By BJ Austin, KERA News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-895529.mp3
Dallas, TX – Texas Stadium, the iconic "stadium with the hole in the roof", is a pile of rubble. Thousands of people watched its implosion yesterday. Once the site is cleared, it will become a "parking lot" for bulldozers, cranes and other road construction equipment. KERA's BJ Austin explains.
It took about 30 seconds to bring down two million pounds of concrete, two and half million pounds of steel, and 39 years worth of memories. The Dallas Cowboys spent 37 seasons there, and brought home five Super Bowl championships.
Irving Mayor Herbert Gears says the Texas Department of Transportation is paying Irving 16 million dollars to park on the site while crews re-make the Highway 114, Loop 12 and 183 interchange.
Gears: We've leased the site to TxDot to be a staging area, which will save a few million dollars and cut a few years off construction time because of its convenience.
Even then, construction will take five to six years.
Seven years is how long Brad Powell of Bedford was a Cowboys season ticket holder. He watched the implosion from the back of his pickup sitting in those very stadium seats. His wife bought them for him after the Cowboys moved to the new stadium in Arlington. A die-hard tailgater, he has a particular, special memory of Texas Stadium.
Powell: My best memory is Emmitt setting the rushing record. I actually went back out cause I had some things on a smoker on the grill. Then I went back in and got to see it, pretty neat.
Pete Nolasco is an Irving native, and a chef. He brought a 100 pound ice sculpture of Texas Stadium to the parking lot filled with more than four thousand cars and pickups. Saying goodbye was a personal thing.
Nolasco: I graduated from the 50 yard line of Texas Stadium back in 1984. This is my tribute back to Texas Stadium for all the great memories.
The stadium "melted", so to speak, before Nolasco's ice sculpture.
Chris Arnold and Christie Perry came through the gates at 2AM to get a good vantage point.
Arnold: It was awesome, perfect: sad too, got a little teary-eyed, lots of memories.
Perry: Football games, and concerts and experience and graduations, and it's sad to see it all go away. But, it's exciting for the future, as well.
Mayor Herbert Gears thinks so too. He says this is a prime piece of real estate that will add millions to the city's tax base once the highways are improved and DART Light Rail arrives.
Gears: We want lots of people to be able to live around the train station, so that's high rise residential. And when you have that, you need support services like retail and all types of institutional uses, and commercial office, and you have room to do it all. We know that the opportunity to create a very large addition to our tax base is there, and we're gonna plan it out as best we can. We'll work with Forest City. We've chose them to represent the property. And they've shown us what can happen there. We know that it's a great site. We know that we'll be able to choose what happens there. And so, we can take our time. We're not going to be in a rush and settle for anything substandard. It's a significant location, the gateway between the city of Dallas and the city of Irving. We take that seriously.
Mayor Gears says Irving's development plans should time-out nicely with the anticipated economic recovery. Meantime, for thousands of daily commuters, the drive looks very different now.