Best: New Meadowlands Stadium an impressive place to visit
New baseball stadiums often take pains to be charming and quirky. Exhibit A: Citi Field.
New football facilities? Less so. Exhibit B: New Meadowlands Stadium.
As I toured the place Thursday in advance of tomorrow's public opening for a lacrosse triple-header, I struggled to come up with the right description.
Then Tom Rock, Newsday's perspicacious Giants beat reporter, did it for me, comparing the Jets' and Giants' new home to a battleship: "Big, gray and expensive.''
It is all of those things, with more than double the square footage of Giants Stadium (much of it in concourses and vast club lounges), a neutral grayish-ness (including all 82,500 seats) to maintain team neutrality and a price tag of $1.7 billion, a record for an American sports palace.
All of which sounds grim and joyless. But that's not quite right, either.
From initial appearances, NMS (which still awaits a naming-rights sponsor) will be a comfortable, modern, all-around pleasant place to watch games or socialize - not necessarily in that order.
The sight lines are on par with the famously friendly ones at the old stadium, and the upper deck is smaller, pushing a higher percentage of seats into (more expensive) lower areas.
If anyone is unhappy with the view from his or her seat, there are four 118-foot-wide, 30-foot-high video boards in each corner, not to mention hundreds of smaller screens throughout the building.
A key goal, CEO Mark Lamping said, was to maintain a relatively intimate feel in the seating bowl even while extending areas outside it for the inevitable trappings of modern arenas, such as more places to spend money on food and merchandise, more restrooms, more leg room, more of pretty much everything.
That seems to have been accomplished, but the true test will arrive with paying customers.
The first step comes Saturday with a test run expected to draw about 20,000 for three games featuring the top four lacrosse teams in the nation. (Hofstra will face Delaware at 1 p.m.) Only the lower bowl will be open.
On May 7 Mexico faces Ecuador in soccer, the first event for which the entire building will be open. The Giants and Jets meet in a preseason game Aug. 16. By then Giants Stadium should be rubble, and its footprint well on its way to becoming a parking lot. The demolition, along with ongoing roadwork surrounding the stadium, gives the area an unfinished feel. The intention is to have all in place for the regular-season NFL opener.
Week 1 will be the ultimate test for Lamping's crew, because one of his - and the stadium's - most important tasks is keeping both teams happy by making everything even-steven.
Stadium workers will have about 24 hours to convert it from Giants blue Sept. 12 to Jets green the following night. That will be done through everything from convertible lights to replaceable end zones to flipping around merchandise kiosks to go from Giants to Jets souvenirs.
For night games, small lights on the ornamental metal "fins'' that surround the building will turn it green or blue.
The most contentious aspect of the stadium has been the personal seat licenses the Jets and Giants are selling for the right to purchase tickets.
The costliest of the PSLs secure access to the gleaming Coach's Club, located under the stands, with a terrace that gives fans access to the field itself.
It will be an excellent location for socializing during warm-ups, but at 15 feet behind the back of the bench area, it figures to be a poor place from which to see what is going on during the game.
Even that amenity pales compared to the Commissioner's Club, a 10,700-square-foot space for owners of the 20 choicest suites, which go for up to $1 million per season for both teams' games.
The place is all dark wood and dark seats, like something out of a smoky men's club from a previous millennium.
It is anything but gray. Actually, it reeked of green.
Not Jets green. The kind of green that funds $1.7-billion football stadiums.
