One last look at San Francisco's now-vanished Candlestick Park

SAN FRANCISCO—The signs are still there, directing you to parking lots for a stadium that no longer exists. Bayview Hill is still there, looming over Candlestick Point. And the wind—oh yes, the wind is still there, whipping off San Francisco Bay in unpredictable and relentless directions.

What’s gone are the curving modernist wedges of concrete, the rickety escalators, the battered field that defined Candlestick Park. It was never the prettiest stadium, it was never the most beloved; even its most ardent defenders barely tolerated it. But as caravans of football fans head south on the 101 from San Francisco to Santa Clara, it’s hard not to glance over at the now-empty space at Candlestick Point and feel a twinge of … something.

“It was tough to get into, tough to get out of, and miserable while you were there,” longtime San Francisco sports columnist Ray Ratto said. “It was a constant endurance test. The fans who put up with that upholstered toilet were raising a middle finger to everyone who couldn’t handle it.”

Candlestick Park looked like the past’s version of the future, a squat reinforced-concrete multi-use semicircle divided against itself. Built in the late 1950s and opened for the Giants and the Raiders in 1960, the stadium would go on to host some of the most notable moments in American culture, from The Catch to the Beatles’ final concert as a group. The stadium hosted six baseball postseasons and eight NFC championships, plus two All-Star games and untold movies and commercial shoots.

And yet, and yet … every other stadium with such an iconic history has had armies of defenders. Candlestick had … survivors, is probably the best way to put it.

“Best thing about Candlestick Park was that it was close to SF,” said Lester Chan, a San Francisco fan who attended games at the park as far back as the 1962 World Series. The worst? “Long lines into the rest rooms and getting out of the parking lots for football games. And it is cold and windy.”

“The best thing I can say is, there was always an advantage,” 49ers legend Steve Young told Yahoo Sports. “Even when the Giants were there with the [dirt] infield. It was an odd place, but it was ours, and I knew it really well.”

Perhaps a little too well. “It was raw,” Young continued. “You’d be at your locker, and something was dripping on you. Could be condensation from when the itide was high. Could also be … whatever else.”

Candlestick’s signature moment came not from a game, but before one: October 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco. The World Series was mere minutes away from the first pitch, and tens of thousands of fans gathered in Candlestick swayed along with the earth.

“I can still close my eyes and vividly remember the terror I felt while gripping the armrest of my seat as we were jolted back and forth, the sound like a train roaring down the tracks,” USA Today’s Jeff Gluck wrote in 2014. Gluck’s mother, with him at the game, observed huge sections of the stadium roof moving back and forth. The stadium’s much-maligned industrial design didn’t collapse, preserving thousands of lives.

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“It laughed at the Earth!” Ratto said. “This ugly Stalinist stadium told the earthquake to kiss it ass. That was Candlestick’s greatest moment.”

Even despite all the nightmarish traffic, the postapocalyptic infrastructure, and the unpredictable influence of Mother Nature, Candlestick nearly got a Super Bowl. During the owners’ meetings in 1994, the NFL awarded Candlestick Park Super Bowl XXXIII. (At that same meeting, the NFL seeded the expansion Carolina Panthers into what was then the NFC West.)

However, the award was contingent on Candlestick making significant improvements. When that didn’t happen, the NFL gathered two years later and stripped the game from San Francisco, awarding it to Miami. That Super Bowl, played in 1999, matched the Atlanta Falcons against the Denver Broncos. The Falcons’ Eugene Robinson found trouble on the Miami streets the night before the game; John Elway led the Broncos to a championship and retired immediately afterward.

Now, Elway and his Broncos again return to a Super Bowl in the Bay Area. They’ll play in Levi’s Stadium, a sleek, corporate behemoth that’s the MP3 to Candlestick’s cracked vinyl. A trip to Levi’s is about as nostalgic as a trip to Amazon.com, but at least there’ll be the traffic in common. And while Levi’s will take decades to match Candlestick’s championship pedigree, at least someone’s going to celebrate winning there on Sunday.

Demolition of the stadium took place in stages to control dust in the swirling winds. Here's some amateur video of the stadium in various stages of deconstruction:

Two days before Super Bowl 50, a visit to Candlestick reveals … nothing. Trucks drive around the now-barren ground, spraying water to control dust. Seagulls gather on the site of the old field. Chain-link fences enclose it all, with only those signs left to mark what used to be here. Maybe the site will one day host one of those “mixed-use developments” that look so glittering in artists’ renditions; maybe it’ll sit empty except for those signs … and, of course, all those memories.

“The best team in football played in a smoldering dump,” Ratto said. “It was a culture of shared deprivation.”

“No matter what it was,” Young said, “for twenty years, that was where all the big games were.”

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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.