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Katherine Bond has a complicated relationship with her neighbor down the street.
Bond has lived on Panoramic Hill, an enclave of historic homes in Berkeley, Calif., for 35 years. Several times each year, Bond’s neighbor hosts large gatherings that bring a lot of noise and commotion to an otherwise peaceful neighborhood. In fact, there was one happening Friday night with a guest list that included a 73-year-old millionaire from out of town and his 24-year-old girlfriend.
A few years ago, Bond’s neighbor got a costly facelift that had the whole neighborhood talking. Bond found it all a bit scandalous, considering her neighbor, Cal’s Memorial Stadium, recently turned 102.
“If I were the queen of the world, I wouldn’t have put it there,” Bond said. “I wouldn’t have done any remodeling on the stadium. If I had been in charge, I would have created a world-class earthquake study center and put the stadium someplace that was a little more central with safer access.”
Built in 1923, Memorial Stadium straddles the Hayward Fault in Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon and sits directly adjacent to homes on Panoramic Hill. The close and sometimes contentious relationship between an old stadium and its neighbors is something that could only happen in a college town, where the boundary between big-time sports and quiet domesticity is constantly shifting.
Old stadiums are some of college football’s most visible and iconic landmarks. There’s Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wis., and many others that date to the 1910s or 1920s. If those stadiums were built today, they’d be surrounded by parking garages, mixed-use retail spaces and luxury apartments. Because these stadiums were built in a different era, the surrounding neighborhoods have had to absorb the changes that come with college football’s evolution into a multi-billion-dollar entertainment product.
Cal football games have been part of life on Panoramic Hill for decades, and many residents say they enjoy the atmosphere. The streets are blocked off to outside traffic, which gives those fall Saturdays a nostalgic glow. Kids sell snacks and bottles of water to fans passing through the neighborhood, and their parents pull out coolers and lawn chairs to watch fans walking into the stadium.
Memorial Stadium sits between Cal’s campus and Berkeley’s Panoramic Hill neighborhood. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
At least for some residents, conference realignment has dampened the enjoyment. Cal’s move to the ACC has meant more matchups like Friday’s win against North Carolina, which inevitably drew morbid curiosity because of the headlines surrounding UNC coach Bill Belichick. The game kicked off at 7:30 p.m. local time, meaning residents had to deal with light, noise and foot traffic late into the night.
“When it was smaller and the visiting teams were local, it was a little slower,” said Berkeley resident Michael Wallman. “The new style is where you have a lot of out-of-towners. It kind of kills the vibe.”
Game days can create headaches for nearby residents, but they also create entrepreneurial opportunities. When these stadiums were built a century ago, planners weren’t thinking about what to do with tens of thousands of cars. In Ann Arbor, home to the largest stadium in the U.S., a microeconomy has emerged to handle game-day traffic.
When Helen Giordani bought her house in Ann Arbor’s Lower Burns Park neighborhood in 2011, she inherited the previous owner’s parking business and a map showing the precise way to park 25 cars in her yard without blocking anyone in. She learned that the neighbors on her block have their own parking consortium with unwritten rules, including one inviolable tenet.
“You do NOT undercut,” Giordani said, recalling a tense scene when a teenager showed up with a sign advertising parking $10 below the neighborhood rate. “This whole block negotiates what we think the best price should be.”
On a recent Saturday morning, Giordani handed out her famous chocolate chip cookies while directing cars into every inch of her front yard, making sure nobody’s bumper blocked the sidewalk. The secret to a well-run parking operation is to be both friendly and firm, she said. A car that misses its mark by even a few inches can throw off the whole operation.
“It’s kind of like Tetris,” Giordani said.
Helen Giordani’s chocolate chip cookies help her front-yard parking lot stand out next to Michigan Stadium. (Austin Meek / The Athletic)
Giordani’s parking operation is more than a business. She’s become close with many of her regular customers, listed in her phone with names like Two Drunk Guys, High Maintenance Dad and Dallas Steve. The regulars threw her an impromptu baby shower when she was pregnant and brought stacks of Michigan gear for a Ukrainian exchange student who stayed with her.
Along with the happy reunions, there are somber moments each year when Giordani realizes one of her regular customers has died or stopped traveling to games. Those spots are soon claimed by someone else, and the circle of life continues.
Turning her yard into a parking lot for six or seven Saturdays a year means Giordani has to make sacrifices. She wanted to put in raised garden beds but realized they would take up two whole parking spots. Going out of town for a weekend in the fall? Making a run to the grocery store on Saturday afternoon? Forget it.
“It’s all-consuming,” Giordani said, “but I do love the atmosphere.”
In general, people who choose to live near a college football stadium know what they’re signing up for. Ann Hanson, a longtime Ann Arbor resident, has made peace with the Saturday football crowds. Still, she was apprehensive about last month’s sold-out Michigan Stadium concert featuring country music star Zach Bryan.
The concert promoter, AEG, said the crowd of 112,408 was the largest for a ticketed concert in U.S. history. Streets in Hanson’s neighborhood filled up hours before the concert began, just as they would before a football game against Michigan State or Ohio State. The concert-goers were well-behaved, Hanson said, but with Michigan and other universities looking for ways to fill revenue gaps, she worries that the concert’s success will lead to more big-ticket events that disrupt life in her neighborhood.
“I signed up to live in the shadow of Michigan Stadium for 6-8 home games a year, plus a couple other big events. I did not sign up to be in the shadow of Pine Knob,” Hanson said, referring to a 15,000-seat amphitheater in nearby Clarkston, Mich.
Near Camp Randall Stadium, residents have learned that a little neighborhood outreach can go a long way. Doug Carlson, president of Madison’s Vilas Neighborhood Association, said school officials meet with representatives from surrounding neighborhoods each year to talk about the upcoming football season. There’s also a meeting before each home game so residents are prepared for road closures, pregame flyovers and other potential disruptions.
Wisconsin’s Camp Randall Stadium opened in 1917. (Orlando Ramirez / Getty Images)
In 2003, Wisconsin students launched a campaign called Rolling Out the Red Carpet to promote a friendlier atmosphere in and around the stadium. Neighborhood relations have improved steadily since then, Carlson said.
“Twenty or 25 years ago, we used to have a lot more issues with trash, some minor vandalism, noise, tailgating, things like that,” Carlson said. “Over time, a lot of those issues have improved. We’re kind of working our way up the apple tree. Rather than dealing with people peeing in our yards, we’re dealing with picking up candy wrappers.”
Berkeley, a town known for its activism, has an especially colorful relationship with big-time college football.
In 2006, protestors occupied a grove of oak trees slated to be cut down for the construction of a new athletic center. The standoff lasted 21 months before the protestors finally came down from the treetops in September 2008.
Bond was among the neighbors who opposed the construction of the athletic center and the renovation of Memorial Stadium, which was completed in 2012. The university took on reported debt of $445 million to finance the project, almost 300 times the cost of building the stadium in 1923.
With more night games at Memorial Stadium, Bond worries about the impact of the lighting and noise on barn owls and other wildlife in the area. And because a single winding road connects Panoramic Hill with the rest of Berkeley, she has catastrophic visions of what might happen if an earthquake or a wildfire struck during a Cal football game.
“Imagine a fire starting,” Bond said. “People panic. They can’t help it. They jump in their cars and get to where the stadium intersects, and then all the other people in the stadium are panicking and running around. You can’t get emergency vehicles in because there’s a flood of people and vehicles.”
Other neighbors aren’t as concerned. Because of its proximity to the stadium, Panoramic Hill is often first in line for disaster preparedness measures, including the thinning of brush and eucalyptus trees on the hill, Berkeley resident Kevin Casey said. Cal’s home attendance averages around 39,000, a fraction of the crowds in Madison or Ann Arbor, and stadium-goers have public transit options to cut down on the traffic.
For Casey, being a few steps from Memorial Stadium on game day is part of the charm of living on Panoramic Hill. It forces everyone to slow down, and that’s not such a bad thing.
“The energy is amazing,” Casey said. “It’s Berkeley, right? Anyone who’s a major football fan would laugh at it compared to an Alabama game. But the fraternity’s out in full force. It’s all just happening right at the end of the street. It’s amazing to be able to live around that.”
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