Proposed Stadium for the St. Louis Rams

By Patrick Londrigan

The holidays are over; we’re back from break, and its time to get back to work.  Time to start pushing designs for our thesis project and getting done.  Just a friendly reminder my thesis project is a new NFL stadium for the St. Louis Rams.  For those of you that don’t know St. Louis are in danger of losing the Rams to L.A. unless they come up with a new NFL stadium.

Now, over the break L.A. proposed their new stadium design and their so-called “NFL City.”  To respond to their proposal, a few weeks later, St. Louis came up with their own design.  St. Louis’ design is a few blocks north of their current stadium, Edward Jones Dome, and on the Mississippi waterfront. 

A new NFL stadium on the North Riverfront will benefit many of the current businesses and successes like CityArchRiver, the ongoing growth on Washington Avenue, Ballpark Village, St. Louis Union Station Hotel and the other downtown projects.  The entire metropolitan area will benefit as a business and tourism destination, and this stadium will create new and sustainable jobs while also delivering a significant economic boost for the region.

This stadium would be designed to hold 64,000 people with an initial seat distribution of 54,020 general seats, 2,000 suite seats (includes private suites and on-field seating), 480 loge box seats (eight seats each in 60 boxes), and 7,500 club seats.  The location plans to have 10,439 parking spaces on the 90-acre (part publicly owned, part privately owned) property.  As previously mentioned the stadium will be on the Mississippi waterfront, with an open-air design.

A few negatives that I, myself, have seen.  The possibility of flooding would be a concern at the location on the water.  Granted it was 20 years ago, but the water was once up 20 feet in August, which would make it very hard to play football.  The city does say they own 25% of the land they wish to build on, though the other 75% is own by several businesses, so of which will be extremely hard to move, one being Laclede Power.

Though it will be difficult I believe that the St. Louis stadium is possible.  I will be pursuing this site for my own thesis project for the new Rams stadium, with hope that it will be used in the future.  This would be a great opportunity and a chance to revitalize the downtown.  Fingers crossed the Rams stay in St. Louis.