Say hello to the newest kid on an already youthful block.With a $400 million price tag and 76,125 seats, Invesco Field at Mile High takes its place as the upstart sports venue in central Denver's cityscape.
The stadium's inaugural football game officially makes Coors Field -- home of the Colorado Rockies baseball club since 1995 -- the city's oldest major professional sports venue.
The Pepsi Center, in the South Platte River corridor south of Coors Field, is home for the Colorado Avalanche hockey team and the Denver Nuggets basketball team. The facility is 2 years old.
The areas around the South Platte have always been home to Denver's sports venues. The city's first stadium, built in 1870, stood in a cottonwood grove near lower 16th Street and the river.
The amateur players who took the field there for football or baseball were inspired to play by beer kegs strategically placed in the end zone or on the bases, said Denver historian Tom Noel.
"I guess Denver has always been a sports-crazy town," Noel said. "We've always had this kind of striving to be a big-league city, a world-class city, and a lot of people equate that with major sports arenas."
Now there is a gleaming new home for the Denver Broncos. Considered by many to be the most technologically advanced stadium ever built, the tax-supported building, with its wavy metal lines, rises from what was once a city garbage dump.
In sheer numbers, the building is imposing, with its 1.7 million square feet, 124 luxury suites and 12,000 tons of structural steel. But imposing is what it had to be.
The Grand Dame of Denver sports venues, Mile High Stadium, stands in the shadows just north of the shiny new edifice. She's been home to the Denver Broncos since 1960, and no one necessarily wants to see her go.
But go she will.
by early next year Mile High Stadium, which was sold out for every home football game since the early 1970s, will become a parking lot for the new stadium, just as McNichols Arena did last year.
"Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to this building," said Tim Romani, executive director of the Metropolitan Football Stadium District, who also built the Pepsi Center.
"This is the finest stadium ever built, not only in this country but in the world," he said. "I've thought of a lot of different words I could use to describe this stadium, but I think the best one I can use is . . . done."
Contact Michele Ames at (303) 892-2327 or amesm@RockyMountainNews.com.
