Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 16, 1994 TAG: 9408160052
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
If all proceeds according to plan, the bids will be sorted out and construction will begin in September. Plenty of time, ballpark advocates say, for the new ballyard to be ready for Opening Day of the 1995 season.
For those optimists, a bit of a cautionary tale:
In October 1989, Frederick, Md., began construction of the $6 million Grove Stadium, the new home of the Carolina League's Keys.
Through the winter, construction stayed on schedule. Mild weather in western Maryland that year helped immensely. So did city crews that had the expertise to do the parking lot and lighting work, thus relieving contractors of those chores.
Everything fell into place almost perfectly.
Opening Day arrived amid much fanfare, as is the norm with such happy events. A thrilling new era of professional baseball in the Maryland foothills was widely heralded.
Yet the tenants of the sparkling new facility had some thrills of a different sort before the curtain rose.
"We were putting away paint brushes and hiding the hammers right up until the time we opened the gates," said Keith Lupton, the Keys' general manager at the time. "As a matter of fact, we didn't get the occupancy permit until an hour before the gates were to open."
An hour? Plenty of time to spare.
Folks spent $4.5 million on L.P. Frans Stadium in Hickory, N.C., another park that went up in less than a year .
"We didn't get our occupancy permit until 10 minutes before the gates opened," said Hickory Crawdads general manager Marty Steele. "We have pictures of the two teams warming up for the first game with a big crane working on the scoreboard in the background.
"We lost 45 construction days to rain, then we had 10 inches of snow in March. It was a very stressful time for us all."
The same snow, the great spring blizzard of 1993, buried under-construction Frawley Stadium in Wilmington, Del. That facility was supposed to be ready to greet a new team, the Blue Rocks, by the opening of the '93 season a month later.
"We had crews shoveling snow out of the grandstands so that we could install the seats," said Matt Minker, the general contractor for the Wilmington ballpark and a part-owner of the Blue Rocks.
Despite that, Wilmington was completed on time.
"To be very honest, we could have lost another week and still had it ready," said Minker. "The whole world told me it was impossible to do on time. That made us want to do it all the more."
Other teams moved into ballparks that were not finished. That happened in Frederick.
"We just stopped working on the skyboxes and the restaurant until the season was over," Lupton said. "They weren't ready until the next season."
The architects at Kinsey Shane and Associates, charged with designing Salem's stadium, have heard all the horror stories, but they are undismayed.
As well they should be, says Durham Bulls vice president Mike Hill, who is overseeing construction of the $14 million successor to Durham Athletic Park.
"There is no doubt in my mind that they can get the new stadium ready on time if everybody works hard and works together," he said.
That's what the people in Salem are counting on.
"It's doable," Kinsey Shane and Associates architect Bob Fry said. "But nobody said it was going to be easy."
In several respects, construction of Salem's ballpark should be simpler than some of the recent projects in surrounding states.
For one, the city owns the land where the facility will be built in Salem. The site is relatively open with Salem Stadium and Salem Civic Center nearby. In Frederick, it took more than a year to weather a court challenge by a neighbor who opposed the construction.
There won't be a great deal of site preparation in Salem. The lot is relatively flat and stable. In Hickory, it took 45 days of excavation before construction could begin. The Wilmington project involved bringing in 4,000 truckloads of fill dirt and installing wooden pilings on which to build the stadium.
"We were building in a swamp," Minker said. "I don't know how many pairs of shoes I ruined. It was awful."
The Salem job will be done with precast concrete that can be assembled at the factory and brought to the site on the back of a truck. In Frederick, construction was held up for days until the weather was warm enough to pour concrete.
"Not having to pour concrete will be a big advantage for Salem," Lupton said.
Architects at Kinsey Shane and Associates have made the plans in such a way as to allow contractors some flexibility. Plans call for the playing surface to be installed first so it has time to establish itself. After that, the sequence of construction will depend to a degree on the preference of the contractor.
Another advantage for Salem's new ballpark is that the utilities are already in place. In other words, no new lines have to be dug. The facility just has to be hooked up to existing lines. Plus, the parking lot is there, so no new paving will be required.
"I'll tell you something else that Salem has that none of the rest of us had when we were building," Lupton said. "And that's a place to fall back on if the new place isn't ready."
That would be Municipal Field, which Bucs management does not want to see again after the team moves out in September.
Still, the point is well-taken. The Class AA Bowie Baysox didn't move into the $10 million Prince George's County (Md.) Stadium until June 16, the 33rd home date of this season. The ballpark was supposed to have been ready for Opening Day. Instead, the Baysox moved into a facility with a clubhouse that had no lights or water.
"The stadium was about 65 percent incomplete," said Lupton, the Baysox's general manager.
Back in Salem, Fry is aware of the pitfalls of building a stadium in the winter.
"We aren't thumbing our noses at nature," he said. "Nature is going to do what nature wants to do. Our job [as architects] is to make things simple as possible for the builders."
by CNB