An Intimate Football Stadium?

With all the haggling going on over whether to pressure a reluctant National Football League to warehouse a new team in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, it’s easy to forget why the Coliseum is a great location for a stadium. But the reason is well worth remembering: The Coliseum, unlike any other local football venue existing or proposed, lives and breathes in the urban context of Los Angeles.

You would think that these days, when the urban atmosphere plays such an important role in creating successful public amusements ranging from baseball to movies, that the Coliseum’s most basic asset would be obvious. Unfortunately, however, it’s hard for the NFL owners to see things way down on the ground from the vantage point of their luxury skyboxes. With or without the NFL, Los Angeles can make the Coliseum work as a viable football venue by recognizing the stadium’s important assets and building on them to change the model of what a football stadium is supposed to do.

All the things that drive the NFL crazy about the Coliseum are all the things that make it a great place for a football stadium. It’s an old facility located on a tight site. It’s in an older part of town. It’s adjacent to an urban college campus (the University of Southern California) and it’s a part of a once-magnificent but now somewhat rundown urban park, Exposition Park.

All these supposed problems can easily be turned into opportunities, which, if managed properly, can challenge the NFL to reinvent professional football’s image in a way that lukewarm Los Angeles will respond to.

The first--and maybe most important--step toward this goal is simply to admit that the Coliseum is an urban stadium. For decades, sports teams tried to solve their financial problems by fleeing urban areas for squeaky-clean suburbs. But recently, at least in some sports, this trend has begun to turn around.

Major-league baseball has managed to attract a new generation of fans by making stadiums themselves an attraction, and connecting the baseball experience to the larger experience of exploring a city. The fabulously successful new baseball stadiums are intimate “ballparks” dripping with so much atmosphere that it’s fun merely to be inside them. (In sun-baked Phoenix, the county is building an intimate ballpark inside what amounts to a large barn in order to protect it from the sun, a kind of “Coors Field in a box.”) Furthermore, they are located in older urban neighborhoods that are also built to an intimate scale.

But intimacy has never been part of the NFL experience. With virtually every game televised by a major network, NFL stadiums long ago were transformed into little more than concrete television studios, with fans serving as a kind of studio audience to make the whole experience seem more real on TV. There is little evidence that the NFL is backing off from this television-oriented approach. Desperate for a new generation of fans, the league has hired a former MTV executive as its marketing director.

The NFL notwithstanding, however, it is possible to use football to create the same kind of intimate urban experience that baseball is thriving on these days. In fact, football is still used this way all over the country. Not by the NFL, but by colleges and universities, which understand the marketing value of providing a specific kind of “experience” in putting on football games on fall afternoons. This experience stands in stark contrast to the pro games, which tend to conjure up an image of overweight, middle-aged men getting drunk in a parking lot before entering a vast concrete bowl. Professional football can learn some important lessons from the continuing success of the college game--and from the resurgent success of baseball.

The Coliseum is one of the great enigmas in American sports architecture, to be sure. For decades, the Coliseum Commission and various sports entrepreneurs have struggled with how to redesign it. Most plans have called for reducing its size and putting the playing field closer to the fans. None of them addressed the stadium as part of a park--or a neighborhood--or a great city. But this is the necessary starting point to bring the Coliseum back.

Intimacy is probably the last word anyone would use in connection with the Coliseum. Much of the rap on the stadium is that it is so vast you might as well be watching the players on TV. (Indeed, a lot of fans in the stands at the Coliseum do just that.) But the cavernous nature of the stadium itself is a solvable problem. Far more important is the fact that the immediate vicinity is rich with possibilities in providing football fans with a positive, urban-oriented experience very much in keeping with current American trends in public amusements.

Step 1 is to reconfigure the inside of the stadium so that it’s smaller, more personal and closer to the fans. But Step 2 is equally important; the whole idea won’t work without it. That task is to follow through on the fine-grained urban-design improvements at Exposition Park already planned by the state of California. Because it is Exposition Park, more than any other single element of the Coliseum’s location, that makes the idea of an intimate football stadium work.

Exposition Park is one of L.A.’s lost jewels. In addition to the Coliseum and the Sports Arena, which presumably would be closed, it is home to the Museum of Natural History, the almost-completed California Science Center and 3-D IMAX theater and a once-spectacular rose garden. At its best, Exposition Park is one of Los Angeles’ few refuges of true urbanity: a classically proportioned “tight” space that reflects the early 20th-century feel now coming back into vogue as part of the new urbanism and other movements in urban design. The Coliseum itself plays into this historical motif. It is a creation of the 1920s, the period in which Los Angeles pursued “material dreams,” in the words of historian Kevin Starr, and it holds memories of two Olympic Games and an endless string of sparkling fall afternoons.

People don’t like to go to Exposition Park these days because there is a lot of competition for urban experience in L.A. The beach, Universal CityWalk, Third Street Promenade, even Dodger Stadium--all combine human density and varieties of experience in a much more appealing way. But all these successes point to a deep hunger for experiences that are urban but still manageable.

If the stadium can be reconfigured and Exposition Park can be refurbished, then Los Angeles has drawn the basic outlines of a football experience that can be created on the city’s own human-scale terms, not on the TV-driven terms of the National Football League. USC’s interest in the Coliseum would only be enhanced, as would the potential to use the Coliseum for soccer, which, unlike football, seems like a sport with huge long-term growth potential in Los Angeles.

By borrowing the best ideas from major-league baseball and college football, and by reclaiming L.A.’s lost urban-design past, the Coliseum can reshape the experience of attending a professional football game. This possibility is badly needed by the NFL, but it won’t be realized in any other city, because nowhere else does the league need the city more than the city needs the league. This possibility simply does not exist at Hollywood Park or Dodger Stadium or even at the Rose Bowl. By using the Coliseum and Exposition Park right, Los Angeles can bring professional football back to town on its own terms, and strengthen the appeal of its own urban experience along the way.*