by Neil deMause
As the stadium’s biographer Peter Richmond wrote, “Baltimore didn’t need a new baseball stadium, but it was more than grateful for the deliverance of a national showpiece.” Camden Yards, as the park would soon be known nationwide, caught the attention of every baseball team yearning for a new stadium. Fans flocked through the gates of the new “old-time” park, filling the Orioles’ ledgers with unprecedented revenue, and the repercussions would be felt nationwide.
“Comeback City”
While the Orioles’ new owner was lobbying for a new home in Baltimore, the hapless Indians (helmless as well after O’Neill’s death) were about to see their fortunes change. Whether real or imagined, the threat of losing their baseball franchise, no matter how much the Indians had struggled, was of enormous importance to many Clevelanders. The city had witnessed, as had the rest of the country, what had happened to Baltimore’s beloved Colts when another town laid down better terms. So when, two years after the domed stadium went down in defeat at the polls, the Indians were bought by brothers Richard and David Jacobs, there was a collective sigh of relief. The Jacobses (no relation to Orioles owner Eli Jacobs) were locals who had made millions in real-estate development, especially in shopping-mall construction. Significantly, they had made their fortunes in the Cleveland area and had considerable interest in downtown development projects. “Increasingly they began to make substantial investments in the city of Cleveland,” explains David R. Elkins, a professor of political science at Cleveland State University, noting that the brothers purchased building after building in the downtown area. “They made some enormous changes on the physical appearance of the city.”
There wouldn’t be much of a grace period for Clevelanders, however, because the Jacobs brothers weren’t about to give up on the idea of having a new home built for their team. The brothers had made their fortunes in an industry that had benefited tremendously for decades from Cleveland’s generous tax-abatement policies, and when they bought the Indians, they argued that a central element of their successfully rebuilding the team would have to be a new home. But in a city that had already rejected public funding of a new stadium, it would take masterful manipulation to persuade the populace to fund such a project.
In 1990 the Central Market Gateway Project was formed in order to develop a new downtown stadium for the Indians and an arena for the basketball Cavaliers (who had been playing in suburban Richfield), with what was then proposed as a mix of public and private funds. The project got its title from the proposed construction site—twenty-eight acres of prime downtown real estate that was home to the city’s historic Central Market. The site was one of the city’s two old open-air produce and supply markets and was still an active, if somewhat neglected, neighborhood gathering spot when it was demolished in 1989 at the request of the domed-stadium supporters. For several years, as stadium backers plotted tactics, the site sat, unused, as Cleveland’s inner-city residents were forced to go elsewhere to meet their shopping needs. Those same taxpayers presumably could take solace, along with the rest of the city, in thinking of the newly razed spot as the centerpiece for what had been dubbed a “comeback city.”
With property taxes a proven failure with voters and politicians alike, the principal means of paying off the city bonds that would fund the new stadium project was to be a “sin tax”—a tax on alcoholic beverages and cigarette- and tobacco-related products. The Cuyahoga County commissioners, no doubt fearful of tying their own political futures to such a project, decided to put that decision to the voters—against the wishes of stadium boosters, who desperately wanted to have the county impose the tax without a costly referendum campaign. Raising $1 million from private interests, including $300,000 from both the Indians and the Cavaliers, supporters of the initiative set out to prove to Cleveland voters that a vote for the stadium was a vote for the future of Cleveland.
”Who wins with Issue 2?” blared a newspaper ad just days before the 1990 vote. “We All Do,” answered the placards held by a multicultural rainbow of Cleveland schoolchildren. “Gateway will create a development that will generate $33.7 million in public revenues every year and provide: 28,000 good-paying jobs for the jobless; neighborhood housing development for the homeless; $15 million a year for schools for our children; revenues for City and County clinics and hospitals for the sick; energy assistance programs for the elderly.” The ad went on to promise what wouldn’t be taken from taxpayers’ wallets or given to team owners: “No property tax; no sales tax; no income tax; no tax abatement… Gateway: the next chapter in our future.”
The PR campaign was combined with some hardball threats from the Major League Baseball establishment. Two days before the vote, baseball commissioner Fay Vincent paid a visit to the city of Cleveland. “Should this facility not be available in Cleveland, should the vote be a negative one, we may be finding ourselves confronting a subject that we want to avoid,” Vincent said. “I say to you, it would be very bad for baseball, and I am opposed to Cleveland losing its team.” A Plain Dealer columnist laid it out for the public: “Anyone who thinks the Indians will still be playing in [Municipal] Stadium at the end of the century is nuts. They’ll either be in a new stadium here or a new stadium elsewhere. Period.”
The so-called Gateway initiative won a narrow victory with 51.7 percent of the vote. As with the earlier domed-stadium initiative, all but one of the twenty-one wards located within the city limits voted against the proposal.
The voting reflected a split in the local electorate, explains John Ryan, executive secretary of the Cleveland AFL-CIO. “One is the suburbanites and a couple of wards that have quite a bit of money. The other are low-income people or people that rely on the school systems. And for the most part, they are people who don’t have much of a voice.” The stadium vote had reaffirmed working-class and poor Clevelanders’ suspicions that, when it came to matters of public policy and decision making in the city, their pocketbooks were the first to be raided (via cigarette and liquor taxes, which, like all taxes on the sale of goods, fall disproportionately on those with lower incomes), even though their concerns were the last to be addressed.
Voters had approved the proposal with the understanding that the combined cost of the new stadium and arena would run about $344 million. But that soon turned into a much greater public investment—some estimate the total cost through 1996 to be as high as $462 million, with as much as two thirds coming from the public.1 And that cost continued to accumulate. It wasn’t until late December 1996 that Gateway Economic Development Corp. signed a contract agreeing to pay, over five years, $1.6 million in overdue taxes—most of it owed to Cleveland schools.
“The arena was the real bugaboo,” says Elkins. The Cavaliers played in a nearly new arena in nearby Richfield, he explains, and the team owners, Gordon and George Gund, had just refurbished that arena at their own expense. The Gunds, he recalls, “were constantly saying, ‘We don’t need to come downtown. We have a fine facility out at Richfield Coliseum, and if we don’t have a state-of-the-art facility here in Cleveland, there’s no incentive, more or less, for us to come downtown.’”
Cost overruns or not, by the spring of 1994 the Indians had their new home. (Gund Arena, for the Cavaliers, would follow that autumn.) Named Jacobs Field after Richard Jacobs offered the highest bid for the naming rights, the new stadium was directly in the Camden Yards mold—modestly sized and constructed out of lime rock to reflect local construction resources, with an asymmetrical seat layout and state-of-the-art scoreboard.
Send in the Browns
Even while some Clevelanders bemoaned a stadium seen as too big, too old, and too drafty for baseball, the town’s football team continued to pack in crowds at the same location. The Cleveland Browns, owned since 1961 by multimillionaire GOP fundraiser Art Modell, were as much a symbol of NFL glory as the Indians were a baseball embarrassment. All winter long, Sunday afternoons meant packed Browns games at Municipal Stadium with a boisterous core of working-class fans who’d chee
red the team on for decades. The rabid enthusiasm was symbolized by the nationally known “Dawg Pound”—the rowdy crowd of fans in the end zone bleacher seats who painted themselves in the team’s orange and brown, often consumed great quantities of alcohol, and donned canine masks when the team’s defensive secondary took to calling themselves the Dawgs and barking. (Arsenio Hall would immortalize this group by encouraging his late-night national television audience to bark in the same manner.)
By the mid-1980s, when the fate of the Indians was portrayed as being in severe jeopardy, the future of the Browns was never publicly questioned. But on November 4, 1995, Modell stunned the city with the revelation that he had been involved in negotiations with Maryland officials to move his team to Baltimore. Rumors had circulated for months that Modell resented the city’s finding money to build the Gateway Project and the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while not funding renovations of Municipal Stadium. But Modell had also promised the city in 1994 that as long as he owned the team he’d never leave town, and the rumors remained just that—until November 1995.
Modell had long requested renovations to Municipal Stadium, and some were in the works. In fact, the story of his probable exodus broke the day before a scheduled vote to extend the sin tax created to fund the Gateway complex so that it could be used to pay for improvements to the Browns’ home. Perhaps not surprisingly (the Plain Dealer ran a front-page editorial urging a yes vote), the referendum passed.
But with a lucrative offer from Baltimore in hand, Modell was not to be placated with mere stadium renovations. Three days later, the deal was official. Cries of fury came from almost every corner of Cleveland. From carefully orchestrated petition drives by the mayor’s office, to spontaneous anti-Modell outbursts (at times lapsing into anti-Semitism—“They killed the wrong Jew” read one memorable homemade sign at a Browns game after Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was slain), the city reacted with passion and outrage to Modell’s announcement.
There were several “Save Our Browns” rallies in the months following Modell’s announcement—especially after Mayor Michael White urged Clevelanders to let the nation hear their outrage. “No Team, No Peace” was a common slogan in a surreal time in which a city saw its usually moderate mayor tirelessly campaign against one of the town’s most famous multimillion-dollar residents. Concerned citizens wore orange armbands and gathered petitions, Cleveland-born comedian Drew Carey spoke at one rally, and a cottage industry hawking anti-Modell T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers blossomed. But the Browns left anyway, and the city reeled. It was perhaps the only time the New York Times has ever run a photograph of a grown man wearing a dog mask, smoking a cigar, and weeping.
As for Baltimore, after twelve years the city had finally found its replacement for the Colts, even if the new Baltimore Ravens didn’t yet have quite the allure of the old club. The Browns’ move also meant that Baltimore would at last have to build the new stadium that it had denied the Colts, a football-only stadium adjacent to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, at a cost of an additional $200 million in state-lottery money. For the Ravens, there was no question of paying their own way: Their new lease guaranteed the team thirty years of free rent, plus a $50 million cash relocation bonus. “As sweetheart [deals] go, call this one the Demi Moore special,” San Diego Union-Tribune sportswriter Tom Cushman wrote, noting that a Ravens subsidiary would even rake in half the profits (plus a 10 percent “management fee”) for rock concerts and other non-football events at the new stadium. The Orioles, noting a parity clause in their lease requiring that they get at least as good a deal as any football team at Camden Yards, immediately demanded free rent, too.
Baltimore had paid dearly to replace its departed football team; now it would be Cleveland’s turn to ante up. The city had hoped that the renovation of Municipal Stadium that voters had approved in November would be enough to lure a new team. But when Mayor White met with NFL officials in early January 1996, he was told that the league would consider a replacement team only if there were a new stadium in place. White, following negotiations with NFL officials on the city’s chances of getting a replacement football team, quickly brokered a deal to tear down Municipal Stadium and replace it with a new $220 million football-only stadium to be paid for primarily with tax money.
A populace that had just been called upon to hand over $175 million in stadium-renovation money was now going to have its wallets raided once again. And yet, with Cleveland’s voters and politicians facing the very real specter of a town without football, local activists calling for a change in fiscal priorities faced an uphill battle.
Marge Misak, a longtime community activist, remembers well her sense of isolation. “There was no outcry. There were no people publicly, no politicians, no groups, that were saying, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s look at it. Let’s question it.’ It was astounding, especially in light of the fact that all the cost overruns at Gateway were coming through, and the county was coming up with more and more loans that were obviously not going to be repaid, just to finish that project.… It was kind of an astounding juxtaposition, because you would think that there would be questions about, ‘Did we learn our lesson here?’”
Six days of debate in the Cleveland City Council culminated in a 13–8 vote in support of funding the new football stadium. The final tally was closer than many had expected. At the council hearings, recalls Misak, “One councilperson got up and talked about his neighborhood and the children, apologizing to the eight-year-olds in his neighborhood who didn’t have swings to play on. In the beginning of his speech I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I can’t believe this person, who is a total mayor’s ally.’ I’m thinking he’s going to come out against this.…” She trails off in a laugh. “But he didn’t! He apologized to all the eight-year-olds in his neighborhood and then voted to put the city general fund at risk.”
By February 1996 the Plain Dealer could boast in its lead editorial, “The best deal possible; Cleveland is rid of Art Modell and his mediocre team, and Mayor White has helped foster a Browns rebirth.” It was civic-boostering spin at an all-time peak—what had been painted as tragedy only a few short months before was now seen as the only possible way for the city to hold on to its team name and rid itself of a suddenly unpopular man at the same time. No one dared mention that the city coffers didn’t have the money to fund a new stadium—Cleveland’s third publicly funded new sports facility in less than a decade—or that acquiring a new team could very well mean enticing a team to bolt from yet another town.
Early reports had the Cincinnati Bengals or, ironically enough, the Indianapolis Colts being brought in to play in the new Cleveland stadium. But the Bengals soon took themselves out of the running by striking a deal for their own new stadium—paid for lock, stock, and luxury box by the citizens of Cincinnati to keep their football team in town. The March 1996 referendum that authorized that football stadium also approved a new stadium for the baseball Reds to keep them from feeling left out. And so, by the spring of 1997, plans had been laid for four stadiums in two states as a consequence of Art Modell’s flight from Cleveland, itself a product of the Colts’ move from Baltimore more than a decade before.2
Aftermath
According to today’s conventional media wisdom, both Cleveland and Baltimore are cities in the midst of “renaissances,” rising from the ashes of ’70s decay to stand newly triumphant as urban growth centers. Credit for these rebirths is largely given to the cities’ reconstructed downtowns, anchored in each case by a multimillion-dollar sports complex that draws tourists from across the country.
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the new stadiums could have been more successful. Jacobs Field and Camden Yards sold out virtually every game from the day they opened; in 1996 and 1997 the Indians set a new baseball record by selling out the entire season months before opening day, leaving the team’s ticket sales staff with little to do for the year but count the money. A study by the city of Baltimore found that the number of fans coming into town
from outside the Baltimore–Washington region for Orioles games nearly doubled after the new ballpark was built.
As for the visions of a rising economic tide that would lift all boats, though, the story was more troubling. And so while Cleveland, under the leadership of Mayor White, has been lauded repeatedly by the national media as a classic comeback town—with its beautiful new sports facilities as key elements—life remains much the same for the city’s still-shrinking urban population. In the midst of a decades-long drop in population, the percentage of Clevelanders living in poverty rose from 17 percent in 1970 to more than 40 percent by the mid-1990s. The city school system, drained of property taxes, is in shambles—only 38 percent of its students graduate high school, with only 7 percent testing at a twelfth-grade level—and was placed in state receivership in 1995. In fact, the day before the deal for a new football stadium in Cleveland was approved by the Cleveland city council, the Cleveland public school system announced it would cut $52 million over two years, laying off up to 160 teachers and eliminating interscholastic athletics from a program that Cleveland school superintendent Richard A. Boyd described as “in the worst financial shape of any school district in the country.”3
In Baltimore the toll is harder to quantify. Because the stadiums were built with state money, there is no guarantee that the city would have reaped the benefit of alternative uses for the funds. Still, the Camden Yards complex ultimately drew more than $400 million out of the state treasury, the bulk of it coming from poor Baltimoreans who are the lottery’s best customers. That’s $400 million, critics charge, that could have been spent on the city’s gaping chasm of needs for education or drug treatment. And the vein is now tapped out: With each new sports lottery to meet the stadiums’ cost overruns, state lottery officials have seen their yield decline, leading many locals to conclude that the lottery market is simply saturated. In 1997 a plan to legalize limited casino gambling in the city of Baltimore and use the proceeds for education was shot down by Parris Glendening, Schaefer’s successor as governor.4