Good news for anyone who is a fan of old ballparks. Yesterday, members of the Toger Stadium Conservancy presented the Detroit City Council with proof of $219,000 in escrow – enough funds to stave off the final destruction of what remains of the ballpark at the corner of Michigan & Trumbull.
As reported on MLB.com, this is just the first step:
The next step is two-fold as the conservancy delves deeper into the planning stages for the project. It faces a Dec. 1 deadline to present redevelopment designs and budgets to the DEGC for approval. Estimates for the project have been forecast around $15 million.
Those designs, Gillette said, have been ongoing. It has been a unique challenge simply because there’s no precedent. Most if not all old ballparks have been torn down once teams move to new ones, with maybe a monument or home-plate location noted where a stadium once stood.
“We have been all along working on the long-term plan,” Gillette said. “In fact, the long-term plan has been more solid than the short-term plan,”
If the designs are approved, the conservancy will then have until Dec. 10 to pay another $150,000 deposit.
All the while, the conservancy will be trying to finalize funding for predevelopment costs as well as the larger project itself. That work has been going on since the summer. Now that they’ve met the first fundraising deadline and demonstrated the effort’s viability, the other fundraising sources are expected to step up.
Tiger Stadium was an amazing place to see a ballgame. It’s a shame that of the big 4 (Wrigley, Fenway, Yankee, and Tiger), Tiger Stadium was too often forgotten and hardly thought of in terms of the history of the game.
Too often we tear down the past to make way for the future, only to regret what we have done years later. Don’t let that happen to Tiger Stadium. To get more information on the plans and to find out about supporting the effort to save this historic landmark, check out http://savetigerstadium.org/
