Do you love the football talk on history and evolution? Then wait till you check out the original article Tim wrote Building and Opening Harvard Stadium.

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Transcription of When Harvard Stadium Opened with Tim Brown

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes at PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And it is Tuesday.

As we have traditionally done over the last couple of years, we have visited with Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com, talking about another aspect of great football history that maybe isn't mainstream and we don't know much about. Tim has done some digging and studying on it, and he's got a great one for us tonight. Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thanks, Darren. Yeah, looking forward to talking about cementing our relationship. If I can really pull in a really bad bet.

Yeah, I think that might earn some cement shoes there on that one. That's... I don't prepare these. He's just, you know, they just come right out, you know, and sometimes it doesn't come off right.

Tim is segwaying into a tidbit that he wrote a little about a year ago, a little over a year ago, or maybe it was this year, June 26. Building and opening Harvard Stadium, which is, you know, a great iconic stadium of college football that, you know, the cathedral, I guess, of football. So maybe, Tim, we'd love to hear about the history of what you have on this one.

Yeah, so Harvard Stadium, you know, I'm happy to report that I did see one game there. I went and saw Harvard Yale there 20 years ago or so. And it was; I've only had obstructed viewing seats on two or three occasions, and that was one of them.

There's, atop the stadium, there's these big cement pillars. And my seat was directly behind one of those. So I paid the full ticket price.

But anyways. Yeah, so it gives me visions of the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium where the Browns used to play, the old Browns. And the same way you get up on those upper levels, you have these giant pillars in the way, just half the field.

Well, yeah, that's I mean, I've done the I-beam thing at the Old County Stadium and Tiger Stadium, but. This was a much, this was much bigger than an I-beam. So anyways, but, you know, that Harvard Stadium was built in 1903.

Prior to that, they played basically right next door to where they built Harvard Stadium. It's, you know, it was an open area across the Charles River from from the rest of campus. That's over near where the Harvard Business School is.

But the. So. You know, the money, you know, they had all this money to build this new stadium, and they decided to build it out of reinforced concrete, which at the time was just this.

You know, exciting new way to build, you know, major structures. But this was the first, you know, sizable structure in the world to be built of reinforced concrete. So, the Romans had figured out how to do concrete.

And then we'd forgotten the magical, you know, of that for, you know, almost whatever, eighteen, nineteen hundred years. So, but, you know, they kind of got that going again. And so.

They had the money and they basically said, OK, we're going to build the start building this thing. After the baseball season is over, because they were building it atop the old baseball field. So they couldn't couldn't start building until like.

I was like, you know, half midway through June or something like that. And then it was just like Katie barred the door. You know, I mean, they literally had 800 workmen there every day trying to build this thing.

And they didn't have to dig it out or anything. They didn't. You know, it was basically just that they poured these big concrete slabs.

You know, just it's kind of like an assembly line production built one slab after another. And it was all with, you know, they it was all built with like sack creep. So, you know, they figured they had like 90,000 bags of cement.

Wow. These people poured. And so, you know, but, you know, the stadiums didn't have all the amenities that they have now.

So there were no bathrooms. There were no there were no concessions. That there were no lights.

You know, there's no maybe they had telephones in there. But I mean, literally, I mean, it was about as fair as you could have it by today's standards. You know, at the time, it's just this incredible structure.

So, I mean, they ended up it literally was being the progress of building the stadium was reported around the world, you know, among construction aficionados. Right. But so they, you know.

As we talked last week, you know, Yale would play almost all their games at home. Harvard was in the same situation. Everybody would come to Harvard because, you know, even before they built Harvard Stadium, they had a fairly sizable stadium.

They could make more money by playing there than playing at home. So so they played eight home games in the old stadium and in the tid, you know, in the tidbit itself. I've got a cool image from the newspaper showing them playing a game.

I think it's a game that they played against Carlisle. And then in the background, you can see, you know, the stadium is rising, you know, in the background. One other just quick little side note is that, and this is in the tidbit, too, there was in it when I found this article or one of the articles adjoining that article was a newspaper article about this guy in Britain named C.S. Rolls, and he had set a new world record by driving eighty-four miles an hour over the course of a kilometer.

So eighty four miles an hour was the fast, basically the fast anybody had ever driven a car. So I just thought it was interesting that that was next, you know, next door or next to this article. Then, this guy named Rolls joined up with Royce the next year.

They started a car company that most of us are familiar with and fits well with the Harvard thing, right? So anyway, they're building this thing, but they just couldn't get it completed. It is time for the last two games of the season. They wanted it to be ready for the Yale game, which was being played at Harvard that year.

So they stopped construction and then focused for about a week or two just on like cleaning the place up. They built temporary stands. They built like areas to block off the things that were still under construction.

And they had like 90,000 concrete paper bags laying around. They had to clean up. Well, it created a hell of a bonfire.

That's right. And so they did all that stuff, you know, they get it all set up. So then they play.

They wanted to I think they wanted to give it a, you know, a test run playing Dartmouth before, you know, Yale the following week. So Dartmouth comes into play and typically Harvard beat him every year. But that year, Dartmouth had a pretty good team and they end up winning 15 to nothing.

So, you know, the Harvard people are kind of peeled. Thankfully, Yale lost the same week. And so both teams were coming into the game, you know, with their most recent game being a loss.

And but everybody's excited. You know, there's you know, this is going to be the largest crowd to ever see a game at an on-campus stadium. You know, I mean, there were bigger games played at the polo or bigger crowds and polo grounds and, you know, a couple of places here and there.

But on campus, this is like they were going to have about 23 or 25,000 because the stadium wasn't complete. But sure enough, Yale comes in and beats Harvard 16 to nothing. So, you know, so they didn't score in their last in their first two games in Harvard Stadium.

They didn't even score. And they had to wait till the start of the 1904 season before they could win a game in their brand new, massive, reinforced concrete stadium. So anyway, that's kind of just the story.

But it's still, you know, kind of a cute, cute deal. And, you know, it's just. You just realize the things that we just take for granted in terms of the quality of stadiums and the the size of stadium, you know, 33,000 was what they designed this for.

And, you know, at that time, it was a U-shaped stadium. It is now again. But, you know, it was like it was considered just a palace compared to most places.

Right. Yeah. It's not a big fire hazard.

Some of the other ones were worried about collapsing as much as some of the things that were happening at that time at many games around the world. Yeah. So I mean, just the irony that they, you know, they have all this momentum and all this hype of this new stadium and then going, oh, and two and can't even score a point in their games against two rivals.

That's kind of ironic. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's other stuff, too, that I think I'm not 100 percent sure about, but I believe that when they built that stadium, they did not plan for it. They didn't plan for like wooden benches. It was just that everybody was going to sit on concrete.

Eventually, they put concrete or wood boards there. But I'm pretty sure the original intention was to sit on concrete, which is fine in September and maybe October or November. Not so much.

Yeah. Now, when did the Yale Bowl that came a few years after the Harvard Stadium? Yeah, that opened in 14. OK.

It's almost 11 years. I mean, Yale, Yale had a, you know, Yale Field, which preceded Yale, the Yale Bowl was a pretty good sized stadium. I mean, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing it was like 20.

Twenty thousand or something like that, and it increased in size over the years. But, you know, they build those stadiums and all of these, and it would go on; it went on for another 20 years. A lot of times, they'd have like if they were playing like Wesleyan or Bowdoin or something like that.

They'd get 6000 people. But so they really built the stadiums. To handle the Harvard and Yale games and to a lesser extent, Princeton, once every 24 months in the Harvard Yale game.

Well, but, you know, there were everybody. Wanted tickets, and like when they opened it in 03, because of the reduced capacity, they couldn't handle all, you know, all the some people got rejected. Right.

And so, you know, if you're a Harvard guy and you want tickets to the game and you get rejected, that's not a good thing. Yeah, probably not. Your social circles.

You have to get your Rolls-Royce and head back to Boston. Tim, that is an incredible story in so many facets. I'm still trying to absorb all this, so, you know, the whole thing with the Harvard team, the stadium, the Rolls-Royce.

You know, that's just tremendous stuff. You know, you have a lot of things going on there, and it is very historic. And you have a lot of different items like this.

So you come up in your tidbits that you're doing multiple times every week. And maybe you could share with the listeners how they, too, can partake in some of what you're writing is. Yeah, excuse me.

Yeah, just easiest thing is just go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. And, you know, you'll get an email every time that I send out a new a new post, which, you know, like you said, a couple of times a week. Other than that, you can follow me on on the Substack app.

That's probably the next best thing. But, you know, if you want to if you want to make sure you get it, you know, subscribe, get the email. And even if you don't read it, you can just delete it.

But it's up to you. Consume as you must. Well, we always enjoy reading from the hardworking historian of the gridiron up there, footballarchaeology.com. We always enjoy that and enjoy the stories.

And we love having you on here each and every Tuesday. And we'd like to talk to you again next Tuesday. Very good.

Again, look forward to chatting next week.