That speaks to the city’s civic priorities, too. Surprise Stadium seats 10,500 fans and is located on a 124-acre site that includes six full practice fields and a half field, as well as separate clubhouse and office facilities. “Later on, it had the drive-in theaters, restaurants, nightclubs. “It matters if they know it when they leave.”. However, the stadium's real purpose was to attract a major league team to the Metroplex. People in town are still warming up to the idea of things like waiting in line for meat, and restaurants selling out of their wares. It drew colorful gangsters like Benny Binion, who—according to legend—opened the famous Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas with money he won at Top O’ Hill. These votes pass with 60% support, and very few people are fooled by the faux economic studies or after-the-fact reasons. When I asked Mullen if the city really needed a new stadium, she said yes, echoing what everyone in the city seems to express—Globe Life Park, after all, doesn’t have a roof. Don't have an account? Live! 16418 N. Bullard Avenue I have a twelve-year-old dog who suffers separation anxiety if I leave him too long, and I asked if it would be okay if he stayed with me at Live! The first incarnation of the XFL lasted only one season, losing $35 million in 2001 before folding. by Loews. 623.583.0133, Go right on Bell Road for 3-4 miles to N Bullard Ave, Go Right on N Bullard Ave. and the Surprise Stadium will be on the Right, All bags will be inspected before they are permitted into the ballpark, No cans, glass containers, or open containers, Gates will open 90 minutes prior to all home day games. 623.975.5540, Residence Inn by Marriott Surprise, AZ 85374 It was replaced after the 1984 season with a new scoreboard and series of billboards that ran from foul pole to foul pole. On May 20, 2016, the Rangers announced that they would vacate Globe Life Park in Arlington. “When I first came here in 2006, we really had to boost Arlington’s self-image and build the community’s confidence,” Campbell says. It’s part of a bigger plan to make the North Texas city a destination. In 1971, the struggling Washington Senators announced their intentions to move to the Metroplex as the Texas Rangers. It served as the home for the Texas Rangers (MLB) from 1972 until 1993, after which the team moved into The Ballpark in Arlington (now Globe Life Park in Arlington). 16601 N. Stadium Way It’s part of a bigger plan to make the North Texas city a destination. Well, what else were you looking for?” Geraldine Mills, a lifelong Arlingtonian who was born in the city in 1941, and who assumed her role as head of the Arlington Historical Society in 1996, laughed. It’s even caused controversy at the ballpark: When the Rangers clinched the AL West in 2015, they—like every division winner—were granted an MLB-designed T-shirt to sell at the stadium to celebrate the first-place finish. Unified welterweight world champion Errol “The Truth” Spence Jr. will duel two-division world champion Danny “Swift” Garcia on December 5 at AT&T Stadium. Arlington, meanwhile, is trying to make lemonade out of surplus-stadium lemons. Norris had successfully lobbied the state of Texas to abolish racetrack gambling in the twenties, and when Arlington threatened to become a predecessor to Vegas, Norris crusaded against it, eventually rallying law enforcement to a post-World War II raid. Home plate was inserted into place at the Ballpark in Arlington by Tom Schieffer (Texas Rangers President), Richard Greene (then mayor of Arlington), Tom Vandergriff (former mayor responsible for bringing the team to Arlington), and George W. Bush (then team part-owner; later Governor of Texas and President of the United States). Thank you for helping the Texas Rangers make this a safe and memorable Spring Training Season. [4] With the 1978 renovations, however, the stadium was locked in its baseball configuration for the remainder of its existence. The site of the old stadium is just west of the Arlington Convention Center and north of the youth ballpark. Surprise, AZ 85374 The article states: “The Rangers looked at adding a roof—too expensive—or building a canopy structure to add more shade, which a rep for the architecture firm the team commissioned said “would change the entire character of Globe Life Park” without substantially cooling it down.”. Although it was built primarily for baseball, its general shape was very similar to the major league multi-purpose stadiums that were beginning to emerge in the mid-1960s. If you fill out the first name, last name, or agree to terms fields, you will NOT be added to the newsletter list. Arlington Stadium never saw a playoff game or an All-Star Game, but was host to several of Nolan Ryan's greatest moments, including his 5,000th strikeout[7] and his seventh (and final) no-hitter. Rangers officials seemed to understand that, too—at a meeting with the Dallas Morning News editorial board in 2016, before the stadium vote, Rangers vice president of business operations Rob Matwick was asked if the team was really considering leaving. The vision is to eventually grow downtown Arlington into a destination in its own right. Even the XFL named the team in Arlington the Dallas Renegades. The Dallas Renegades are playing there in the spring, while a minor league soccer team will use it in the summer. Why Quinn Mason, a 24-Year-Old Composer From Dallas, May Be Classical Music’s Next Superstar, The Weird, Wonderful Story of Texas’s First Radio Station, Remembering Wick Allison, Founder of D Magazine, a Fierce Critic and Champion of Dallas. Due to its location in a natural bowl, only minimal excavations (such as connecting dugouts directly to the clubhouses) would be necessary to ready it for a big-league team. The old Arlington might have some trouble adjusting to the ambitious plans for the city’s future. The city was founded in 1876 and incorporated in 1884, but it didn’t become well-known until the 1930s, when the Top O’ Hill Terrace opened a tea garden as a front for an illegal gambling den and speakeasy. The Fort Worth Cats of the Texas League moved there as the Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, and played there for the next seven years, setting many Texas League attendance records, especially after it expanded to 20,500 seats in 1970. Arlington is the seventh-largest city in Texas, and the biggest of the North Texas suburbs, with 400,000 people. The Texas Rangers’ Shiny New Stadium Embodies the ‘New Arlington’. The road was renamed AT&T Way in 2013 along with the corporate renaming of Cowboys Stadium. On March 31, 2020, a new era for the Texas Rangers begins with the opening of Globe Life Field in Arlington. Arlington Stadium was a baseball stadium located in Arlington, Texas, United States, located between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Second, the large number of metal bleacher seats came in handy on Bat Night, the promotional game in most years when children age 13 and under received a real bat that could be pounded on the bleachers. Why wouldn’t the open air “old” stadium make a perfect home place for Rodeos? There’s talk of using the stadium as a concert venue—Billy Joel played the stadium last October—but with both Globe Life Field and AT&T Stadium looking to book musical acts, too, Globe Life Park has a ceiling on its potential there. “It’s not an inclusive coverage system to cover all of Arlington.” If you’re going all-in on tourism, in other words, there are other civic priorities that end up off the table. In the mid-aughts, as the Dallas Cowboys sought an upgrade on Texas Stadium, a deal between the Jones family and the city of Dallas fell through over public funding. It’s there to remind visitors that, while the 25-year-old stadium is hardly obsolete, watching games there in the summer is a sweat-drenched affair. The Texas Rangers' new, modern stadium will be no match for Globe Life Park on its best days In "Centerfield," there's a reason John Fogerty sang … and the rest of the entertainment district turns out to be a smashing success, that could work—but thinking that you’ll find something else to do with a used stadium, when there are two brand new ones literally across the street, seems like the sort of gamble that a city might make if its initial boom was built around an underground casino.