David Briggs: A dome on the Glass Bowl? It almost happened

Jun. 12—Fifty years after it would have opened, it remains one of the great what-ifs in our city's history.

What if the University of Toledo had built a roof over the Glass Bowl, and, in the spirit of the Astrodome, given us the Glasstrodome?

Come again?

Yes, believe it or not — and here's betting only readers of a certain age will — it almost happened.

In a mostly forgotten but completely fascinating bit of local trivia, Toledo nearly converted the Glass Bowl into the second multi-purpose, domed sports stadium on the planet. The Ninth Wonder of the World — the Astrodome in Houston was billed as the eighth upon its opening in 1965 — would have been home to the Rockets' football and basketball programs.

Carty Finkbeiner, the former Toledo mayor who was a UT football assistant from 1963 to 1967, remembered the sense of wonder that greeted the possibility.

"One day in particular, there had been a story in The Blade," he said, "and everybody was buzzing about how, 'Damn, we might get a domed stadium.'"

Steadily, momentum built.

With Toledo in need of a new basketball arena to replace the old Field House, a 29-member athletic facilities committee recommended early in 1968 that the university go through with the dual-use Glasstrodome. The board of trustees then commissioned a report and imaginations ran wild.

Some proposals called for a barrel-vaulted roof to be constructed 120 feet over the existing 16,000-seat Glass Bowl — built in 1936 by the Works Progress Administration — others for a new domed stadium on the same site.

One leading contender was a new venue that would accommodate 24,000 fans for football and 14,200 for basketball, with the court placed in the end zone, flanked by permanent seats on three sides and a portable 5,000-seat grandstand on the open-ended sideline. A second deck could have been added later if the demand arose.

The stadium likely would have opened in time for the 1971 football season, perhaps sooner.

"It's not a fantasy, and it's not a dream," The Blade reported.

Until, suddenly, it was.

Today, let us raise a glass on this non-anniversary and lovingly remember the stadium that wasn't.

Or not.

In retrospect, the Glasstrodome's failure to launch — and we'll get to the reasons in a minute — was a blessing.

The architectural novelty of a lidded bowl would have been like a typical weekend in college, the fun trailed by head-throbbing regret the next morning.

Instead, Toledo touched up the Glass Bowl and went on build a new basketball arena across the street in 1976. The buildings — updated over the years — endure as the best stadium and gym in the Mid-American Conference.

Truly, the Rockets dodged a missile.

"Although I am personally intrigued by the idea of a domed college stadium," said Anthony Malik, a Toledo architect and president of the local chapter of the American Institute of Architecture, "I'm glad that they maintained the character of the Glass Bowl."

Still, it's fun to look back and wonder what might have been, both for Toledo and college sports.

For better or worse, the Rockets were nearly a pioneer, the Glasstrodome almost a fateful milepost on the evolutionary road of American stadiums.

Think of the landscape in the late 1960s. The Astrodome — with its hemispheric roof and first-of-its-kind artificial turf (Astroturf) — inspired wonder, but not an immediate wave of copycats.

It would be another decade before the next big domes went up — the Pontiac Silverdome and New Orleans' Superdome in 1975 — and many years before a handful of colleges joined the party, most notably Syracuse, which opened the 50,000-seat Carrier Dome for football and basketball in 1980.

Toledo would have built the first domed college stadium in the country, and, given the era's minimal focus on preservation, there's no telling what it might have spawned.

How about a golden dome over Notre Dame Stadium? A ceiling for the Big House? A top for the 'Shoe?

"In the '60s and '70s, it was more about modernity than preservation," said Robert Trumpbour, a communications professor at Penn State Altoona who wrote the 2010 book, The Rise of Stadiums in the Modern United States: Cathedrals of Sport. "When I was a kid in the 1960s, my dad took me to Shea Stadium quite a bit and Yankee Stadium was looked at as this crappy relic that probably should be torn down. And, frankly, I think they did make a mistake in tearing it down [in 2008].

"But in the '60s and '70s there was this thought that we need modernity. What's so funny is if Toledo had done that, I just really have to wonder what might have been as far as the total college landscape, and if that would have been a little bit of a game changer. Some institutions might have said, 'Well, if Toledo can do it, we ought to try it.' If Toledo had built it, would Michigan have started contemplating ways to put something over its stadium?"

So, exactly how close were we to finding out?

I suppose that depends on how you define close, but it's clear the drive to turn the Glass Bowl into a tureen at least reached the red zone, with talks ultimately becoming as heated as the dome would have been on a bone-chilled November day (or, in later years, a sub-arctic Wednesday night).

The idea first picked up steam with the endorsement by the athletic facilities committee, which Toledo president William Carlson had appointed to study the need to modernize the school's sports compound, namely the Hoover-era basketball gym. One national writer described the Field House as a "dimly lit airplane hangar."

In consultation with Brown athletic director Philip Theibert, a leading facilities expert, the committee believed the Glasstrodome was a way to take out a flock of birds with one stone. A roof over the Glass Bowl would have addressed the basketball problem (allegedly) and — in an era long before schools had indoor training complexes — served as an all-seasons training ground for the Rockets' other sports.

"The flexibility would be a wonderful thing for us," Toledo AD and football coach Frank Lauterbur said, "and we would be solving a lot of facility problems at the same time."

Unfortunately, the movement stopped just short of Toledo authorizing a full architectural study, so there are neither renderings nor answers to all of our questions, including on the roofing specifics.

But, from my understanding, after a spin through the archives, the domed proposals ranged in scope from a $4 million renovation to an $8.5 million new stadium. All of them called for a tartan basketball court that could be moved to midfield — like we see at the Final Four today — for huge games. (There was talk of a dedication game against Kentucky.)

In the Toledo community, the concept inspired both awe and ... ugh. Many suggested the dome would be too vast of a setting for basketball and questioned how the new stadium would be funded. An accounting firm informed UT it could pay for the Glasstrodome if it raised student fees from $96 to $150 per year, the highest amount allowed by the Ohio Board of Regents.

The debate played out day to day, including on these pages.

"Without going into the argument about whether or not football should be played indoors," columnist Tom Loomis wrote, "one must admit that a Glasstrodome with 20,000-spread out seats would be less than ideal for anything but football and perhaps soccer."

The next day, John Hannen offered a rebuttal headlined: "If TU Turns Down Dome, It Could Be A Great Mistake."

Of course, Toledo did, and, with respect to the legendary Hannen, a longtime Blade sports editor, it proved the great escape.

After the board was unable to pull the trigger on a project seen as too expensive for a half-measure curiosity, the dome was not to be, left to live on only in the drawing board of our minds.

Oh, and maybe one other place.

I reached out to Arthur Daemmrich, the director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution and a student of stadium history, and told I told him of Toledo's futuristic vision of old.

"This is fascinating," he said. "I should expand the piece I'm still researching ... about stadiums for an academic journal to include the ones that never were built."

Long live the Glasstrodome.

First Published June 12, 2021, 11:00am