Detroit PAL to use artificial turf at stadium site
Amid celebration of Detroit Police Athletic League's successful campaign to raise money for its youth sports facility at the former Tiger Stadium site, some grumbling was heard among sports purists over plans to use synthetic turf.
Detroit PAL CEO Tim Richey said groundbreaking will take place in April and the facility will be ready in about a year. He spoke at an event at DTE Energy's downtown headquarters to celebrate PAL hitting its initial fund-raising goal,
The facility will be an L-shaped building that will line the Cochrane and Michigan Avenue sides of the site, leaving the historic playing field open. Opposite the PAL facility across the playing field, a $37-million mixed-use development by Larson Realty is expected to break ground later this year. It will create residential, retail and commercial space along the Trumbull and Michigan Avenue frontages.
The playing field itself will remain but become adaptable to multiple sports.
"What we expect to do is have the markings out there for baseball but then be able to change the lines," Richey said. "So we can play football out there, soccer out there, we can play lacrosse out there. So the lines will be erasable."
Detroit PAL celebrated reaching its initial fund-raising goals for a $15.6-million project that will see PAL build its new headquarters and youth sports facility on the site, raising more than $11 million so far.
Richey said that tens of thousands of local kids will be able to play baseball, soccer and other sports on the former baseball diamond where Tigers greats including Ty Cobb and Willie Horton played.
Detroit PAL hits goal for HQ at Tiger Stadium site
Mayor Mike Duggan, former U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, and other civic leaders spoke at the celebratory event at DTE Energy on Tuesday. Levin hailed the marriage of PAL's youth sports programs and the former stadium site, calling the site "a field of dreams."
"It's a field that will inspire kids for generations to come, to do the best that they can do and to be the best that they can be," Levin said.
And Levin praised the volunteers known as the Navin Field Grounds Crew that mowed the grass and organized amateur baseball on the site over several years to maintain interest in the site.
The success of PAL's fund-raising effort is the latest step forward in a multi-year effort to remake the site of the old ballpark. The Detroit Tigers played their final game at the historic site in 1999. The city and preservationists dithered over the fate of the closed Tiger Stadium for years before the final piece of the old ballpark fell to wreckers in 2009. Only in 2014 and 2015 were city leaders and developers able to put into place a realistic development plan.
Richey confirmed Tuesday that PAL intends to install a synthetic surface at the site rather than maintain natural grass there. He said artificial turf is cheaper to maintain and more adaptable for a multi-sport facility that will see daily use.
"Primarily it's the durability of the surface and then just the maintenance that goes into it," Richey said. "We're trying to get thousands of kids a chance to play on there. We want to program the site for hours at a time during the week, give lots of people a chance to play there, so synthetic surface just makes better sense for us."
While the decision to go with artificial turf has been made, PAL hasn't yet decided which of the various systems on the market to use.
"We're still working with the different providers," Richey said. "It'll be the newer kind of synthetic turf that plays a lot like grass, looks a lot like grass. and so we think it's going to be something that's clean, it's going to be green, it's going to be safe for kids, and it's going to be easily maintained."
If artificial surface is more easily maintained, the decision to forgo natural turf is proving unpopular with some fans of the old ballpark, where Tigers greats long played on grass. On Twitter, fans began to tweet reactions to Richey's comments, saying, "This ain't right" and "this is VERY bad news," among other comments.
Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.