Jaguars to add Dog Park on gamedays

[VigilantZombie]

Jacksonville has always done things "a little different" so this doesn't surprise me.  It's just another 'attraction' for 'customers'.

[sp6488]

On 4/21/2018 at 2:32 PM, Troy Brown said:

All ya'll buzzkills. It's a cool idea. I hope it works out well. 

Yea, well, how far can this Cool Idea punt a football?!?!?!

[Woz]

On 4/19/2018 at 7:51 PM, EliteTexan80 said:

Do not send it to General. I'll bat this bad boy back like a tennis ball.

Are we playing forum ping pong? Or forum hot potato?

[pwny]

On 4/20/2018 at 5:35 PM, Boltstrikes said:

Seriously... how drunk was the guy that designed that stadium? Too big for the supporting city, then adds in a pool, now a dog park... maybe they could also add a kid zone with rock climbing walls and giant hamsterball wrestling.

The stadium was built to be so large because it was a replacement for the Gator Bowl Stadium. Jacksonville plays host for the Florida/Georgia game and the Gator Bowl every year.

In 1994, the games got moved to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium while the Jacksonville Municipal Stadium was being built, and the NCAA would have kept the games in Gainesville long term if Jacksonville didn’t build a stadium that could hold at least 80,000 people. So they built a stadium that could allow the city to continue the tradition of hosting those games.

As for the pools, it was a smart thing if you look at it in context of the seating issue. Having the pools and cabana areas put in puts the stadium at 69,132 seats, which is pretty much the right size for the NFL market. In addition, it increases revenue by having a premium pricing area in the stadium. And the areas for the pools and cabanas can be replaced with seating that allows the stadium to get up to 82,000 for the NCAA games. It’s a nice way to size the stadium appropriately for both types of issues without the need for unsightly tarps or dead areas in the stadium. It was an inventive way to handle a problem that couldn’t just be fixed. I think most everyone would admit that it’s a little weird to have pools in a stadium, but at least it looks nice. It’s far better than the tarps ever looked.

 

The distaon for the dog park is a little weird too. It isn’t inside the stadium. It isn’t a Bark at the Park type event. It’s basically a day care area for dogs. They’re trying to create reason for people to spend time near the stadium after games. The area around the stadium is currently dead. There’s empty shipyards and closed up businesses. Basically the only thing to do in that area of town before Shad Khan bought the team was to go to the Jags games and then go home.  There’s been development started around the area, but when there’s no reason for people to stay around there after games, foot traffic to some of the places is too light to be sustainable without creating extra means to be around. Being able to go to some of the parks in the area after a game because you brought your dog to the game is a decent way to generate extra traffic in non-summer months. Shad is trying to bring life to that section of town. A dog park is one of about 50 different things he’s trying to get done there.

 

This is what the area around the stadium looks like currently:

It’s empty and dead. It’s a suck on the way the city looks and really does a lot of damage to Shad’s hope of turning the city into an NFL destination. When Jacksonville hosted the Super Bowl back in ‘05, it was widely viewed as a disaster because of how terrible the surrounding area was. The city is basically guaranteed to never get a Super Bowl in its current state, and really will never be able to draw any truly major events no matter how nice the stadium is.

When Shad took over, he came in with the mind to make Jacksonville a destination to be for everyone. For the players, he put in the most advanced training facility on the planet and built the best locker rooms he could imagine. For fans, he revamped the stadium, put in the largest scoreboards in the world, added several sections to the stadium that make fan experiences better, added the pools and did a lot more. Now we’re starting to see the plan for making Jacksonville not just a destination for players and fans, but for everyone else.

This is Shad’s vision for the area:

The dog park is just a small portion of the things he’s utilizing in order to breathe life into a dead section of the town. He’s also trying to build an amphitheater, luxury hotels, shopping complexes, a multi-tier practice facility, and tons of other stuff. It’s a two billion dollar project that would completely reshape the city and make Jacksonville and specifically the area around the stadium a place that people would want to be.

But you can’t make that stuff successful unless you start giving people reasons to stick around and do the things that are there currently and bring revenue and life to an otherwise dead area.