SkyDome under construction in downtown Toronto, June, 1988.John McNeill/The Globe and Mail
Millions of people around the world are watching two of baseball’s best teams battle under the sport’s brightest lights. For many, it will also be the most they’ve seen of the stage.
Even if only for a few seconds – aerials during the anthems, cutaways between innings – the home of the Blue Jays will get a spotlight it hasn’t held in decades.
When it opened in 1989, the SkyDome was the first of its kind: a stadium with a fully retractable roof, imagined almost without precedent. As those who helped build it would probably agree, it was far from perfect – but that’s hardly the point. Not now, when building anything of that scale has become a political and economic flashpoint in the debate over a country’s identity.
The story of how it was made – in the tight downtown confines of a city on the verge of explosive growth, across multiple levels of government, within a constellation of private interests picking themselves up from a recession – is as improbable today as the stadium’s clamshell silhouette against the grid of glass towers that now surround it.
Anger at the sky
There are two origin stories told about the world’s first stadium to have a fully retractable motorized roof.
The first, and more cinematic, opens upon a rainy game of football. The 1982 Grey Cup at the Exhibition Stadium turned into a soaking ordeal that forced thousands of fans under the stands while the hometown Argonauts slipped to Edmonton. The “Rain Bowl,” as it came to be called, spurred an outpouring of anger: Chants for a domed stadium grew into a protest the next day at City Hall, were then echoed loudly across Queen’s Park, and eventually became a mandate to build it. Never again would a Toronto sports team’s fate yield to the sky.
The second story – the one told by Art Eggleton, Toronto’s longest-serving mayor – suffers from being less mythic, but closer to the truth.
“From the time the franchise was awarded in 1977, it was clear that Exhibition Stadium would only be temporary,” Mr. Eggleton said in an interview. “Given our climate, a roof seemed obvious.”
He was a driving force behind the SkyDome and was equally adamant that the new park belonged downtown. There was plenty of parking at night and the subway and GO Train were already effectively connected, he said. “It made sense. I didn’t want a stadium sitting in a field surrounded by parking lots.”
Ten dignitaries, including former Ontario Premier William Davis (front row, third from left) and former Metro Chairman Paul Godfrey, donned golden hardhats and used silver shovels turning sod for new stadium, Oct. 3, 1986.Edward Regan/The Globe and Mail
Elected mayor in 1980, Mr. Eggleton pushed to repurpose the rail lands west of Union Station. But the railways refused, giving “endless excuses” including contaminated soil and ongoing traffic, until then-Ontario premier Bill Davis used provincial leverage to strike a deal.
By 1986, he was standing next to Metro chair Paul Godfrey – who was instrumental in bringing the Blue Jays to the city – with a shovel in his hands.
“Everything required a lot of determination,” he said. “It took all of our officials, at every level, coming together to figure out how this was all going to work.”
Reaching that common ground took years of negotiation over financing, location and control. The province created a new agency, the Stadium Corporation of Ontario, to steer the project and bring in private investors.
In 1985, it launched a design competition that drew four teams to submit detailed proposals.
The way things work
Among them were Toronto-based Rod Robbie, an architect renowned for his design of Expo 67’s Canadian Pavilion in Montreal, and Ottawa structural engineer Michael Allen. The two spent months trading piles of sketches by Greyhound – an unconventional but effective method of delivery in the early eighties.
“Fax machines were crude, maybe good for single pages,” Mr. Allen said. “We put ours on the bus at the end of the day, and they would have it by morning. No one lost any office time.”
It wasn’t until the duo learned where the stadium would be built that Mr. Allen saw the problem with most of the ideas floating around. The downtown decision made sense, but the site barely had room for the structure itself, never mind a place for the roof to move.
Inspiration struck on a return flight to Ottawa later that Friday, and he began to sketch. He remembers thinking, somewhat reluctantly: “This could work.”
He spent the weekend trying to kill it. By Monday, having been unable to prove it wouldn’t hold up by every measure he could conceive, he called Mr. Robbie. After a time, they had agreed upon a design unlike anything ever attempted before.
He put the drawing on a bus.
The SkyDome, in the early stages of construction, Sept. 7, 1986.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
The puzzle
The proposal from Robbie/Young + Wright Architects, which had linked up with the London, Ont.-based EllisDon construction company, stood apart for its elegance, and for the fact that they were able to show how it would work through computer modelling: A three-panel steel roof would move along giant curved rails, revealing most of the field to the sky.
Their winning team united designers and engineers under one roof in a dedicated office on Toronto’s University Avenue. Richard Young, a director of the project, recalled about 60 people working “hell-bent” on getting the drawings done ahead of construction.
“At one point,” he said, “we were only six weeks ahead of the construction sequence.” Designers were still sketching even when the concrete started to pour on-site.
Modern stadiums with retractable roofs like the SkyDome open faster, says Art Eggleton, 'but there’s no doubt it’s a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned.'Courtesy of EllisDon
The tables were covered with pages of problems. The stadium would rise on a wedge hemmed in by rail lines to the north and Lake Ontario’s shifting winds to the south. Snow would pile in winter; gusts would funnel through the growing wall of high-rises. Nothing like it had ever been built, much less to the demanding standards of a Canadian winter.
And then you have “Canadian football,” said Mr. Young, who is originally from the U.K. – “an outrageous size of pitch” that stretches about 12 yards wider than the American field of play.
“And a baseball diamond, which is the absolute opposite.”
They had looked for inspiration everywhere, only to find lessons in hardship: In Montreal, the Olympic Stadium’s initial fabric roof had failed against gales barely pushing 20 kilometres an hour. Japan had a multipurpose stadium that could slide its entire soccer pitch in and out on demand, but those builders had the luxury of surrounding space. On a parcel of land barely large enough for the SkyDome itself, it was nothing more than a curiosity.
“If you think about the operational sequence necessary to make the roof work, which is a roof going around on a circular track on one part of it and going on a horizontal track on another part of it, it’s pretty complex,” Mr. Young said.
He remembers looking at the plans and thinking: “Is it going to work?”
A model of the stadium used for testing.Courtesy of EllisDon
‘The wind and snow guys’
From some angles, the upward push of wind meant designing for the equivalent force of a 747 taking off inside the structure, Mr. Young said.
About 100 kilometres west of Toronto, a small but growing engineering firm of about 30 employees was already building a reputation.
“We were the wind and snow guys,” said Anton Davies, one of the founding partners of RWDI, which now has offices around the world. From its headquarters in Guelph, Ont., their engineers began running scale-model tests to understand how the roof would withstand the forces of inclement weather. “This was a really unusual structure, and snow was going to be really, really important.”
An employee at RWDI works on a model used to test weather effects on the stadium.Courtesy of RWDI
A wind tunnel at RWDI. The company tapped into three decades of meteorological records to model how storms would strike the arena from different directions.Courtesy of RWDI
Using twin wind tunnels, engineers tested their models of the SkyDome and its surroundings with the roof open, closed and half-open. Sand particles were used to imitate drifting snow.
RWDI drew on three decades of meteorological records from several weather stations and airports to model how storms would strike the structure from different directions.
The company developed new software to simulate snow accumulation over time – hour by hour, through entire winters – to help calculate unbalanced loads. “There’s 11,000 tons of steel in that roof,” Mr. Davies said. “The engineers had to know exactly where to put it.”
An EllisDon employee inspects work during construction of the stadium. 'Everything was right down to the wire,' recalls EllisDon’s Geoff Smith.Courtesy of EllisDon
The builder’s bet
While the designers wrestled with physics, the construction company was taking on a massive financial gamble.
Geoff Smith, now EllisDon’s executive chair, was running the company’s budding western operations when his father, Don, brought the company into the SkyDome project.
“It was a reckless decision,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “But my dad was as close a person as you’ll ever meet to being just a pure entrepreneur. And he just saw the challenge and he went for it.”
Looking back on the period, he remembers asking his father about stories he had heard about testing gone wrong. He told him not to worry. “That’s all he said to me. ‘It’s not for you to worry about. I’ll worry about that.’ The guy had ice water in his veins.”
EllisDon, then a mid-sized builder with a few hundred employees, poured most of its resources into the project. The company set up a dedicated management team for the stadium; hundreds of its employees worked tirelessly to meet waves of deadlines.
Chuck Magwood, a former real estate developer hired to steer the crown agency, gathered representatives from each of the companies and issued a mandate, Mr. Smith said. “I keep hearing that we can’t do things this way,” Mr. Magwood told the teams. “But we’re doing something that’s never been done before. Obviously, we’re not going to do things the way they’ve always been done.”
EllisDon workers followed inspectors around the building and fixed issues as they were pointed out, Mr. Smith said. “Everything was right down to the wire.”
“How did the dome get built in 30 months?” he asks, almost four decades after the fact. “Frankly, I just don’t see that ever happening today.”
Workers install bogies.Courtesy of EllisDon
The night it rained inside
By late spring of 1989, after nearly four years of work, the SkyDome was ready to open to a starry night in Toronto.
The province had spent millions on the project, and wanted to prove to the nation – to the world, really – that every penny was worth it.
Mr. Eggleton still laughs at the irony of what was broadcast across the nation as the roof slowly opened that night in June. “There was a big stage show, all the officials there – premier David Peterson, Paul Godfrey, myself – and they opened the roof to show everyone how it worked,” he said. “Then it started to rain. They didn’t close it right away, so we all got wet.”
Two nights later, the Blue Jays lost 5-3 to the Milwaukee Brewers. But apart from a karmic bit of rain and the game itself, the SkyDome was a success.
The legacy
The triumph, for some, was short-lived. Construction costs ballooned and by 1993, the publicly owned Stadium Corporation was more than $400-million in debt. The province assumed full control, but in 1998, the corporation declared bankruptcy and sold the facility to a private consortium. Several years later, a Canadian telecommunications giant bought it for $25-million and renamed it, to the lasting consternation of many, the Rogers Centre.
EllisDon grew into one of Canada’s largest construction firms, employing thousands worldwide. RWDI expanded to about 1,000 engineers with projects including the Burj Khalifa, the London Millennium Bridge and the Grand Canyon Skywalk.
The Argonauts, who lost the game that sparked mad fury at the sky, are back to playing beneath it again. Just before their lease at the Rogers Centre expired, a new ownership group moved the team in 2015 to the nearby BMO Field, an open-air venue it shares with the city’s soccer team.
Rogers has spent hundreds of millions in recent years restoring the upper decks with new patios and gathering spaces, breathing fresh life into an old building with strong bones. More modern structures like it have been built over the years. “Some of the new ones are faster to open,” said Mr. Eggleton, who still has the shovel in his home office. “But there’s no doubt it’s a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned, of a stadium.”
A view of the SkyDome under construction before the 1988 season.Rick Stewart/Getty Images