by Neil deMause
The Fan Club asked the team for a copy of the report—at which point Tigers officials demurred, insisting variously that the study was an “informal” one, or even that no written report existed. Finally, a local newspaper reporter, after nearly a year of Freedom of Information Act requests, uncovered the actual study, at which point the reason for the team’s reticence became clear: the consultants, it turned out, had actually recommended only $6 million in renovations—much of it for such items as a new sound system. (The $100 million figure, it turned out, was the price for erecting a dome atop the existing ballpark.) They had never even mentioned any salt damage. The Fan Club—which had initially taken the Tigers’ claims at face value—began turning a more discerning eye on the public statements of the team and its political supporters.
So the following March, when the city released a consulting report by stadium-builders Hellmuth Obata Kassebaum—who would stand to make millions off a contract to design and build a new stadium—the Fan Club was prepared for the worst. As expected, HOK’s report asserted that a new ballpark was the way to go, estimating that it would cost anywhere from $57 million to $245 million to renovate Tiger Stadium to the point where it would meet the team’s needs. Instead, HOK proposed a fifty-six-thousand-seat stadium with 150 corporate boxes, a helipad, a Domino’s Pizza outlet, and no bleacher seats.
By this time, Fan Club members had come to realize that the battle they were engaged in was over far more than merely saving an old ballpark. By the first summer of its operation, the Fan Club newsletter, Unobstructed Views, had moved from talking about members’ love of Tiger Stadium to asking, “Should public money be used to increase the profits of one of the wealthiest men in the Midwest?… Is the improvement of Mr. Monaghan’s profit margin a more pressing need than the education of our children, the safety of our senior citizens, the vitality of our besieged community?” Taking a more political line would cost the Fan Club some of its original support—two local radio stations that had sponsored the initial stadium hug backed off once it was clear the Fan Club meant to take “controversial” stands—but it also enabled them to draw the links between the fate of Tiger Stadium and the future of the city as a whole.
Scrambling to counter the renewed push for a new stadium, the Fan Club struck back in two ways. They launched an immediate boycott of Domino’s Pizza—making more enemies in a region where Domino’s is one of the largest corporate presences. And they contacted architects John and Judy Davids to prove that the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the stadium industry was wrong about renovation.
The Davidses, two young architects from suburban Royal Oak who drove downtown for dozens of Tiger games every year, came to the Fan Club late, but they were to become two of its most important and vocal members. The couple was already intimately familiar with Tiger Stadium, having designed a renovated owner’s box for Monaghan in the early ’80s. They were also frequent visitors to the ballpark, sitting sometimes in the owner’s box but more often with their friends in the right-field bleachers. When the Fan Club called to ask if they would design a renovation plan for the ballpark, the Davidses jumped at the chance. Armed with surreptitiously obtained blueprints and the stadium requirements the Tigers had submitted to HOK, the two spent months of evenings and weekends laboring over a detailed proposal to provide everything the Tigers had requested without changing the character of the old ballpark. When completed in January 1990, the Cochrane Plan (named for an extension to the old ballpark that would be constructed over seldom-used Cochrane Street, which ran behind the third-base line) had achieved all its goals, including expanded concession facilities, club offices, handicapped access, and seventy-three new luxury boxes. Best of all, the renovation would cost just $26.1 million, a fraction of the price of a new ballpark.
In developing the Cochrane Plan, Fan Club members discovered something else about Tiger Stadium: Not only was it historic, but it also turned out to be one of the most fan-friendly ballparks in the nation. One day in 1989, Frank Rashid was at the Fan Club office when a phone call came in from John Pastier, an architect and student of ballpark history who was looking for information on Tiger Stadium. “Aw, I love Tiger Stadium. With the catwalks!” Rashid recalls Pastier saying. “Not only are you right that it’s a great place to watch a ballgame, by actual mathematical measurement the average seat at that ballpark is closer [to the field] than the average seat at any other ballpark.”
Pastier, a former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, had the credentials to back up his opinion: His consulting work included contributions to the design of Camden Yards. But his greater passion was seating distances. As part of a project to study the old steel ballparks built in the same era as Tiger Stadium, Pastier had catalogued the average distance from upper-deck seats—the traditional province of the average fan—to home plate in dozens of ballparks across the country. Tiger Stadium, which to fit the most seats in a tightly confined space had been built with the upper deck set atop pillars right above the lower deck, indeed boasted upper-deck seating that was closer to the field than in any other ballpark—barely half the distance of most of the newer ballparks, including Camden Yards.
The key was in the columns. Anathema to new-stadium designers like HOK because they block the view of some fans in the back rows, these steel support beams are absent in every new park built in the last thirty years, necessitating that upper-level seats be set back from the field to support their weight. It’s an argument that both Pastier and John Davids dismiss as missing the forest for the girders. In modern ballparks like the new Comiskey, says Davids, “to lose the three or four thousand obstructed seats that they have, they put twenty thousand seats twice as far away. Which is a bad tradeoff. If you ask people in Chicago to compare Comiskey, which had columns like Tiger Stadium, to the new Comiskey—they’ve had real trouble selling their upper-deck tickets. People there were used to sitting close to the field, like Tiger Stadium is. I think once they sat in the upper deck a couple of times, they said, ‘We’re not going to pay fifteen bucks to sit up here.’”
Though Fan Club members blanched a bit at some items in the Cochrane Plan—particularly the luxury boxes that the Davidses planned to install on the stadium’s seldom-used third level, which struck some as an affront to Tiger Stadium’s egalitarian spirit—by and large, the plan was applauded as a savvy compromise that would fill the Tigers’ needs while saving both public money and the character of the old ballpark.
It also helped convince many Detroiters who might previously have dismissed the Fan Club as a bunch of nostalgic kooks. Bill Dow, a local attorney, first saw the Cochrane Plan scale model on exhibit at the Michigan Gallery and was so impressed that he immediately joined the Fan Club, quickly becoming a part of the core group. “When I first heard about the [stadium] hug a couple of years earlier, I just kind of thought, ‘Aw, boy, what is this?’” he remembers. “But then when I saw the Cochrane Plan I was just so impressed. After meeting with Frank [Rashid] and John Davids and a couple of people down at the Michigan Gallery, the next day I called up and said, ‘What can I do to help?’”
The Davidses, flush with praise, proudly called up Tom Monaghan’s office to present their plan to their old boss, certain that he would be elated at their work, which would meet every objection of the stadium opponents while saving millions of dollars. “We were telling people at [the Fan Club] meeting, ‘No problem, Monaghan’s cool,’” Judy Davids later recalled. “We’ll just call him, and we’ll tell him who we are.” Instead, he refused to meet with them. They called Monaghan’s home number and spoke to his daughter; according to John Davids, she replied, “Yeah, I mentioned it to him, and he didn’t make any commitment to call you.”
The Davidses were stunned that their hard work was to be dismissed without even a hearing from the team ownership. Meanwhile, accolades poured in from other corners of Detroit: the News and Free Press both ran laudatory editorials about the Davidses’ proposal, and the city planning commission recommended
seriously investigating the renovation option. Pastier says the Cochrane Plan would have been “comparable to the Wrigley Field remodeling [in Chicago]—an intelligent, pragmatic way of extending the life of a very important structure, something that was very valuable to the sport in terms of its history and character.”
As they lobbied for the Cochrane Plan, the Fan Club continued to fight on other fronts. A committee led by Gruber had successfully lobbied the Department of Interior to place Tiger Stadium on the National Register of Historic Places. The Fan Club mailing list continued to grow, ultimately to eleven thousand, and hundreds would turn out for periodic demonstrations at the ballpark. (One featured a group of kids pulling toy wagons filled with petitions urging the ballpark be saved.) Their twenty core members, all volunteers, took turns staffing their tiny storefront (donated rent-free by the building’s owner, a Fan Club supporter) and standing on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, where they sold bumper stickers and T-shirts and distributed their newsletter. When Tigers president Bo Schembechler threatened that the team would move if a new stadium were not built, the Fan Club immediately gathered to pore over the team’s lease, discovering that it solidly bound the team to play in Detroit until the year 2008, a fact they promptly brought to the media.
Tigers management and their allies, meanwhile, fell back on their original party lines. “I’d rather have the old stadium,” Monaghan told reporters in the summer of 1990. “But everybody that knows better wants a new one.” The following April, Schembechler, an ex-college football coach who had been hired specifically in the hopes that his iconic status among Michiganders would make him a PR asset, made headlines when he declared in an angry speech before the Economic Club of Detroit, “It’s unfair for you to think that you can shackle us to a rusted girder in Tiger Stadium and expect us to compete and win.”
That May, Mayor Young again predicted that Tiger Stadium was “about to fall down.”
The stadium proponents were starting to run into difficulties selling that story, though, according to John Davids: “The Young administration didn’t do a very good job of peddling the idea, and Monaghan’s organization was a disaster for that kind of stuff.” (Monaghan’s nadir came when he inexplicably fired Hall-of-Fame broadcaster Ernie Harwell before the 1991 season, leading to a fan boycott that left thousands of seats vacant on opening day.) But starting in late 1990, Wayne County deputy executive Mike Duggan joined the fray, making the stadium issue a personal crusade. Even as he assured Fan Club representatives that he would seriously consider the Cochrane Plan, Duggan was lobbying hard for a new ballpark, paying special attention to members of the media who had been relatively unreceptive to Monaghan.
County officials “spent an awful lot of money and time taking columnists out to lunch and making presentations about how many thousands of jobs the stadium would create and how Tiger Stadium was just too old and couldn’t be renovated,” says Davids. “They were able to really collar some people and turn some people around who had been supportive of us before.”
But though they kept up their rhetoric, the stadium proponents faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: There was simply no money to build a new ballpark. The state legislature had rejected repeated attempts to pass stadium-funding bills; Wayne County, meanwhile, was locked in a dispute with the city over where to build a new facility. And when the Detroit city council began mulling putting its own money into the project, the Fan Club led a referendum campaign that resulted, on March 17, 1992, in a resounding 2–1 vote barring any city money from being spent on a new ballpark.
It was, says Rashid, the high-water mark for the Fan Club. Because later that year, two new forces would enter the political mix. Tom Monaghan sold the Tigers for $80 million to Detroit Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch. And Governor John Engler, who had promised on his election in 1990 that no state money would be used to build a new stadium for the Tigers, began searching for a method of doing just that—and a method that would be immune to the desires of the state legislature or the public.
Act Two: Pizza with Everything
When Mike Ilitch bought the Tigers, Bill Dow remembers, “We thought, here’s a chance. This guy’s a lifelong Detroiter, he had, apparently, fond memories of the ballpark. And we thought, here’s a chance that maybe we can convince them to buy into renovation of the stadium.” Their hopes were buoyed further when Ilitch agreed to meet with them to look over the Cochrane Plan.
Mike Ilitch, like Tom Monaghan, is a pizza baron, his Little Caesar’s running neck and neck with Domino’s for fast-food pizza dominance. More important for the fate of the stadium struggle, he is also a downtown developer whose ties to the city-development cabal run deep and strong. A board member of Detroit Renaissance, the corporate-funded redevelopment organization that dominates city planning, Ilitch spent the better part of the early ’90s negotiating the rights to redevelop large swathes of downtown real estate, most notably the historic Fox Theater. He now made use of all these connections to pressure city political leaders for a new stadium.
Ilitch, explains Dow, was looked on as “a savior of the city—this businessman who put his headquarters downtown. When we met with Senator Carl Levin, he said, ‘You know, my daughter would kill me if I didn’t fight for renovating Tiger Stadium.’ But then he said, ‘How do we say no to a guy like Mike Ilitch?’” To further bolster his cause, the pizza king worked behind the scenes with Detroit city officials to grease the political skids for the new park. Over the course of time, two separate city-development directors would lobby hard for a new stadium then leave public office only to turn up on Ilitch’s payroll.
Meanwhile, in Lansing, Governor Engler had fixed his attentions on the Governor’s Strategic Fund. This was a pool of money that had been set up as a discretionary fund, under the sole control of the governor, to help environmental groups, small businesses, and minority business startups—“kind of a Democratic-inspired slush fund for worthy projects,” explains Rashid. Engler had been a staunch opponent of the fund when it was first set up, deriding it as “corporate welfare.” Once elected governor, however, he saw it as the perfect vehicle for funding a new Tigers ballpark—so perfect, he announced, that he would augment its modest $20 million in cash reserves with $35 million more from a new tax on casino gambling on Indian reservations that had just been passed by the state legislature.
The Fan Club immediately filed suit against Engler’s plan, calling it a blatant misuse of funds and an unconstitutional end run around the powers of the state legislature to appropriate money. Every lawyer consulted by the Fan Club remarked that their suit looked solid—in fact, says Dow, several told the activists that they had a moral obligation not to allow this theft of funds to become law. But in its first stop, the circuit court in Lansing, the case was thrown out, ruling that the gaming moneys were “not state funds.” Stunned, the Fan Club appealed all the way to the state supreme court, which returned a decision that affirmed the stadium opponents’ argument but still ruled against them: Engler’s move was bad law and would not be allowed to stand as a precedent, but the court would not stand in the way of this particular misappropriation of funds.
Meanwhile, Ilitch’s lobbying mechanism had kicked into high gear. In March 1996 Ilitch and Mayor Dennis Archer (who was elected to succeed Coleman Young in 1992) went after the ban on city funding that had been the Fan Club’s greatest victory, staging a public referendum to reverse the results of the earlier vote. The Fan Club raised about $20,000 to promote the continued ban; the city spent more than $600,000. Archer, remembers Rashid, was on television nearly nonstop during the weeks leading up to the vote, “every half hour on the half hour, with glossy fancy ads telling us basically all the lies, about how the new stadium was going to bring jobs, going to improve schools and police protection.”
Archer’s allies also raised for the first time something that had not been a major issue in the fight over Tiger Stadium: race. The city politicians behind the stadium push were, like 85 percent of Detroi
t, overwhelmingly African American; the Fan Club was predominantly white. Organized baseball has long been one of the worst sports at reaching out to people of color, dating back to the days of segregated Negro Leagues and continuing to the present day. (One survey found that just 4.8 percent of fans in attendance at baseball games in 1995 were African American, down from 9.8 percent just six years earlier.) Since the Fan Club had made a conscious decision to recruit its membership from Tiger fans, they were left with a membership that was largely, though by no means entirely, white in a predominantly black city.
Archer and his allies in the black political establishment quickly seized upon race as a wedge to drive between the Fan Club and the black electorate. The Michigan Chronicle, a local African American business newspaper, ran a front-page story on Bill Dow headlined “Stadium critic lives in suburbs,” the story alluding to “heavy-handed suburban influence” in the upcoming elections. The Fan Club leaders countered that all its founding members and a majority of its executive committee were from the city, and pointed out that neither Ilitch nor his top aides lived in Detroit. But their arguments fell on deaf ears: “They want us to renovate the old Tiger Stadium, yet when those in the suburbs build, they build new,” wrote V. Lonnie Peek in a Chronicle op-ed. “Detroit deserves a new stadium, not a renovated old one.”
The city funding ban fell by a more than 4–1 margin. Soon afterward the Detroit Lions announced that they, too, would be moving back downtown to play in a separate football stadium to be built at public expense. The total cost in public dollars: an estimated $240 million.
Epilogue: Monoculture
“Here is a tremendous theater,” Frank Rashid says, pointing to a parking lot. He is driving through downtown Detroit, or what’s left of it. “This was the Michigan Theater—wonderful lobby. It’s all gone.” Down the street a ways sits the Fox Theater, recently renovated by Mike Ilitch after city development director Emmet Moten arranged to have it condemned and sold to Ilitch at a $2 million loss to the city. Across the street from the Fox is the United Artists, which Ilitch similarly arranged to have the city transfer to his control and which the pizza king may now tear down to provide additional parking for the two new stadiums.1