Candlestick Park: Wind, Earthquakes, and the Last Beatles Concert
Near San Francisco, California
If you look east from the highway just south of downtown San Francisco, you can see the vacant land where Candlestick Park stood for more than half a century. The stadium is gone now, demolished in twenty fifteen, but what happened inside its concrete walls is woven into American cultural history in ways that outlast any building.
Candlestick opened in nineteen sixty as the new home of the San Francisco Giants, who had relocated from New York two years earlier. It was the first major American stadium built of reinforced concrete, and it cost fifteen million dollars. Almost immediately, it became infamous for its winds. The stadium sat in a natural wind tunnel on the San Francisco Bay, and the gusts could yank a pop fly sideways mid-flight. Conditions were so bad that, according to a widely repeated but disputed story, the Giants' pitcher Stu Miller was blown off the mound by a gust during the nineteen sixty-one All-Star Game, though Miller himself denied it happened quite that dramatically.
On August twenty-ninth, nineteen sixty-six, the Beatles played their final concert before a paying audience anywhere on earth, right here at Candlestick. The show drew only about twenty-five thousand fans to a stadium that held forty-two thousand, and it lasted less than thirty minutes. John Lennon later said he had decided before the show that the Beatles would never tour again. The era of rock concerts as communal events had grown to a scale where the music could barely be heard over the screaming, and the band was done with it.
Twenty-three years later, on October seventeenth, nineteen eighty-nine, a six-point-nine magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco twenty-five minutes before the start of Game Three of the World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics. The stadium shook, the lights flickered, and the game was postponed for ten days. Candlestick survived. Sixty-three people across the Bay Area did not.
The stadium served as the Forty-Niners' home through twenty thirteen, hosted a farewell concert by Paul McCartney in August twenty fourteen, and came down the following year.
