Remembering the Kingdome on Its 10-Year Implosion Anniversary

The Kingdome looms over the guided missile cruiser USS LEAHY (CG-16), arriving in port during the Seattle Sea Fair 1982. (Photo by PH1 HAROLD J. GERWIEN)

I wrote the following article on the Kingdome's death just under 10 years ago. Since this is the anniversary of the building's implosion, I thought this was a good time to re-present it and remember the Dome in the days after its extinction but before it became a very dim memory:

I didn’t see the Kingdome’s end. I didn’t see the Kingdome’s beginning. I did, though, grow more and more familiar with it throughout the '90s, first as an occasional visitor, then as a Seattle resident.

It always seemed out of place in Seattle’s skyline: the lean skyscrapers glistening off the water and dockside piers and shipping facilities giving way to a plump, squat mushroom bulging above rows of SoDo warehouses. What was that concrete behemoth doing adjacent to the brick and stone of Pioneer Square?

But watching Mariner games (I never saw anything else in the Dome, save one high school basketball title game) was pretty enjoyable. The controlled climate assured you that the weather wouldn’t intrude on the game, while the dome and carpeted field gave the event a sort of domestic, suburban feeling—like nothing too dramatic or traumatizing would happen.

Usually that was the case: There’s only one game I remember at all vividly. (I missed the big comeback run in 1995, only to later start up a website chronicling those games.) The last time I was in the Kingdome, in the summer of 1998, the Mariners played a 15 or 16-inning game, filled with extra-inning near-defeats for both sides, until the Mariners lost it.

 

"Kingdome? Where?" courtesy of SunBreak Flickr pool member slightlynorth.

All throughout early 2000, as the paneling came off and the cement ribbing of the structure came to light, the Kingdome seemed to completely change. As the seal of the Dome was removed, you could glimpse inside and get some sense of what it really was. It seemed to expand in its openness, growing lighter and more flexible.

 

The mausoleum had turned into an exoskeletal shell which, like the carapace of a dead beetle, has an essential sparseness and structural clarity as it turns from a living shield into a dead container.

I remember one photo in the Seattle Times, which must have come from early March, showing a purplish dawn that flooded the Kingdome with its pale, diffused light. Shafts of light flashed through the open air between the concrete ribs and disappeared somewhere inside the stadium. That was the only time I ever thought of the Dome as something beautiful.

In its dying weeks, the city’s monolith was becoming something different from the building I had known. With the now complete Safeco Field standing as a symbol of a more stylish downtown, with its exposed-steel design and upscale atmosphere, the Kingdome had itself come to look more and more like Safeco.

I found myself wondering why the Dome hadn’t looked like this before, why the internal shape of it had been so grossly obscured by various superfluous and ugly coverings.

As it was undergoing final preparations for dissolution, I was out of the country. I was on the return flight, I suppose somewhere in southern Quebec, as the Kingdome was destroyed. Coming back from the airport, I saw the pile of dust, girders and structural remains left over, and was struck by its brevity: The Kingdome had lived for not even a full generation.

I find myself generally fascinated by the question of what happens to things after they’re officially dead, whether it’s a satellite, a car, a television, or a person, and the Kingdome was not an exception.

Although nothing spectacular happened to the rubble of the Dome, I returned to the site several times to look at the piles of undifferentiated rubble and support columns writhing in the dust, and, of course, the beginnings of the new football stadium replacing the Kingdome.

The explosion had drawn huge crowds, both in Seattle and around the world, but then, as the actual material of the Kingdome was being removed, no one was watching.

I guess that rubble was later used to construct highways or office complexes, but meanwhile, the memories created by and within the Dome remain, and that’s what’s fascinating: how our memories retain and elaborate upon people, events, and experiences that are long since dead.