Candlestick Park - Park History

Park History

When the New York Giants arrived in San Francisco in 1958, they played their home games at the old Seals Stadium at 16th and Bryant Streets. The City of San Francisco agreed to build a stadium if they moved from New York. Most of the land at Candlestick Point was purchased from Charles Harney, a local contractor. Harney purchased the land in 1952 for a quarry and industrial development. He made a profit of over $2 million when he sold the land for the stadium. Harney received a no-bid contract to build the stadium. The entire deal was the subject of a Grand Jury investigation in 1958. Ground was broken in 1958 for the new home of Major League Baseball's San Francisco Giants, who had moved west from New York following the end of the 1957 season. The Giants selected the name of Candlestick Park, after a name-the-park contest on March 3, 1959 (for the derivation of which, see below). Prior to the choice of the name, its construction site had been shown on maps as the generic Bay View Stadium. It was the first modern baseball stadium, as it was the first to be built entirely of reinforced concrete. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon threw out the first baseball on the opening day of Candlestick Park on April 12, 1960, and the Oakland Raiders played the final three games of the 1960 season and their entire 1961 American Football League season at Candlestick.

The Beatles played their last live commercial concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966.

The stadium was enclosed during the winter of 1970–71 for the 49ers, with stands built around the outfield. The result was that the wind speed dropped marginally, but often swirled around throughout the stadium, and the view of the Bay was lost.

The stadium hosted two MLB All-Star Games (1961 and 1984), one National League Division Series (1997), three National League Championship Series (1971, 1987 and 1989), two World Series (1962 and 1989), and eight NFC Championship games, the most notable being in January 1982 when Dwight Clark caught a game-winning touchdown pass from Joe Montana to lead the 49ers to their first Super Bowl (see "The Catch"). In 1998 Steve Young and Terrell Owens had The Catch II and in 2012, Alex Smith and Vernon Davis had The Catch III. Candlestick Park was also home to dozens of commercial shoots as well as the location for the climatic scene in both the 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror and the 1973 Richard Rush comedy Freebie and the Bean. In February, 2011 scenes for Contagion, starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Jude Law, were filmed at the stadium.

On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake (measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale) struck San Francisco, minutes before Game 3 of the World Series was to begin at Candlestick. Remarkably, no one within the stadium was injured, although minor structural damage was incurred to the stadium. Al Michaels and Tim McCarver, who called the game for ABC, later credited the stadium's design for saving thousands of lives. The World Series between the Giants and Oakland Athletics was subsequently delayed for 10 days, in part to give engineers time to check the stadium's (and that of nearby Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum) overall structural soundness. During this time, the 49ers moved their game against the New England Patriots on October 22 to Stanford Stadium, where they had won Super Bowl XIX several years before.

In 2000, the Giants moved to the new Pacific Bell Park (now called AT&T Park) in the South Beach neighborhood, leaving the 49ers as the sole professional sports team to use Candlestick. The final baseball game was played on Sept. 30, 1999, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 9–4. In that game, all nine Dodgers starters had at least one base hit, while the stadium's final home run came on the Giants' first at bat of the game, by Marvin Benard.

Currently, Candlestick Park is the only NFL stadium that began as a baseball-only facility and underwent extensive reconstruction to accommodate football, as evidenced by the stadium's unusual oblong design that leaves many seats on what was the right-field side of the stadium behind the eastern grandstand of the stadium during football games.

On September 3, 2011, Candlestick Park hosted the first college football game in its history with a neutral site game between the California Golden Bears and Fresno State Bulldogs (Cal was designated the "home" team). This game was in San Francisco, because of the massive renovation and seismic retrofit at California's home stadium, California Memorial Stadium. The rest of the Golden Bears' home games in 2011 were played at AT&T Park. Cal would go on to win the game 36-21.

At approximately 5:19 local time on December 19, 2011, Candlestick Park experienced an unexpected power outage just before a Monday Night Football game between the 49ers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. An aerial shot shown live on ESPN showed a transformer sparking and then the stadium going completely dark. However, about 17 minutes later, the park's lights came back on in time for the game's kickoff. With 12:13 remaining in the second quarter, another power outage created yet another 30-minute delay before play resumed again.