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Monster Park Information
Monster Park became the new name of the stadium at Candlestick Point in September 2004. Monster Cable, a San Francisco-based company founded by native San Franciscan Noel Lee, was selected by the 49ers as the naming partner.
Monster is known to thousands of audio, video, car, photo, computer, movie and music enthusiasts as the company that makes their electronics work better. Starting in a San Francisco garage 25 years ago, Noel Lee, The Head Monster, created the first Monster Cable to get better sound from stereo speakers. He created an instant following with music lovers, recording engineers and professional musicians with many of today's hottest music and movies being mixed and mastered in studios completely wired with Monster Cable and powered by Monster Power. Monster has deep roots in the community, being the largest privately-owned manufacturer and largest minority-owned company in both San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
Location 602 Jamestown Avenue, San Francisco, California 94124
Broke ground 1958
Opened April 12, 1960
Owner The City and County of San Francisco
Operator San Francisco, California
Surface Grass (1960-70), AstroTurf (1971-78), Bluegrass (1979-present)
Construction cost $15 million USD
Architect John Bolles
Park History
Ground was broken in 1958 as the new home of the National League's San Francisco Giants, who were moving west from New York. The Giants officially chose the name of Candlestick Park after a name-the-park contest on March 3, 1959. Prior to that, its construction site had been shown on maps as the generic Bay View Stadium. Richard Nixon threw out the first ever baseball on the opening day of Candlestick Park on April 12, 1960. The Oakland Raiders played their 1961 American Football League season at the stadium. In 1971, the NFL's San Francisco 49ers became tenants as well.
The Beatles performed their last live commercial concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966.
The stadium was enclosed during the winter of 1971-1972 for the 49ers, with stands built around the outfield. The result was that the wind speed dropped marginally, but often swirled around throughout the stadium, and the view of the Bay was lost. Candlestick Park has the distinction of being the sole remaining NFL stadium that started life as a baseball-only facility that later had a football field added. (The Louisiana Superdome, where the New Orleans Saints play, has a pressbox which was originally set up for baseball, and still is. It wraps around what was home plate, rather than being entirely along the sidelines of a football game. This means that half of the pressbox goes from the 50-yard line to the endzone, and the other half of the pressbox is then entirely behind that endzone. The seating, however, is configured for football, and always has been.) Previous baseball parks that had been converted to house football included parks such as Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, Angel Stadium of Anaheim, Mile High Stadium, Shea Stadium, and Milwaukee County Stadium. This accounts for the stadium's odd oblong design that leaves many seats on what was the right-field side of the stadium behind the eastern grandstand of the stadium during football games. Candlestick also has the dubious distinction of being the last NFL football stadium where upper-deck supports obstruct the sight-lines from the prime first-deck seating.
The Stick was also home to dozens of commercial shoots as well as the climatic scene in the Richard Rush 1973 comedy Freebie and the Bean starring James Caan and Alan Arkin.
On October 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake (measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale) struck San Francisco, minutes before Game 3 of the World Series was to begin. Amazingly, no one within the stadium was injured, but minor structural damage did occur to the stadium. The World Series between the Giants and Oakland Athletics was delayed for ten days as a result as the overall structural soundness of the stadium (and of Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum as well) was checked by engineers, while the area had some time to recover.
In 2000, the Giants moved to the new, Pacific Bell Park (now called AT&T Park) in downtown San Francisco, leaving the 49ers as the lone professional sports team to use the stadium. The final baseball game pitted the Giants against their arch-rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and occurred on an unseasonably hot day.
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