A century after considering building one of the nation's biggest stadiums, the Wildcats have instead built possibly one of the nation's best.
chicago.suntimes.com
New Ryan Field gives Northwestern a spectacular football venue 100 years in the making
A century after considering building one of the nation’s biggest stadiums, the Wildcats have instead built possibly one of the nation’s best.
In 1925, Northwestern briefly dreamed of building one of the largest stadiums in the nation, then did nothing of the sort.
A century later, Northwestern identified a different superlative target for its new stadium. This time, the university might have achieved it.
“I truly believe it’s the best stadium in all of football,” Wildcats coach David Braun said Tuesday. “We’re not trying to be the biggest. We delivered on being the best.”
Construction is progressing rapidly on the new Ryan Field, scheduled to open Oct. 2 vs. Penn State, and it’s revealing a spectacular — and extremely purple — facility that evokes an English Premier League venue more than a Big Ten stadium.
The soccer vibe stems from two elements. One is a 360-degree roof designed to shield all 35,000 seats from weather and to amplify crowd noise, which Northwestern hasn’t exactly been known for in the past.
The other is a standing-room-only student section behind the southern end zone, which rises steeply enough to require horizontal railings between each row. When populated, it should appear as a wall of fans on top of the field.
All around, it’s a beautiful facility, one that looks starkly out of place across the street from humble three-story brick apartment buildings in Evanston — but feels on the inside like a self-contained futuristic sporting world.
Login to view embedded media
Login to view embedded media
It’s especially surreal that Northwestern will call this facility home, given the nature of old Ryan Field.
There was a certain charm to that dump, but it was a dump. The rusty metal bleachers, crumbling white concrete and jarring asymmetry between the tall western stands and the stumpy eastern stands — the features most visible on TV — were somehow more attractive than the dim, dirty maze of hallways that fans walked through underneath the stadium.
But it’s perhaps less surreal with historical context. James Rogers, the old stadium’s architect, initially imagined it as a behemoth in the mold of Michigan Stadium, which was built around the same time.
Northwestern was a national title contender in football in the 1920s and early 1930s, not yet differing greatly in size from its peers, so early blueprints depicted what would have been one of the world’s first triple-decker stadiums, following the first, Yankee Stadium, by only three years.
Financial constraints and realism eventually triumphed, and NU ultimately didn’t follow Notre Dame and USC into the modern-day tier of private-school bluebloods. Would an enormous stadium have changed that course? Who knows.
The new Ryan Field does feature three decks, creating an optical illusion that makes the stadium seem larger than it is.
That’s because each deck is relatively shallow. There’s a lot of structure but not a lot of seats. Behind the northern end zone, for example, the first deck contains only 12 rows and the second deck only three.
Capacity has been reduced by more than 12,000 from the old stadium, making this one the smallest in the Big Ten and the second-smallest in the power conferences.
.
.
.
continued