Top Menu

Silverdome contents to be auctioned

Silverdome

It was once envisioned as a home for independent baseball once the NFL and NBA moved out, but today the Silverdome is in sad shape, with its contents to be auctioned.

The Silverdome opened in 1975 with a ten-acre Teflon roof supported by forced air, a model also used in the Metrodome and B.C. Place. It was home to the NFL’s Detroit Lions until 2002, when the team moved to downtown’s Ford Field. The NBA’s Detroit Pistons also called the stadium home.

Since then the facility, built for $55.7 million by the city of Pontiac, has failed to field a regular tenant, with various proposals popping up, including the aforementioned 2008 plan to host independent baseball there. Triple Sports & Entertainment bought the facility for a half-million dollars soon after.

But Triple Sports hasn’t maintained the stadium: the roof has collapsed and nature has begun reclaiming it. From AP:

The elements have wreaked havoc. Without electricity, the stadium’s innards are dark and mold-infested. The weed-covered turf, on which Sanders once made tacklers look silly, is floating on a foot of water like an oversized lily pad. Workers scared off a pair of foxes living underneath the roof remnants that cover a section of Honolulu blue chairs in the lower bowl.

The Silverdome’s current owner — an investment company that tried to revive interest by holding events such as soccer and boxing in recent years — is determined to cash in before it’s too late, putting pretty much anything and everything inside up for auction starting on Wednesday….

Among the 4,000 items available for bidding are pretzel warmers, a boxing ring, a Zamboni turf machine, flat-screen televisions and scoreboards. A pre-auction sale of Silverdome seats is already underway.

However, some of the auction appears to be highly inefficient. There’s always a market for used stadium seats, but at $100 a pop, the Silverdome seats are way too highly priced to be moved in any sort of quantity.

—-

Share your news with the baseball community. Send it to us at editors@augustpublications.com.

Are you a subscriber to the weekly Ballpark Digest newsletter? You can sign up for a free subscription at the Newsletter Signup Page.

Join Ballpark Digest on Facebook and on Twitter!

Follow Ballpark Digest on Google + and add us to your circles!

, ,