Regardless of their feelings about whether public money should have been used to build a new stadium for the Minnesota Twins, much of the sporting public has long agreed with the team’s owners and management on one point: As a baseball venue, fond World Series memories notwithstanding, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome—how to put this delicately?—sucked like a Shop-Vac.
To this way of thinking, Target Field, where the team will begin play next month, was bound to be the Not-the-Dome, and the Not-the-Dome was bound to be an improvement. Beyond that, however, there seemed little reason to expect something that would make anyone’s heart soar. The new facility was not exactly conceived under a lucky star.
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What’s Cool About Target Field |
Target Field sits on a fallback site that the Twins settled for after their earlier hopes to get public financing for a new stadium beside the Mississippi River were dashed. With a footprint of only 8.5 acres, the smallest in Major League Baseball, the patch of ground was barely big enough to make the project feasible. (Wrigley Field apparently is the second smallest, though there’s no agreement on how big the footprint of Chicago’s legendary ballyard actually is.)
The building is wedged, like a burger in a bun, between a parking ramp and a big municipal garbage burner. It is further sandwiched by two elevated roadways, North Fifth and North Seventh streets. One edge of the structure actually cantilevers out over Interstate 394 as the highway empties into downtown Minneapolis. Oh, and freight trains run beneath its northwest corner.
Target Field’s designer—Populous, formerly the sports facility practice for Kansas City–headquartered architectural firm HOK—has worked on a multitude of sports facilities, and calls Target Field the most “complex” site upon which a major league ballpark has ever been built. Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction, the general contractor, had to build it from the “inside out”: Cranes sat on the future playing field while they erected the walls. There was no place else to put them.
So not-the-Dome. But one would assume that one should not get one’s hopes up.
One would be mistaken.
