Silver Bullet for Abandoned Stadium

In so many areas of the country, the word "stadium" might as well be four letters.

Most of the time, any animosity comes from the key question of "who's paying for this?" Team owners looking to pad their pockets turn to an increasingly cash-strapped public for public subsidies or to peddle permanent seat licenses.

Then, for some areas that have teams moving to more plush digs, another key question pops up: "What are we going to do with the old place?" Once such area is Detroit, Michigan, where the NFL's Detroit Lions abandoned the Pontiac Silverdome in 2002 to move to Ford Field in downtown Detroit.

The Silverdome has sat mostly vacant since and was sold in late 2009 for a bargain-basement price of $583,000. Now the new owners are pushing an ambitious redevelopment plan, according to a report in the Grand Rapids Press.

The idea floated by Andreas Apostolopoulos would see the famous dome be removed, the lower bowl converted into two venues—an arena and a concert hall—and the upper bowl be used as a soccer-specific stadium sitting on top of the lower venues. The redeveloped Silverdome would potentially be used to lure a Major League Soccer franchise to the area.

This might be a first in terms of a massive redevelopment, but other creative uses have been made out of old stadium spaces in America, such as the former Compaq Center in Houston which is now Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church, and old Cleveland Stadium's new life as a reef in Lake Michigan.