History for the day

John Branch has an article in The New York Times about the end of an era:

Nostalgia crept over Candlestick Park like summer fog as the 49ers played what was quite possibly the final game at a stadium that few ever loved.
Its final few weeks were a blur of retrospectives of championship runs, memorable plays, papal visits, and the Beatles’ last formal concert. But, unlike most stadiums, mere settings for collective sports memories, Candlestick Park had a unique way of becoming a character in its own dramas.
Candlestick— affectionately, but not too affectionately, The Stick— was a lasting original, born of location and meteorology, a cold, dank, concrete edifice where baseball fans dressed in parkas and hot dog wrappers danced in breezy corners.
The stadium opened as the home of baseball’s Giants in 1960 (they left in 1999) and housed football’s 49ers since 1971. It had a reputation as a miserable place to watch baseball in July, but one filled with historic football moments in January.
“It was a dump,” said Dwight Clark, the former 49ers receiver who hauled in The Catch in 1982, which sent the team to its first Super Bowl. “But it was our dump.”
Clark and the baseball Hall of Famer Willie Mays were among many former players and dignitaries at Monday night’s game against the Atlanta Falcons. The former 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo was named an honorary game captain, prompting a pregame Ed-die chant.
San Francisco’s 34-24 victory clinched a playoff berth. Slotted for now as a wild-card entrant, the 49ers (11-4) would start the postseason on the road, with only a slim chance of playing at home in the conference championship game. Another victory on Sunday, coupled with a loss by the Seattle Seahawks, would hand the 49ers the division title and give Candlestick at least one January encore.
The 49ers plan to move next season to new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, about forty miles south, geographically and philosophically stretching the meaning of San Francisco in the team name. In the second quarter, the sellout crowd was instructed to hold placards that spelled out, from end zone to end zone, “Thank you San Francisco,” above the Levi’s logo.
If nothing else, the new stadium promises to be warmer. San Francisco’s seasons can feel reversed, its summers like the coldest winters. And, amid the Bay Area’s mysterious microclimates, Candlestick Point was a notoriously damp and wind-swept low spot against a hill next to the water, south of the city’s well-known tourist attractions and north of the airport.
Thus it seemed fitting that its final sporting event fell on a sunny and still December day, when the temperature reached deep into the sixties. There was no hint of fog, only the haze of barbecue smoke from the surrounding parking lots.
The mood was less that of a football game and more that of a convivial wake. The parking lots and gates opened early for revelry and introspection. Tailgating was shut down before the game to stem intoxicated loitering. Uniformed police officers were prevalent, even on the field during timeouts. Undercover officers patrolled inside and out in the guise of 49ers and Falcons fans. Widespread warnings were meant to quash the temptation of fans to poach seats, signs, or other memorabilia. (Stadium seats were placed on sale weeks earlier, for $749 a pair.) Commemorative t-shirts, a faded red that matched the stadium’s plastic seats, sold for fifty bucks at concession stands.
“We don’t want to be the guys who screw up the last game at Candlestick,” Coach Jim Harbaugh said last week.
It was in doubt until linebacker NaVorro Bowman returned an interception 89 yards for a touchdown with seventy seconds remaining to seal the game for the 49ers.
That set off a postgame celebration for many of the announced 69,732 in attendance, who lingered to salute former players such as Jerry Rice, Steve Young, and Terrell Owens. Boyz II Men sang, and Journey’s ode to San Francisco, Lights, was played before and after a fireworks show.
Candlestick was never a beloved stadium. Before it was built as the home of baseball’s Giants, transplanted from New York City, it had its detractors, from weather experts to striking Teamsters and those who supported a downtown stadium proposal. Vice President Richard Nixon threw out the first pitch in front of 42,269 fans on 12 April 1960, and the Giants lost to the Yankees in game seven of the World Series at Candlestick in 1962.
Back then, long before expansion turned Candlestick into a bowl, the stadium opened to the views of the Bay. There was no buffer from the wind. A gust pushed pitcher Stu Miller into a balk at the 1961 All-Star Game, and a reputation as a brisk and blustery ballpark was burnished, ceaselessly confirmed by highlights of baseball fans in parkas and outfielders vainly chasing pop flies.
The 49ers were not the first professional football team to call Candlestick home. The Raiders, of the fledgling American Football League, played a couple of games there in their inaugural 1960 season (the rest were at San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium, the 49ers’ longtime home), and all of 1961 there, before finding a home across the bay in Oakland.
For most of its first decade, Candlestick was a baseball stadium. But its biggest moment came on 29 August 1966, when the Beatles performed what became their final full, live concert. Only 25,000 were there on another blustery night. “We’d like to say that it’s been wonderful being here, in this wonderful sea air,” Paul McCartney told the crowd. “Sorry about the weather.”
The 49ers soon made noise to call Candlestick home, too. The open outfield was enclosed, and capacity was expanded from 42,500 to roughly 60,000. AstroTurf was installed to compensate for the effect of dual sports and notoriously soggy ground. (It was removed at the end of a 2-14 1978 season, which led to the hiring of a new football coach: Bill Walsh.)
The last game at Kezar, in January of 1971, was a loss to the Dallas Cowboys for a trip to the Super Bowl. Almost exactly a year later, the 49ers lost to the Cowboys again (in Dallas) in another conference championship, and then lost to them for the third postseason in a row at Candlestick in 1972.
The 49ers spent the next nine years toiling mostly in mediocrity, trying in vain for redemption. It came on 10 January 1982. The 49ers trailed, 27-21, with less than five minutes remaining and the ball at their own 11. Joe Montana led a methodical drive. On third-and-3 at the Dallas 6, with 58 seconds left, Montana rolled to his right, away from pressure, and lobbed a pass into the corner of the north end zone that no one could catch, except Dwight Clark, who leapt and snagged the pass.
The Catch will live as Candlestick’s most famous moment. (Although Clark was at Candlestick on Monday, Montana sent his regrets in a video message.)
There were other seminal moments: a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1987, quarterback Young’s serpentine 45-yard touchdown run against the Vikings in 1988, another championship win over the Cowboys in 1995, and The Catch II, a completion from Young to Owens with three seconds left to beat the Packers in January of 1999.
The Giants abandoned the place after the 1999 season, for the warmer and classier confines of a retro-cool bayside park closer to downtown, leaving behind the ghosts of Mays, McCovey, and Marichal, among so many others. But the baseball moment that stood out above all others came in October of 1989, before game three of the Bay Bridge World Series with the Oakland Athletics. A deadly magnitude 6.9 earthquake shook the area. The game was postponed for ten days before the A’s completed a four-game sweep.
Candlestick, built of reinforced concrete, survived the tremor with little damage. But it spent most of its final 24 years rusting along the bay, its orange and red seats faded by sun and rain, awaiting the fate that undoes nearly every sporting shrine.
On a Monday night in 2011, two power failures turned Candlestick black during a nationally televised game between the 49ers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. By then, Candlestick was doomed, efforts to renovate it exhausted in lieu of a new stadium next to the team’s suburban headquarters.
Plans call for Candlestick to be torn down in the coming months, eventually replaced by the predictable menagerie of homes, commercial buildings, and office space that mark progress. Weather and fog and sea gulls may be the only lasting reminders that a stadium once stood there, to which future generations might well ask why...

The article referred, in some copies, to a quotation about San Francisco’s weather that has been erroneously attributed to Mark Twain through the years. As earlier New York Times articles have noted, there is no evidence that he ever said: “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.”

Rico says its ben decades since he was at the 'Stick, and he won't miss it... (And, if Mark Twain didn't say that, he should have...)