The Silverdome: Air, Astroturf, and the Biggest Roof in Football

You are near the site of the Pontiac Silverdome, one of the strangest and most storied stadiums in American sports history, a building held up by nothing but air pressure and remembered for a remarkable list of firsts and lasts.

Construction began in September nineteen seventy-three, and the Detroit Lions played their first game inside it on October sixth, nineteen seventy-five. When it opened it had about eighty thousand three hundred seats, among the largest in the National Football League at the time. The roof was the signature feature: a fiberglass air-supported dome kept inflated by continuous air pressure from fans in the perimeter wall. Any time a door opened without the airlock vestibule working properly, the pressure fluctuated noticeably. Workers inside on windy days could feel the building breathe.

The stadium stacked up an unusual resume. On January twenty-fourth, nineteen eighty-two, it hosted Super Bowl Sixteen, the first Super Bowl ever played in a northern, cold-weather city, a distinction made possible only because the dome kept the weather outside. The San Francisco Forty-Niners defeated the Cincinnati Bengals twenty-six to twenty-one.

In the summer of nineteen ninety-four, the Silverdome hosted group-stage matches of the FIFA World Cup, including a Brazil versus Sweden game attended by about seventy-seven thousand fans, among the largest soccer crowds the building ever saw.

The Lions played their last game there on January sixth, two thousand two, then moved downtown to the new Ford Field. The Silverdome sat empty for years, passed through a series of failed redevelopment deals, hosted a handful of indoor soccer leagues and concert events, and was finally demolished in the winter of twenty seventeen.

Where eighty thousand fans once roared under that inflated roof, there is now a flat site in suburban Pontiac awaiting whatever comes next.