Taylor Field memories selling to highest bidders
Taylor Field is up for auction and Dan Stinnen is hoping for a piece of it.
He has so far bid $10 on two eight by 15-foot pieces of turf, representing the section where he sat for 15 years as a Saskatchewan Roughriders season ticket holder.
“We sat right above the 30-yard line,” said Stinnen, who lives in Regina.
“I thought, ‘Hey, let’s see if we can get that.’ I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with it,” he added laughing.
“It would be neat to do the whole back yard.”
Nearly the entire contents of the old Mosaic Stadium are available for purchase in an online auction over the next three weeks. Hosted by McDougall Auctioneers Ltd., the auction went live on Wednesday with most items beginning bidding at $5.
Jill Hargrove, City of Regina director of facility management services, said auctioning off the stadium wares is part of standard salvage practice for the city, which has monthly auctions.
She said items that still had “useful life” and could be repurposed were excluded from the auction, which has thousands of items for sale.
Like Stinnen, Jeff Hine is hoping to take away a personal piece of the stadium.
He has a $5 bid in for the eastside Rider-green bench where he sat for seven years.
“I didn’t realize that you had to get the whole 15 or 20 feet or whatever,” said Hine, who lives in Regina. “I know a good portion of the people that were in our row, so I’ll see if they want the rest of it.”
Less nostalgic are some of the more practical items for sale, which include: office furniture, supplies and cubicles; clothes hangers; fire extinguishers; doors and windows; hospital beds; flatscreen TVs; commercial washing machines; a salad bar with sneeze guard; stainless steel sinks; oscillating fans; shovels; condiments, which “may be dated”; exit signs; a safe with an unknown combination … The list goes on.
You can bid on a complete washroom — which includes stalls, toilets, urinals, handwash stations and dispensers.
For Rider fans who want memorabilia, there’s clothing and practice jerseys, team lockers, murals and rugs.
For drinkers, there are wine and shot glasses, boxes of Coors hats and beer koozies, and Farewell season 32-ounce plastic cups.
For nature lovers, there are the dozens of trees outside the stadium.
The MaxTron — yes, you can buy the 65-by-45-foot MaxTron — requires a minimum bid of $100. (It also requires a $10,000 deposit that’s refundable once the buyer removes it from the field.) Or, how about the less ostentatious lightup CKRM sign, just 26 feet wide?
Some items are listed as “must take X times the bid price,” which means the winning bidder will have to pay more than they might realize.
The auction is divided into six categories: all benches of stadium; old Rider store, offices, locker rooms, west grand stand, etc.; Green & White Lounge area and equipment; entire field of turf; field goal posts, trees and more; and, entire east side stadium with contents, roll-up garage doors, etc.
The auctions’ end dates range from July 25 to 28.
Items that don’t sell will become the demolition contractors’ responsibility.
Hargrove expects more items will be posted in the days to come. But if your seats aren’t represented in the “all benches of stadium” category, which is listed by section and row, it might be because your bench was incorporated into the new Mosaic Stadium decor.
For the stadium auctions, visit mcdougallbay.com/eventlist.php and scroll down for the green text.