A Big League Minneapolis or a Cold Omaha: Professional Sports and the Promise of Downtown Growth in the Campaign to Build the Metrodome

Abstract

Since the 1990s, cities and professional sports franchises have engaged in a frenzied competition to maintain or lure teams, build modern amenity-laden venues, and revitalize underdeveloped or underperforming downtown areas. This article argues that the case of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (1982) in Minneapolis is instructive for understanding the current context and prevailing trends in stadium redevelopment. To secure a move of baseball and football operations from suburban Bloomington to the city of Minneapolis, boosters and city officials lauded the prospects for downtown revitalization the stadium would bring. Leverage of a stadium’s “intangibles” was particularly alluring to municipal and business leadership in the 1970s as cities like Minneapolis wrestled with population loss and a post-industrial reality. Despite promises unfulfilled, threats of franchise loss and the prospect for downtown revitalization in contemporary stadium development games remain a lasting legacy of Minneapolis’s dome debate.