Dunn Tire Park is a baseball-only facility in Buffalo, New York. It is home to
the Buffalo Bisons Triple-A baseball team. The
stadium opened on April 14, 1988 as Pilot Field, with a sell-out crowd of 19,500
on hand. Oriole Park at Camden Yards often is cited as the vanguard for the trend
in American cities towards "retro"-styled, baseball-only stadiums located in downtown
cores. The firm that designed Camden Yards, architects Ben Barnert and Joe Spear
of the Kansas City-based firm HOK Sport, Inc., actually cut its teeth on the design
of Dunn Tire Park, which opened nearly four years prior to Camden Yards. At
the time of the stadium's construction, Buffalo was hoping to secure either an
expansion major-league baseball team or a relocated team. The Montreal Expos and
Pittsburgh Pirates were often mentioned as a leading contender in the latter category
and Buffalo was one of the four finalists in the 1993 National League expansion
derby, which brought the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins to major-league
baseball. When
completed, however, the stadium seated fewer than 20,000 people. While this was
a large number of seats for a minor-league facility, it was dwarfed by many major-league
parks. Thus, the design made provisions for future expansion that would have allowed
the seating capacity to grow to nearly 40,000 by adding an upper deck above the
existing mezzanine should a major-league team decide to relocate to Buffalo. Prior
to the start of the 1999 season, Dunn Tire, a local chain of retail tire outlets,
became the naming rights holder for the stadium. |