At least a triple for Pennsylvania baseball teams

Stadiums bring mostly benefits

Friday, May 2, 2008

Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by GARY SMITH Workers install protective posts around a fire hydrant outside Regency Furniture Stadium on Piney Church Road in Waldorf on Tuesday. Piney Church Road has reopened ahead of Friday’s home opener for the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs baseball team. The Charles County Sheriff’s Office will be on hand to direct traffic for the opening game. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

Traffic would overwhelm city streets, neighborhood parking would disappear on game nights, the noise would disrupt residents and economic development wouldn’t follow, the naysayers said.

In the four years since Clipper Magazine Stadium opened as the home of the independent Lancaster Barnstormers, the criticism has waned as the fears largely never materialized.

‘‘It’s been a home run,” said Mayor J. Richard Gray (D).

The barren fields and empty warehouses that once surrounded the stadium, which rose on top of an abandoned rail yard, have been filled or soon will be. Commercial office buildings and apartments sit to one side of the stadium, while a boutique hotel and up to a dozen new restaurants line the main drag a short walk from home plate.

And city officials announced this week plans for a $1.5 million jazz club in a vacant warehouse across from the stadium. It will be the third entertainment venue in the district, joining an expanded rock ‘n’ roll hall and a $25 million expansion of an instrumental music academy.

A new YMCA is being planned for a site adjacent to the ballpark and a $170 million hotel and convention center is slated to open next spring. Nearby, Franklin & Marshall College and Lancaster General Hospital, the city’s two biggest employers, are also making significant investments.

‘‘It is certainly no understatement to say that the impact of the stadium has exceeded everybody’s expectations,” said Tom T. Baldrige, president of the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Southern Maryland officials have similarly high hopes for $27 million Regency Furniture Stadium, which opens today. It’s viewed more as a community amenity than an economic revitalization project, but there is hope that it will spawn new businesses in the county.

Most of the commercial development nearby will be along St. Charles Parkway, but there is some space across from the ballpark reserved for small businesses like gas stations, convenience stores and restaurants. The county’s next high school will abut the 4,500-seat stadium on Piney Church Road and residential development in the Wooded Glen village of St. Charles will begin in about seven years, said Mark L. MacFarland, vice president of land development for American Community Properties Trust.

Economic development is a secondary goal of the stadium, said Charles County Commissioner Gary V. Hodge, a longtime stadium supporter who unsuccessfully tried to land a team in the mid 1980s.

‘‘Building stadiums has always been an expression of pride, self-confidence and optimism in the communities that have embarked on stadiums and it’s no different for us,” he said.

Although it’s being marketed as a quality of life asset, Hodge (D) also hopes it will leverage economic development opportunities down the line, just as it has in Lancaster.

Every rose has its thorn

The Lancaster stadium has been bad news for some small business owners.

‘‘We’re about to go out of business,” said Clara V. Behmer, owner of Bubba’s Green Briar Café, a small corner tavern across the street from the stadium’s main entrance. ‘‘There’s no parking. The traffic that goes into the city is generally family-oriented. They take their kids to the ballgame and use up every little bit of parking around here.”

Sales are down at least 50 percent and her staff of five is now down to just one other worker. Behmer comes in at 6:30 a.m. to start cooking, leaves in the afternoon and comes back at night to handle the evening crowd. The only way to save her bar is to make upgrades and convert it into a lounge catering to stadium-goers, she said.

Three small bars nearby have already gone out of business, said Behmer, who has owned the pub for 18 years. ‘‘The little guys are going to suffer because we can’t get the big hoopla out of the mayor to get the grants to fix our places back up. We’re pretty much sitting on a wire.”

On game nights, a few customers will wander in before the game for cheaper drinks, but it doesn’t replace the revenue from the regular barflies, she said.

A numbers game

If a baseball stadium is measured on attendance figures, consider Lancaster a glowing success.

In only its third season, the team welcomed its 1 millionth fan last August. The Barnstormers averaged more than 5,000 fans per home game last season in the 6,000-seat venue, the third-highest attendance in the seven-team Atlantic League (Southern Maryland will be the eighth team, replacing the nomadic Road Warriors who played all its games on the road last year).

‘‘It’s really one of the places now, after only a short period of time, that is a see and be seen,” said Lisa D. Riggs, president of the James Street Improvement District, which includes the stadium.

It also helps to field a winning team. The Barnstormers won the league championship in 2006, its second year of existence, and some of that excitement has been sustained even after finishing 12 games below .500 last season. The first three home games this year have all been sold out.

‘‘The community has taken strongly to the Barnstormers, so the ballpark is frequently crowded ... when we were in contention and when we are not,” Baldrige said. That’s partly because the baseball is only one part of the stadium experience.

It has become a community hotspot, where locals wander the concourse and chat with friends and neighbors, Gray said. ‘‘It’s a social and community event as much as it is a baseball game.”

Booming business

Clipper Magazine Stadium has been a godsend for Christian B. Kelker.

He’s a co-owner of The Brickyard Restaurant and Sports Pub, located a long fly ball from the ballpark. When the Barnstomers are in town, his establishment is hopping.

‘‘It brings people down to the city who normally wouldn’t come down here,” said Kelker. ‘‘It shows that the city isn’t a bad place.”

Players frequent the Brickyard after games and it’s become a hotspot for both F&M students and young professionals who work nearby. The club’s new manager, former Philadelphia Philly Von Hayes, has given fans another reason to come out, Kelker said.

The revitalization around what was once a depressed part of town is staggering, he said. Vacant warehouses on both sides of the Brickyard are being renovated into offices and apartments and other abandoned lots are being spruced up. ‘‘In the last three years, the city has just exploded,” Kelker said. ‘‘It’s amazing [how] it’s really come alive.”

The stadium helped revive a part of town that was ‘‘an eyesore” not long ago, Mayor Gray said. ‘‘It wasn’t skid row, but it was close to it.” The stadium ‘‘took a liability and made it an asset.”

A new York

About 20 miles west, the York Revolution is beginning its second season in the Atlantic League and the facelift of the city’s once-rundown center city is under way.

‘‘As we begin the first day of the second season on Wednesday, there’s no question that the baseball stadium has been the first major piece of our redevelopment puzzle for the city of York,” said Mayor John S. Brenner.

Construction on a $53 million mixed-use retail, residential and commercial complex near Sovereign Bank Stadium began last winter. Like in Lancaster, the ballpark is the centerpiece of the he city’s largest-ever revitalization effort, Northwest Triangle Redevelopment project.

When the partially unfinished stadium opened midway through last season, vacant stockyards and dilapidated warehouses provided the backdrop. But officials have big plans for the formerly industrial neighborhood, just north of the downtown arts district.

‘‘I don’t think all this other redevelopment would have taken place without [the stadium],” Brenner said.

First-year attendance figures were modest, averaging just more than 3,700 fans at the 5,200-seat ballpark, well behind their rivals in Lancaster. But team officials expect that to rise now that the stadium is complete and the team, which finished 10 games below .500 in its inaugural season, has a year under its belt.

‘‘All winter, people have been saying they can’t wait until the stadium opens again,” Brenner said.

Expectations remain high in Lancaster that the stadium will continue to reap dividends.

‘‘There is no slowdown in enthusiasm for the team, the stadium and the environment that surrounds it,” Baldrige said. ‘‘There are many that would suggest our greatest successes lie ahead.”