A Funny Thing Happened...
...on the way to the New Haven Coliseum.
About 20 minutes ago, they blew it up.
Yale students, smart kids that they are, held a contest to see how much of an earthquake the implosion would cause.
You will all remember the Coliseum, of course. Once upon a time it was an active attraction for New Haven and the Connecticut suburbs. Even before going to college, I saw the Police play there, the "Ghost in the Machine" tour, in 1981. The Go-Gos (the Go-Gos!) warmed up for them, and the crowd liked them so much, they were called back for an encore. I saw the J. Geils Band there in, I think, 1980. I saw U2 there, with opening act Marshall Crenshaw—they were playing "October" at that point. And I'm pretty sure I saw the Grateful Dead there, but my memory of Dead shows is hazy. Could have been New Haven....
In any event, the Coliseum couldn't really make a go of it, and truth to tell, it was a classic example of bad urban planning. Designed to draw people in from the suburbs, it worked—about once every two weeks. The rest of the time, it sat there, an empty, ominous hulk of a building not far from the New Haven Green. You wouldn't want to walk around it at night. It squashed the neighborhood like a massive brick that plunged from the sky.
And then it started falling apart—the upper level garages rusting out so badly that, rather than repair them, the city just gave up and closed them off.
Soon, the Coliseum was playing host to minor-league hockey and monster trucks.
Now they've blown it up. (I would have gotten up early to watch that.) The area will be redeveloped with new housing and retail, part of New Haven's ongoing renaissance. There will even be cobblestones. Drivers exiting off I-95 and I-91 won't have to pass by a building that looks like a really big mausoleum any more.
Still, there's a part of me that will miss the Coliseum. Just like there's a part of me that misses the Police, and Jerry Garcia, and being 17 years old, driving up to New Haven and hearing a rock concert, jumping up and down in my seat and cheering without a care in the world except having enough money to get some food and gas after the show....
