Seattle Preparing to Blow Huge Stadium to Kingdome Come

In a city that thrives on virtual reality, actual reality can get old--fast. So it is with the hulking Kingdome, heralded 24 years ago as the wave of the future, an engineering marvel--and widely regarded today as the ugliest stadium in America.

Seattle plans a gigantic, dynamite-blasted mouse click on the 110,000-ton dome today, defining and deleting in the space of 20 seconds what has for two decades been one of the city’s defining landmarks.

For those who don’t want to get up to watch the 8:30 a.m. event as it unfolds, Microsoft and a host of other Web sites are offering improved cyber-versions: one in 3-D that sends chunks of concrete flying straight at your head, another that allows you to click on the dome and blast it into oblivion.

That anyone would want to blow up a landmark on which taxpayers still owe $125 million says much about the declining popularity of domed sports stadiums--and about the enduring capacity of urban America to reinvent itself.

Two decades ago, Seattle was a blue-collar city living in the shadow of the Boeing Co. And its middle-class sports fans wanted a place they could get out of the rain. Today, billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen--the Seattle Seahawks’ new owner--wants an open-air stadium with plenty of premium seats, VIP suites, latte concessions and good bathrooms. And if somebody gets rained on, well, the people in the Seattle area these days--home to 59,000 millionaires, growing at a rate of 1,200 a year--can afford umbrellas.

Across the country, aging sports arenas are being replaced. And domed stadiums, whose AstroTurf and artificial gray skies often seem better suited to home improvement shows and monster truck expos than baseball, have been targets of special scorn.

Houston’s Astrodome, celebrated as the Eighth Wonder of the World when it opened in 1965, is being abandoned by the Astros. The Minnesota Twins are itching to get out of the Metrodome. Wrecking balls a year ago slammed into Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena (roofed though not domed) and are aiming for a variety of other aging stadiums across the country.

Nowhere has the move to modernize been as expensive as in Seattle, where the Kingdome, the largest domed concrete structure in the world, is being replaced by two downtown stadiums.

The Mariners opened the $517-million Safeco Field last summer. The elaborate, retractable-roofed affair came in $100 million over budget, leaving the team owners and city squabbling over who had to pay the difference.

Then the Seahawks, blinking at what the Mariners had pulled off, threatened to leave town if they didn’t get a new home too. Allen stepped in to buy the team, but only if the public would pay three-fourths of the tab for a $430-million football stadium, to be built on the rubble of the Kingdome.

The demolition alone will cost at least $9 million, and maybe more, depending on how long it takes to scrape up and haul away the mess.

There are plenty of Seattlites who have cried foul.

Vincent Koskela, who led the fight to save the Kingdome, estimates the total public expenditures eventually will reach $1.6 billion, counting interest. “And a few years from now, people are going to be complaining that they lost the cozy confines of the Kingdome: 72 degrees of temperature all year long, no rain, no wet, no wind.”

While people may be mad about the cost, hardly anyone is shedding tears over the edifice that Walt Crowley, director of this city’s cyber-encyclopedia Historylink.org, calls “a concrete carbuncle on the backside of Seattle.” Local newspapers spent weeks soliciting readers’ fond memories of the Kingdome and came up largely empty-handed.

Instead, most people are making elaborate plans for where they’ll be--and what they’ll be drinking--when the building blows. For those who elect to watch it real-time, there are private parties planned at the Space Needle and in penthouse offices all over downtown. (Some tickets, complete with champagne and Bloody Marys, are going at $250 a head.) Two tour boat companies have scheduled sold-out cruises in nearby Elliott Bay. Allen plans to watch from the elite downtown Harbor Club.

The state patrol is scheduled to impose shutdowns and “rolling slow downs” on Interstate 5, Interstate 90 and other nearby highways, while a several-square-mile section of downtown will be closed completely.

Implosion of the structure--with its 25,000 tons of concrete and 40 vaulted ribs stuck 60 feet into the ground, all supported by a massive concrete ring tightened to 8.8 million pounds of tension--is no easy enterprise. The roof alone is 7.85 acres of concrete.

Crews from Maryland-based Controlled Demolition have wedged dynamite into nearly 5,800 holes drilled into the structure. Exploded sequentially with detonation cords burning at 24,000 feet per second, the Kingdome will look like a flash of lightning and a cloud of dust as, heavily aided by gravity, it collapses in on itself.

At least, that’s the plan. Controlled Demolition officials admit that, of the thousands of jobs they’ve done across the country, none has been so complex. And rightly so. The Kingdome, its designers said, was built to last 1,000 years. Nobody ever figured it would last just 24.

Jack Christiansen, the chief engineer when the Kingdome was built, won’t even take calls to talk about its demise. “It’s maddening to think they could spend millions of dollars to tear it down,” he said in the last statement he gave on the subject, to the Seattle Times, two years ago. “They’re not going to get any help from me. I feel terrible. Sick. Mad as hell, actually.”

Most people, Crowley said, just feel ambivalent.

“On the one hand, the dome is ugly as sin. But on the other hand, except for the bizarre economics of professional sports, it works just fine,” he said. “It’s kind of like the Dodge Dart of sports stadiums. It’s not like the car you want to drive to your best friend’s wedding. But it will get you there.”

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Demolition dome

Seattle’s 24-year-old Kingdome, the home of the Seahawks and one of the world’s largest concrete stadiums, comes crashing down at 8:30 a.m. today in a choreographed collapse.

Source: First & Goal Inc.; Controlled Demolition Inc.