Staley Da Bear
Well-known member
- Mar 16, 2019
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The new Soldier Field opened on Sept. 29, 2003 when the Bears hosted the rival Green Bay Packers on Monday Night Football. The project was completed in 20 months, a record for a sports stadium in the United States. A completely new structure was built inside the old stadium, with only the historic colonnades and part of the south wall remaining intact.
The new 61,500-seat facility featured two 82-foot-by-23-foot video scoreboards, a three-level club lounge, wider seats with cup holders, an open-air courtyard inside Gate 0 and 1,000 television sets scattered throughout the stadium.
"Mike did what everybody said was impossible and that was renovate Soldier Field into a state-of-the-art sports venue," Wood said.
"We talked about legacy a lot when we were designing the stadium. Mike said, 'This is my family's legacy'—not his legacy but the family's legacy, and I think it was his greatest achievement."
The new Soldier Field also included a 280-foot war memorial water wall just outside the facility, a four-level underground parking garage north of the stadium, and 19 additional acres of green space on the museum campus highlighted by 1,400 new trees, a winter garden and a sledding hill.
McCaskey, who served as Bears CEO/president from 1983-99 and chairman from 1999-2011, was extremely proud when the project won a prestigious Patron of the Year Award from the Chicago Architecture Center.
"We thought Soldier Field was bold, it was modern, it really represented Chicago in terms of forward thinking, and it was because of his vision," said Lynn Osmond, president and CEO of the Chicago Architecture Center.
"The architects loved working with him because he was such an architecture geek. When you went to his office, he had all these architecture books and he just would sit and go through them and talk about them. He really had a vision for what Soldier Field could be, and he fought the odds and he did it."
McCaskey was also very involved in the Bears erecting a brand new training facility just northeast of I-294 and Route 60 in Lake Forest. They relocated to the new Halas Hall in the spring of 1997, leaving the original Halas Hall on the campus of Lake Forest College about four miles away.
The move provided the team its own private campus that included an indoor practice facility in addition to space that recently was further developed to include a total of four outdoor practice fields and 305,500 square feet of indoor training and office space.
"Michael recognized the need to improve our headquarters to provide the best resources to our players and coaches," said Bears President and CEO Ted Phillips. "We had only one practice field at the time and had to travel to a temporary indoor facility when the weather was bad. These circumstances weren't uncommon across the NFL at the time, but we knew we could do better."
The new $23 million Halas Hall facility was located on a secluded 38-acre plot and featured a 98,000-square foot building that was more than three times bigger than the original Halas Hall, the Bears' home since 1979.
The complex also included a weight room that was four times larger than the old one, two-and-a-half practice fields including one heated with 14 miles of underground tubing, nine classrooms and a 150-seat theater.