" America is in the midst of a sports building boom. Professional sports teams are demanding and receiving fancy new playing facilities that are heavily subsidized by government. In many cases, the rationale given for these subsidies is that attracting or retaining a professional sports franchise--even a minor league baseball team or a major league pre-season training facility--more than pays for itself in increased tax revenues, local economic development, and job creation. But are these claims true? To assess the case for subsidies, this book examines the economic impact of new stadiums and the presence of a sports franchise on the local economy. It first explores such general issues as the appropriate method for measuring economic benefits and costs, the source of the bargaining power of teams in obtaining subsidies from local government, the local politics of attracting and retaining teams, the relationship between sports and local employment, and the importance of stadium design in influencing the economic impact of a facility. The second part of the book contains case studies of major league sports facilities in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities, and of minor league stadiums and spring training facilities in baseball. The primary conclusions are: first, sports teams and facilities are not a source of local economic growth and employment; second, the magnitude of the net subsidy exceeds the financial benefit of a new stadium to a team; and, third, the most plausible reasons that cities are willing to subsidize sports teams are the intense popularity of sports among a substantial proportion of voters and businesses and the leverage that teams enjoy from the monopoly position of professional sports leagues. "

Table of contents

Many Americans know more about the stadiums that loom over their cityscapes or college campuses than they do about any other aspect of the nation’s geography. Stadiums serve as iconic monuments of urban and university identities. Indeed, the power of sport in modern American culture has produced ‘sportscapes’—landscapes literally shaped by their devotion to athletic competition. Curiously, given the importance of the secular cathedrals in American culture, historians have paid little attention to these edifices. The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport seeks to remedy that oversight. This book will analyze stadiums from a variety of perspectives, paying special attention to the links between the ‘built environment’ in which Americans watch and play games and the larger social environments that the nation’s sporting practices inhabit. The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport explores the role of stadiums in shaping urban identities, determining the economics of intercollegiate athletics, influencing local and national politics. This book was previously published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This title discusses how sports stadiums are built, including engineering, design and construction.

This updated edition asks some great questions. What was the largest stadium ever built? When were the first stadiums built? Why doesn't the roof of a stadium collapse? You'll find the answers to these questions and many more in Building Amazing Structures. Each book in the series looks at some of today's most amazing structures from around the world. Begin your journey by reading about similar structures in history and how they were built. Then discover the techniques and materials that today's engineers and builders use to make even more amazing structures. Finally, learn about structures that failed and why.

In Modern Coliseum, Benjamin D. Lisle tracks changes in stadium design and culture since World War II. Featuring over seventy-five images documenting the transformation of the American stadium over time, Modern Coliseum will be of interest to a variety of readers, from urban and architectural historians to sports fans.