The pride of Pontiac up for auction
Everyone from Super Bowl champs to Elvis played at the Silverdome, but this Michigan town is ready to move on
- Topics:
- Michigan
- U.S. Financial Crisis
- Culture
PONTIAC, Mich. — The skybox that looms above the 50-yard line, once prized seating for the wealthy and powerful, is coated with rapidly spreading moss as thick and green as any AstroTurf. Strips of white canvas that used to make up the roof now litter the arena like the remains of a titanic toilet-paper battle royale. The tunnel through which Super Bowl champions, Pope John Paul II and Elvis all once emerged to the roar of their adoring flocks is flooded now with murky water more typical of a retention pond at a sewage plant.
Everything about the condition of the Silverdome, the former home of Detroit’s Lions and Pistons and the pride of this once booming car-making town, screams metaphor. As its owner, who bought it from the broke city for the humiliatingly low price of $583,000 in 2009, begins on May 21 to auction off everything from the scoreboard to the nacho machines, its devastation is the ultimate in the can’t-look-away genre of dystopian Great Recession imagery.
Yet as big and seemingly obvious a symbol as this buckling behemoth may be of the economic havoc that befell so many Rust Belt communities in recent times, many in Pontiac see the sale of its innards and entrails as a cleansing bit of closure. This city, too, is in a process of emerging from a long nightmare, one that required the governor to empower a series of emergency managers to sell off assets — including the stadium — and outsource virtually all city services. The town, which prevented bankruptcy, had more than 500 employees in 2009. It is now down to a staff of about 20.
“At one time we were a town that had everything,” said a rueful Mona Hofmeister, a lifelong Pontiac resident and anti-blight activist who posts photos of vacant, decrepit houses online as well as videos of their demolition. “It’s a little disheartening. It’s a little embarrassing that we’re begging everyone for stuff.”
Pontiac, released from emergency management last July, is now lean and fiscally stable, with a BBB+ bond rating and a resurgent downtown that has enjoyed about $15 million a year in new investment since 2012. Unemployment, which peaked at 34 percent in mid-2009, is down to 21 percent, and home-building scion Bill Pulte Jr. has pledged to pay to raze 550 vacant houses.
Three big developments — a professional-grade grass-court tennis complex, a massive car-enthusiast playground and an urban vineyard — are providing glimmers of a revival for the first time since General Motors abandoned its last factory a decade ago. The old Sears Roebucks building downtown is now the Lafayette Place Lofts, 60 apartments with a ground-floor grocery that were snapped up within weeks of opening in January.
“The Silverdome was a reminder of losing the Lions, and then it was an embarrassment for being sold at 1/40th of the price that we built it for,” Glen Konopaskie, president of the Pontiac Downtown Business Association, explained over brisket wraps at a sleek lunch spot that, a few years ago, was a crime-riddled dive bar. “Then they deflated the dome, so now it’s an eyesore for another mistake. Do we need [the Silverdome site] to become a new symbol, or are we looking at some of the new symbols that are being launched out of this recovery right now?”
SLIDESHOW: INSIDE THE SILVERDOME
Pontiac’s demise is both similar to and different from that of the city that usually gets the attention around these parts, Detroit. Like Detroit’s, Pontiac’s population, now about 55,000, peaked in the early 1970s, with about 80,000, many of whom enjoyed high-paying car-industry jobs that didn’t require even a high school degree. Many residents moved to the sprawling surrounding suburbs as they amassed wealth, and thousands of white residents fled when a court order forced school integration via busing. The city is now more than 52 percent black, according to the most recent U.S. Census data.
Unlike Detroit, Pontiac’s municipal pensions were always well funded, although the health insurance expenses of retirees have been a big burden that the emergency manager has cut and unions continue to litigate. Also unlike Detroit, Pontiac hasn’t enjoyed any serious efforts by the state or federal government to aid its recovery — certainly nothing like the multimillion-dollar bailout plan coming together for Detroit.
“I don’t know that Pontiac provides a model unless the question is … Does the state have an obligation to bail out bad city government?” said former Mayor Leon Jukowski, who helmed Pontiac from 2009 to 2013 and was the city attorney in the 1990s and deputy mayor for two years in the early 2000s. “It’s almost like Detroit was deemed too big to fail.”
Still, Pontiac is the county seat of Oakland County, one of the wealthiest in the United States. Several moves made to shore up the city’s finances — outsourcing the police and fire operations, selling off the wastewater treatment plant — relied on being surrounded by communities that could afford to help.
For both Pontiac and Detroit, though, the dominance of the car factories meant a steady flow of tax revenue that masked a municipal government mired in waste and cronyism. Automakers like GM had their own security, trash removal and water treatment system, so they filled Pontiac’s coffers while not needing many city services. Jukowski said Pontiac leaders and residents alike were in denial as manufacturing fled overseas and to other cities and states.
Nowhere was this denial quite as pronounced as in the case of the Silverdome. Built in 1975 for $55.7 million, it was Pontiac’s calling card to the nation as the Lions’ home until 2001 and the Pistons’ home from 1978 to 1988. Its largest crowd, more than 93,000, gathered to celebrate Mass in 1987 with Pope John Paul II.
It was also never profitable. When times were good, Pontiac could comfortably absorb the losses, but the city failed to offer a satisfactory renovation for the Lions in the late 1990s, and the team moved to a new stadium in downtown Detroit in 2002.
Jukowski was among those floating the idea of selling the stadium in the early 1990s. He urged the city council to consider an arrangement in which the city would give it to the Lions in exchange for a guaranteed amount of annual tax revenue, but the idea was anathema to a proud town and leaders who viewed it as an important perk.
What happened next, he said, reflected the city’s farcical refusal to face reality. “After the Lions left, the city folks running the Silverdome were still attending conferences in Los Angeles on how to run an NFL-occupied stadium,” he said. “They still had an attorney on staff whose specialty was negotiating lease contracts with vendors.”
By the time Jukowski was elected in 2009, the city was facing a $60 million deficit and then-Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Democrat, had wrested control of the city from its elected leaders, using a controversial provision allowing Michigan to take over municipalities and school districts facing desperate budget shortfalls.
Pontiac then had a succession of three emergency managers, including two appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. One of the first major decisions by the first one, Fred Leeb, was to put the stadium up for a no-minimum auction. It was bought for a pittance by Andreas Apostolopoulos of Canadian-based Triple Investment Group, which went on to hold a variety of events there until the roof began to fail after a December 2012 ice storm.
Neither Apostolopoulos nor anyone from Triple Investment has commented on the auction, leaving the publicity to RJM Auctions. RJM’s point man for the Silverdome sale, Jim Passeno, guided journalists and prospective buyers through the building, clearly mindful of the public perception that Apostolopoulos bought it and then allowed it to deteriorate. Repeatedly, he noted new couches and electronic equipment throughout the property as evidence that Apostolopoulos continued to invest in the place until recently.
“This place was in functioning condition before the roof caved,” Passeno said, pointing to a rolled-up $500,000 soccer turf in a barn across the Silverdome parking lot as evidence of Apostolopoulos’ efforts to lure a pro soccer team. “The owners are involved in whatever the next step may be, whether he redevelops or it gets demolished and something else happens here. It’s not like somebody took the money and ran.”
Perhaps so, but the auction seeks to capitalize on the public’s treasured memories of the stadium and its events. The 80,000 seats, which are not part of the auction, are being sold, starting at $100 for one. People with an attachment to a specific a seat number, row and section — former season-ticket holders, for example — can get the seat of their choice if they are willing to pay more for it. Fans can also pay a premium for a No. 20 seat, the jersey number of Detroit Lions Hall of Famers Barry Sanders and Lem Barney. For an additional $25, seat buyers can get a certificate of authenticity that comes with a small laminated piece of the Silverdome roof.
The May 21 auction is not likely to be the last, Passeno said. RJM is trying to figure out ways to sell a variety of other items, from pieces of the now soaking turf to lockers once used by various athletes and performers.
Many Pontiac residents are resentful. Hofmeister is typically antipathetic, expressing doubt that the owners actually care about the community or have any particular plan for the site.
“He doesn’t really care as long as he gets the money,” she said. “The people who are spending money there are reaching back and touching an important part of their life and times. Not us. We’re moving on.”
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