Crumbling Candlestick Park

Note: Based on reader input, some additional detail has been added (in italics) to the third paragraph.

Despite having lived in the Bay Area for over a year now, I didn't know much about Candlestick Park - home of the San Francisco 49ers - until this weekend.  I had heard that the stadium was known for being shockingly windy and cold, and that the team has been trying to build a new facility either in Santa Clara or near AT&T Park for years.  I also recently attended a panel featuring some 49ers executives during which one of the team's senior marketing executives claimed that her job was to make sure the team was associated with the word "class."  It was with this limited information that I made my way up to South San Francisco on Sunday to see the New York Giants battle the Niners at Candlestick Park.

While San Francisco isn't New York, it's still a large city where a lot of people regularly use public transportation.  The city has both Caltrain, a commuter rail network, and BART, a metro system, but shockingly neither have a station anywhere near Candlestick.  The Caltrain website recommends taking the Caltrain, BART and a bus to get to the stadium from Palo Alto, but after some research I discovered that the stadium is a fifteen minute walk through a quasi-shady San Francisco neighborhood from the nearest Caltrain stop.  We took the 50 minute Caltrain ride from Stanford and then walked down streets, through parking lots and up unpaved hills to get to the field - hardly convenient.  And we were far from the only ones doing it - we followed hundreds of other 49er jersey-clad fans who showed us the way.  How the city of San Francisco hasn't developed a better public transportation alternative for reaching the stadium from the South Bay is beyond me.

Can you see the video board?  Neither could we from our seats in Section 61.

Things didn't get much better once we reached the stadium, either.  Once we got inside the Candlestick grounds, it was immediately obvious why the team is trying so desperately trying to construct a new facility.  The stadium, like many other 1960s-era football stadiums (such as RFK Stadium in Washington, DC), is generic, concrete and ugly.  The concourses are drab, narrow and empty, with extremely limited concessions and bathroom facilities.  Also, because Candlestick was once a mixed-use venue (it housed the San Francisco Giants until AT&T Park opened), there is a section of temporary seating (removable for baseball games) which is improperly angled towards the sideline, so the rows and the yard lines aren't perpendicular and some views are obstructed - you can even sort of see it in the photo below.  Perhaps most surprising, though, was the terrible quality of Candlestick's in-stadium technology.  There were two tiny video boards that were nearly impossible to see, and the PA announcer was barely audible through the stadium's dilapidated stereo system.  Ironically, Silicon Valley's team might have the least technologically sophisticated venue in the NFL.

The 49ers fans were passionate, in a sloppy sort of way.

As for the team's mission of "staying classy," as Ron Burgundy would say, I would say the 49ers are coming up short.  While the team's fans were passionate and relatively loud (it's hard not to be when your team is 8-1), they were far from "professional."  Overall, I would rate my first Candlestick Park experience as mediocre at best.  At least the weather was fantastic - we were all way overdressed, having prepared for a freezing, windy afternoon.  It's definitely time for the team to break ground on a new Santa Clara-based facility ASAP.