Plan Unveiled for Renovated L.A. Coliseum

LOS ANGELES —  An official proposal for renovation of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, unveiled Tuesday, raises a strong possibility that the University of Southern California football team will play its 1993 home games in Anaheim Stadium, officials said.

The renovation would maintain many of the Coliseum’s historic features and traditional sight lines while adding state-of-the-art luxury suites, club seating and a 19-row upper deck. If approved, the project might take as little as 18 months, managers said, forcing both USC and the Los Angeles Raiders to vacate the Coliseum for only one season.

Raiders owner Al Davis said Tuesday that he is considering the Rose Bowl, Anaheim Stadium and Dodger Stadium as temporary playing sites for his National Football League team in 1993. USC Athletic Director Mike McGee said the school is primarily talking with Anaheim Stadium.

“It’s not official yet, but frankly, all our conversations over the last six months have been with the people of Anaheim,” McGee said. “And they’ve been very helpful.”

Anaheim Assistant City Manager Jim Armstrong confirmed that there have been discussions with USC officials, but said there have been no talks between city officials and the Raiders.

The Coliseum plan, still subject to an environmental-impact report and final design approval by the Coliseum Commission, represents an agreement worked out in months of talks with the architects, major tenants such as the Raiders and USC and preservationists from the Los Angeles Conservancy.

The Coliseum’s capacity, now about 92,500, would be reduced to about 70,000 for Raiders games and 85,000 for USC’s most popular football games against UCLA and Notre Dame. The number of seats between the goal posts at all football games would increase to 40,000 from 22,000.

Project managers of the Spectacor business partnership, which includes ARA Services and the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, said that construction would begin immediately after the Raiders finish their 1992 season.

Terry Miller of the Kansas City architectural firm of HNTB called the 16-to-18-month construction schedule “aggressive but not inconceivable.” He said that HuntCor, a Phoenix construction firm retained as consultants, had assured the developers the schedule was feasible.

Only last year, designers had estimated construction time at 27 months, which would have necessitated the Raiders and USC playing two seasons outside the Coliseum.

Nonetheless, even the faster schedule probably rules out use of the stadium for the 1994 World Cup tournament because no timely guarantee could be given that work would be finished in time for the World Cup opening on June 17, 1994. At the Coliseum news conference at which a model and schematic drawings were unveiled, Davis, USC President Steven B. Sample and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley all hailed the renovation.

Davis said he will be proud to play in a Coliseum that “keeps the historic elements of the old stadium, keeps the continuity, but as we go into the 1990s, becomes state of the art.”

Sample said USC, the Coliseum’s oldest tenant, will “urge everyone to rally around and support” the renovation.

Bradley said he could say with confidence that the new plan “is going to please everybody.”

Ed Snider, the head of Spectacor, said that despite the current business recession, the developers feel confident they will be able to obtain necessary private financing to allow the Coliseum project to proceed on schedule.

The project’s chief executive officer, Richard Schulze, said that seismic tests, as well as a study of the water table, indicate there will be no special impediments to the work, which will be facilitated by using the stadium field as a repository for equipment and material and as a staging area.

The $175-to-$200-million plan would maintain the historic peristyle, exterior walls and broad sweep of the 68-year-old Coliseum, while incorporating as many as 282 luxury suites, at least 10,000 special club seats, subterranean service concourses, a new press box and new lighting.

The field would be lowered 11 feet and seats added that would bring many spectators closer to the field of play. The Olympic track will be removed, but seats at the lowest levels could be taken out so that a track could be installed in case the Coliseum ever hosts a third Olympic Games.

The aim, developers said at a news conference Tuesday, is to make the Coliseum a much more intimate facility in which to view football, soccer and concerts. Even the furthest seat from the playing field would be 40 feet closer to the action than it is now, the architects have promised.

Distances from the football sidelines to the first seat would be reduced from 92 feet to less than 50, and end zone lines would be 20 to 70 feet from the nearest seats rather than the present 100 to 215 feet, the stadium’s managers said.

By recessing the luxury suites into the superstructure between the club seats and the new upper deck, the developers said they are seeking to make sure the Coliseum “doesn’t become a corporate-dominated stadium.”

The suites will seat 12 to 16 people each. Marketing details will be released in a few weeks, the developers said.

By constructing mainly subterranean service concourses next to the various seating levels, spectators will be required to walk only 50 to 100 feet to buy food and drinks rather than the 300 feet many must go now. Essentially, the concessions will be moved inside the stadium.

As the only stadium in the world to host two of the modern Olympic Games, in 1932 and 1984, a World Series in 1959 and two Super Bowls, the Coliseum is a national historic landmark.

Because of that, major efforts have been made to placate preservationists who insisted that the historic values of the stadium be maintained. Public officials and representatives from the nearby community were also consulted.

Last December, a four-day design workshop that included some of the nation’s leading preservationist architects and engineers was held in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, adjacent to the Coliseum.

Five alternative plans were developed at the workshop and many of the favored concepts, including preservation of all the traditional entry tunnels, became a foundation of the HNTB architects’ later design work.

In the meantime, Bradley obtained a written commitment from Spectacor and the Coliseum Commission that the new Coliseum would retain both the eastern peristyle and the exterior walls.

Bill Delvac, chairman of the Los Angeles Conservancy’s Coliseum task force, said this week that while the Conservancy has not endorsed the plan presented Tuesday--pending release of a draft environmental-impact report by the end of this year--the group is highly pleased by the consultations undertaken thus far.

Times correspondent Terry Spencer, in Anaheim, contributed to this story.

TEAMS UPROOTED: USC, Raiders look to Anaheim Stadium as venue for 1993 seasons. C1