In the comments under Chas’s last post, a discussion started between he, Pat, and I about whether or not razing old Pitt Stadium and moving to Heinz Field was necessarily a good move — as Chas assumed it was in his post. For some reason, Haloscan won’t let me add another comment and respond to Pat’s last point (Chas?). So I’m bringing the discussion up into a new post because I have no choice.
To bring everybody else up to speed, here’s Pat’s last comment.
A string of posts would be nice, but in a nutshell, Pitt got a new stadium for free.
Far more luxury boxes, club seats, and parking spaces to sell than they could ever have at Pitt Stadium (unless they did what Chicago did with Soldier Field, which would be expensive and wouldn’t include parking).
No doubt the parking (and tailgating that goes with it) brought more people to games than would have come if they were at Pitt Stadium – even with high expectations for the team on the field. It’s the perceived inconvenience that hurt attendance at Pitt Stadium in the past.
Pitt did indeed get a nice new stadium for free in Heinz Field. I, myself, especially appreciated Heinz Field’s seat backs and armrests while I was shivering on a muddy aluminum bench last month at Mountaineer Field. That being said, old Pitt Stadium had been paid for long ago and was presumably free too. Furthermore, the taxpayers of Allegheny County weren’t stuck with the bill for its construction. Anybody want me to compare the relative sales taxes between Pittsburgh and Altoona?
To make an obvious point that we all already agree on, the main advantage of old Pitt Stadium was the fact that it was located on campus. Ceteris peribus, an on-campus college football atmosphere beats an off-campus college football atmosphere every freakin’ time. The alumni can actually tailgate around their old haunts. More students show up, and more show up drunk. Don’t tell me that we all weren’t just a little jealous of that scene down in Morgantown. Pitt will never be able to compete for atmosphere with WVU, let alone with a few Big Ten schools that I could name, as long as were all driving to the North Side.
So all I’m asking is did we have to move? Couldn’t we have fixed up the bathrooms and added a few luxury boxes to old Pitt Stadium? We could have built a simple tower of luxury boxes opposite the press box just like Penn State did at Beaver Stadium. I’m not sure that we would have had to radically alter the old girl.
So I’m not quite buying Pat’s luxury box and free stadium arguments just yet. However, I will buy his parking argument. Pitt is surely making a hell of a lot more money off of parking concessions now than it used to. But as far as the perceived inconvenience of parking on campus goes, Ohio State and Notre Dame fans never seemed to have a hard time finding somewhere to park in Oakland, did they? I would suggest that Pitt’s losing seasons and commuter-student culture killed attendance in the 1990s more than the parking (not that the parking wasn’t something of a factor, admittedly).
Besides we all agree that the urban tailgating in Oakland was something truly unique in college football.
In conclusion, I’m simply not sold on the NECESSITY of razing Pitt Stadium yet. Obviously, I haven’t seen enough of whatever cost-benefit analysis was performed to know if razing the old girl was an outright good idea or not. And I realize that we haven’t really factored in all that the Pedersen Center brings to campus yet. We did need a convocation center. I’m just not sure that it had to be located on the ashes of was once one of the greatest stadiums in football.
Now maybe we can get another four comments under this post before somebody has to start another post.
Hail to Haloscan’s improving its service.
