As the A’s make their last apparent stand at the Oakland Coliseum, it appears the sun is finally setting on the remnant of a stadium. Once a glittering vision of the future, it now drifts into the past.
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“Well, this vibe is so dope,” A’s fan Robert Mikinka said. “I’ve been to so many stadiums. There’s no other vibe like Oakland. There’s none. I’ve seen this place packed. With [Mount] Davis wrapped up. Fans only. ‘Oakland! Come on, Oakland!'”
Mikinka and Jason Dana have come for a long farewell, making some final memories in a building full of them.
“Every day, when I walk through Rickey, [Henderson]”, added Mikinka. “Denis Eckersley. Hangs out there with Dave Stewart.”
Now approaching 60 years old, the Coliseum has been described as “outdated” for decades, and many fans love it.
“We were just talking before you sat down, they haven’t really done much renovation,” Dana said. “But the fans love the stadium the way it is.”
“It was built with a rawness, simplicity and real elegance,” said Craig Hartman, senior design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architectural firm that designed the Coliseum in the early 1960s.
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“Very innovative structure,” Hartman explained. “And the architect, Myron Goldsmith, was a genius, both with the land and the geometry. These buildings were nestled into the land. Very California in that sense. The relationship between the architecture, the land, the climate is so beautiful. It really has a California feel to it.”
And the Colosseum reflects even broader aspects of that time.
“It was part of the American philosophy of the time; the idea of making things flexible and transformable and using them for multiple purposes,” Hartman added.
Americans were also on the move, out of the cities and into the suburbs. A Coliseum surrounded by a huge parking lot fit right into that vision of the future. There’s one more thing to be said about this complex: It was an absolute bargain, even in 1960 dollars. $25 million then would be only $260 million today.
The Raiders’ new home in Vegas cost $2 billion. The Coliseum is from an almost unimaginably different time. And time has not forgiven this stadium.
“I don’t like it,” said one fan of the changes in 1996 when “Mount Davis” was installed. “You used to be able to see the hills of Oakland and now it looks like a dump. And I don’t think it’s going to look good when they’re done.”
Many still strongly oppose Mount Davis. And the conditions inside the building have become legendary in sports. And any of the Coliseum’s contemporaries with a conversion design are long gone. But for a few more days, this is home to fans of the Oakland Athletics and the A’s.
“Thursday is going to be a really tough day,” Mikinka said.
So the long goodbye draws to a close. Last call at Baseball’s Last Dive Bar.
“Yeah, it’s Oakland,” Dana said. “That sums it up, man. That Oakland feeling is going to go away. It’s weird.”
Wilson Walker
