5 KEY ISSUES
On Nov. 11, 2013, the Atlanta Braves announced the team would leave Turner Field and would play the 2017 season in a new stadium in Cobb County. Cobb commissioners, expecting new investment and new tax revenue, committed public dollars to pay for more than half the construction cost of the $622 million stadium. The Atlanta Braves will pay the rest and will also invest up to $400 million in a mixed-use development surrounding the stadium. Here are five issues that must be settled before opening day.
1.
MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT. Some but not all of the development will be complete by opening day. The Braves and the development team overseeing the project told Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters J. Scott Trubey and Dan Klepal they envision a 365-day a year entertainment complex that will lean heavily on bars, restaurants and events such as concerts to provide foot traffic when the Braves aren't playing.
2.
PARKING/PEDESTRIAN ACCESS. The Braves are attempting to lease thousands of off-site parking spots that would save the team tens of millions of dollars that otherwise would be invested in building parking garages. At stake for the Braves are millions of dollars and potentially valuable real estate. A critical unresolved issue is the construction and financing of a pedestrian/public transit bridge that will span Interstate 285 and allow fans to access the stadium complex by foot or by bus. The AJC will explore the obstacles the bridge project must overcome.
3.
STADIUM/FAN EXPERIENCE. The Braves have not yet disclosed the details on the roster of amenities the new stadium will offer. The goal is to create a fan experience superior to the one at Turner Field, and one that will entice fans to leave their couches for the ballpark.
4.
TRAFFIC. Traffic projections predict 20,000 additional cars will visit the area surrounding the stadium on game days. Plans on how to ease the expected congestion are still developing. Essential to a solution is an investment in public transportation — which is predicated on winning federal grant money — and road improvement projects.
5.
PUBLIC SAFETY. Game day crowds will require a still-to-be-determined commitment of police officers and other public safety resources.
The Atlanta Braves have had the most prolific designer of Major League Baseball stadiums, Kansas City-based architecture firm Populous, working on plans for their new Cobb County ballpark since January. But so far the baseball team has shown the public only a few glimpses of the emerging design, and a team official says more detailed images could be months away.
“I would expect we will release more renderings to the public sometime in the next 90-120 days,” Braves executive vice president Derek Schiller said.
Among the key questions yet to be fully answered, one year after the Braves made the surprising announcement of the move to Cobb: How will the fan experience inside the new stadium be different than at Turner Field?
Georgia Tech architecture professor Benjamin Flowers said the renderings released to this point have been “surprisingly generic” and haven’t revealed dramatic differences.
“My guess is that the real change in the fan experience for most people will be as a result of the context in which the stadium sits and won’t really be about (the stadium itself),” said Flowers, referring to the suburban setting and planned adjacent mixed-use development. “But it is a bit surprising to my mind that we haven’t seen a little more.”
The Braves most recently unveiled four artist renderings at a ground-breaking ceremony in September, cautioning that they remained a work in progress.
Those renderings show a three-level stadium with a large canopy horse-shoeing around the top to provide shade for some upper-level seats, a much-expanded “Chop House” restaurant/bar beyond right field, can’t-miss SunTrust Park signage beyond center field, and an exterior incorporating brick, steel and glass. Other details also have trickled out.
“Some of the key differences of SunTrust Park is that it is very fan friendly and intimate,” Schiller said last week in an emailed response to questions from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The ballpark will have 41,500 seats, about 9,000 fewer than at Turner Field, and the Braves say the seats will be closer to the field. A cantilever design will jut the middle level out over part of the lower level, Schiller said, although that isn’t obvious in the renderings.
“We’re significantly far along on the design of the ballpark,” Schiller said. “The configuration of the seating bowl is for all intents and purposes complete. The configuration of walls and major structures throughout the ballpark is also complete. We are still working on interior finishes, how our branding will be represented and the ways in which we pay homage to our history.”
One thing that has been settled, Schiller revealed, is an outfield wall different than Turner Field’s.
“We are going from a gentle curved design, which is all relatively uniform, to a design which has different (heights) of wall,” he said. “We’ll also have two distinctive power alleys, one in left field and one in right field. … The differences in wall height create a great fan experience in the seating area behind those sections.”
The goal is a “pitcher’s park” that also is “fair for a hitter who really gets a hold of a ball,” Schiller said. The total area of fair territory will be “right in line with Major League Baseball’s average, which is roughly 2.48 acres.”
The stadium will be oriented (from home plate to pitcher’s mound) in a south-southeast direction, which is unusual for an MLB park.
Populous, formerly named HOK Sport, has designed 13 of the past 14 MLB stadiums to open and 19 of the 30 currently in use. The firm’s work includes Baltimore’s trend-setting Oriole Park at Camden Yards, San Francisco’s AT&T Park and both the New York Mets’ and Yankees’ stadiums.
The Atlanta Falcons, building a new downtown stadium that is scheduled to open in 2017, the same year as the Braves’ ballpark, have released many more details about their design and planned amenities. The Falcons have had their lead architect — from a different Kansas City-based firm — make several presentations to open meetings of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority board.
Flowers, the Georgia Tech professor, said the two teams appear to have strikingly different architectural goals.
The Braves seem to be going for a “a retro, nostalgic kind of quality,” similar to many Populous-designed ballparks, Flowers said. By contrast, the design of the Falcons’ stadium is “very futuristic,” he said.
The Braves’ open-air stadium has a $622 million budget, while the Falcons’ 71,000-seat retractable-roof stadium has a $1.2 billion budget. Both involve hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
In an earlier interview with the AJC, Earl Santee, the Populous principal in charge of the Braves project, said the mixed-use development will distinguish the Cobb stadium from all others his firm has designed.
The goal inside the stadium, Santee said, will be to “create smaller personal experiences for everyone within each section.” The Braves have suggested that will be accomplished partly with club areas attached to seats at different price points. The stadium is expected to have about 20 fewer suites, but thousands more club seats, than Turner Field.
“We are confident SunTrust Park will be uniquely different from Turner Field and other venues out there today,” Schiller said.
