It’s a Suite Deal--If You Have $20,000 or More

They are self-contained living rooms, with cocktail bars and big picture windows overlooking the gridiron, and you can have one for as little as $20,000.

The Rose Bowl’s future luxury suites have been put on the market for this year’s UCLA football season, even though the brand-new $11-million press box that will hold them is still nothing but a steel skeleton perched on the bowl’s western wall.

But everything’s on schedule, Rose Bowl officials say. The press box, almost 50% completed, will be finished by mid-August. And the suites will be ready for use for UCLA’s first home game, Sept. 12 against Cal State Fullerton, said Tournament of Roses football director Harriman Cronk.

Rose Bowl officials showed off some full-scale models of the two kinds of suites: the club suite, with theater-like rows of glassed-in seats, and the executive suite, with movable seats and plenty of schmoozing room around the bar.

Most of the club suites are 14-seaters and most of them go for $25,000 a season. (One will be offered for $20,000.) The executive suites have a dozen seats and they lease for slightly more. The lease includes admission to six home UCLA games, the Rose Bowl game on New Year’s Day and, starting next year, the Fourth of July fireworks show. And each seat-holder gets a place on the reviewing stand for the Rose Parade.

Officials say that, with a recession battering a lot of would-be corporate customers, they have kept the prices low. “It’s a lot less than the Coliseum was shooting for,” Cronk said.

Late last year, Spectacor Management Limited Partnership, the company that manages the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, put a proposed $175-million renovation project on hold because of lackluster sales of $3,600-per-season club seats and $90,000 luxury boxes.