St. Louis, Missouri - Busch Memorial Stadium, night - postcard, stamp 1971

• Postcard

   

• Picture / Image:  Busch Memorial Stadium - [from air at night]
• Publisher: Plastichrome / St Louis Color Postcard Co.
• Postally used: yes
• Stamp:  USA John F Kennedy 13c issue
• Postmark(s): Newark, NJ 1971
• Sent to:  Marlow Bottom, Bucks., England
• Notes / condition: 

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NOTE: All postcards are sent in brand new stiffened envelopes which I have bought for the task. These are specially made to protect postcards and you may be able to re-use them. In addition there are other costs to sending so the above charge is not just for the stamp!

I will give a full refund if you are not fully satisfied with the postcard.

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Busch Memorial Stadium, also known as Busch Stadium II, was a multi-purpose sports facility in St. Louis, Missouri, that operated for 40 years, from 1966 through 2005.[5]

The stadium served as the home of the St. Louis Cardinals National League baseball team for its entire operating existence, while also serving as home to the National Football League's Cardinals team for 22 seasons, from 1966 through 1987, as well as the St. Louis Rams during part of the 1995 season. It opened four days after the last baseball game was played at Sportsman's Park (which had also been known since 1953 as Busch Stadium).

The stadium was designed by Sverdrup & Parcel and built by Grün & Bilfinger.[6] Edward Durell Stone designed the roof, a 96-arch "Crown of Arches".[7] The Crown echoed the Gateway Arch, which had been completed only a year before Busch Stadium opened. It was one of the first multipurpose "cookie-cutter" facilities built in the United States, popular from the early 1960s through the early 1980s.

Its final event was the sixth game of the 2005 NLCS on October 19.[8] The stadium was demolished by wrecking ball in late 2005 and part of its former footprint is occupied by its replacement stadium—the new Busch Stadium (a.k.a. Busch Stadium III), located just south.

The baseball Cardinals had played at Sportsman's Park since 1920. They originally were tenants of the St. Louis Browns of the American League. Although the Cardinals had long since passed the Browns as St. Louis' favorite team, they had wanted to get a stadium of their own as early as 1920.

In 1958, Charles Farris, the city's head of development, proposed a new stadium downtown as the core of a plan to revive a 31-block area of the business district. The original design of the stadium had called for a baseball-only format, but the design was altered to accommodate the football Cardinals, who had moved in from Chicago after the 1959 season and shared Sportsman's Park/Busch Stadium with the baseball Cardinals.[citation needed] With support from the local Chamber of Commerce, the Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation was established in September 1959; it was given power of eminent domain, which it used to condemn the city's small Chinatown, the Grand Theater (a strip club), and various warehouses and flophouses.[1]

Groundbreaking occurred on May 25, 1964,[2] and construction took just under two years. The plan also included parking garages, a hotel (a Stouffer's hotel), and office buildings.[1] A few years later, it also became the new home of the Spanish Pavilion from the 1964 New York World's Fair.[9] The stadium opened on May 12, 1966, one month into the baseball season, as Civic Center Busch Memorial Stadium. However, the "Civic Center" part was almost never used, and most people called it simply Busch Memorial Stadium.

The stadium's grass was replaced with AstroTurf in 1970,[10] in part because St. Louis' notoriously hot summers made it difficult to keep the grass alive. The Cardinals retained the traditional dirt skin infield for eight seasons, then converted to sliding pits when the surface was replaced for the 1978 baseball season.[11][12] With artificial turf, the playing conditions at Busch Stadium were among the hottest in baseball,[13] with temperatures well above the local official readings.[14][15]

Anheuser-Busch (who owned the baseball Cardinals at the time) bought the stadium in 1981 for $53 million and removed the "Memorial" from the stadium's name, becoming simply Busch Stadium; the price included the parking garages.[1]

Over the years the grounds became home to bronze statues of Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Dizzy Dean, Rogers Hornsby, Red Schoendienst, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, James "Cool Papa" Bell, George Sisler, Jack Buck, and Ozzie Smith.[citation needed]

Following Busch's last 1995 event—the Rams' October 22 game prior to the opening of the now-Dome at America's Center—the Cardinals retrofitted it into a baseball-only stadium. A large section of the upper deck outfield seats was closed, replaced with a hand-operated scoreboard and flags commemorating the Cardinals' retired numbers and World Series championships. The stadium's original natural grass field was restored, and the outfield walls were repainted green from their original blue.[16]

Busch Memorial Stadium was originally slated to be imploded like most modern-day stadium demolitions to be able to finish construction on the new stadium in time for the 2006 season. Due to fear of damaging the nearby Metro subway and stadium station, it was decided to tear down the stadium with a wrecking ball, piece-by-piece, over a period of a few weeks.

Demolition of the stadium began at 3:07 p.m. CST on November 7 and was completed shortly after midnight on December 8, 2005.

Part of the footprint of the old stadium is now occupied by the outfield of the current stadium. The Cardinals had planned to build Ballpark Village on the site of the stadium ($320 million for the first phase). It was to consist of boutiques and restaurants, condominium apartments anchored by the new headquarters of Centene Corporation — all to be built in time for the All-Star Game in 2009.

None of the construction had occurred until groundbreaking ceremonies on February 8, 2013, and locals derisively referred to its rain soaked unfinished status before that date as "Lake DeWitt"—after Cardinal President William DeWitt, Jr. The Cardinals in March 2009 announced the site would be used for a softball field and parking during the game.[17]