Ford Field and the Detroit Lions
Near Detroit, Michigan
Ford Field sits in the heart of downtown Detroit, an indoor stadium that brought the Lions back to the city after twenty-seven years in the suburbs and anchored a bet that downtown Detroit could live again.
The Lions had played at Tiger Stadium into the nineteen seventies, then moved to the Pontiac Silverdome in nineteen seventy-five. The push to return downtown gained momentum in the late nineteen nineties as the city was investing in a cluster of new sports and entertainment venues. Wayne County voters approved a funding referendum, and the five-hundred-million-dollar project broke ground in November nineteen ninety-nine.
The stadium opened with a preseason game on August twenty-fourth, two thousand two. Its most distinctive architectural feature is the incorporation of the former Hudson's warehouse, a massive nineteen twenties-era brick building that flanks the southern sideline and forms the outer wall of the stadium's suite level. Rather than demolishing it, designers wrapped the new structure around the old one, giving Ford Field a sense of urban texture unusual in modern American sports architecture.
On February fifth, two thousand six, Ford Field hosted Super Bowl Forty, with the Pittsburgh Steelers defeating the Seattle Seahawks twenty-one to ten before sixty-eight thousand two hundred six fans.
The Lions themselves have spent most of the Ford Field era in the difficult position of being one of the NFL's historically least successful franchises. The team went zero wins and sixteen losses in two thousand eight, the worst record in league history. Yet the stadium has remained a vivid part of the downtown revival, hosting college basketball tournaments, high school championship games, and concerts, filling a role in the city's public life that goes well beyond any single football season.
Detroit's downtown sports cluster, which includes Ford Field, Comerica Park next door, and Little Caesars Arena a few blocks north, represents one of the more successful concentrations of sports investment in any American city of the past twenty-five years.
