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Midwest League Guide on Harrison Square
By Chad Gramling | January 11, 2007
Joel Dinda (AKA “Jowo”) over at the MidWest League Guide offers his thoughts on Harrison Square. soem good points. I’ll wrap up my perspectives tomorrow with part 3 of my series.
Harrison Square, a city-sponsored downtown redevelopment project which would necessarily include substantial public and privately funding, is an apparently-serious effort. The project would include a new ($30 million) ballyard for the Wizards, who would participate in the entire project, including a $5 million portion of the stadium (the owners are Atlanta-based real estate developers). While the Wizards would like to have the new ballpark in place by the start of the 2008 season, I’m skeptical about the feasibility of that timeline; the apparent need for a hotel chain’s endorsement is certainly a potential holdup, if not a deal-breaker. And the project’s a bit too ambitious to believe it will be implemented exactly as planned. [Source: MWLguide.com]
I’d be interested to hear any other thoughts you have on the project Joel.
Topics: Uncategorized, Weighing in on Harrison Square |
January 25th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Apologies for the belated response; I’ve been ignoring Bloglines for the past couple weeks.
Really not much to add; the farther the town is from Lansing, the less I know about the local situation, though I do watch most of the MWL-town’s online papers to some extent. That said:
Virtually all ballpark (and team purchase) efforts are serious to someone, but most of them don’t get beyond the preliminary discussion stage and very few survive funding and approval processes. Even worse, some collapse after the funding’s in place and all the approvals have been received. So I tend to discount every project.
The downtown Fort Wayne situation’s interesting to me, personally, because you folks have been having this discussion for a couple decades; every now and then the heat turns up and it makes some news. The convergence of community interest and the new ownership group’s apparent experience just might work out for everyone. That would be good.
But I remain skeptical….
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Tried to explain this to a reporter at the Plain Dealer once, when the Quad City team was apparently sold to suburban Cleveland. The reporter had seen the sale contract (so had I, though I didn’t tell her), and didn’t want to hear about the possibility things would fall through.
January 25th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Joel-Thanks for your comments. I really apprecaite your unique perspective. Though I don’t want to consider the possibility of the deal falling through, it has to be excepted as a true possibility. In fact, if we can’t land the hotel, it’s pretty much dead in the water. Thanks again. Looking forward to watching MWLguide evovle as the season does.