Originally posted by RTFirefly:
Originally posted by PacTiger:
Originally posted by Phoenix49ers:
Its not like they had a ton of options, it was either build the stadium in a radioactive, toxic wasteland ,tear it down and rebuild at Candlestick while playing elsewhere for a few seasons and having the city dragging their feet the whole time or build outside of San Francisco. I blame both the Yorks and the city for not getting it done.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/01/_49ers_santa_clara_why_didn_t_san_francisco_try_harder_to_keep_its_football.html
But former Mayor Gavin Newsom deserves a good share of the blame. For years, he pressured the 49ers to build a new stadium inside a deserted and radioactively polluted naval shipyard. The team resented the proposal, and the city didn't make any serious offers that didn't involve relocating to a Superfund site. In the meantime, Newsom did propose a sweetheart deal to lure a more esoteric event to San Francisco. As the 49ers get set to leave town, the America's Cup's 72-foot catamarans will set sail in San Francisco Bay later this year.
The stadium was to be a fantastical anchor in homebuilder Lennar Corp.'s plans to refashion hundreds of acres of weedy wasteland into a thriving metropolis for well-to-do residents. Lennar offered the team virtually free use of shipyard land and $100 million, a liberal chunk of its anticipated redevelopment profits, to help meet stadium construction costs. Rep. Nancy Pelosi helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for environmental work at the shipyard, which was used in part to clean up a neat rectangle of land where the stadium would be built. Surrounding shipyard soil remains heavily polluted.
But never once did the 49ers say they wanted to move to the shipyard, which is one of the nation's most polluted places. An underground landfill at the site filled with petroleum and other toxic chemicals burned for more than a month in 2000, releasing an acrid cloud through the soil.
By 2010, even as Newsom offered the 49ers a polluted shipyard, he proposed giving away an estimated $128 million worth of prime waterfront property rights and other public benefits to Oracle Corp. co-founder and America's Cup holder Larry Ellison for the right to host the America's Cup regatta. That was despite there being few other serious bidders for the event. Warm-up racing began in 2012 and the America's Cup will be raced in San Francisco Bay later this year under a less generous deal approved by city lawmakers.
But the city never offered up any appealing sites for the 49ers. In private talks, city officials left a rebuild at the Candlestick Point location on the table, and the site in nearby Brisbane continued to be discussed. But when it came to a new location for a stadium, the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was the only site that the city offered. Take it or leave it was Newsom's ultimatum. "There was not a lot of cooperation," said planning commissioner Antonini. He said the franchise must share some of the blame for the bad will that mushroomed between team and city officials. But he criticized Newsom's administration for not working with the 49ers to come up with a more appealing alternative to the shipyard. "People weren't foresighted enough to work with them," he said.
The 49ers should be playing in San Francisco but I'm not going to cry about it, the 49ers are still the 49ers. Hopefully with this current HC and GM they build their own winning tradition at the new stadium.
Should've rebuilt at candlestick point. Santa Clara Levi's stadium sucks on so many levels.
That was my hope as well. But, and it's a big but, Undead Al was adamant in not sharing his stadium. The NFL insisted on a stadium with NFL number of seats. The best we could probably have hoped for was several seasons at the LA Coliseum (ye-uck!!) sharing with USC followed by returning to Candlestick 2.0. That's my understanding of it anyway.
I guess I don't have a super informed thought on it as I have never lived in the SF area. But, I was fortunate enough to make it to the Cardinals 49ers game we won in our last season at Candlestick. It was great for my wife and I as lifelong fans to have been able to be at Candlestick and we were able to score great seats(7th row at the 35ish yard line). However, having been to 3 games at Century Link field(formerly Quest field) in Seattle I can say the infrastructure around Candlestick and access to public transportation and ease of exiting the game was so much better in Seattle simply because it didn't deal with the obstacles in the way of Candlestick. It seemed to me that where Candlestick was there wasn't a lot of feasible, cost effective options for easing all the massive traffic congestion.
Seattle's traffic system is a mess and because of where the Clink is located it still didn't cause a ton of issues and you could get out of the game, to your vehicle and down the road without too much trouble. It helps that the Clink is located on the south end of Seattle where the city really first starts, in an inudstrial area of the city that is largely unused on game-days and has nearby train, lightrail(Seattle's BART) and bus stations.That's why they built it there - literally across the street from SafeCo field.
