Portland Beavers Ballpark
| Location | Portland, Oregon |
|---|---|
| Capacity | ~10,000 |
| Opened | abandoned 2010 |
| Tenants | |
| Portland Beavers (PCL) | |
Portland Beavers Ballpark was a description of a new stadium in Portland, Oregon, or in an outlying city that was being planned for the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League of Minor League Baseball. The ballpark idea was abandoned in October 2010, with no location ever determined for it; several locations were rejected due to public criticism.
Until 2010, the Beavers played in PGE Park, now Providence Park and shared it with the Portland State Vikings college football team and the Portland Timbers soccer team, which played in the USL First Division, the second division of American soccer.
In 2009, the city of Portland was awarded a Major League Soccer (MLS) expansion franchise for 2011, also to be named the Portland Timbers. Due to MLS requirements about the playing surface, seating configuration, and scheduling, PGE Park was to be renovated as a soccer- and football-only stadium and a new stadium was to be built for the Beavers.Merritt Paulson, whose Shortstop LLC organization owned both the Timbers and the Beavers, estimated that a new baseball stadium with a capacity of 8,000 to 12,000 seats, along with the renovation of PGE Park for MLS, would cost about $85 million.
On February 3, 2010, the Portland City Council approved a $31 million agreement with Beavers' and Timbers' owner Merritt Paulson to renovate PGE Park, meaning that the Beavers had to find a new place to play their home games by 2011.
In the initial proposal, funding for the new soccer team was dependent on a replacement Beavers stadium being found in Portland. Initially, the ballpark was to be built at the site currently occupied by the Memorial Coliseum, which would have been torn down. But public outcry about demolishing a Portland landmark led Portland mayor Sam Adams to propose a second site in the Rose Quarter area north of Memorial Coliseum, which proved to be too small.
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