Inside the Cleveland Indians’ renovation plans for Progressive Field
Zack Meisel and Jason Lloyd 3h ago 24
CLEVELAND — The Terrace Club at Progressive Field sits mostly dormant, an abandoned shell of its once-vibrant self. Its 14,000 square feet contain some of the finest views of the ballpark, but the wasted real estate now includes shuttered bars, dust-covered televisions and rows of upside-down chairs resting on unused tables.
The glass-paneled restaurant that hovers over the lower bowl down the left-field line has rarely operated the last few years — business began slowing well before the pandemic. Those in the Indians organization deem it antiquated. It initially served as the jewel of the new ballpark, a coveted destination where fans who paid for special access consumed cocktails and gorged on gourmet meals atop white tablecloths while watching the Indians dominate the American League. Now, one team official compares the restaurant’s buffet to an Applebee’s.
The decline of the Terrace Club is perhaps a microcosm of what ails this franchise. The ballpark remains pristine, even after 28 baseball seasons and ferocious winters in Northeast Ohio. It doesn’t quite function as efficiently as it once did, however. What fans demand from an in-game experience has changed over the years. The Indians are trying to adapt.
The organization has waited years for this moment, recently partnering with an architecture firm to sketch fresh ideas for a reimagined Progressive Field once the new lease extension that will generate $435 million in stadium upgrades is approved by the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. The modifications include tearing out the “shipping containers” in the right field upper deck, flipping the home dugout from third base to first base and demolishing the Terrace Club, which will likely be replaced by a multi-tiered social space that is outdoors and open to all ticket holders.
The Indians are nearing the conclusion of the research and planning phase of the process, and they indicated to The Athletic that construction will likely take “three to four years” to complete. The club remains motivated to transform Progressive Field into an iconic baseball landmark mentioned in the same breath as Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Dodger Stadium. Multiple sources confirmed the idea of tearing down Progressive Field and building a new stadium was never discussed during the lease negotiations. All sides knew it was a nonstarter.
Instead, the Indians are planning a fairly significant overhaul to what is still considered one of the top parks in baseball. The website stadiumjourney.com, which routinely ranks all of the stadiums across the country, rated Progressive Field as baseball’s best in its most recent rankings (2019).
There’s much to be learned about whether the team’s renovation strategy will pay dividends. Will renovations attract new fans and convince them to visit the ballpark on a more regular basis? Will the investment by the team, city and state (and taxpayers) result in enhanced revenue streams that can fuel a healthier payroll?
The Athletic obtained a collection of renderings of the potential renovations, gained insight into the organization’s thinking and canvassed the land around the ballpark to assess whether that might factor into the equation. We also spoke with real estate, financial and city planning experts as well as league sources to determine how the team’s ballpark project reached this point and to better understand the answer to a question that has, for years, surfaced inside the walls at 2401 Ontario St.:
What does the future hold for Progressive Field?
The Indians anticipate demolishing the Terrace Club down the left-field line and replacing it with a multi-tiered, open-air social gathering hotspot that could entice more fans to visit the upper deck. (NBBJ / Cleveland Indians)
During the eight months The Athletic has spent investigating the team’s future in Cleveland, sources routinely stressed the significance of creating new revenue streams for a small-market franchise.
Owner Paul Dolan continues to privately insist his family has no interest in selling a majority share of the franchise, so how can they create additional revenue to better compete with the spending habits of contenders across MLB?
“Something fundamentally has to change,” said one high-ranking baseball official with intimate knowledge of Cleveland’s finances. “It’s just hard, especially hard for a baseball team where the revenue isn’t shared and there’s no salary cap.”
As mixed-use development sites continue to explode around sports venues in cities like Milwaukee, Atlanta, Miami, Glendale, Ariz., Inglewood, Calif., and Foxborough, Mass., multiple sources said the Indians explored that concept during lease negotiations.
The reigning NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks, for example, opened Fiserv Forum in 2018, and the team’s owners also operate the 30 acres surrounding it under the Head of the Herd Real Estate Development LLC affiliate. The plaza outside the arena (similar to Cleveland’s Gateway Plaza), which fans packed when the Bucks were crowned champs this summer, can also host outdoor movies. The venue is expected to eventually include commercial and residential space and year-round entertainment options.
It’s the same type of vision John Loar, the managing director of Music City Baseball, dreams of bringing to Nashville if the city can secure an MLB franchise. Loar’s plan includes lengthy concert residencies similar to Las Vegas. He has a real estate background and consulted on Miami’s transformation around the Marlins’ stadium.
“(Mixed-use development) is kind of the buzzword around sports,” Loar said. “But it really works. It’s The Battery (in Atlanta). It’s Ballpark Village in St. Louis. It’s the new deal in Texas (around the Rangers’ new stadium). You’re building these mixed-use development environments and entertainment environments where there’s a million things to do besides going to the game.”
Despite the discussions held during Cleveland’s ballpark lease negotiations, multiple team sources stress the Indians aren’t studying the areas around the park, at least not yet. Their focus remains on updating the interior of Progressive Field before perhaps looking beyond the walls in another five to 10 years or so.
Executing a mixed-use development plan around Gateway would be difficult, sources said, in part because of the city’s sagging population. One source pointed to Sherwin-Williams moving its headquarters downtown as an example of a necessary driver. More business, and more residents — the downtown population sits at only about 20,000 — need to migrate downtown to make such an arrangement viable.
One league official even questioned whether Progressive Field would be built in downtown Cleveland if the project were launched today. That source wondered if a location near the intersection of two main highways — at I-480 and I-77, for example — would more conveniently serve the team and its fan base. There is more land around Independence to establish the type of mixed-use site that has gained popularity in recent years.
One real estate expert understood that line of thinking, but added: “I hate that model. That’s what retail did forever. It’s only good until the next thing pops up. … You have to build a town around it.”
The logistics around Progressive Field could make such a venture a bit tricky. A cemetery lines the stadium to the east, and Carnegie Avenue is essentially a highway that eliminates the land to the south. The Dolans do not own any of the real estate around the stadium and therefore would have to get creative to execute potential deals, such as pulling in the various land owners and making them partners.
There are pockets of real estate that remain intriguing near the ballpark, though, including the vast number of surface lots around the stadium and the alley on Larry Doby Way between the stadium and parking garage. The Indians have experimented with that alley, converting it into a pregame street festival for the occasional weekend series. While a full-scale residential/entertainment complex might not be feasible around Progressive Field, the ability to recreate Boston’s Jersey Street outside Fenway Park or Baltimore’s Eutaw Street outside Oriole Park remains a more modest and realistic goal for down the road.
“(The purpose) is to create some energy in a district around the stadium,” one league source said. “(That) can be done, but you need both the size of population and the entertainment dollar to justify it. I’d be nervous to think that would work in Cleveland, just because there’s such a limited disposable dollar.”
For now, the team’s renovation mission is more manageable: make the upper deck more inviting to visitors attending games and perhaps create a massive conference center that can be rented out to businesses seeking enough space to host hundreds of people.
“The overarching thing,” one league official said, “is can you create an environment where people want to come to that ballpark, kind of like Wrigley Field, regardless of winning and losing, because it’s such a great experience?”
Wrigley is the model the Indians are using for at least one new concept. The team hired a director of non-game day events shortly before the pandemic to try to build revenue streams on nights the Indians aren’t playing home games. Concerts are the biggest draw; Fenway and Wrigley host multiple shows a year. But there is stiff competition in Cleveland, where Blossom has a vast outdoor venue, FirstEnergy Stadium can seat upwards of 70,000 and Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse sits directly across the plaza.
Nevertheless, the ballpark hosted a beer fest earlier this summer, Topgolf is bringing an event to Progressive Field in three weeks and Elton John is playing there next summer. Team officials admire the way the Cubs can host up to 15 concerts a summer at Wrigley.
“I don’t know that we can get to that level,” one team executive said. “But we can do more than one concert every four years.”
A walkway spanning the entire upper deck would allow Progressive Field visitors to walk the stadium from foul pole to foul pole while also providing views of the city’s landscape. (NBBJ / Cleveland Indians)
A few times each season, usually on a summer weekend, fans will populate the upper deck in right field. Groups gather in the areas that even team officials reluctantly refer to as “shipping containers” while acknowledging the upper deck redesign did not turn out the way they anticipated.
The Indians haven’t nailed down exactly how they want to transform those tan and forest green boxes, but as one team official stressed: “It needs to be different.” Their goal is to make the upper deck less of an afterthought, to motivate fans to explore what that level has to offer in terms of sight lines and concessions.
“We just don’t give people a good reason to do that,” the official said.
Team executives started brainstorming potential renovations nearly three years ago. As the parties closed in on a new lease agreement this summer, the team partnered with architecture firm NBBJ to create renderings. Almost half of the $435 million investment tied to the new lease will fund capital repairs, including concrete, plumbing and electrical restoration. The remaining sum will cover upgrades throughout the ballpark.
The Corner, the oft-buzzing bar beyond the right-field foul pole, is the inspiration for their upcoming alterations. The concept of a chic, beer-focused location seemingly pops up in every organizational conversation about areas of the venue that need to be updated.
Those in the organization have reimagined the Terrace Club as a multi-tiered, “hyped-up version” of The Corner that provides access to the upper deck, a way to reinject life into a premium spot that has gone from astir to asleep.
“The biggest downfall is you don’t feel connected to the game,” one team source said. “It’s like you’re in an aquarium. You don’t hear or smell or see much. It’s a cool view. You’re just not connected.”
One team official suggested nearly half of attending fans enter the ballpark via the left-field entrance adjacent to the Gateway Plaza. If they look up, those fans see the Terrace Club. That part of the project is tentatively set to be put into action first, a source said.
“It’s a huge piece of real estate in a really important place,” a team official said. “It’s really a front door to the ballpark.”
Remodeled offices, a spacious conference center and a reimagined entrance from the Gateway plaza would serve as a “front door” into the stadium and may include a new location for the team shop. (CBBJ / Cleveland Indians)
Aside from the right field fiasco, the Indians haven’t addressed the upper deck since the ballpark opened in 1994. Team officials admit the amenities up there aren’t prevalent enough: There are few standout concession stands, and there’s no view of the field from the concourse.
One way to encourage fans to tour the upper deck: a walkway spanning the entire level, perched above the first handful of rows of seats. The goal would be for fans to peer to one side to see the game and look the other direction for views of the city, its bridges, the Cuyahoga River or the sunset. The inner ring would meander through a series of beer stands and perhaps even a food hall setup. The Indians would remove certain walls to create better visibility, as they did on the main concourse during their previous round of renovations. One official even compared the idea to The High Line, the elevated park path in Manhattan, though on a much smaller scale.
Then, there are those rarely frequented shipping containers. The team has cycled through tens of ideas, with the most common preference being one that resembles the beer garden the Rockies created at Coors Field. The Indians want to be careful not to overdo the Corner-type setup. To steer clear of that, they’ll emphasize creating distinct traits for each new space, whether via food and beverage options, sight lines or by connecting multiple levels of the seating bowl.
The Indians hope to replicate The Corner’s appeal while creating distinct new spaces around the park. (Dan Mendlik / Cleveland Indians / MLB via Getty Images)
Team executives stressed the upgrades shouldn’t reduce the seating capacity, as was the case in 2015, when it was an intended consequence of the club’s renovations. If construction costs the Indians a couple rows here and there, one official said, they could compensate for the losses with new standing-room-only spaces. They have yet to reach the engineering phase of the process, though. They’re far along in the research and development stage, but until they finalize their estimated budgets for each modification, certain plans could deviate a bit.
There will be less-visible alterations, too. The team plans to redevelop the dugout suites behind home plate and install a large, social gathering space behind them, a similar setup to what’s used by many NBA teams (including the Cavaliers), as well as certain MLB teams, including the Royals, Nationals and Pirates.
The Indians plan to renovate the home and visitor clubhouses, and they’re leaning toward swapping the location of the two. That would result in Cleveland switching to the first-base dugout. They want to add common spaces dedicated to sports science, nutrition, mental coaching, training and rehab work, batting cages equipped with updated technology and other collaboration areas for coaches and players. Before the pandemic, the Indians held pitcher meetings in a multi-purpose room often used for manager interview sessions and, occasionally, pingpong matches. Flipping dugouts might be necessary because there is more room to expand on the service level down the first-base line than there is down the third-base line. It would also place Cleveland’s clubhouse much closer to the players’ parking lot, and the visitors clubhouse closer to where team busses drop off Cleveland’s opponents.
The administrative building, which abuts the ballpark on the Ontario Street side, will also receive a face lift, which could include the addition of a fifth floor, a centralized grand staircase, a cafe and a shared conference space situated between the offices and the stadium. They’ve kicked around the idea of shifting the team shop to an area facing the plaza.
The organization hopes bulldozing will start in October 2022. The Indians will begin presenting the plan to city government this month. Once the new lease is carried out — if there’s no political pushback after the city’s elections, that could happen by the end of the calendar year — they’ll visit with architects, engineers and designers to finalize their blueprints.
The Indians will become the Guardians. Their stadium, and perhaps eventually the land around it, will soon look drastically different, too.
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