tiggerhawk
Well-Known Member
Perhaps some very important background details would be useful in projections about future stadium expansion.
First, we should keep in mind that while the University owns Kinnick Stadium, it doesn't own the land on which the stadium is situated. The land belongs to the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics. Meaning that the future of Kinnick depends on what decisions UIHC makes in the future about where & when it expands its physical plant.
UIHC is already the largest teaching hospital in the world--and it is growing at an accelerating pace. Most of the open spaces within the current UIHC campus have been used for new facilities in the past decade or are scheduled for utilitization in current construction or that scheduled soon. It is fast running out of room--and while the next stage of renovation & expansion has UIHC going up more than out, more vertical building than horizontal...nonetheless over the next decade (the one beginning in 2016) UIHC is going to have to find sites for probably twenty or more new buildings.
To the North, UIHC is bordered by the Veterans Hospital, Dental School, Carver-Hawkeye, McDonald House, Hiway 6, the CRANDIC tracks--not any desirable options there. Nonetheless the lack of space to expand already has led to the building of the new Public Health building on the other side of hiway 6 & the CRANDIC tracks, accessible only by a pedestrian walkway.
To the East are the dorms (with two new towers planned to replace the Quad), the Fieldhouse, the Law School, and a formidable barrier called the Iowa River.
Expansion south might be more feasible: UIHC could use eminent domain to acquire the private homes south of Melrose Avenue--which wouod be complicated, a lot of litigation, costly...and both less convenient and less necessary.
Less necessary because to the West of Elliott Drive is UIHC-owned land that it is not yet built upon, except for a single parking facility. Land that includes Kinnick, the bubble, the baseball field that are currently leased to the athletic department.
Second, the question of replacing Kinnick with a larger stadium already has been confronted, with a fairly long-term but temporary solution. About 15 years ago when UIHC was contemplatint an expansiosn plan & timetable. it considered terminating the lease & forcing the athletic department to move more of its facilities out beyond Mormon Trek.
The planning for such a move went so far as to the drawing up of no fewer than seven plans for a new Kinnick, at several sites but primarily in the area west of Mormon Trek & east of Melrose. The plans still exist, kept in the files of the U's architectural offices. The scope of the new stadium in the different proposals varied from 75,000 to 100,000 seating.
Eventually, the U and UIHC were able to reach agreement that extends the lease on the current Kinnick site until about 2025. While Bowlsby is long gone, and the prospect that Kinnick would have been marked for demolition is not something anyone is going to chat about offhandedly now--there are indications that it was seriously considered. The key question was whether or not Kinnick--in need of major structural repairs & upgrading--could be renovated at a reasonable cost in a way that would meet future needs and be satisfactory to the football program and the Hawkeye fan base. Once the structural reports, etc were favorable, the athletic dept and university administrators turned attention to getting an agreement with UIHC on an extension of the lease. They were able to accomplish their puspose mostly because the master plan that was taking shape for UIHC had am initial stage providing new research facilities & med school building toward the southeast corner, a cancer treatment center as an extension of the familty care center at Melrose & Elliott, then a second stage (now underway) to rebuild Boyd Tower, renovate & enlarge the main hospital, then toward the close of the expansion in 2016 the rebuilding & expansion of the three major pavilions for patient care. Effectively, this delayed the need to expand across Elliott to the site where Kinnick stands for twenty years or more.
Two conclusions seem obvious from this history:
One, eventually there will be a new Kinnick out past Mormon Trek, neighboring the new Field Hockey, Soccer facilities, new Athletic Admin Bldg--and the valiant efforts to save Kinnick from demolition to make way for new medical facilities, including those for a school of medical engineering, will not be enough.
Two, there probably won't be an expansion of stadium capacity until the new stadium is built. The question of expanding Kinnick once again was taken up ten years ago, but the engineering problems indicated that the costs of building Kinnick higher, fully enclosing the ends with much more higher seating added, etc really involved a Hobson's choice: on the one hand, projections showed that future demand would more than match increasing capacity to 80,000, but they would be 80,000 lesss comfortable seats with less adequate support facilities. In the end, Iowa opted to significantly upgrade the quality & the comfort of its fans rather than increase the capacity of the stadium (the cynic in me wants to say this rested on the presumption that they could more than offset the shortfall of cash from fewer seats by raising the price of the 70,000 seats being kept).
I assume that when the time comes that the plans are drawn up for the new Kinnick that it will be for 100,000 capacity or more--plus luxury boxes, numerous topflight bar lounges, etc, etc. But that is so far down the line a better assumption is no assumption at all.
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