Yeah, yeah, yeah . . . tear it down. Unless the Tigers are going to go back to it – clearly, an impossibility -- or unless it’s going to host baseball games played by someone, there’s nothing else to be done with the beautiful old wreck.

I don’t know -- maybe it wasn’t beautiful. Maybe I just remember it as a beautiful place because it was where I saw my first major league ball game (1959, box seats behind home plate, Yankees visiting, Mickey Mantle (Mickey Fucking Mantle!) breathing the same air I was as he played sideline catch before the game, a 1-0 Tiger win in ten innings); maybe I remember it as a beautiful place because, in my infrequent return visits (I’m not a Detroiter; hell, I’m not even an American) throughout various stages of my life, I saw many beautiful things there: from the center-field bleachers I saw Al Kaline peg a guy at third from right field; from the upper deck in left field I saw a Willie Horton home run disappear deliciously below me into the lower left-field seats; from the same vantage point, I saw Boog Powell crush a ball into the upper deck across the field from me; years later, from the center-field bleachers again, I saw Denny McLain – Washington Senator Denny McLain – get shelled by the Tigers . . .

Over the years, I spent a few more beautiful baseball days at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, one of he last long before the beautiful old wreck was abandoned after the 1999 season. On the day I'm now imperfectly remembering (I think it was a 1990 July Saturday afternoon, but I'm almost certain I'm slightly off on the year and the month), I was, as I had been way back in 1959, sitting behind home plate, but this time . . . Oh, never mind – I wasn’t a kid anymore, and it was the White Sox visiting instead of the Yankees, and I was with a woman who used to be my wife.

That’s it, of course: Tiger Stadium could hold a lot of people (more than my smallish Canadian home town), but it was always simultaneously huge and small. It makes no sense at all to let a contradiction like that stick around.

Tear it down, but do build the new facility for kids. If Detroit can't find $20mil for kids amongst the major car manufacturers and other industries, then that's pathetic. I just went to the basketball hall of fame in Massachusetts, and it was like a mini-mall with fast-food joints and a hall-of-fame as an afterthought (and I think the NBA has a FEW extra dollars). Don't let that attitude happen in Detroit.

The city of Detroit and the old neighborhood have such a great opportunity to use the old ball park in some creative ways. There are countless examples of historic buildings transformed into youth and communtiy centers throughout the United States.

According to the editorial, leaving it as an empty lot is suppose to be some sort of signal of progress. Wouldn't using the nostalgia, historic value, and much of the existing structure in a creative way send a much stronger signal to the people of Detroit?

If they can fund it privately and come up with a realistic plan, by all means keep it. But those are big ifs. The place is falling apart now. And it's hard to find examples of giant stadiums being repurposed. Even in the plan mentioned, it's hard to imagine a 50,000 seat stadium being scaled back to 10,000 seats without demolishing much of the park--at which time you'd almost certainly be ahead tearing it down and starting from scratch.