The Kingdome
Near Woodinville, Washington
There is nothing here now but pavement and the ghost of a roof that once covered nearly ten acres of steel and concrete. The Kingdome stood on this site from nineteen seventy-six to two thousand, a domed stadium that became the unlikely crucible of some of the most dramatic sports moments the Pacific Northwest has ever produced.
King County built it for sixty-seven million dollars. It opened on March twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-six, and within a year it housed three professional franchises: the Seahawks of the National Football League, the Mariners of Major League Baseball, and for a time the SuperSonics of the National Basketball Association. It was enormous, loud, and almost immediately unloved. The concrete dome trapped noise in ways that felt punishing. The artificial turf was notoriously unforgiving. And in July of nineteen ninety-four, four large ceiling tiles, each weighing twenty-six pounds, fell from one hundred eighty feet during a Mariners game. The team evacuated, repairs cost fifty-one million dollars, and two workers were killed in a crane accident during the fix.
But the Kingdome also gave Seattle one of the great baseball nights in American sports history. On October eighth, nineteen ninety-five, the Mariners were down two games to none in their playoff series against the New York Yankees, having clawed back to force a fifth game after trailing the California Angels by thirteen games with two months left in the season. In the bottom of the eleventh inning, with Seattle trailing five to four, Edgar Martinez laced a two-run double down the left-field line, scoring Joey Cora and then Ken Griffey Junior, who slid home as fifty-seven thousand people came off their seats at once. The Mariners had never won a playoff series before.
On March twenty-sixth, two thousand, five thousand eight hundred gelatin dynamite charges detonated in sequence and the Kingdome collapsed in sixteen seconds, at the time the largest structure ever demolished by explosives. King County finished paying off the construction debt in two thousand fifteen.
