US sportsThe stadium was once hailed as the finest sporting venue in the world. On Sunday, its demolition will begin and few will shed any tears for its end
When the Detroit Lions played their first regular season NFL game at the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium on 6 October 1975, millions of Americans tuned in to witness Michigan’s new 80,000 state-of-the-art facility in all its glory. Alongside Alex Karras and Frank Gifford in the ABC commentators’ booth, legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell described the venue as “the most magnificent football structure of its kind … the finest edifice of its type known to mankind”.
Over the course of the following 20 years the Pontiac Silverdome, as it was quickly rebranded, staged huge events: Super Bowl XVI, WrestleMania III, the 1994 World Cup as well as concerts from artists such as The Who, Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Madonna and Pink Floyd. Pope John Paul II even staged a mass in the arena in front of a reported 93,682 people in 1987.
This Sunday, the process of demolishing the once great arena, now abandoned and dilapidated, will begin. Within eight months a stadium used in this year’s Transformers movie to illustrate a post-apocalyptic world – with little editing, it seems – will be consigned to the dustbin of history. Few tears will be shed for facility that has recently been described as an “eyesore”, an “embarrassment” and even “like a war zone”.
To many, the decline and decay of the Silverdome has come to symbolize the decline of southeast Michigan, a once booming region ravaged by the collapse of the automobile industry in the United States (although, in truth, the area’s problems started before the Silverdome was built). Indeed, just six months after strong winds and snow fatally damaged the Silverdome’s inflatable roof in January 2013, the city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy after reported debts of $18-20bn.
While Pontiac is a city in itself, some 30 miles northwest of downtown Detroit so deep are the sporting ties between the Silverdome and Motor City that the two have become inextricably linked. It is now hoped that the Silverdome’s demolition will help usher in a new start not just for the 127-acre site but for Detroit itself, which has begun the process of regeneration. The fact that Ikea is looking at the site for a second store in southeast Michigan indicates the promise of a bright future ahead.
The Silverdome was the brainchild of Pontiac resident Don Davidson, an architect who was determined to revive his local city after returning to the area in 1965 and observing: “It looks as if someone has dropped a bomb on [it].” A sports stadium was a key part of Davidson’s plan for urban renewal and, after being conceived in 1966, the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium was completed in 1975 at the cost of $55.7m (about $250m in today’s money). “I think it’s the best stadium in the world right now,” said Davidson of the 80,311 arena, which contained 102 luxury suites and 7,384 club seats. Having secured the Detroit Lions as anchor tenants, it was the largest stadium in the NFL until FedExField (91,000 capacity) in suburban Washington DC opened in 1997.
The Teflon-coated inflatable roof was the stadium’s most famous feature – leading the way to its new name ‘the Silverdome’ in 1976 – but also its biggest problem. The roof was not even finished for the Lions’ first game in the venue, a pre-season meeting with the Kansas City Chiefs in August 1975. The following summer it partially collapsed after a thunderstorm; it was a huge embarrassment but proved an unexpected boon to two local soccer enthusiasts, Englishmen Roger Faulkner and Gordon Preston, who had arranged for Pele’s New York Cosmos to play NASL rivals the Dallas Tornado at the Silverdome shortly after, on Labor Day.
Faulkner, a former tennis player from England who has promoted soccer in Detroit since the 1960s, told the Guardian: “The week of the event I met Gordon and he had this enormous smile on his face. I said, ‘What’s happened? Something terrible has happened hasn’t it?’ and he was just laughing away. He said the roof of the Silverdome has collapsed and I laughed too. It was an English reaction.
“He said, ‘Let’s get to the car and get to the Silverdome’ and we were on the news on every channel. It was wonderful promotion for the game. We got 28,000 people and a lot of attention to become a potential NASL team. The roof came down 20 or 30 feet but they were able to get it up again.”
After Faulkner and Preston succeeded in securing Pele’s return to the Silverdome in 1977 – for a friendly between the Cosmos and Brazilian club Santos – the NASL awarded Detroit an expansion team, who were co-owned by Faulkner and compatriot Jimmy Hill, the Coventry City chairman and broadcaster. With a lack of other suitable venues, the Detroit Express played at the Silverdome for three years in front of crowds averaging just 14,000 in the 80,000 capacity venue.
“It is a mistake to play in a stadium when your capacity far exceeds your attendance but we didn’t have the sophistication to drape parts of the stadium like they can today,” Faulkner admits. “But there was no other stadium. There was no suitable facility in the metropolitan area so we had to go to the Silverdome.”
From the outset, the Silverdome was a multi-purpose stadium – it was also used for supercross, Jehovah’s Witnesses conventions and a Billy Graham Crusade among other events – but the key to its success for so long was having the Detroit Lions and the Detroit Pistons as tenants. When the Pistons moved further north to the The Palace in Auburn Hills in 1988, it was a devastating blow for the arena, not least because it came just before the so-called ‘Bad Boys’ won back-to-back NBA titles. (Ironically, following the Pistons’ move to Little Caesars Arena in downtown Detroit this year, the Palace, now closed, appears in danger of going the same way as the Silverdome.)
The main reason for the Pistons’ decision to move to their own arena was because they were forced to play the final 15 games of the 1984-85 season at the Joe Louis Arena (yet another defunct sports arena in Detroit – go figure) after the Silverdome’s roof collapsed under the weight of snow following a heavy overnight storm in March 1985.
“It looked just like an avalanche,” said Lions quarterback Gary Danielson, who was practising in the arena at the time. “It looked like somebody threw hand grenades in there. All we did was start pointing ... then it started coming down all at once, and we ran like hell to the tunnel.”
An improved replacement roof was installed at a cost of $8.5m but the damage done to the wooden basketball floor coupled with delays to the repairs led to the Pistons moving out. The Silverdome weathered the storm to some extent and two years later it staged two of the biggest events in its history in quick succession – WrestleMania III and mass with Pope John Paul II. Officially, the attendances were 93,173 for WrestleMania and 93,682 for the Pope but it has since been claimed that both figures were massaged upwards, with His Holiness given the higher figure to avoid the appearance of wrestling outdoing religion.
Nonetheless, Wrestlemania was a huge hit. B Brian Blair, a former wrestler and member of the tag team the Killer Bees, recalled: “It was the largest crowd I had ever wrestled in front of. Man, it’s probably the greatest event I’ve had, and I’ve had over 6,000 wrestling matches. It was amazing. The whole building was electric. It’s about as high as you’re gonna get.”
Soccer returned to the Silverdome in 1994, with the help of Faulkner, when most unexpectedly the stadium became an official venue for the World Cup finals. In the height of the summer, conditions in the indoor facility were unbearable for both players and fans alike. The Silverdome staged four group matches, including the United States’ opener against Switzerland.
“It was a very hot summer and Detroit was extremely humid,” recalled former USA midfielder Paul Caligiuiri. “The Silverdome was built for turf, they brought grass in these big octagons and they had to water it. It added to the humidity and the texture of the grass, it was too soft ... The combination of hot weather — 90 degrees with 90% humidity in an unventilated dome with grass that shouldn’t be there that was watered, it made for severe conditions.” Fellow midfielder Thomas Dooley bluntly added: “It was the worst place I have ever played.”
The 1994 World Cup was in many ways the beginning of the end for the stadium. Inspired by running-back Barry Sanders, the Detroit Lions were a solid play-off team in the 1990s but the team had begun making plans to relocate to a new venue in 1995; money from parking, concessions and luxury boxes went to the city to pay off stadium debt and not the Lions. Eventually the Lions moved to Ford Field in downtown Detroit in 2002.
With the absence of an anchor tenant, sparse events and huge maintenance costs, the city of Pontiac, in the midst of a financial crisis, put the Silverdome up for auction just to get it off its books. The Greek-born Canadian real estate developer Andreas Apostolopoulos won the auction to buy the stadium with a bid of just $583,000 - around 1% of its original cost - much to the dismay of local residents. Apostolopoulos reportedly spent $6m on upgrading the Silverdome and had some success in bringing sporting events back to the venue, including boxing, monster trucks and a soccer friendly between AC Milan and Panathinaikos in 2010.
There were tentative plans to bring Major League Soccer to the Silverdome - as well as a team in the revived NASL - but a further roof collapse in January 2013 proved to be the death-knell for the venue, which in the past four years has laid empty and abandoned save for a few photographers keen to record haunting pictures of its ghost-like state.
The last few valuable items, including end zone turf, were sold off at an auction in 2014. The last professional athlete to perform at the Silverdome was BMX rider Tyler Fernengel in June 2015 . “It brought back a lot of good memories,” Fernengel recalled. “Being out on the field, it was crazy to think that there once was a motorcycle track there, every year, with all the fans, but now it’s nowhere near the same — it’s like a war zone.”
The final use for the venue? The Silverdome parking lot this year served as a storage space for 9,000 recalled Volkswagen diesel cars. Not only was this done without the correct permits but a number of cars were subsequently stolen. Pontiac mayor Deirdre Waterman won a battle to force Apostolopoulos’s Triple Investment Group to demolish the Silverdome, a process that will begin on Sunday with a partial implosion of the mechanical equipment platform atop the 400,000-square-foot stadium.
Waterman could not be happier. “Farewell Silverdome,” she said recently. “Hello world of new opportunity.”
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