Demolishing Rogers Centre will be 'expensive and noisy,' says stadium's ex-CEO - The Athletic
Working at SkyDome was so much fun in the early 1990s — with the championship baseball teams, the concerts and the celebrities — that Richard Peddie grew his hair out. He had a ponytail for a while, and he started wearing an earring just to match the relentless energy around him.
He was the president and chief executive of a building billed as “the eighth wonder of the world,” with a built-in hotel, a retractable roof and a Hard Rock Cafe. Madonna played to sellouts for three nights in a row one spring. Frank Sinatra sang 31 storeys beneath the famous roof.
It was a multi-use, multi-purpose marvel. Peddie joined the year it opened, in 1989, and the feeling was that, whatever an event could draw at another venue, you could safely add another 25 percent if it was moved to SkyDome because everyone wanted to be there.
And then he went to visit Camden Yards, shortly after it opened in 1992, in Baltimore.
“Oh f#ck,” he said.
It was a baseball park designed for baseball. It had natural grass and an authentic feel. Its seats were not on rollers connected to tracks that made them easy to move for different events. It was designed for one thing — and to do that one thing very well.
“I remember it so vividly,” Peddie said. “I was so in love with Camden Yards. I said, ‘That’s the end of multi-use.’”
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There were structural problems that did not relate to the building. Peddie said one company was in charge of building a stage for a concert, but another was in charge of providing generators. He said McDonald’s held the rights for fast food but another company held the rights for fine dining, and they would often get into disputes over chicken sandwiches — were they fast food or fine dining?
He said SkyDome had a capital budget of $2 million each year, which was money used to replace old lightbulbs, fix cracked seats or paint over scratches in the walls.
When he joined Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, Peddie said the capital budget for Air Canada Centre (now Scotiabank Arena) was up to $8 million a year.
“I don’t really believe in the shelf life of stadiums,” Peddie said Friday. “I believe that if they were built right the first time – and you’re prepared to constantly invest in them — you don’t have to replace them in 30 years.”
Scotiabank Arena is only 10 years younger than Rogers Centre.
“And it looks damned good,” he said. “And they’re spending a lot of money to make it look good.”
Demolishing Rogers Centre would be complicated by the fact so many condominiums have sprouted along the edges of the property, he said. There would be environmental questions about the dust and the noise associated with taking down a building of that size — and with that much concrete.
It would not be like the videos of other stadium demolitions, he said with a chuckle, with a series of explosions followed by the orderly collapse of an old venue.
“You can not do that at SkyDome,” he said. “It will take nuclear weapons to take that thing down. It will be expensive and noisy.”