AT&T Stadium: The House Jerry Jones Built

You are passing AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys, and the building itself is almost as famous as the team.

The Cowboys entered the NFL in nineteen sixty as an expansion franchise that went zero and eleven and one in their first season. Under coach Tom Landry, they remade themselves into a dynasty. Between nineteen sixty-six and nineteen eighty-five they posted twenty consecutive winning seasons, an NFL record that still stands. Roger Staubach led them to back-to-back Super Bowls in the nineteen seventies. A later wave, built by Jimmy Johnson, produced three Super Bowl titles in four years between nineteen ninety-two and nineteen ninety-five, the first two under Johnson himself and the third under his successor, Barry Switzer. That run of sustained excellence earned them the nickname America's Team, coined in a nineteen seventy-eight highlight film.

By two thousand four, owner Jerry Jones wanted a stadium to match the brand. Arlington voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase to contribute three hundred twenty-five million dollars toward construction, and Jones covered the rest, totaling one point two billion dollars. Architect Bryan Trubey of HKS designed twin steel arches that soar nearly three hundred feet above the field and span almost a quarter mile, the longest single-span roof structure in the world at the time of its completion. The retractable glass end-zone doors stand one hundred eighty feet wide and one hundred twenty feet tall and take eighteen minutes to open or close, letting the Texas air in on mild nights.

The stadium opened on May twenty-seventh, two thousand nine. That September, a regular-season game against the New York Giants drew one hundred five thousand one hundred twenty-one fans, setting an NFL attendance record for a regular-season game. Jerry and Gene Jones also filled the building with art, commissioning works by fifty-three contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor, Jenny Holzer, and Ellsworth Kelly, transforming the stadium into one of the largest contemporary art collections in Texas.

The building seats eighty thousand for football and can expand past one hundred thousand with standing room, making it the largest stadium in the NFL.