Design
Goodbye, Candlestick Park (Finally)
Demolition has started on a stadium best known for providing consistently unbearable cold and wind.
In a matter of months, San Francisco's Candlestick Park will finally come down. Demolition of the ballpark began earlier this week, and when the Bayview-Hunters Point site is cleared, work will begin on a new mixed-use development.
Originally built for Major League Baseball's Giants after the team relocated from New York City in 1958, the no-frills, boomerang-shaped facility opened just in time for Opening Day 1960. The land had been purchased by local contractor Charles Harney for $2,100 an acre in 1953, but Harney sold 41 acres back to the city just four years later for $65,853 an acre. The sale price turned out to be just one of many suspicious elements behind a deal Deadspin calls "a forerunner of the modern public financing con."