Put dome on County Stadium? There was a plan (sort of)
With weather like this, it’s easy to see why they put a roof on Miller Park.
Turns out they had the same idea for County Stadium 50 years ago — but not because of Milwaukee’s endless winter.
In 1968, county officials kicked around the idea of putting a dome on top of the stadium, not to keep out the snow and cold, but as a cheaper Plan B.
On March 26, 1968, the County Park Commission’s stadium committee recommended seeking funding to determine the feasibility of putting a dome on top of County Stadium.
It was part of a bigger conversation — three conversations, actually.
The first was Milwaukee’s pursuit of a major-league baseball franchise, three years after being ditched by the Atlanta-bound Braves. The second was planning for a new sports center that could offer a bigger home for the Milwaukee Bucks and other possible big-league teams.
The third was a proposed convention center in downtown Milwaukee, a $15 million to $20 million facility that would have room for all the non-sports events held at the Arena.
For one county supervisor, putting a lid on County Stadium helped all three.
On June 19, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported, Supervisor Gerard B. Skibinski introduced a resolution to hire an architect to design a roof for the stadium. Boasting that a dome would cost about one-fourth the money of a new sports facility, Skibinski said his plan would “eliminate the white elephant that we have there in Piggsville, by converting it into a paying proposition.”
Bill Anderson, manager of the stadium, dismissed the idea.
“I’m no engineer, but we’ve done some investigating and our best information is that it would be almost impossible, regardless of expenditure, to put a dome on the present stadium,” he told The Milwaukee Journal in a June 23, 1968, story.
Even if a system could be built around the ballpark to support a roof, Anderson said, “I doubt that a domed stadium would solve Milwaukee’s problem.”
Skibinski plowed on, hiring Donald L. Grieb, the Milwaukee architect who designed the Mitchell Park Domes, to draft a plan for putting a dome on the stadium.
Grieb introduced his vision on July 11, a $7.5 million project that would enclose County Stadium with added walls to support “three giant arches made of metal and translucent material,” the Sentinel reported July 12. The arches, the paper wrote, would be 400 feet wide, 1,000 feet long and 12 feet thick, joining at the center of the dome 213 feet above ground.
The County Board wasn’t buying; it hired an architect to design a new arena instead.
Skibinski was undeterred. He revived the dome proposal on Oct. 8, but the resolution died in committee. He brought it up again in January 1970, when the Milwaukee Bucks were making their first-ever playoff run. (The County Board rejected it again.)
Skibinski died two years later at age 53, but the idea he championed didn’t. In 1978, Supervisor John St. John pushed for a dome over the stadium, getting about as much traction as Skibinski did.
“The idea of a dome is fanciful thinking,” County Supervisor Fred Tabak, who led the opposition to St. John’s proposal, said in a Journal story on June 20, 1979 — nearly 22 years before the first opening day at Miller Park.