“SOMETHING MUST BE DONE about Memorial Stadium.”
That quote could be accurately attributed to anyone who’s been in the stadium anytime this century. Its incredible location at Seattle Center underneath the Space Needle belied a truth that came into sharp relief as years of use accumulated: Memorial Stadium was falling apart.
Seattle Kraken President and CEO Tod Leiweke saw its decline firsthand while attending his son’s high school lacrosse games in 2007.
“I remember it being this rickety thing,” he says. “The turf was a lawsuit waiting to happen. It was decades past its useful life.”
For generations, Memorial Stadium was a hub of the Seattle community during important moments. Opened in 1947, it served as the primary gathering spot for events across nine different decades. Pro, college, high school and adult rec league teams all played there, as did performers ranging from high school choirs to legendary rock groups. All of that took place in addition to major political rallies and civic events, including the 1962 World’s Fair.
Discussions about an overhaul began in the 1990s, but complexities (most notably lack of money) got in the way of any real action. Meanwhile, time marched on and it eventually became impossible for parents watching their kids play sports or walk through graduation ceremonies to ignore the crumbling walls, aging plumbing and general dreary feeling of a relic falling into disrepair.
“It was really dilapidated and the lights were always flickering,” says Ballard High school student Willow Millstein, who played soccer at the stadium in 2024. “The locks on the stall doors (in the locker rooms) didn’t work. Honestly, it felt like an unsafe environment. You’re with your friends and you’d look around and go, ‘Boy, this is just not a very nice place.’”
Then, in 2022, Seattle voters passed a $787 million levy for construction projects involving Seattle Public Schools, which owns and operates Memorial Stadium due to a deal it made with the City of Seattle in the 1940s. $70 million of those levy funds was earmarked for Memorial Stadium — with the original idea being to build new grandstands and locker rooms, upgrade the water distribution system and stadium lights, and replace the turf.
After the levy passed, the city committed $40 million and the state $4 million more. In 2023, the city and Seattle Schools issued a Request for Proposals for a development partner. They received two: One came from a real estate and development conglomerate that was, according to Seattle’s Director of Capital Development David Kunselman, “a commercial retail proposal” that involved surrounding the new stadium with stores.
The other came from a Seattle Center neighbor who envisioned taking a nonprofit approach to building a bigger, better stadium that could serve the students and community for years to come.
That neighbor? The Kraken.
Shaping the future stadium
On a weekday morning in March at the Kraken Community Iceplex in Northgate, several Seattle Kraken staffers are gathered for a meeting, chaired by Leiweke, to discuss the Memorial Stadium project. The meeting is a weekly affair where ideas bounce around the room, some far-fetched, others more doable, all possible.
The Kraken’s proposal to the school district and the city grew out of the experience they had with similar projects. Leiweke and Kraken executive vice-president and legal counsel Lance Lopes had worked together at the Seahawks when the team built a new training facility in 2008. Then they worked on the Iceplex and Climate Pledge Arena in advance of the Kraken’s first game in 2021.
Armed with knowledge accrued on those projects, they pledged to gather additional funding — $30 million to $40 million in donations from Seattle philanthropists and foundations — to ensure the project could be built to perfection, rather than reduced by budgetary corner cutting.
The proposal they submitted called for the Kraken to manage the project, cover any cost overruns and run the facility when construction was done. Their plan would funnel any money made by the stadium into maintenance and upkeep with revenue above that going to Seattle school district athletics, arts and culture programs.
“Everyone benefits; no one profits” became Leiweke’s mantra.
But before the Kraken even submitted their proposal, Leiweke had an important in-house sale to close. He needed the approval of Kraken owner Samantha Holloway. The project would add to her management team’s workload, but she quickly said yes.
“I think at our core, it’s who we are,” Holloway says. “We built this (the Kraken) from the ground up, authentically within this community and for this community. This is for the students in Seattle. What’s more important than that?”
She also felt a new community stadium would elevate the entire Seattle Center. “The campus is important. It’s in the heart of the city, and this is a big piece of it, and we’re on the campus too.”
Embracing the plan also required a holistic way of thinking, according to Kraken senior vice president for social and civic affairs Mari Horita: “You had to shift your thinking away from ‘we’re a business and how’s this line up with our bottom line?’ to ‘how does this align with our values and what we’re trying to do in our community?’”
What they’re trying to do is build a stadium that’s both reflective of the rich history of the location and positioned to serve the community in the future.
Designed by Generator Studio, a Kansas City architecture firm with a focus on sports and entertainment venues, the new stadium has an open concept that allows people to see through it and across the Seattle Center campus. Spectators in the new facility will have views of the Seattle skyline and the Space Needle. Construction is well underway.
The stadium will be a multiuse facility with canopy roofs that will cover the majority of 6,500 permanent seats. A berm at the stadium’s west end will hold another 1,500 people. A new plaza will connect the west side of the stadium to the International Fountain. Like high school sports and other events, professional sports and concerts are likely to return when the new Memorial Stadium opens in a year and a half.
On paper the idea could have sounded too good to be true. The Kraken were assuming a big percentage of risk and as Lopes puts it, “operating a stadium with no opportunity to ever benefit from it financially.”
But Kunselman, from the city, was never concerned about the Kraken’s intentions. “We had no misgivings,” he says. “We understood the investment that they made at CPA [Climate Pledge Arena]. We started this based on trust.”
Fred Podesta, chief operations officer for Seattle Schools, also saw the benefits of attracting various tenants and users.
“Just building a stadium for high school athletics was missing an opportunity given the location,” he says. “One way or another Memorial Stadium had to be replaced and doing it this way with partners brings a lot more return on the investment.”
A venue with profound history
Memorial Stadium is one of the most culturally and historically important places in Seattle and many area residents hold good memories of times spent there.
The facility was built primarily for high school sports — and one of the first games played in 1947 featured future University of Washington and NFL legend Don Heinrich who led Bremerton High School to a 19 to 14 win over Ballard.
President Harry Truman made a campaign speech there in 1948.
The opening ceremonies of the World’s Fair took place at Memorial Stadium in 1962 and as part of the fair an oval shaped tank that held 700,000 gallons of water and was dubbed the “Aquadrome” was constructed inside the stadium and used for daily shows featuring boat races and water-skiing exhibitions.
Before they joined Major League Soccer in 2009, several earlier versions of the Sounders called the stadium home at some point, and the Seattle Reign played there from 2014 to 2018.
Jerry Garcia performed one of his final concerts there with the Grateful Dead in 1995. Seattle icons Heart headlined a massive all-day rock show called Summer SunDay in 1977, and Pearl Jam raised a half-million dollars for local charities at a pair of benefit shows in 1998.
Meanwhile, Seattle-area high school students competed in football, soccer and lacrosse. Marching bands performed at games and competitions, and the stadium hosted countless school graduation ceremonies. It also served as the finish line for the Seattle Marathon for 54 years and as a staging area for the Seafair Torchlight Parade.
Sellen Construction’s Russ Paananen, who is the senior superintendent for the project, says everyone involved seems to have a connection to the stadium’s past. “Everyone has a story about it so keeping that memory alive and that theme [during construction] is important,” he says. “That’s something I’ve never experienced before.”
Malik Prince is the head football coach at Ballard High and played for the Beavers himself from 2008 to 2011. “Playing under the Space Needle on a Friday night with the lights bumping and it’s a beautiful night sky. There’s nothing like it,” he says. Prince thinks building the new stadium where the old stadium stood is a “full circle moment that will be true beauty and awesome for everybody.”
A monument for remembrance
One more particularly poignant piece of Seattle history is being restored with the new Memorial Stadium.
During World War II, the names of Seattle school district graduates who lost their lives in the war were listed on a temporary wooden marker in a place downtown called Victory Square (on University Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues). When Memorial Stadium was built, Seattle Mayor William F. Devin proposed that a permanent monument be placed on the stadium grounds.
Money to pay for the monument came from proceeds of an annual Thanksgiving high school football game that became known as The Turkey Day game, an annual tradition that became wildly popular and drew overflow crowds for nearly 40 years. Proceeds from the first three years funded what came to be known as Memorial Wall.
A contest was held to encourage high school students to submit design ideas for the wall. Out of 61 entries, the winner was Garfield High student Marianne Hanson, whose design contained the names of the 762 Seattle graduates who perished in the war, with fountains on either side of the list. She wrote the inscription that adorns the wall to this day: “Youth hold high your torch of truth, justice and tolerance, lest their sacrifice be forgotten.”
Like the stadium, Memorial Wall had deteriorated over time, creating a sad bit of irony when juxtaposed with Hanson’s touching inscription. Important people took note.
Alyson Teeter saw 23 years of active duty in the Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve. She’s the District 2 Commander for the Veterans of Foreign Wars in the Department of Washington. When fellow VFW member Bob Kettle (who is also on the Seattle City Council) mentioned to Teeter that the Memorial Wall was in a severe state of disrepair, she decided to look for herself.
“I visited and it was just terrible,” she says. “I have a picture of my daughter next to the fountain with a bunch of garbage in it. It was very sad to see that.”
As Teeter began advocating on behalf of the VFW for something to be done to improve the wall, she became aware of the plan to rebuild the stadium. She learned that the wall had been a driving motivation for the people involved.
“The wall was the catalyst for the project,” the Kraken’s Lopes says. “If the Memorial Wall had not been a part of the stadium and we were just building a stadium it would not have been as inspiring.”
Paananen says the wall serves as a daily reminder of the importance of what his crew is working on. “The Memorial wall was the first thing we addressed when we mobilized on site. It holds weight. You walk by it and see those 762 names, and it reminds everybody.”
He says the wall is in “good condition aside from a couple small chips we are repairing.”
Ultimately, the fountains will work again, new lights will be installed, and a plaza will be added in front of the wall.
Teeter and other veterans attended meetings and made suggestions on how the wall and the area around it should look. She says she’s grateful that the effort will “elevate the memorial wall as a space for veterans to visit, take their families, and talk about the history of service and sacrifice.”
A facility rooted in community
A community treasure is being reimagined, thanks to the many organizations who came together to make it happen.
But the project began thanks to the community itself. “We should all be thankful to those voters, that they were willing to make this investment,” Podesta says. “That levy covered the lion’s share of the cost.”
As for the money raised by the Kraken, Lopes says the uniqueness of the project pushed that effort past the finish line. “It only worked because we weren’t doing it for our own benefit. Once people saw the altruism of the project we had a chance to get it done.”
When the new facility opens in September 2027, Ballard High School sophomore Benji Stephens will be starting his senior season with the Beavers. Having played football games in the old building in 2024, Stephens will be part of a select group of athletes to play in both.
“It’s awesome to be able to play in a stadium that was really rich in history,” he says. “Then, I get to play in a new stadium that’s going to have much more history.”
Work is not done and the finish line isn’t quite in sight, but Leiweke allows himself a moment to reflect on what’s being accomplished by the coalition he and his team forged.
“How many opportunities like this come along?” he asks. “(Rebuilding) a legacy stadium long past its useful life. A stadium where all these incredible things happened right in heart of the city at the foot of the Space Needle in a park. This is as pure as it gets, and it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever worked on in my life.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com ’
