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Football palace will delight Bears fans
By Larry Mayer
Senior Writer
June 20, 2003
CHICAGO - Eyes opened, jaws dropped and cameras clicked away Friday as nearly 50 Bears employees toured the team's spectacular new football palace along Chicago's magnificent lakefront.
The new stadium, which opens 100 days from Saturday when the Bears host the Green Bay Packers Sept. 29 on Monday Night Football, will be a vast improvement over the old Soldier Field in every conceivable aspect.
All seats will be an average of 37 feet closer to the action and the vertical design will keep the noise in, creating a true home-field advantage that didn't exist in the old building because of the horizontal configuration of the stands.
"It's a really intimate stadium," said architect Tony Montalto. "It's going to be a really loud stadium. You basically have two walls on either side of you. Hopefully that will be that 12th member on the field for the Bears and definitely (provide) an edge."
The new Soldier Field will feature two 84-foot-by-23-foot video scoreboards, 133 executive suites, 8,600 club seats, and five times as many concession stands and twice as many restrooms as the old facility.
Other highlights include a three-level club lounge, a gallery depicting historical events from the Bears' past and an open-air courtyard inside Gate O for an in-stadium tailgating experience.
There will also be a Miller Lite party deck in the north end zone, 1,000 television sets scattered throughout the stadium, colonnade access to fans year-round, an official Bears team store and wider seats with cup holders.
In transforming a national landmark into a civic treasure, the Bears left no stone unturned-regardless of its distance from Chicago. The seats for the new stadium are being manufactured in Australia and some glass panels for the project are being made in Germany and Italy.
"The great thing about architecture and a project like this is to be able to bring the hottest and the latest from all these different areas," Montalto said.
The Bears have joined the Seattle Seahawks as the only NFL clubs to purchase seats from Camatic Seating, which bills itself as "Australia's largest cinema, theatre, stadium and office seating manufacturer." About 64 percent of the approximate 61,500 seats are already in place.
"The actual seat installation is very unique in that they install the beam first," Montalto said. "So they don't need the seats on site to get all the layout complete. The seats then all snap in very quickly. They have a very modern design and a very contemporary look."
The playing surface, a blend of six different types of Kentucky bluegrass, was installed earlier this month. The grass had grown for two years on a Manteno farm not far from the Bears' training camp home in Bourbonnais.
One major upgrade in terms of the field conditions is a state-of-the-art irrigation, drainage and heating system that runs under the ground. Liquid glycol will flow through 4,000 miles of one-inch tubing and keep the surface temperature above 50 degrees even in the dead of Chicago's notorious winter.
"In the old days we used to have to cover the field with a tarp and then put heaters in the corners and the middle and just billow the air and keep it from freezing that way," said Bears stadium operations staffer Bryan Pett.
Friday's tour included a peek at the Bears' spacious locker room, which will eventually include an in-ground whirlpool, 60 oak lockers, a digital sound system in the ceiling, an equipment room and a loading dock.
A security guard sat outside the team's video control room, an area bustling with technicians and stocked with television screens, editing equipment and cables.
"What comes out of here feeds the videoboards," said Bears director of broadcasting and production Greg Miller. "We'll have all the cameras coming into here. Five of our own and up to eight network cameras can be rooted into this room.
"This is just like a television control room. We have replay systems and graphic systems, and we can switch everything just like a live TV game broadcast."
The mezzanine level of the stadium, which will be open to all fans regardless of where their seats are located, will sport cases of memorabilia and a ring of fame honoring Bears Hall of Famers.
Soldier Field's legacy as a war memorial will be enhanced with a doughboy statue of the World War I foot soldier inside Gate 0 and a 280-foot memorial granite water wall outside the facility.
As part of the $606 million lakefront improvement project, engineers will add 17 acres of green space and plant 1,400 new trees, many of which will line a street winding through the museum campus. There will also be a winter garden and 33-foot sledding hill that will be open year-round.
The plan calls for 1,000 new parking spots-2,500 in a four-level underground garage north of the stadium, 1,550 in a two-story circular deck immediately south of the facility and 1,550 in a second lot south of Waldron Drive.
As the 20-month project nears the home stretch-the timeframe is the shortest of any modern stadium in U.S. history-those involved often sit back and shake their heads in awe.
"I knew we could do it; I knew it could be done," Montalto said. "But every day it's truly amazing that we're pulling it off on time, particularly with the complexity and the quality of this job."
Football palace will delight Bears fans
By Larry Mayer
Senior Writer
June 20, 2003
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CHICAGO - Eyes opened, jaws dropped and cameras clicked away Friday as nearly 50 Bears employees toured the team's spectacular new football palace along Chicago's magnificent lakefront.
The new stadium, which opens 100 days from Saturday when the Bears host the Green Bay Packers Sept. 29 on Monday Night Football, will be a vast improvement over the old Soldier Field in every conceivable aspect.
All seats will be an average of 37 feet closer to the action and the vertical design will keep the noise in, creating a true home-field advantage that didn't exist in the old building because of the horizontal configuration of the stands.
"It's a really intimate stadium," said architect Tony Montalto. "It's going to be a really loud stadium. You basically have two walls on either side of you. Hopefully that will be that 12th member on the field for the Bears and definitely (provide) an edge."
The new Soldier Field will feature two 84-foot-by-23-foot video scoreboards, 133 executive suites, 8,600 club seats, and five times as many concession stands and twice as many restrooms as the old facility.
Other highlights include a three-level club lounge, a gallery depicting historical events from the Bears' past and an open-air courtyard inside Gate O for an in-stadium tailgating experience.
There will also be a Miller Lite party deck in the north end zone, 1,000 television sets scattered throughout the stadium, colonnade access to fans year-round, an official Bears team store and wider seats with cup holders.
In transforming a national landmark into a civic treasure, the Bears left no stone unturned-regardless of its distance from Chicago. The seats for the new stadium are being manufactured in Australia and some glass panels for the project are being made in Germany and Italy.
"The great thing about architecture and a project like this is to be able to bring the hottest and the latest from all these different areas," Montalto said.
The Bears have joined the Seattle Seahawks as the only NFL clubs to purchase seats from Camatic Seating, which bills itself as "Australia's largest cinema, theatre, stadium and office seating manufacturer." About 64 percent of the approximate 61,500 seats are already in place.
"The actual seat installation is very unique in that they install the beam first," Montalto said. "So they don't need the seats on site to get all the layout complete. The seats then all snap in very quickly. They have a very modern design and a very contemporary look."
The playing surface, a blend of six different types of Kentucky bluegrass, was installed earlier this month. The grass had grown for two years on a Manteno farm not far from the Bears' training camp home in Bourbonnais.
One major upgrade in terms of the field conditions is a state-of-the-art irrigation, drainage and heating system that runs under the ground. Liquid glycol will flow through 4,000 miles of one-inch tubing and keep the surface temperature above 50 degrees even in the dead of Chicago's notorious winter.
"In the old days we used to have to cover the field with a tarp and then put heaters in the corners and the middle and just billow the air and keep it from freezing that way," said Bears stadium operations staffer Bryan Pett.
Friday's tour included a peek at the Bears' spacious locker room, which will eventually include an in-ground whirlpool, 60 oak lockers, a digital sound system in the ceiling, an equipment room and a loading dock.
A security guard sat outside the team's video control room, an area bustling with technicians and stocked with television screens, editing equipment and cables.
"What comes out of here feeds the videoboards," said Bears director of broadcasting and production Greg Miller. "We'll have all the cameras coming into here. Five of our own and up to eight network cameras can be rooted into this room.
"This is just like a television control room. We have replay systems and graphic systems, and we can switch everything just like a live TV game broadcast."
The mezzanine level of the stadium, which will be open to all fans regardless of where their seats are located, will sport cases of memorabilia and a ring of fame honoring Bears Hall of Famers.
Soldier Field's legacy as a war memorial will be enhanced with a doughboy statue of the World War I foot soldier inside Gate 0 and a 280-foot memorial granite water wall outside the facility.
As part of the $606 million lakefront improvement project, engineers will add 17 acres of green space and plant 1,400 new trees, many of which will line a street winding through the museum campus. There will also be a winter garden and 33-foot sledding hill that will be open year-round.
The plan calls for 1,000 new parking spots-2,500 in a four-level underground garage north of the stadium, 1,550 in a two-story circular deck immediately south of the facility and 1,550 in a second lot south of Waldron Drive.
As the 20-month project nears the home stretch-the timeframe is the shortest of any modern stadium in U.S. history-those involved often sit back and shake their heads in awe.
"I knew we could do it; I knew it could be done," Montalto said. "But every day it's truly amazing that we're pulling it off on time, particularly with the complexity and the quality of this job."
