The Bears At Soggy Field
The Bears are in a weird place right now. Virginia Halas McCaskey managed to outlive the Queen but she’ll be gone pretty soon unless she uses Lazarus pits. There are rumors about internal strife amongst the ownership of the team, and some speculation on if the team will be sold upon McCaskey’s passing. Also among the list of Bears organizational drama: they appear to be moving.
It is confirmed the Bears purchased land in Arlington Heights to develop into a new Bears central hub. Arlington Heights is a suburb in the greater Chicagoland area, nowhere near the current location of Soldier Field. Soldier Field itself is an absolute mess. It’s small, especially for the market the Bears have. It’s historic and beautiful, at least the parts that aren’t part of the renovation that made it look like a spaceship parked on it. The Bears do not own the stadium, which means they do not retain all the money the stadium can make, especially things that aren’t NFL games. Lastly, the field is a pile of shit. We saw that on Sunday when a bad rainstorm turned the field into more of a bog than a football field.
The team didn’t care. That was one of the most Bears games I can imagine seeing. Old Chicago dorks in BEARS sweaters would probably want every game to be exactly like that.
I haven’t been to Chicago since I was a wee lad of 7 or so and I’m curious how actual residents and fans feel about the whole thing. I know the stadium location is simultaneously beautiful and annoying to get to. Would fans prefer the city’s option of renovating the area and keeping them on the lake in Soldier Field or is a move to a more open suburb actually preferable?
I gotta say watching them attempt to, I guess, squeegee water off the field was entertaining. Much like trying to empty buckets of water from a sinking boat by dumping the water into a different part of the boat.
“I once saw a man punished by being forced to mop up rain. My goal in the military was not to screw up as bad as that guy.”
-Zach Hazard.
idk what the attendance data says but arlington heights is north of the city and alienates fans from the south side (and other areas). would love to see how the team develops under new ownership though!
I don’t live in/near Chicago, but I’m all for them moving out to Arlington Heights. They’ll have much more control over what they can do with the stadium, they can have an incredible new facility that’s a hub for hotels/shopping/restaurants, and since it will most likely be a domed stadium, they can host a lot of other events there throughout the year. It’s also right next to a fairly major freeway, is pretty close to O’Hare Airport, and already has a Metra stop right there. They might need to beef up the train schedule a bit on game days, but the line goes from downtown all the way out almost to the suburbs of Rockford, so you could park anywhere along in there and ride the Metra in to the stadium, then back out, and not have to deal with driving.
I loved Soldier Field…the old Soldier Field…but it’s time has passed and they need to move on.
Soldier Field’s a pit and it makes all the sense in the world for the Bears to build their own stadium that they’ll own.
But I don’t want them to move. I love that Soldier Field is downtown. Many people from all over Chicagoland can fairly easily get there without a car, since every train line in the region converges on downtown. Yes, the new location is next to a Metra station, but that’s only convenient to the folks living along ONE line. (I happen to live along that line at the moment though.) It’s possible the new location will be an even greater traffic nightmare than Soldier Field currently is.
And the views of the lake and skyline are stunning.
If they’re gonna move, I say move back to Wrigley Field.
Hey at least the new stadium is still going to be NEAR a train line and thus the city. I’m tired of teams building stadiums nowhere near the city. It bothers me that my city (Boston) has one of the if not the best transit systems in the US and stupid Robert Kraft builds his stadium halfway to Providence. It would take me 2.5 hours to get there from my apartment using commuter rail. Fenway meanwhile is 20 minutes.
Dude, have you seen the state of the T for the past few months? That is not a transit system to be proud of.
That looked like one of those rain games at the old 70s multipurpose stadiums with the thin carpet astroturf fields. The 1975 Oilers-Bengals game at Riverfront Stadium is a particularly notable example, and gave Ed and Steve Sabol a lot of material for one of their football follies films.
JaguarGator9 on Youtube has some clips of that one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe5SO7Y3ECk
Either option would be fine for the fans but obviously the Bears want to be able to keep all stadium revenue, not just revenue from Bears games, so they’ll pick the new stadium option. Will be interested to see if they can con any government entities into paying them to move from one part of Chucago to another, or if they’ll have to pay for it all themselves.
As a lifelong Bears fan, I’ll always have nostalgia for Soldier Field. The stadium and location are iconic, and there’s nothing else like cold/poor weather football in the winter.
That being said, it’s a complete dump compared to newer stadiums. The renovation was so botched that it got delisted from the national register of historic landmarks, the mile-ish long walk from the nearest L station is entirely through museum campus so it’s just a long slog with other fans with nothing else in the way, the facilities in the stadium are outdated, and a dozen other things that make it a subpar experience. The city’s “dome” proposal would cost almost as much as a brand new stadium and still wouldn’t address the Bears not owning the actual stadium, so they still would have minimal control over the turf. My preference would have been the team finding another site in the city and building a new stadium complex from the ground up, but obviously there’s not exactly a ton of empty land for the team to buy out. I’ll miss having all the Chicago teams actually BE in Chicago, but Arlington Heights isn’t exactly that far from the city and is still in Cook County, so I can’t say I’m that upset about it if the stadium and surrounding areas are developed appropriately.
Bears fan / current Chicago resident here. Arlington Heights isn’t that far (30-45 minutes) away from the city, and it’s doable if the Bears move there. But regarding the current stadium, yeah, it sucks for a lot of us to get to (it’s next to Lake Michigan so you can only access it from 3 directions), but the views in the stadium are phenomenal (Lake Michigan, the skyscrapers downtown, etc.). The field itself is new grass just installed by the new GM / coach, so the jury is still out on that. The stadium itself is actually pretty flippin’ cool, and there’s no need to upgrade or change it. The weather event last Sunday was very weird for Soldier Field, so none of us are overreacting to it. And hell yeah it was cool to see the Bears beat a favored team in “Bear weather” in our home stadium!
Teams like the Chicago Bears don’t evolve well. They’re similar to the Celtics and Yankees in that they are obsessed with being “traditionalists” aka never changing at all, never pushing the game forward. Us Bears fans be are sick of the shitty turf in Soldier Field, and I’ll gladly sacrifice tradition for evolution.
@billytheskink: Does JaguarGator9 still make his videos like 10 minutes longer than they need to be? That has to be killing his youtube analytics.
Bears fan here. What’s happening at Soldier is the same that happened at Wrigley. The league’s profit model changed from “Hey we play football come see” to “We have TV contracts and needs for seating more than 55,000 and Wrigley isn’t big enough”. People forget that this idea of the Bears owning their own land and stadium to profit off of it has been around since Papa Bear Halas. He wanted to build Bearland in the 70s over in Gary, Indiana. Blurb that links to a dead Tribune story is here -> https://www.q101.com/2017/01/15/the-bears-could-have-moved-to-gary-indiana/ At the time such a thing would have been revolutionary – The 60s spawned the football revenue sharing agreement – but for non-football revenue to put money squarely in the owners pockets was a newly minted idea to monetize the entire game day experience.
Soldier’s renovation was spawned out of the McCaskey family being cash poor after Virginia’s 100% ownership run, and the fact the city wasn’t going to bend over and bulldoze Soldier, nor were they or the State of Illinois about to shit out $700 million for a brand new place on new land. This compromise was struck and EVERYONE LOST in the deal. The only real addition to Soldier is the building of the wall of suites on the West side of the stadium. City still owns it via the Parks Department and maintains it enough, but the stadium gets used heavily being in the primest real estate in the NFL and center shot in the Loop of the 3rd largest city in America. This compromise has aged ungracefully and is now due. The idea of owned stadiums with accompanying commercial development is now in full swing and the Bears are finally stepping up for their piece.
The Soggy Bottom Bears
The renovation was so screwed up it basically ruined the chance for soldier field to be the bears stadium forever. It sucks, and they obviously will never find as perfect of a location for it.
That said, this reeks of when the Braves moved out of Atlanta to a locally inaccessible area. Arlington Heights sucks, has nothing else to offer anyone wanting to do something else in the immediate vicinity, and most importantly, has the least welcoming atmosphere of anyplace I have ever been in my life. My Laosian friend from Schaumburg and I were treated like buskers and when asked if there was somewhere to eat where told “not for you here”, despite being dressed up for a rare night in the city and riding in his beamer, and stared at like freaks any time stopping for gas since. I’m from hill billy central IL, but Arlington Heights is easily the least welcoming, most seemingly stuck in the 50s town in the state. I cant imagine those people being pleased with the crowds that football games would bring in.