[CBFF] CT: So what if we were punked? (Re: Soldier Field)

[Victor Waldron]

So what if we were punked?
Soldier Field should have been bulldozed. The stadium wasn't befitting
the military personnel lost in WWI.
By Dennis Byrne

May 1, 2006

On an autumn weekend in 1958, we St. George High School "Dragons"
filled 500--to be charitable--seats in Soldier Field. Far across the
gridiron were the fans of another Catholic League football power,
whose name I forget, filling another, say, 500 seats.

That left 99,000 empty seats. Well, not seats. Benches, with places to
put about 100,000 butts.

Which is how I remember Soldier Field: A pile of concrete rubble
getting in the way of a perfectly good ride on the Outer Drive. A
place so unattractive, dysfunctional and unwanted that it had been
reduced to hosting high school football games.

St. George, late of Evanston, played there only because it didn't have
its own football stadium. So we always were on the road, pretending
that this or that stadium gave us home-field advantage. Gately Stadium
or Lane Tech Field, for example, where a crowd of 1,000 actually
looked big.

If you haven't seen a few hundred fans spread out loosely between the
47-yard lines at Soldier Field, then you don't know the meaning of the
word "empty." Empty meant Soldier Field. The Bears played elsewhere.
So did the Cardinals.

Soldier Field was so desperate that it even booked stock-car races. I
remember them in the late 1940s, the jalopies not exactly speeding
around an asphalt track on the field's perimeter, just inside the
stands. I can't remember how large the crowd was, but I doubt that
anyone was in that 100,000th seat at the far north end of the
then-horseshoe-shaped stands. Actually, that seat might not have been
occupied since the celebrated 1927 Dempsey-Tunney world championship
boxing match, one of the events that supposedly made Soldier Field a
national treasure.

This was a pathetic, miserable place, and some of us native Chicagoans
wish for an end to the constant carping about the conversion of what
we're told is a venerable landmark into a yucky, discordant playhouse
for the Bears. The latest lamentations were heard last week when the
world awoke to the awful news that some obscure committee of the U.S
Department of Interior had yanked Soldier Field's designation as a
"national historic landmark."

For a while, we had been warned that Interior Secretary Gale Norton,
on the advice of the National Park System Advisory Board, was about to
de-designate Soldier Field. As if it were our last chance to repair
our mistake.

But the expected de-designation came anyway, meaning that Soldier
Field no longer was one of the nation's 2,500 most-hallowed sites, as
historically significant and possessing "as much exceptional value or
quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United
States" as--get this--the White House. For years, some of us were
unaware of the Rock Pile's historical luminescence. But please, don't
make us laugh so hard that it hurts.

The de-designation of Soldier Field now is being read as a comeuppance
to Mayor Richard M. Daley and the rest of us Chicago provincials who,
well, just don't care and no longer deserve this great honor. I guess
we're supposed to say: "Oh, gosh, we're really sorry now that we
didn't listen to the landmark preservationists when they blistered the
idea of any alteration or removal of the Lakefront Blemish."

It was explained to us that the loss wasn't just Chicago's, but the
entire nation's. Said Carol Ahlgren, architectural historian of the
U.S. Park Service's Midwest regional office: "If we had let this
[designation] stand, I believe it would have lowered the standard of
National Historic Landmarks throughout the country." Here's news for
her: Just including it on the list lowered the national standard.

Years ago, I suggested that the best way to settle the fight over
Soldier Field was to bulldoze the entire mess, start from scratch and
construct a memorial stadium befitting the 120,000 American military
personnel lost in World War I. But no, the heat was on, and the
designers of the remodeled facility had to accommodate the absurd
demands of the preservationists. The result? An absurd compromise that
indeed may be the ugliest structure in the city, if not the nation.

Well, perhaps, this will assuage the preservationists: Yes, Soldier
Field was expelled from the landmarks list, but we got something
better added: Lincoln Park's "exquisite" hidden Alfred Caldwell lily
pool, which "symbolically celebrates the history of the Midwest."
Which, according to the list's creators, puts it in the company of the
U.S. Capitol.