Good morning. This is LEADOFF, today’s first look at Atlanta sports.
Exactly one month from today, Mercedes-Benz Stadium will open -- all except the roof, that is.
A marathon project in the works for a decade, and under construction for almost 3 ½ years, is now on the final sprint to opening day.
“The first meetings I remember having about it were in late 2007, early ’08, with Mayor Franklin and Gov. Perdue,” Falcons president and CEO Rich McKay said this week, referring to former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. “So we have been talking about this for a long time, and an awful lot of people have worked really hard to get us to this point.
“It’s definitely hard to believe that we’re actually just 30 days away.”
On Tuesday, workers began installing the artificial-turf playing surface, a development that will make the stadium look much closer to game-ready. Protective covers were being removed from the upper-deck seats, a sure sign fans will be sitting there soon.
But also on Tuesday, the CEO of Falcons/Atlanta United parent company AMB Group, Steve Cannon, said the retractable roof won’t be ready to retract when the stadium debuts. Events from the stadium’s Aug. 26 opener -- a Falcons-Arizona Cardinals preseason game -- through September and into October (and possibly beyond) will be played under a closed roof while work is done on automating the retractable portion. Suddenly, AMB Group went from saying the roof would be fully operable from the start to saying it expects to be able to play games with the roof open sometime this year.
Right now, the roof can be slowly opened and closed, one petal at a time. But to function for events, the roof is supposed to open and close in about 12 minutes, all eight petals in unison. There’s a ways to go on that.
The first-of-its-kind roof ultimately should be one of the building's signature features, along with the 63,000-square-foot halo-shaped video board and the striking exterior architecture. But, for now, the roof will be closed for events. (See much more about that here.)
Other than the problematic roof, McKay described most of what remains to be done as finishing touches.
“Look at it just like you would look at building a big ol’ house, although this is a 2 million-square-foot house,” McKay said. “Right now, what you’re doing is a lot of completion of the interior build-out, a lot of furniture, a lot of fixtures.
“Every day it seems like some new area gets completed. ... But when you have 2 million square feet, it’s just a lot of different areas to complete.”
He remembers seeing another new local stadium -- albeit one without a roof -- at about this point in the process earlier this year.
“I went to visit SunTrust Park with about three weeks to go, and I said to Derek (Schiller, the Braves’ president of business) on the way out, ‘Derek, boy oh boy, you guys have got a lot to finish,’” McKay recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, but it’s all in the finishing phase.’ And I went to their opening night, and everywhere I had seen before was finished. So I take comfort in that.”
READ ON ...
Don't miss Jeff Schultz's digi-blog, which went to Mercedes-Benz Stadium in search of the button to close the potentially retractable roof. Read it here.
