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Candlestick Park (also commonly referred to as Candlestick or The Stick) is an outdoor sports and entertainment stadium located in San Francisco, California. The stadium was originally built as the home of the San Francisco Giants, who played there from 1960 until moving into Pacific Bell Park (since renamed AT&T Park) in 2000. Currently it is the home field of the San Francisco 49ers NFL team, who moved in for the 1971 season. Candlestick Park may be replaced by New 49ers Stadium as early as 2012.

The stadium is situated at Candlestick Point on the western shore of the San Francisco Bay. Due to its location next to the bay, strong winds often swirl down into the stadium, creating unusual playing conditions. At the time of its construction in the late 1950s, the stadium site was the cheapest plot of land available in the city that was suitable for a sports stadium.

The surface of the field is natural bluegrass, but for nine seasons the stadium had artificial turf, from 1970 to 1978. A “sliding pit” configuration, with dirt cut-outs only around the bases, was installed in 1971, primarily to keep the dust down from the breezy conditions. Following the 1978 football season, the artificial turf was removed. Natural grass was re-installed before the 1979 baseball season.

	Capacity		70,207
	Opened		April 12th 1960
	Owner		The City and County of San Francisco
	Cost		$15 million
	Architect		John Bolles

History

Ground was broken in 1958 for the new home of the National League’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. Prior to that, 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. Richard Nixon threw out the first baseball on the opening day of Candlestick Park on April 12, 1960, and the Oakland Raiders played their 1961 American Football League season at the stadium.

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

The stadium was enclosed during the winter of 1971–72 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.

Currently, Candlestick Park is the only NFL stadium that began as a baseball-only facility and underwent extensive reconstruction to accommodate football, as evidenced 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. Candlestick is also currently the only NFL football stadium in which upper-deck supports obstruct sight lines from the first-deck seating.

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.

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.

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 September 30, 1999, against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 9–4. Ironically, the last game was played under blue skies with no fog and a game time temperature of a very non Candlestick like 82 degrees.

Future

Plans were underway to construct a new 68,000-seat stadium at Candlestick Point. However, on November 8, 2006, the 49ers announced that they would abandon their search for a location in San Francisco and begin to actively pursue the idea of building a stadium in Santa Clara, California. As a result, San Francisco withdrew its bid for the 2016 Olympics on November 13, 2006, as its centerpiece stadium was lost. However, 49ers ownership is still willing to hear any offers San Francisco may want to bring, including the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard.

(source .. wikipedia) reproduced under GFDL

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