Posted on 04/13/2010 4:53:57 PM PDT by csvset
No one follows the Giants more avidly than Corinne Woods. She has a baseball schedule tacked up on the wall in her Mission Creek houseboat, keeps another in her car, and even carries a pocket version in her wallet.
She's not a baseball fan. She's just trying to make sure she can get out of the neighborhood before baseball fans swarm the streets. "We live and die by the Giants' schedule," said Woods. "Can I get to the store before the game? Can I get there before the seventh inning when everyone starts to leave?"
Exactly 10 years ago today, AT&T Park hosted its first regular season game. Most fans consider it a nice milestone, worth a nod and a smile. How quickly we forget. In 1997, when I went to the site of the new ballpark for the first time, I drove right past the squat, gray two-story concrete warehouse with barely a resident in sight.
When construction began, hundreds of rats ran out into the neighborhood.
Now AT&T Park is a model for the new architecture of baseball stadiums and is the anchor of the first totally new neighborhood in San Francisco in decades. People howled at the idea of gentrifying the area. But the ballpark has turned out to be the rarest of urban concepts - a big idea done well.
This is not only a postcard-perfect structure; it has helped to drive a tsunami of development that has transformed an urban wasteland into the city's new hot address.
Teresa Ojeda of the city's Planning Department calculated that from 2000 to 2009, nearly a third of all the city's new housing - almost 7,200 residential units - was built in the census tracts closest to the ballpark. "It's an entirely new neighborhood, if not a minicity,"
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
I liked Candlestick better.
Really? Why?
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
The critical point:
“At that point the Giants, under the direction of an ownership group headed by Peter Magowan, decided to finance the park by themselves.”
Yes, in San Francisco(!), this was PRIVATELY FINANCED.
Great ballpark with horrible parking (expensive and very very slow getting in and out).
I've watched night games at AT&T Park and while the wind can pick up some times, it's still way more pleasant than Candlestick--not to mention the amenities there are way more modern, too! And I enjoyed the fact I could ride CalTrain to within one block of the park, too. 
The thing about the new park: there is a free area for us poor people out in the outfield. We used to just ride our bike up to it.
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