PONTIAC SILVERDOME DEMOLISHED ON 2ND ATTEMPT

MLIVE-DETROIT

The second attempt at a partial implosion of the Pontiac Silverdome was a success just after 4 p.m. on Monday, more than a day after the first attempt was a failure. According to Adamo, the demolition company tasked with the implosion, eight charges disconnected -- preventing the fall of the Silverdome on Sunday morning. "We had a lot of difficulty getting people out of here the other night...we don't know if someone accidentally pulled the wire off. We don't know, we're still researching that," said Adamo Executive Vice President Rick Cuppetilli. Monday's explosion seemed to be much larger, and sent the upper level of the Silverdome crumbling to the ground.

GREAT PHOTOS 

GREAT VIDEO FROM DETROIT FREE PRESS

FINALLY!! THE SILVERDOME TO BEGIN DEMOLITION DEC 3 !!

WHERE TO WATCH THE DEMOLITION

Finally! The demolition of the old Silverdome is almost here! Read this great article from Crain's about it.

The decaying Pontiac Silverdome, former home of the Detroit Lions and pain in the neck building where I used to do shows, will also be destroyed by a controlled explosion — in part.

But whether a structure is demolished over the course of weeks or months, or in just a matter of seconds or minutes, depends on a variety of factors.

The most critical is what surrounds the targeted building, said Rick Cuppetilli, executive vice president of Detroit-based demolition contractor Adamo Group Inc., which is razing the Silverdome starting Dec. 3 with a minor implosion of the stadium's upper ring.

Materials:

• Pounds of dynamite to be used: 300.
• Structural steel to be recycled: 1,700 tons.
• Rebar to be recycled: 1,800 tons.

READ FULL ARTICLE ON CRAIN'S 

PONTIAC SILVERDOME SCRAPS FOR SALE

The once light and spacious venue is now dark and moldy. What scraps are left of this once majestic building are up for sale. One would figure the copper and any other valuable wiring would have already been removed by scavengers. My question is what is left to sell?

AP A marvel of 1970s-era engineering, the stadium covered by a 10-acre, Teflon-covered roof supported by air once was THE place to see big events — the Super Bowl, the NBA finals, the World Cup, WrestleMania.

Nowadays, the 80,000-seat venue north of Detroit is a shell of its former self. The unforgiving Michigan weather shredded its roof, long strands of which hang from high above or are crumpled on the stadium floor.

The elements have wreaked havoc. Without electricity, the stadium's innards are dark and mold-infested. The weed-covered turf, on which Sanders once made tacklers look silly, is floating on a foot of water like an oversized lily pad. Workers scared off a pair of foxes living underneath the roof remnants that cover a section of Honolulu blue chairs in the lower bowl. FULL STORY HERE

READ MORE ON RK

PONTIAC SILVERDOME IS DESTROYED

SILVERDOME DESTROYED AFTER BEING ABANDONED FOR OVER A YEAR!

 Video of the Dome

I worked in this building back in the late 1980's. It was the most ridiculously designed facility I have ever encountered with the exception of Nashville's Municipal Auditorium. The Silver Dome was a huge white elephant since it's inception. Billed as an "engineering wonder" the dome's air inflated roof collapsed not long after it first opened. 2 loading doors had to be installed for shows to move in to prevent the air pressure to escape causing another collapse..

Ultra skinny aisles

The aisles! Between the rows of seats were 4ft wide....If you had a crowded show like we did,the crowd flowed down like molasses..Hated working in that building...

However...the abandoned monstrosity has been left to the elements for over a year...The taxpayers will most likely be stuck with this clean up..just like they were stuck paying for it's construction...WHO makes these costly decisions?

Here is the entire WHO IS TO BLAME story from the Oakland Press 

Open to the elements since January 2013, the Pontiac Silverdome will soon be stripped of the only thing it has left: its furnishings. Five years after buying the stadium for just $583K, real estate investor Andreas Apostolopoulos (APOP) will attempt to sell "nearly every fixture" in the Silverdome in an online auction, including seats, urinals, and even swatches of the shredded roof. APOP is locally famous for his ownership of the Penobscot Building and a failed attempt to demolish the State Savings Bank Building.

 Loading door entrance

The demise of the Silverdome's roof came about after APOP intentionally allowed it to deflate in 2013. Demolition hasn't been mentioned yet, but the SilverBowl is likely doomed. Its demise would leave APOP with a 127-acre sea of asphalt. APOP is suing his insurance company for now covering the roof repair to the tune of 23 million dollars...

BOB BAUER: THIS COUNTRY'S ROCKIN: MAY 22, 1989

WLLZ disc jockey Bob Bauer at This Country's Rockin

This was an interesting day... I spent time interviewing Detroit DJ Bob Bauer today... We discovered that we were both at "This Country's Rockin" 23 act concert at the Pontiac Silverdome..May 22, 1989.

Bob was a host and I was a show promoter watching from the audience...This concert had 23 legendary bands...but to me the audience was dead...I couldn't believe how few people actually showed up for this fabulous show..

I watched the gates all day and finally I couldn't take the stress anymore and I found the promoter and asked him why he wasn't upset with the poor attendance. He laughed abd told me they had sold the cable tv rights and they made a profit in advance!! So Bob and I talked about this show today...

PEOPLE MAGAZINE ARCHIVE STORY

With a cast and crew of some 500, a production tab of $2 million and tickets that sold as poorly as caviar at a K mart, the 23-act country-rock crossover hoedown in Detroit's Silverdome could have been a megawatt disaster. Instead, it turned into a 13-hour marathon of pickin' and riffin' that was as much celebrity bash as staged spectacle.

Dwight Yoakam

The fans, who numbered a peak 18,000 in late afternoon but even then rattled around in the 50,000-seat arena, had paid prices ranging from $22.50 (in advance) to an empty Coca-Cola can (at the gate) to see Gregg Allman, Ted Nugent and the Marshall Tucker Band on the same bill with the Stray Cats, Dwight Yoakam, Sawyer Brown and Ronnie Hawkins.

(L-R) Rock singer Ray Davies Carl Perkins & Ronnie Hawkins

But crowd size was irrelevant. The point of the This Country's Rockin' concert was to produce a 10-hour tape that will air on cable television July 4. The bill was designed, said promoter Jim Fitzgerald, "to break down the barricades and show how rock, country and blues have all been influenced by each other, and that good music is good music."

Ted Nugent

Emcee Ted Nugent teasingly threatened to make "everybody chewing tobacco swallow it at the door," but decided that "most country artists are just frustrated rockers anyhow." David Crosby and Stephen Stills performed separately but spoke briefly. The Band's Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko caught up with country rocker Ronnie Hawkins, whom they backed up in the early '60s.

Former Oak Ridge Boy William Lee Golden toted along sons Chris and Rusty, who perform as the country-rock group the Goldens. Country singer T. Graham Brown rented a Lear jet so he could keep a later gig in Austin, Texas. Gregg Allman, too, found it important enough to fly in for the afternoon.

And rockabilly granddad Carl Perkins, 57, accepted credit for inventing the genre when he wrote "Blue Suede Shoes" in 1956. "Somebody said, 'Carl, you really opened up that rock and roll door,' and I said, 'Yeah, and I stood in it and got run over by every damn one of y'all.'"

But Perkins saw the beauty of the musical merger as he took the stage at 3 A.M. for a hardy holdout crowd of 3,000. "It's like iced tea," he said. "You got tea to make it hot, ice to make it cold, sugar to make it sweet and lemon to make it sour, but it all comes out tastin pretty good."