Yankee Stadium-New York, N.Y.
It’s common for the New York Yankees to start the year with lofty expectations – a trip to the World Series is almost always a serious goal. So it’s hardly a surprise when the franchise finally began planning a new 51,000-seat, $1.3 billion stadium in the Bronx in early 2005, it set the bar high for an elegant design, innovative approaches, high-end, and fast-track execution.
“From day one in the design process, the Yankees were pretty clear with their vision,” says Bradd Crowley, project manager for Kansas City-based Populous, the stadium’s architect. “They wanted to hearken back to the original 1923 facility. They wanted it to be a majestic look. And they wanted it to be the tradition of the Yankees – 26 World Championships – because they were proud of that. But at the same time on the interior, they wanted it to feel a whole lot different.”
The effort has won wide praise, including overall Project of the Year honors from the New York Construction awards jury. The achievement shines through in the grand scale of replacing the House that Ruth Built, but also in detailed touches, such as echoing the original copper frieze above the upper deck of the old 1923 stadium. Of course, the modern frieze made of 86 steel plates and tubes does not mimic the use of columns that block fan views.
Most of the finishes – from steel detailing to the precast and limestone façade – are emblematic of the project’s high aesthetic standards. Even features with practical purposes – such as the 31,000-sq-ft main entry space where 80% of fans pass through to access escalators, elevators, ramps, and stairs – manage to inspire awe. That became the 500-ft-long, 70-ft-high Great Hall clad in architectural precast, framed by open-air high arches, topped with a translucent Kalwall roof system, and gilded with a “media wall” recounting historic baseball moments.
The project had many such layers, from big-picture budget management to limiting the impact of on the community by using a street sweeper to clean excavation dust from sidewalks and a soundwall to limit construction noise.
“The Yankees wanted world-class work but also wanted us to stick to the budget and schedule and goals,” says Mark Pulsfort, v.p. and deputy operations manager for the New York business unit of Turner Construction, the project’s general contractor.
Sophisticated Plan Plans for a new stadium went back more than a decade, and after many starts and stops, design began in 2005 and groundbreaking came in August 2006. Despite an aggressive deadline of Opening Day 2009, the project team actually moved in administrative offices months early and was ready for two preseason games.
“There was a tremendous amount of work on a monthly basis,” Pulsfort says. “You could not miss a beat.”
Fast-tracking also meant drawings weren’t complete when construction began, requiring intense coordination, Pulsfort says.
Managing the guaranteed maximum price budget also was challenging because subcontractors were booked solid, driving up bids like an overheated free agent market. The team tried “to thread that fine line of value...
...engineering through a market that was going crazy,” Pulsfort says.
It also strived to ensure 25% of contracts went to Bronx-based firms and 25% of workers came from neighboring districts, a goal in the project’s Community Benefits Agreement.
But the biggest challenges were in the actual design and construction. Though the 1.35-million-sq-ft steel-framed structure is 500,000 sq ft larger than the old stadium while seating several thousand fewer fans, the need to fit in modern amenities, field-facing concourses, 68 luxury suites, and wider seats with more legroom made for a tight squeeze, says Crowley, whose firm this year changed its name to Populous from HOK Sport.
“These buildings are so big, but it always seems to come down to feet and inches trying to get all of the programming in,” he adds. “You have to have enough space to prepare the food, for people to dine, and adequate space to circulate the fans. And you’re always trying to get a few more toilets into the system. It’s a real balancing act.”
The design also called for sightline and access improvements, such as seating decks that are less steep and closer to the field than the old stadium, as well as a sunken field – dug 12 ft below grade with 250,000 cu yd of excavation – to provide at-grade access to main seating areas. And the design provided the majestic touch the franchise wanted with an Indiana limestone and granite-clad precast stone exterior that evokes the 1923 stadium, along with giant gold-leaf lettering embedded into the façade to announce “Yankee Stadium.”
The cantilevers are sophisticated, extending 50 ft to position several upper seating bowls closer to the field, says Michael Squarzini, senior principal at Thornton Tomasetti, the project’s structural engineer. “At the finished stadium now, it’s not apparent how that cantilever is supported, and it’s because all of those trusses are hidden within suite walls,” he says. “The suite level and the upper deck level are connected and work as one large cantilever.”
The structural design called for various column-free spaces to offer unobstructed views in unique corners, such as the “batter’s eye” cantilevered over Monument Park beyond centerfield or the subtle cantilever supporting the 500-ft-long scoreboard behind the outfield with columns inset by about 40 ft, Squarzini says.
And while the design eschews steel elements on the grand façade, there are exposed steel box columns and girders just behind it that create a moment frame supporting the perimeter wall, provide a striking structural skeleton for the Great Hall, and tie the whole system back into the main structure.
The structural design even complemented the accelerated schedule, with the team choosing a concrete system for several seating bowl cantilevers, instead of steel, which is more efficient structurally but had long fabrication lead times. The decision allowed the team to jump ahead by six months on building parts of the seating bowls with concrete before the main steel bid packages finally came through in May 2007.
The team made extensive use of 3-D building information modeling software for detailed steel design and to detect clashes between various trades, which was critical to keep the project on schedule. Thornton Tomasetti used Tekla Structures software to model steel, concrete, and precast components, and Turner incorporated those with sheetmetal, mechanical, plumbing, sprinkler, and electrical designs – and Navisworks clash...
...detection software – to achieve project-wide coordination that flagged 10,000 clashes before they could impact installation.
Pulsfort says it was the first major project on which Turner had used BIM to such an extent. And Squarzini says the team’s use of BIM brought steel detailing “to another level” for a stadium project, particularly with the self-supporting frieze structure.
Complex Coordination The effort featured all of the typical challenges of urban construction, with a few twists, such as nearly 190 dates in which roughly 45,000 fans were swarming around the project site, visiting the old stadium to watch Derek Jeter stretching to snare line drives – and complicating steel erection, materials delivery, and other functions. There also are three subway lines, with a mere 15 ft separating the site from the elevated station for the 4 and 6 lines, and similarly close quarters underground near the tunnel for the B and D lines. That proximity required the team to closely monitor vibration and pile-driving to avoid impact on the transit structures.
Even within the 15-acre stadium site, the team had to carefully plan construction tasks to also allow space for laying down materials, manage logistics for three cranes, permit delivery of materials, and properly distribute peak manpower of 1,400 workers and more than 110 vendors, Pulsfort says.
But the real coordination was in scheduling and sticking to the plan. Turner used a detailed CPM schedule broken into small-level activities in order to plan monthly deadlines. No work activity was allowed to run more than a month, allowing the team to keep a compartmentalized eye on schedule, budget, procurement, equipment, crew levels, and safety monitoring.
“You have to break it into smaller segments,” Pulsfort says. “Otherwise, it gets too chaotic.”
The problem with a stadium is that there are few repetitive construction phases, unlike a high-rise, where core tasks repeat floor by floor on the way up, Pulsfort says. The team opted to break the stadium into six distinct zones, each with its own schedule, and each with as many repetitive elements as possible – such as construction of bathrooms and concessions – to keep crews and work progressing efficiently.
The team thought carefully during preconstruction about other ways to build in repetition, and chose the electrical design as a crux. It called for a main electrical closet in each zone, rising up through each level, with the crews testing and commissioning the infrastructure and then branching out lines from the main riser for that entire zone. The team then repeated that with lighting circuitry and the low-voltage lines for broadcasting, security, fire alarm, and audio-visual components throughout each zone.
“Then we took a similar approach for the mechanical systems, positioning the mechanical rooms to facilitate that construction methodology throughout the stadium,” Pulsfort says.
The team also arranged manpower strategically, assigning similar work in different zones to distinct subcontractors in order to maximize use of available vendor resources, especially for the extensive electrical work.
The immensity of the effort shows in the box score: 7,000 pieces of structural steel, 15,000 gallons of paint, 946 mi of electrical wire, 20,000 light bulbs, 10 mi of HVAC piping, and 25.5 mi of plumbing pipe. Overall, the structure...
...contains 57,555 cu yd of concrete; 1,600 piles averaging 82 ft in length; and 12,700 tons of structural steel.
And during the 32-month schedule, the project team had no fatalities, no serious falls from heights, and no serious accidents – the construction equivalent of a no hitter.
Something Extra When the stadium opened in April, Yankee hurlers and sluggers got most of the cheers. But the structure was roundly applauded as well.
Perhaps the only off notes were stunted early-season ticket sales, thanks to a crippling recession, and the conspiracy theorists who claimed the stadium’s configuration and orientation had created a home run-friendly “wind tunnel” into right field. While the Yankees did register the most home runs as a team in 2009 with 244, they were also second in all of baseball with 108 home runs on the road. And the critics might have noticed that the new stadium, like the old, features a short right field porch, and that the team is unsurprisingly stocked with lefties who can reach it with one swing.
The stadium’s modern amenities and design get most of the attention, with a scoreboard six times larger than in the old facility. It includes both a 60 x 102 ft high definition LED screen as well as a pair of manual scoreboard for that traditional touch. The open-air design also allows fans to view the field from many vantage points, including the concourse and concession stands, but there are also 1,100 flat panel video monitors throughout the facility. And there are restaurants, a banquet hall, and a Yankees Museum for fans, as well as a giant clubhouse for the team that stretches from behind home plate to the right-field foul pole – complete with coaching offices, training rooms, administrative space, the locker room, and conference areas.
The end result is enough to make a lifelong Yankee fan have to take a deep breath, says Crowley, who grew up rooting for Mantle and Maris.
“It’s a once in a lifetime project for a design team, and to have a major part in it was tremendous,” he adds. “What else can you say?”
Key Players
Owner: New York Yankees
General Contractor: Turner Construction
Design and Production Architect: Populous
Structural Engineer: Thornton Tomasetti
Development Manager: Tishman Speyer
Geotechnical-Foundation Engineer: Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers
Steel Contractor: Koch/CanAm
Plumbing Subcontractor: Almar Plumbing, Bethpage, N.Y.
Electrical Subcontractor: EJ Electric, Long Island City, N.Y.
Steel Subcontractor: BPDL, Quebec, Can.
Hoist Subcontractor: MDG Builders LLC, Bronx, N.Y.
Concrete Subcontractor: Central Excavators, West Caldwell, N.J.
Carpenter: Component Assembly Systems, Pelham, N.Y.
