While we expect to get a “sell job” from private land developers and their enablers in the various consultancies, we need and deserve better from the technical reports produced under the direction of municipal civil servants whose job it is to protect the public interest. None of the technical reports written by “hired guns” provides a thorough or believable explanation of how the stadium and park failed in the first place.
To take an informed decision on the future of Lansdowne, we need to understand what planning mistakes were made in the past and how they contributed to turning the Park and neighbourhood scaled stadium into a dysfunctional facility and lamentable “sea of asphalt”.
Private media outlets are also failing to provide answers or thoughtful analysis. Instead, they cheerily sing the praises of this ill-conceived, un-tendered business deal. With no proper process or consultation, the proposal gives a hand picked group of developers rent-free control of city-owned land to run and exploit as they please, almost as long as they please.
Fortunately, to understand why it’s a very bad idea to re-develop Landsdowne as a large stadium, park and entertainment complex, you need only visit the public library, talk to some long-time area residents, and do some digging in the Google-indexed daily newspapers of old. Unlike the present incarnation of the Ottawa Citizen, the archived versions are stronger on factual reporting than the paper we’re now forced to endure. Doing a bit of research on Lansdowne’s history and evolution will give even the most ardent Lansdowne Live supporter cause to re-think this project’s merits. Is this really good public policy, urban planning or a sustainable strategy to give the park and professional football and soccer a long-term lease on life?
Looking back at the considerations that shaped the Lansdowne we know today, and the promises that were made each time the stadium was expanded between 1967 and 1975, we’re in a much better position to understand what did and did not work, despite the best of intentions. Before we go any further and repeat the Lansdowne mistakes of the past, we need to understand them. That examination of how we got here has not take place. As the foregoing will demonstrate, when we place Lansdowne in its proper context, as an historic and on-going land-use planning problem, it is difficult not to conclude that it would be a mistake in both 1965 and 2010 for City Council to significantly develop a site that is largely cut-off by the Canal from supporting transportation networks and devoid of adequate parking. Perhaps, once again, it’s time for Ottawa City Council to hit the “re-set” button.
Getting it Wrong in 1967: A Stadium Outgrows its Site
In the exciting months and years leading up to Canada’s Centennial in 1967, the Ottawa Rough Riders, led by Coach Frank Clair, was a top CFL football team. They had won the Grey Cup in 1960 and made it to the final in 1966. For 1967, Ottawa was chosen to host the Grey Cup. With Canada celebrating its one-hundredth birthday, and a huge Expo planned for Montreal, it’s not surprising that Ottawa wanted to join in the celebration and have a place where it, too, could host a big party. To do so, one of the Capital’s Expo projects was to build the Civic Centre at Lansdowne and a massive 28,000 seat stadium.
In addition to the Civic Centre and stadium, the shiny new facility promised an Olympic sized swimming pool and 5000 parking spaces to welcome the throngs. But City of Ottawa planners knew that the Lansdowne site, home to the Central Canada Exhibition since 1875, was too small to accommodate the stadium, Civic Centre, swimming pool and the many tiered parking garages that would be needed. To build the infrastructure to support the expanded Lansdowne, it would be necessary to demolish a number of buildings, “to eliminate the OTC bus terminal, the year-round playground and the Little League baseball diamonds.” Moreover, planners recommended that the City expropriate a 3.3 acre section of the Glebe bounded by Adelaide and O’Connor Streets and Holmwood north to Fifth Avenue (Citizen, April 2; May 21, 1965)
A municipal election was slated for fall 1966, and when some of the details of the new Civic Centre project at Lansdowne were announced the April 2, Citizen reported that “there would be no expropriation of private property in the Bank Street and Holmwood area.” Indeed, Ottawa Mayor Don Reid’s leadership on the $5 million Lansdowne and Civic Centre project, for which he secured $1 million from the federal government and $500,000 from Queen’s Park, was a key reason why he was endorsed by the Ottawa Citizen Editorial Board during the 1966 municipal election. (Citizen, November 26, 1966).
Not only did Reid obtain significant funding from other levels of government, he also got direct support from Prime Minister Lester Pearson that the Civic Centre would be treated as a national priority as a construction project that had to be completed in time for the 1967 Centennial. With preparation for Expo 67 underway, there was a shortage of construction workers to get the projects completed on time. This circumstance impacted the City’s decision to not proceed immediately to expropriate lands adjacent to Lansdowne for parking garages; there was no capacity to get them built, even if the lands could be freed up. The City settled for building what they could under the circumstances: the stadium and Civic Centre.
In the absence of Expo 67 and the national Centennial, the City of Ottawa might have taken more time to consider the merits of building at Lansdowne as organizations such as the Central Canada Exhibition were raising concerns about how much land the project and its huge new buildings would eat up.
A report prepared for the Lansdowne Live proposal notes that a stadium at Ottawa’s Exhibition Grounds was first built in 1888, when a modest grand stand was constructed near the present north side stands. In 1890, the Exhibition Grounds were renamed Lansdowne Park after the marquis of Lansdowne, the Governor General. The following year, streetcars of the Ottawa Electric Railway were extended down Bank Street to Lansdowne, making the stadium significantly more accessible to Ottawans. (The report says the electric railway service re-oriented the Park’s main entrance to Bank Street, and dealt a killing blow to the rival transport service provided by Canal barges for Lansdowne visitors. It’s likely Mayor Larry O’Brien has not read this report; he’s still promoting the potential of “water taxis” to solve the transport problem of getting people to this “magical place” architects have concocted out of water colours).
For 70 years and most of its history, from 1888 to 1961, the stadium at Lansdowne was much smaller than the “Frank Clair Stadium” constructed in 1967. In 1909, Ottawa architect Werner E Noffke, who designed the Old Fire Hall at 260 Sunnyside and many other buildings that blended well with their surroundings, designed and supervised the construction of the 10,000 seat Lansdowne grandstand. Until 1961, the 1909 grandstand, built of steel and concrete, was combined with more temporary seating to bring Lansdowne’s capacity to about 15,000.
As noted, when the Ottawa Rough Riders won the 1960 Grey Cup, there was strong demand to accommodate more spectators. To meet it, a new south side grandstand was constructed and opened in 1961, adding 7,301 additional seats and boosting capacity to 22,650. The July 20, 1961, Montreal Gazette reported how Club President Barry O’Brien and his staff would celebrate and dedicate the “new look Lansdowne palisades” with “a new group of majorettes and baton wielders under the direction of Miss Marjory Bishop,” led by a marching band and topped off with fireworks. It would be “a three-ring circus…never been anything quite like this around Canada’s Capital since Colonel By was on the loose.”
It sounds like it was a lot of fun and the Ottawa Rough Riders of the 1950, 60s and 70s brought joy and pride to the growing national capital. But newspapers of the day document how Lansdowne’s suitability as a major stadium location declined sharply as Ottawa’s population grew, spread to distant suburbs and became more dependent on automobiles as the preferred mode of transport.
Car ownership in Ottawa doubled between 1946 and 1953. In 1959, citing declining ridership and revenues, the streetcar service that brought spectators from all corners of the city to Lansdowne was cancelled. It was replaced by a bus service, but transit in Ottawa was on a downward spiral as new roads like the Queensway, built on a converted railway bed, opened the way to new suburbs, especially in the growing west end beyond the city limits.
As early as September 22, 1948, the Ottawa Citizen reported how record attendance for a Rough Riders game versus the Toronto Argonauts at Lansdowne brought “the problem of handling an extremely heavy flow of traffic in and out of Lansdowne Park”. Parking was also becoming a major problem. In 1960, only a year after the streetcar service ended, new zoning rules were put in place to require businesses to provide sufficient parking. Glebe merchants went so far as to volunteer to pay the City a local improvement charge to support the acquisition of off-street parking facilities. “Parking Badly Needed – Glebe Businessmen Set to Help Find it, ” declared the Citizen on January 4, 1960.
At Lansdowne, more attendance records were set when the stadium expanded in 1961; while its official capacity was 22,000, crowds of up to 24,000 were jammed in. But in the 1960s, Ottawa’s growing population was shifting its base. The centre was hollowing out and older suburbs such as the Glebe and Ottawa South were declining in population relative to the new outlying suburbs of Alta Vista and City View in Nepean.
Jane Jacobs’ groundbreaking 1960 book on “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” describes in powerful yet simple language how the shift in population and movement toward car oriented planning harmed the quality of life in older, inner neighbourhoods. The sidewalks of central communities were narrowed and the roads widened to speed up voluminous traffic commuting to the suburbs. In Ottawa, transportation planners who came of age during the ascent of the super-highway proposed new and bigger roads to serve our increasingly car-dependent pattern of growth.
John Leaning’s history of the Glebe recounts how residents there responded in 1967 to the City of Ottawa’s plan to extend a major arterial, Carling Avenue, through the Glebe, Central Park and over the Canal into Ottawa East. “That proposal galvanised the people of the Glebe into actions to save their neighbourhood from traffic damage. A big meeting was held at First Avenue School, through which the road would have passed. As a result the road proposal was dropped and the Glebe Community Association was born in September 1967.”
It’s clear that the Carling arterial proposed by planners for the Glebe was being considered as early as 1965 to serve an expanded Lansdowne. Accordingly, had Glebe residents been better organized prior to 1967, they might have given the City of Ottawa cause to re-think both the merits of the new roadway and maintaining Lansdowne Park as the location of the new Civic Centre and a major new football stadium.
Given that surviving buildings and homes designed by Werner E. Noffke are some of Ottawa’s most important heritage structures, there were probably many good arguments to oppose the 1966 demolition of his stately 10,000 seat “1909 Grandstand” at Lansdown, which was far more suitable in size and scale for the site.
In retrospect, we can now see clearly how the new, significantly larger Frank Clair stadium of 1967 was a big planning mistake made in a hurry, in the rushed excitement of the lead-up to celebrate Canada’s Centennial and Ottawa’s excellent football team. The combined Civic Centre and enlarged football stadium completely overwhelmed the Lansdowne site. Given the lack of road and public transit options, the new stadium drew excessive amounts of traffic and demand for parking in the compact neighhourhoods of the Glebe, Ottawa South, Ottawa East and Centretown.
The new Civic Centre and 28,000 seat stadium opened on July 11, 1967. But the success of the Rough Riders created a strong incentive to add more seats and temporary ones were put in the end zones bringing capacity to 32,000. These crowds drew more people in cars looking for parking and the issue of whether or not to expropriate residential homes and lands north of Holmwood to Fifth Avenue for parking and other uses was back on the public agenda a year after the 1966 municipal election. An August 30, 1967 Citizen article estimated the cost of the expropriation at $6 million, which it said was well within the City’s means.
Once again, to quell the concerns surrounding expropriation, and with the fall 1969 municipal election looming, Ottawa City Council tried to put Glebe area residents at ease. However, the solution proposed was seen as an inadequate half measure that did not provide clarity on how the now much larger Lansdowne facilities could be made to work on the existing site. According to Citizen reporter Roger Appleton, who covered the story for the October 24, 1969 edition, City Council “once again obscured the main issue of growth and development of Lansdowne Park. “Council, after a stiff debate, agreed to let the Central Canada Exhibition Association purchase property north of Lansdowne…No expropriations will be involved. But if property owners want to sell, the Exhibition Association may negotiate and purchase. Council never settled the real issue. By implication, Lansdowne Park will be expanded north. But there is no guidance on how soon or how far.”
The October 24 article by Roger Appleton concluded with this prescient warning: "Lansdowne Park may not grow to be a city-wide issue by election day, but it is sure to be a major campaign subject in large sections of Ottawa South and the Glebe."
With Grey Cup wins in 1968, 1969 and 1973, it was not difficult for the Rough Riders’s owner David Leob to convince Ottawa City Council in 1974 to build an even bigger stadium. Leob convinced the City to secure $3 million in public funding, of which $2 million was borrowed, to construct an additional, south side upperdeck that boosted the stadium’s capacity by 7,800 to a total of 35,000.
The proposed expansion was not welcomed by many of the residents who lived closest to Lansdowne. They felt that the latest stadium expansion plan would further and unreasonably curtail their right to enjoy their own properties, and hinder the neighbourhood’s ability to function. It was reported that during football games about 9,300 extra cars circulated and sometimes raced through the nearby neighbourhoods in search of parking. Spectators’ cars occupied every vacant public space, including schoolyards in Ottawa South and the Glebe where children might normally play.
An enlarged stadium would bring more traffic congestion and noise. It was estimated that only 11% of football spectators used transit, while 73% drove, and efforts to increase that modal share didn’t yield much success. A headline in the April 18, 1974 Ottawa Citizen warned football fans to “Take the Bus or face fine.” To show his solidarity with “traffic-plagued residents of the Glebe, Ottawa East and Ottawa South” Ottawa Mayor Pierre Benoit vowed to personally take the bus to Rough Rider games and to “cut back the three hour parking limit on residential streets around Lansdowne Park to one or two hours.”
In the April 18 article, Eric Clemmens of the Ottawa South Community Association derided the “absence of an over-all Lansdowne Plan,” while the Mayor and Council considered a report from Murray & Murray architects that “accepted the prospect that the football stadium would continue as a major sports facility,” despite the Mayor’s acknowledgement that there was no plan or budget for a tiered parking facility on the grounds of Lansdowne. The Mayor and Council continued to work on an agreement with the Rough Riders to secure a long-term lease in exchange for the City funding the nearly 8,000 seat expansion. “Supporters say the expansion will more than pay for itself. And Ottawa won’t keep big league football without it.” Team owner David Leob held out the security of the signed package deal of a long-term lease and stadium expansion.” (Citizen, Oct. 21, 1974).
In October 1974, the Glebe, Ottawa South and Ottawa East community association leaders brought the matter of the proposed stadium expansion to the Ontario Municipal Board, a tribunal involved in municipal planning issues. At the OMB, the Mr. Leob, the Rough Rider’s owner, said that if the new more “marketable seats” weren't added to replace less desirable ones in the end zones, Ottawa’s professional football team would fold (or be “doomed” as the Citizen headline warned). An October 24, 1974, Citizen headline hinted that civic pride was being wounded because Ottawa’s stadium wasn’t up to national standards in terms of size (second smallest after Regina). While the Rough Riders averaged 22,000 fans per game in the 8 years following 1967 construction of Frank Clair stadium, with the new stands, the club president predicted an average attendance of 28,500 by 1982.
The Citizen enthusiastically cheered on the stadium’s enlargement as did Ottawa City Council, offering to cover the entire $3 million needed to construct the south side stands. An October 23, 1974, Citizen report by Paul Workman quoted Mayor Pierre Benoit saying that “the environmental impact of building 7,800 new seats at Lansdowne would not be severe enough to warrant canceling the project,” although he did acknowledge that “it would create more noise and traffic problems.”
The three community associations opposed to the deal argued that the project would increase traffic parking and noise problems, impose a massive, gaudy structure on the Rideau Canal and result in taxpayers subsidization of a football team, a private company. In his appearance before the OMB, Mayor Benoit defended the City’s action by saying that it had no choice but to approve and fund the expansion, otherwise the stadium’s biggest tenant, the Rough Riders, would leave. In exchange for the deal, the Rough Riders would sign a 26-year lease with the city that pay it $3.8 million over the duration. Mayor Benoit assured the public that it was good deal for Ottawa.
Citizen Columnist Bob Mellor, in the October 25, 1974 edition, derided the people of the Glebe for their complaints about excessive traffic congestion and noise. He targeted the 1974 Glebe Traffic Plan for special criticism and lectured Glebe residents that the stadium had always been there. Mellor said "the survival of football is important" and clearly trumped the interests of local residents.
In the fall of 1975, a year after the OMB approved the expanded south side stands, the City of Ottawa announced that it was spending $27,000 to commission a Lansdowne parking study to be conducted by De Leuw Cather Canada. But the damage was already done and new southside stands were so large and imposing that they made the Riders’ practice field, which was now located beneath the stands, too small and unusable. Despite the City’s having just funded the $3 million construction of the southside stands, the Riders management threatened legal action over the encumbrance of “their practice field”. The September 10, 1975 Citizen reported that the Rough Riders, claiming a breach of contract, demanded that the City build them a new practice field at an estimated cost of $100,000. Team president Leob said practicing on the actual Lansdowne stadium field could damage it and recommended that the City pave over the practice field to earn more parking revenue.
That appears to be exactly what the City of Ottawa did. Elaine Marlen, a Glebe resident of over 40 years who was interviewed for this story, said that “over time all of the greenspace surrounding Lansdowne simply disappeared. One day there were two soccer fields and the next day they were gone. The City paved over them to increase parking space.” With no capacity or desire to expand outward through expropriation, the City owned stadium simply turned inward, solving its parking problems by cannibalizing the site of greenery and buildings.
The official “Lansdowne History” prepared for the Lansdowne Live redevelopment shows that between 1966 and 1971 a series of demolition permits was issued for Lansdowne. Most of the former building sites became parking lots to accommodate increasing numbers for events such as the Exhibition and football. In fact, more buildings, including the heritage Aberdeen Pavilion, might have been destroyed to make way for parking had it not been for the interventions of the Glebe Community Association, Heritage Ottawa and young, energetic new leaders such as Capital Ward Councillor Jim Watson. (When Watson became Mayor of Ottawa, he celebrated the rescue and renewal of the Aberdeen Pavilion by emblazoning its image on City of Ottawa coffee mugs).
The negative response of Glebe and Ottawa South residents to the botched redevelopment and expansion of Lansdowne in the early 1970s, and the neighbourhood destroying road network that would have been required to support it was unique to these areas or Ottawa. From the early 1970s to the present, community associations throughout the City played a central role in protecting their neighbourhoods from the onslaught of ever increasing vehicular traffic and related parking problems. Invigorated by Toronto’s success at stopping the Spadina Expressway in 1971, the maturing suburb of Alta Vista prevented the construction of the 417 highway through a transportation corridor that still sits empty today. New Edinburh residents halted the Vanier Parkway in its tracks at St. Patrick’s street and preserved the western banks of the Rideau River as an eco-system and for recreational enjoyment. In Centretown and Sandy Hill, neighbourhood plans were created to balance pressure from developers, the office needs of a swelling public service and the traffic it induced.
In the Glebe and Ottawa South, young families bought the aging homes of Ottawa’s first suburbs. A varied mix of old and new Ottawa residents, many post-war immigrants, mixed and banded together to renew their communities and to make the case that Lansdowne had become too large and unserviceable. It had become a major, regional destination, but it lacked sufficient mass public transit or arterial road access to make it work in a way that balanced local quality of life with the interests of occasional visitors.
In the early 70s, neither the City planning department nor the newly created Ottawa-Carleton Regional entity seemed capable of understanding or responding to changing values and needs. Despite the 1967 cancellation of the Carling arterial through the Glebe, and its proposed connecting bridge over the Canal to Ottawa East, a new No. 10 Fire Station, strategically planned with the cancelled arterial roadway in mind, was still built in 1974. Today the station, like its neighbour Lansdowne, sits next to the Rideau Canal, cut- off on three sides from access to the rest of the city. Both testify to the history of failed Ottawa planning and an inability to reconcile the contradiction of “theoretical planning” and reality.
In 1972, the new Regional Government produced a draft transportation master plan that called for big roads to connect the various small cities of Ottawa-Carleton. But the mounting support for more environmentally sustainable planning resulted in a 1974 Regional Official Plan that gave priority to transit, at least on paper.
Some residents of the new Gloucestor suburb of Beacon Hill were so frustrated by the Region’s tardiness and inability to solve transportation needs that they started their own transit service in 1972. These civic and environmentally minded suburban residents were featured in an NFB documentary: “A Bus, For Us”. Nobody called them whiners for moving to a distant suburb, where they should have already known that there was no bus service, and that there hadn’t been one there for the past 100 years!
Still, in spite of the promises of the Region’s Transportation Master Plan, the planners paid scant attention to the concerns of inner city communities and lavished resources and attention on addressing the road “deficiencies” of outlying suburbs. Even when the Regional Government turned its attention to building an innovative rapid bus-way, no plan or effort was made to service Lansdowne Park, despite Ottawa’s long-term public investment in the Civic Centre and stadium as professional sports venues.
In 1979, just 4 years after the latest City-funded expansion of Lansdowne, the prospects of a transportation solution that met the quality of life needs of area home owners and football fans seemed unlikely. This planning failure continued to diminish the functioning of both the stadium and surrounding neighbourhoods.
“Headaches in the Glebe and Ottawa South: Residents tolerate parking; football fans split the fines” declared a headline in the November 5, 1979 Citizen. The article, by staff writer Jim Butler, discussed how many fed-up Glebe and Ottawa South residents had become resigned to the persistence of illegally parked cars, blocking their driveways and choking their streets and lanes. The City Environment Committee had recently rejected a proposal to increase parking fines in the communities near Lansdowne, and some residents interviewed didn’t think it would even make a difference.
“Football fans interviewed said they have the right to bring their cars into the area. ‘The last thing you want to do after being in the middle of a crowd for three hours is to get onto a bus jammed to the gills with more people,” said City View resident Neil Bradley, returning to his car with two friends. ‘I usually come early to try to find a legal place, but if I can’t, we just split any [$8] ticket we get three ways, even if they’d gone up to $15.’”
The challenge confronting both Mr. Bradley and residents who lived near Lansdowne would play itself out 1000s of times in 1000s of neighbourhood places over the next 20 years. There are innumerable newspapers stories, some sympathetic others not, about Glebe area residents and their antipathy towards football fans and Exhibition attendees in search of parking, or worse, a bathroom break. Can we draw any lessons?
Getting it Wrong in 2010 with Lansdowne Live
Lansdowne’s past, especially its recent past, tells us much about the likely future of this latest re-development proposal. We have little reason to be confident because the plan is not based on good planning or good process. It is based on the flimsy premise that some developers close to the Mayor have a conditional CFL football franchise. This is not a normal, competitive and genuinely consultative public process.
In "Our Times," the Ottawa Citizen's "A Pictorial Memoir of Ottawa’s Past", the Citizen explains that the Rough Riders 1996 failure was preceded by "15 years of fumbling teams, bumbling management and inconsistent attendance."
In 2002, the CFL awarded yet another Ottawa franchise. But barely 4 years later, in 2006, this professional football team, the Renegades, also failed.
In light of this record, especially the lack of success for professional football at Lansdowne that the Ottawa Citizen says was chronic from 1985 onward, it is difficult to understand the City’s rationale for accepting an unsolicited proposal for redevelopment that uses professional football as a key justification for proceeding. Does the City really understand why professional football at Lansdowne Park has been a failing proposition, on and off, for the past 25 years?
Is it possible, as the Ottawa Citizen suggests, that getting people to attend Lansdowne is simply too difficult, owing to its inconvenient location, lack of parking and lack of road and transit connections, rapid or other wise? The City's own study to determine the best sites in Ottawa to locate a professional stadium clearly indicates that there are big problems with Lansdowne. The December 2008 study, “Needs Assessment and Location Analysis For Multi-Purpose Sport And Entertainment Facilities,” by the Corporate Research Group, says that for a stadium: “Accessibility is key, notably access to transit, parking.” Among the sites under consideration, it found that Lansdowne has the worst prospects for parking and second least transit and road capacity. It was also among sites most likely to "impact neighbours” [negatively]. (pp. 53-54)
Of course, as we now know, all of these deficiencies with the Lansdowne site were well known by the City planning department as early as 1965. Thus, we must ask if the decision to re-develop Lansdowne and to further expand it is based on plans to once again seek expropriating of residential homes in the Glebe. Equally, given the lack of transportation access to the Lansdowne site, the City should state clearly whether or not it plans to open up and widen streets such as O’Connor Avenue in the Glebe to connect Lansdowne directly to the Queensway.
The transportation plan for Lansdowne that was prepared by Delcan for the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, which is the same plan adopted by the City and endorsed by McCormick-Rankin, reads like a fanciful work of fiction, one that is completely unbelievable. Therefore, residents need to know what the real plan is to accommodate all of the new development slated for Lansdowne, while at the same time allegedly “greening” the Park.
A significant amount of public money has been poured into “technical” studies that mysteriously ignore what well-documented recent history, experience, knowledge and common sense tells us about the pitfalls of Lansdowne as a major stadium site. As this discussion clearly illustrates, almost no effort has been made to get to the truth of why Lansdowne has been a perennial failure. There has been no effort or due diligence to explain why this site is a “sea of asphalt” and why the stadium is a consistent failure.
Those who live next door to Lansdowne will tell us that its problem has not been a lack of good shopping. And it’s not because the site didn't have a pretty “front yard park.” On the contrary, the history of Lansdowne clearly indicates that any park built in the shadow of a stadium for 24,000 to 40,000 spectators, with 350,000 square feet of retail, very little parking and inadequate road and transit infrastructure is doomed to failure and destined to become parking space.
By the Ottawa Citizen’s own account, in the 43 years that have passed since the Lansdowne stadium was “super sized,” it has been failure for at least 25 of them. This consistent record of failure for professional football cannot be explained by glib nostrums about not having the "right ownership" group; during those two-and-a-half decades of chronic failure for professional football at Lansdowne, we've had every conceivable form of ownership, and ownership group...some of them twice!
Setting aside all of the mindless boosterism and pretty pictures, what do we really know about Lansdowne’s past that can help us to make the best decision today? One thing seems clear, if Lansdowne is to serve as a stadium site it should be for a stadium that is built to the same scale as the transportation network that exists to serve it.
A chorus of paid consultants’ reports insisting that the future will not look like the past, given an even more clogged road system and diminished capacity to serve the site’s transportation and parking needs, should convince even the most fervent football and professional sports fan that Lansdowne Live is not a good deal for anyone.