The
Kingdome is Dead!
Long Live the Kingdome!
Seattle/March 26, 2000/by Rick Miller
There's pretty much only one thing in the world that could get me up at 5:45 AM on a Sunday morning, and that's a chance to see world-famous Seattle eyesore the Kingdome get imploded. The Kingdome is (was) one of the first of the giant enclosed dome type sports stadiums built way back in the seventies at considerable taxpayer expense; in fact I'm pretty certain that even now there is some outstanding municipal debt remaining on it, in spite of the fact that it is at present little more than a big pile of rubble. Dear god that thing was ugly, spectacular in its utilitarian ugliness, a dirty grey concrete dome unadorned with even a hint of color or ornament, so huge and imposing and proletarian in its belligerent refusal to concede any ground to aesthetic considerations that it would have made Kruschev-era Soviet architects proud. At the time of its building it was considered state-of-the-art and it's easy to see how people living in Seattle would see a tremendous appeal in a stadium with a roof on it. Plus back then it was "modern." People are suckers for that.
A few years ago some big chunks of that roof starting falling into the outfield at Mariners games, which made the players understandably nervous, although for my part I enjoyed seeing an element of risk injected into that godawful boring game. If those players are going to get paid outrageous sums of money to stand around in the outfield and chew tobacco products while scratching themselves, I say let them earn their keep and provide the fans their money's worth of entertainment by having to dodge enormous blocks of masonry hailing down on their heads. But that's just my opinion. Obviously the lawyers didn't share my views (the killjoys), and so the Mariners promptly demanded a new stadium or they were moving to some other city, preferably one where it doesn't rain all the time. The Seahawks soon followed suit with similar demands. They pointed out that the building wasn't earthquake-safe. Of course downtown is all built on a faultline on a foundation of fill-dirt over a sinking marshland anyway, but I guess they felt that the stadium should be the one safe place downtown when the big one hits, and indeed it would be nice to know that if an earthquake happens you can always seek shelter at a baseball game.
Nothing strikes terror into the hearts of civic-pride boosters and diehard sports knuckleheads like the threat of losing sports teams to other less-deserving cities, so the city and state agreed to build BOTH teams brand-new stadiums at taxpayer expense over the protest of a large portion of the citizenry who pointed out that unlike, say, the subway system or seventy new schools that could be built with the same money, the sports stadiums would charge the citizenry twenty dollars to get inside to the see what their tax money had purchased (plus eight bucks for parking and, of course, five dollars for a cup of beer). These voices of dissent were summarily dismissed as kooks by decision-makers in spite of the fact that the bond bill to pay for the baseball stadium lost (the politicians funded it anyway), and the football team's owner, Microsoft Billionaire Paul Allen, had to hold a privately-funded special election (the first of its kind in the country and a whole new spin on the concept of buying an election, complete with his own pollworkers and election staff) to squeak through enough votes to get his stadium built. (In case you're wondering what it costs to hold your own election: apparently less than the cost of building a state-of-the-art football stadium.)
But the one unexpected silver lining in all of this was the wonderful piece of public entertainment I witnessed today. At seven in the morning, after gathering for coffee and Western Family Cornflakes (40% cheaper than leading brands!), we piled into two cars and drove down to the Central district to find a parking spot as close to the action as we could. We lucked out and caught somebody just as they were pulling out and snagged a choice spot at the corner of Cherry and Terry, just blocks from our selected vantage point (Serious urban dwellers will appreciate our sense of triumph at obtaining free parking so close to our goal. As long-time commuters in this city we regarded it with the same sort of reverence and awe that Lewis and Clark probably felt upon their first glimpse of the Continental Divide).
We made our way over to the Yesler bridge just across from downtown and right outside the restricted blast-zone and found a spot on a hill just above the freeway. Crowds of people with cameras stood sipping coffee and in some cases beer (at eight in the morning! Yeah!) in preparation for the spectacle. Ten thousand cameras and camcorders stood at the ready to record this event for posterity. It couldn't have been a more perfect morning for this impromptu public gathering either, with the morning sun climbing into a clear blue sky and the cherry trees and dogwoods in full spring bloom. The churchgoers in their Sunday finest stood shoulder-to-shoulder with atheists normally unaccumstomed to being up at this hour on a Sunday, all sharing the identical purpose of witnessing this singular event.
And so at 8:30 this morning, after we'd been standing around waiting for long enough to almost forget what we were all there for, it happened. The best part is there was no countdown at all, at least where I was, so at some point I turned to Alexis, who was standing right next to me, and said "Hey, what time is it anyway?", and she said "My watch says 8:34, but I think it's a little fast" and then we heard a loud kind of crack and the ribbed supports on the roof all sent up little puffs of smoke and huge sections of the roof buckled and then the whole structure crumbled into a little heap while a sort of greyish-tan cloud of dust began to billow out and envelop all the visible structures of downtown. The crowd all cheered at this display of state-sanctioned destruction, and my heart surged with the same sense of patriotic pride that I get every year on the Fourth of July, the feeling that I am so glad I live in a country where the citizenry has such a fitting and proper reverence for really big explosions (if you doubt this please review the lyrics to our National Anthem).
Thank God we live in an age where we not only possess the technology to build great hulking architectural marvels such as the Kingdome, but also the means to blow the living hell out of them in seconds flat.
We walked back to the car as a thick cloud of grey stadium dust began to settle over the city and thought about how lucky we were to have witnessed this historic moment which we could all tell our grandchildren about years from now, with any luck while we're standing on that same hill watching the implosion of the football stadium that will be built on the very same spot where the proud Kindgdome once stood.
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