Eye Nosh: Is This the Best Pastrami in America?
Does Traffic Get Worse After the End of Daylight Saving Time?
Zenyatta Makes "Her"Story
Pixies 'Doolittle' @ The Palladium 11/4/09
TV Junkie: Interview with Kristin Bauer aka Pam from 'True Blood'
The Pasadena City Council chose stagnation over progress, and voted 4-2 to help make the Rose Bowl less relevant. In other words, the Rose Bowl has rejected the NFL's potential offer to give Pasadena more than $500 million for renovations.
What kind of City Council says "no" to $500 million to fix up a facility that loses $2 million a year? The Rose Bowl is a gorgeous stadium, a true historical landmark, but it's also in need of a facelift. Hosting 5-6 UCLA football games a year, plus a Bowl game with a future that's tied to the questionable BCS, won't keep the Rose Bowl sustainable much longer.
Opponents feared that the renovation would compromise the historical architecture of the Rose Bowl. But we've pointed out before that the plan is to have the process be more like Lambeau Field than Soldier Field. Opponents also feared traffic, noise, etc. While LAist feels the traffic and parking plan for the Rose Bowl renovation was questionable, we also feel like it was workable.
But LAist supposes that the residents of Pasadena generally got what they wanted. Pasadena just wants to be a sleepy little town. And so a facility hosting game called "the grandaddy of them all" will be napping like an old man in its forseeable future.
As for the NFL in LA, the only options remain the Coliseum and Anaheim. Does anyone else think it's absurd that after 10 years, we're left with the two sites that effectively hosted the Raiders and Rams?
That's 10 years of looking at new plans at places like Chavez Ravine, South Park, El Segundo, Carson, etc, and we're basically right back where we started. Come on, LA! Where's our creativity? Where's our ambition? Where's our boldness? Why must we insist on only working with what we have, rather than trying to build something new, daring, and dazzling? Why must we cowtow to every NIMBY complaint that could ever arise?
This is the greatest city in the world, but it has the potential to be even better. In the last ten years, only Phil Anschutz and AEG have built new sports facilities in LA (STAPLES Center and Home Depot Center), and both have been tremendously successful. The final piece to the LA sports puzzle is a football stadium, but we've basically come up with modifcations on what we've always had.
LAist wishes we had better options, but given what's realistic in today's political climate, we support the Coliseum plan. That stadium is also a historical landmark, the neighborhood is improving, and it's actually within the city limits, unlike Anaheim where we can revive the Los Angeles Whatevers of Anaheim debate while driving two hours to see our NFL team.
Sure, support the Coliseum. Now let's just get it done.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
I think Northsiders as a whole are breathing a sigh of relief that a pumped-up Rose Bowl won't cause a whole new range of headaches for us. Our Pasadena Weekly fought the proposal vigorously; the problem being that there just isn't the infrastructure up here to handle that kind of influx of people. Pasadena is growing, but I don't blame the city for wanting to do so slowly and intelligently. Personally, as an ArtCenter student, I'm *really* glad I won't have to battle that kind of traffic on my way up the Arroyo every day. I know most area residents are glad of this, too.
Slowly and intelligently? Take what slowly and intelligently? This is your only opportunity to do a real Rose Bowl renovation without having to pay for it. You take it slow, and you miss your window of opportunity.
The infrastructure isn't there to handle that many people? Um, it already hosts 5-6 UCLA football games a year. It used to host 15 Galaxy games a year. It fits almost 100,000 people a year for a bowl game. It's held two World Cup finals. A renovated Rose Bowl would actually seat far fewer people than it currently holds (65,000-75,000), thereby causing a reduction in the number of people who come for games.
Oh, and NFL games generally take place on 8 Sundays a year. So unless you're going to ArtCenter class on Sundays, you'd be OK.
The Rose Bowl used to be the premier football stadium on the West Coast. It used to be what every other stadium aspired to be. It can be that again. It can be great.
But who needs the headaches?
Maybe it's a NIMBY thing, but 5-6 major events at the Rose Bowl each year is just fine with this Pasadena resident. I suspect you weren't around for the World Cup finals, but the event basically put the city into gridlock for more than a week. UCLA games shut down much of the west side of the city. The Arroyo Seco park that the Rose Bowl sits in is the major recreational facility in Pasadena, and the arrival of the NFL would mean that the aquatic center, the golf course, the children's museum and the ball fields would effectively be off limits for half the Sundays, plus half the Saturdays, in the season they are possibly used the most.
Plus, ``modernizing'' the stadium means taking out 30,000 affordable seats in order to build tax-subsidized luxury boxes for the corporate leeches who can't stand to sit with the hoi polloi, which I find profoundly antidemocratic. The Rose Bowl as presently constituted is one of the most beautiful stadiums in the country. I would hate for it to be disemboweled in order to line the pockets of the elitist billionaires who run the NFL.