LAist: Wilted Rose

condiment

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 21:51:34 -0800

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.

Phil

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:48:22 -0800

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?

Josh Strike

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 14:24:21 -0800

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.