Soldiers Field at Harvard opened in 1903 and was dedicated to the Harvard men who had died in the Civil War. But yeah, those built after WWI or subsequent wars were for the most recent war. Harvard’s was private money, but it seems like the start of expensive athletic structures.
The promoter thought the Gaul sounded better. Goth is used for the second line match
This Wikipedia entry seems about right:
“The Los Angeles Coliseum became the first fully publicly funded stadium in 1923, but such stadiums did not become the norm until the 1950s. Twenty-seven of the 30 stadiums built between 1953 and 1970 received more than $450 million in total public funding for construction. During this period, publicly funding a stadium grew in popularity as an effective incentive to attract professional sports teams to up and coming cities. Famous examples include the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving New York in exchange for 300 acres in Chavez Ravine and the New York Giants moving to San Francisco for what would eventually become Candlestick Park.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadium_subsidy
Its supported by a decent article, which sees the exit of those two teams from New York as opening an era of inter-city competition, which allowed private sports team to extract money from cities for new stadiums, whether they moved or stayed. Note that the Coliseum was built in order to attract an Olympics, so it was not necessarily built to benefit a specific private enterprise.
Thanks, PD. That’s interesting.
IMO using public money to benefit a private business with only incidental public benefits is clearly corrupt and immoral. So, for example, I think the renovation of Soldier Field in the early Aughts to suit the Bears, mostly paid for by the city, was less to benefit the city and more a “not on my watch” move by Richie Daley.
Not to mention the fact that pro sports is a de facto monopoly. League expansions in the NFL, NBA, etc. are rare and competitive and it’s clear there are many places that would like teams if only the leagues would allow it. They don’t for obvious reasons (and leagues are usually controlled by the team owners, so it’s also a cartel with the usual incentives). So there is a lot of demand that team owners can turn into leverage. Oh, you don’t want to build us a new stadium? Well, such-and-such city is willing to and I’ll move the team there unless you match their offer. Politicians don’t want to pay a political price for “losing” a team.
I wasn’t keeping notes about such things back then, but one thing I recall from living in Boston fifty years ago was that rebuilding or rebuilding or modifying sports stadiums always loomed as big big big city council issues. Traffic congestion, parking problems, noise, crowd control, police patrols, civic pride, potential riots and hooligans — all of these were connected to stadiums and all of them affected the actual running of the city.
Which meant that the city administration and the city council was usually going back and forth with sports team owners over how many parking spaces would be available at the stadium, whether the stadium should pay part of the overtime for police traffic controllers, whether unarmed guards or armed cops should provide some or all security at the stadium, etc. etc. etc.
One can imagine circumstances where a mayor and council members took different sides on some of these issues — I hasten to add I don’t recall such happening in Boston, but perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention. One can imagine a city government handling issues differently for different owners — I suspect Tom Yawkey and the Red Sox got different treatment in Boston in the 1960s than his successors in later decades.
So … It’s not just the cost of building stadiums that matters, how they get run over a period of time also matters, and is apt to become part of city politics and city culture. You can’t pretend managing sports teams is ever going to resemble Economics 101..
New from Reason on this very topic:
https://youtu.be/652fdt5Razg