The real shame in all of this is on the Tigers for letting it get to this point.  Ideally, they should have planned and helped to preserve the old ballpark ten years ago.  Absent that, they should have ensured its demolition within a year of leaving.

And that doesn’t even bring up the years of willful neglect for the building itself and the area around Michigan and Trumbull for which they are responsible and used as leverage to move to Comerica.

Thank God the Red Sox were sold to someone with a big more imagination, because Fenway was on its way down this path before John Henry and Co. bought the team.

“someone with a big more imagination”

Read: “a bit more imagination”

The real shame is that the Tigers aren’t still playing there.  That was an effort I strongly supported, and still believe that a well maintained Tiger Stadium (before they let it go to hell) was a better ballpark than what they have now, and that the money spent on Comerica could have been better spent elsewhere.

The Red Sox got lucky.  They tried for 40 years to get a ballpark built by the city.  Yawkey wanted a dome in the 1960s to share with the Patriots.  They wanted a cookie cutter (like Riverfront) in the 1970s, and they tried for a modern mallpark in the 1990s.  The current group came in and just realized it wasn’t going to happen.  What they did in response was turn the old park into a jewel rather than the dump it was becoming.

Craig’s last comment…..I don’t know, OYS was refurbed in the early 70s and somehow that was never to everyone’s satisfaction, but the neighborhood bounded back when everything else did.
Detroit’s a tough case, biggest population decline (and fastest, starting in 50s), downtown tough to get anything done (I believe Hudson’s on Woodward was the largest dept. store in the country, Hank the Deuce had to put in major money for the Ren Center) and a current administration that is at loose ends.
No one at the time thought going “all in” on the auto industry was such a bad bet.