Kickoff Carries a Special Meaning : Rebuilt Coliseum marks L.A.’s quake recovery

When the USC football team takes the field at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum this afternoon, it will mark an event far more important than the start of football season. It will symbolize to the entire nation how rapidly this region bounced back from the Northridge earthquake of Jan. 17.

This fall USC and the Raiders pro football team will be playing in a handsomely rebuilt football stadium. Less than eight months ago, that seemed improbable, if not impossible.

Most people who inspected the 71-year-old Coliseum in the aftermath of the disaster thought it was doomed. There were more than 10,000 cracks throughout the stadium, and whole sections of the superstructure had separated from the outer walls. Rebuilding estimates started at $35 million, a daunting amount that experts warned was likely to go higher. It did, reaching almost $60 million.

But to their great credit, members of the Coliseum Commission were not among those who figured nothing could be done except relegate the stadium to the status of a damaged landmark, like its namesake in Rome.

Led by Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, local leaders immediately began funneling to the Coliseum some of the federal and state disaster aid money that flowed into Los Angeles after the quake. They were fortunate, of course, to be pushing for the reconstruction of a building officially designated both a national and California historic landmark, a structure that had hosted two Olympics as well as speeches by presidents, popes and other leaders.

The Coliseum’s historic status allowed the Clinton Administration to fund the start of reconstruction quickly, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency; 90% of the rebuilding costs were paid by Washington, with the balance coming from the state.

With funding assured, more than 2,000 construction workers and engineers began working around the clock, seven days a week. They completed the task with days to spare. The result is a stadium that is not just seismically safer, with thicker support walls and reinforcing beams throughout, but that also looks better than it has in many years.

To be sure, the freeways that were even more hurriedly rebuilt are more important to our economy. So are the many schools, hospitals, libraries and other buildings that have come back into use since that awful January morning. But for people throughout the rest of the nation who watch Raider or USC games on television this fall, no symbol of Los Angeles’ recovery will be more powerful than the Coliseum filled with Angelenos and others cheering the local teams.