The King County Stadium, or Kingdome as it was more commonly called was a multi-purpose stadium that stood in Seattle, Washington from 1976 until its closure and demolition in 2000. The stadium was home to the MLB’s Seattle Mariners, the NFL’s Seahawks, the NBA’s SuperSonics, and the NASL’s Seattle Sounders. Having nearly every major popular professional sport represented shows what a truly versatile yet flawed stadium the Kingdome was. It was truly a Jack of All Trades, but Master of None. Before we dive in I’d like to encourage you to subscribe for more sports history and news content from the Archive of Everything. Now let’s learn more about the Kingdome.
The first talk of a domed stadium in Seattle came in 1959 when local businessman David L. Cohn wrote a letter to the City Council suggesting a covered stadium be built to lure a professional sports team to Seattle. At the time Seattle had no professional sports teams. With the frequent rain it was universally believed that Seattle would have to have a domed stadium to have any chance of being granted an expansion baseball or football team. The city council agreed, although it took a number of years before the proposal for a domed stadium reached the 60% threshold needed to approve the public bonds.
In 1967 the American League of the MLB granted Seattle an expansion franchise to be called the Pilots. A condition of this expansion was Seattle must rush construction of a domed stadium to be ready by the 1970 season. Seattle officials agreed to the proposal, with the Seattle Pilots set to temporarily call Sick’s Stadium, a small baseball venue in the city home until the dome was complete. This turned out to be a grave mistake.
The Sick’s Stadium venue was so horrible, that team ownership had to declare bankruptcy due to lackluster attendance. The team was bought and moved to Milwaukee to become the Brewers before the beginning of the 1970 season. Seattle was now once again without a major sports franchise, and without a good reason to build a dome.
By 1970 a new voter referendum was introduced to build a domed stadium at Seattle Center. Voters rejected the plan due to no professional teams on the horizon who could immediately occupy the facility. Finally in 1971 a proposal for a domed stadium at a new site in the International District was approved. With that nearly 13 years after it was first proposed in various places, construction was started on King County Stadium.
Although the stadium was finally approved with groundbreaking in 1972, this was only the beginning of a tumultuous nearly 4 year construction timeline that saw the project go nearly $20 million dollars over its $35 million dollar budget. The construction issues stemmed from the fact that the Seattle City Council chose Drake Construction of Portland, Oregon instead of the more experienced Kiewit Construction of Omaha. Drake undercut Kiewit’s bid but lacked the scale to complete the project. When work fell severely behind, Drake was fired around halfway through the project. Kiewit was brought in to fix the mess that Drake had started leading to the cost overrun, and quality issues that would plague the stadium throughout its lifetime. Finally the stadium opened in a dedication ceremony on March 27, 1976. The first professional event at the 66,000 seat stadium was a NASL game between the Seattle Sounders and the New York Cosmos. Soon after the Seahawks and Mariners moved in, with the SuperSonics joining them two years later. From there the problems of course continued.
The largest problem with any multi-purpose stadium is the playing surface. It has to be able to be quickly and easily converted from events like soccer to baseball to football. The Kingdome accomplished this by having a series of complicated zippered AstroTurf surfaces. The AstroTurf was known to have holes, divots, and uneven areas that caused injuries to many athletes who called the facility home. Things were so bad that the playing surface was rated dead last in the NFL by players after the 1998 season. There were efforts over the years to improve the quality of the playing surface, but none were successful. This poor reputation amongst NFL players led to 5 bids to host a Super Bowl being declined by the NFL. If Seattle was to ever host a Super Bowl something had to change.
The straw that finally broke the camel’s back for the doomed stadium was a series of ownership changes and structural failures. After both the Seahawks and Mariners were sold in the 1990s, new team owners demanded new sport specific stadiums be built for their teams, or else both would be moved to newer venues out of state.
