The Seattle Stadium That Wasn’t
July 30th, 2007 @ 1:34 am by Cliffe | Sorted Miscellaneous |
What if the
Kingdome never existed? I was recently routing through some old city archives and found a few rather interesting documents. Being a big Seattle Mariners fan, these seem even more interesting. It’s a 1963 proposal from the Cheney Construction Company (and associates) to the Central Association (who is now the
Downtown Seattle Association) regarding a new 70,000 seat stadium to literally be built
in Puget Sound. The stadium was to have a forward thinking retractable roof. Remember, this wasn’t realized in Seattle until 1999 with
Safeco Field. For those keeping score at home, this was also 13 years before the Kingdome was built. Check out the old propsal documents, schematic, map, and pencil sketch. Click on the images for a larger view:
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Page one of the proposal from Cheney Construction Company for the stadium to be located on Seattle’s central waterfront. This pages lists 75,000 seats while the overhead schematic shows 70,000.
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Page two of the proposal discussing cost and financing. Interestingly, the cost analysis seems to be coming *after* the proposal, nice! But a budget of $15 million is given as a, um, ballpark.
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Overhead schematic showing baseball diamond and football field areas as well as seating levels.
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Map showing the location of the proposed stadium in relation to Seattle Center. The planners also wanted to connect the monorail to this facility.
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Pencil sketch of the stadium. Imagine getting directly to a Mariners game by boat! Seattle Center and the Needle can be seen in the background.
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Ah, yes, the one more chapter in The Future that Wasn’t. When the last monorail vote came down, I was seeing Jetson-esque monorail lines that took full advantage of the third dimension, dropping off spectators at the *top* of the stadiums or at least at club level
Ah, well. That kind of boldness is a thing of the past. Thanks for sharing this.
Taryn…
Great site! i’m looking forward to reading more….
The built-in ferry dock is seriously awesome.
If that would have been built, Seattle may have received an AFL or NFL franchise by the end of the 60′s, and either the A’s or Braves may have moved there(my money is on the A’s because I heard that Finley was eyeing Seattle back then).