Candlestick Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Candlestick Park sat at the edge of San Francisco Bay, on a finger of land called Candlestick Point, where long-billed curlews once gathered in such numbers that locals called them the candlestick birds. For more than half a century, that exposed promontory served as the home of two beloved sports franchises and the setting for some of the most memorable moments in American sports history. The wind off the Pacific never stopped. The fog rolled in without warning. And yet tens of thousands of people came, season after season, wrapped in coats and clutching coffee cups, because something extraordinary kept happening inside those reinforced concrete walls. How did a stadium built on one of the coldest, windiest patches of land in the Bay Area become the site of an earthquake that stopped a World Series, a legendary touchdown pass, and the final concert ever given by the Beatles? Those are the questions Candlestick Park demands we answer.

• 2. Land, Money, and a No-Bid Deal

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  Most of Candlestick Point was purchased from Charles Harney, a local contractor who had bought the land in 1952 for a quarry and industrial development. When San Francisco needed a stadium site as part of its agreement to lure the New York Giants west, Harney stood ready to sell at a profit of over two million dollars. He then received a no-bid contract to build the stadium itself. The entire arrangement was investigated by a grand jury in 1958, though construction pressed on regardless. Ground was broken after a name-the-park contest settled on Candlestick Park on the 3rd of March 1959; before that, maps referred to the site simply as Bay View Stadium. When Richard Nixon, then Vice President, threw out the ceremonial first pitch on the 12th of April 1960, he was inaugurating what would be described as the first modern baseball stadium built entirely of reinforced concrete. At the time, it was one of the few pieces of land within San Francisco large enough to accommodate both a ballpark and the 10,000 parking spaces the city had promised the Giants. The site's geology on the bedrock of Bayview Hill would later prove its worth, but the financial arrangements that brought the stadium into being left a shadow over its origins that residents and reporters never quite forgot.

• 3. The Wind Nobody Fixed

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  Architect John Bolles designed a boomerang-shaped concrete baffle in the upper tier specifically to shield the park from wind. It never worked properly. Prevailing winds arrive from the Pacific Ocean seven miles to the west, travel through a passage known as the Alemany Gap, and then swirl over a hill immediately adjacent to the park before pouring down into the stands. For the first ten seasons, the wind blew in from left-center and out toward right-center. When the park was enclosed in 1971 to accommodate the 49ers, city planners hoped full enclosure would cut the wind significantly. Instead it swirled from all directions, as strong and cold as before. Willie Mays, the Giants' Hall of Fame center fielder, claimed the wind cost him over 100 home runs. In the 12 years he played at Candlestick from 1960 through 1971, Mays hit 396 home runs total, with 203 at Candlestick and 193 on the road. A 1962 study commissioned by Giants owner Horace Stoneham found that had the conditions been known before construction, building the park 100 yards farther to the north and east would have improved them substantially; that ground was fill, however, and less stable during earthquakes, so the location was never changed. Attorney Melvin Belli filed a claim against the Giants in 1960 because his six-seat box, which cost him almost $1,600, was unbearably cold. He won in court, ruling the advertised radiant heating system a failure. The pipes under the lower box seats ran hot water through a space between the concrete and the ground, but were not embedded in the concrete and generated nowhere near enough warmth to matter. Rather than repair the system, the Giants played more day games than any Major League Baseball team except the Chicago Cubs, whose home ballpark, Wrigley Field, did not receive lights until 1988.

• 4. Survival Pins and Stadium Nicknames

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  Patrick J. Gallagher, the team's marketing director, first issued the Croix de Candlestick pin in 1983. The pin was awarded to any fan who stayed through the end of a night game that went extra innings; to claim it, they had to bring their ticket stub to Patrick and Co. Stationery store in San Francisco. The design featured the Giants' SF monogram capped in snow, with the Latin motto Veni, Vidi, Vixi: I came, I saw, I survived. In 1983 the Giants played five extra-inning night games, drawing a combined attendance of 70,933 fans eligible for the prize. The pin was distributed for several years, and at the Giants' final three-game home stand in September 1999, tens of thousands of fans received one. A San Francisco Chronicle columnist later called it the smartest marketing promotion in Bay Area history. That spirit of proud endurance produced an entire vocabulary of nicknames. Locals called the stadium North Pole, Cave of the Winds, Windlestick, The Quagmire, The Ashtray By The Bay, and simply The Dump, a reference to what the land had once been used for. Sports Illustrated's Peter King, writing in 2009, compressed the stadium's whole corporate naming saga into a single mock title: Candle3Monsterstick. Through every name change and every nickname, fans who grew up with the park simply called it the Stick.

• 5. Three Catches and an Earthquake

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  Dwight Clark's leaping touchdown reception from Joe Montana in January 1982 sent the 49ers to Super Bowl XVI and passed immediately into legend as The Catch. Clark caught that pass in the back of the end zone during the NFC Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, and it is still counted among the most iconic plays in football history. The 49ers hosted eight NFC Championship games at Candlestick Park in total, going 4-4 in those contests. Two more plays at the stadium later borrowed the same name. In the 1998 NFC Wild Card round, Steve Young found Terrell Owens for a touchdown with eight seconds remaining against the Packers, a play called The Catch II. In the 2011 NFC Divisional Playoffs, Alex Smith threw a winning touchdown to Vernon Davis with nine seconds left against the New Orleans Saints, known as The Catch III. Then there was the evening of the 17th of October 1989, when a magnitude 6.9 earthquake named Loma Prieta struck minutes before Game 3 of the World Series was to begin. No one inside the stadium was injured. Al Michaels and Tim McCarver, calling the game for ABC, later credited the stadium's design for saving thousands of lives. An engineering project completed between the 1988 and 1989 seasons at the insistence of the local stadium authority had eliminated what engineers described as a potential collapse wave. The World Series was delayed ten days for structural assessments, and the 49ers moved a game against the New England Patriots to Stanford Stadium, the same venue where they had beaten the Miami Dolphins 38-16 to win Super Bowl XIX on the 20th of January 1985.

• 6. The Beatles' Last Night

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  On the 29th of August 1966, the Beatles played their last full public concert at Candlestick Park before a crowd of approximately 25,000. The 11-song set ran 33 minutes and closed with Long Tall Sally. At no point during the evening did the band announce that this would be their final show; even if they knew, it was a closely guarded secret. The Beatles' press officer, Tony Barrow, recorded the performance at the band's own request, but his cassette could only record 30 minutes per side and ran out with roughly a minute of the closing song still remaining. That recording has never been officially released, though it has circulated online as a bootleg. Most of the surviving color film from the concert was shot by Barry Hood, a 15-year-old Beatles fan who was there that night. Hood later released some of his footage in a limited edition documentary titled The Beatles Live In San Francisco, but much of what he captured remained in a vault, unseen by the public as of 2017. When Paul McCartney returned to Candlestick Park on the 14th of August 2014 for the stadium's final concert, he contacted Hood directly and used a portion of Hood's original 1966 footage on a big screen during the show. That closing night drew 53,477 people and generated $7,023,107 in revenue, making it the last chapter of a musical history that also included the Rolling Stones' two-night run in October 1981, which drew a combined 135,000 fans and brought in $2,092,500.

• 7. Names, Naming Rights, and the End

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  3Com Corporation licensed the stadium's naming rights from September 1995 until 2002 for $900,000 a year, turning Candlestick Park into 3Com Park at Candlestick Point. Many fans and even the Giants' own media guides continued using the original name, since the deal was initiated by the 49ers. Chris Berman referred to it on air as Commercial-Stick Park. When the 3Com deal expired in 2002, the park was briefly called San Francisco Stadium at Candlestick Point before a new deal with Monster Cable was signed on the 28th of September 2004, renaming it Monster Park. A ballot measure passed on the 2nd of November 2004 required the name to revert to Candlestick permanently once that contract expired in 2008, and the freeway signs that had been changed to read Monster Park were switched back. On the 10th of August 2007, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the playing field would be renamed Bill Walsh Field in honor of the former 49ers coach, who had died on the 30th of July that year. The 49ers played their final game at the stadium on the 23rd of December 2013, a Monday Night Football win over the Atlanta Falcons, 34-24, that was the facility's 36th and final appearance on that broadcast, more than any other NFL stadium. Demolition began in November 2014, was completed on the 24th of September 2015, and 1,000 historic seats were installed at Kezar Stadium, the 49ers' original home, for the public to use.