Flying First Class at Memorial Stadium

Ever since I heard that UC Berkeley was going to finance stadium renovations entirely with private money, partly by selling luxury seats, I've wondered what buyers would get for the money and how MUCH money.  And also what the hell is inside that huge new structure perched on the western rim of the stadium:



On Sunday afternoon, I got a chance to check it out at a stadium open house.  Jerry and I hiked up the hill and wandered around that massive structure, which turns out to be full of lounges and seating and bars for people who buy premium seats through the Endowment Seating Program.

Field Level Club seat

Which is not cheap.  The lowest level of the program is the Field Level Club.  For a $40,000-$60,000  one-time upfront fee, or $2,700-$4,100 annually for 30 years,  you get an uncushioned seat close to the field, between the 30-yard lines.  This includes the cost of a season ticket each year, plus parking and a guarantee that the seat will be yours for 40-50 years.

If you buy a Field Level Club seat, you get to buy food drinks at Field Club restaurant  on that level:



Owners of Field Level Club seats use this restaurant.  TV screens everywhere.

If you want to sit on a padded seat,  you can opt for the Stadium Club,  also located between the 30-yard lines but higher in the stadium.  These seats cost from $75,000-$125,000 upfront, or $5,100-$8,500 annually for 30 years.  The seats look just like the Field Level Club seats, with the addition of 3-4 inches of padding on the seat.   Among free perks:  free food and drinks at the Stadium Club restaurant/bar, as well as parking and a guaranteed seat for decades.

Bar in the Stadium Club



Looking west from the  Stadium Club

 

 

 

Stadium Club, with steps to the mezzanine

 

 

And for higher-rollers, there's the University Club a few floors above Stadium and Field levels  (in between  are broadcast and press levels that weren't open for inspection).   For these you pay $175,000-$225,000 in a one-time fee, or $11,900-$15,400 annually for 30 years. The seats and backs are lushly padded and have cup holders. You're sitting at the very top of that new structure, looking way down at the field.  

 

 

View from University Club seats

 

 

 

The University Club has a deck with spectacular views across San Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate.  And inside are lounges and bars, where the food and alcohol are complimentary.  The general public can rent the facilities on a non-game day for $9,750.

 

 

View looking west from the terrace of the University Club

 

 

A wall of windows in the University Club

 

 

 University Club lounge looking toward the football field

 

 

A bar in the University Club

 

 

 

Access to the Stadium and University club seats and restaurants/lounges appears to be strictly controlled:

 

 

University and Stadium Club seat-holders are issued ID bands



 

Yikes.  Are people actually paying this kind of money to go to a football game? I wondered.  I came home and read up.

 

People are buying these seats, but not as many as expected. The launch of Endowment Seating Program coincided with the recession. As of June 30, 2012, only 65% of the Endowment Seating was sold.  Not surprisingly, more Field Level Club seats had been sold (72%) than Stadium Club (60%) and University Club (25%).  And 82% of the buyers elected to  make payments rather than pony up the entire fee. Only $40 million had been paid on pledges of $140 million, and buyers can back out at any time.

 

If the program fails to reach the goal of $270 million from seat sales, there's speculation, per the Wall Street Journal in April, that funds might have to come from the campus to cover the bond payments.  This at a time when state funding has be drastically cut and tuition raised annually. 

 

I left feeling mildly depressed. I love UC Berkeley, and I loved being a student there, but I think fellow alums of my era will probably agree that so much showy money, such stratification of privilege, doesn't seem like the Berkeley we knew. Are we out of step? Or were the Intercollegiate Athletics powers-that-be who thought this up? The stadium needed work to be earthquake-safe, many of its facilities needed updating, and building an endowment to support intercolleagiate athletics is a nice idea. But this?

"Grandiose," is how Jerry describes it. You have to wonder if the lavish restaurants and lounges were necessary to sell the expensive seats.   Who knows.

After viewing all the fancy amenities, it was comforting to see a few of the old bleacher seats refinished and used to panel the Hall of Fame Room near the Field Level Club:

A plank from an old bleacher, refinished and incorporated into a paneled wall in the Hall of Fame

 

On another note: I was curious about the grove of native oak trees that was removed to make way for the Simpson Student-Athlete High Performance Center.  The oaks have been replaced by 134 new trees, according to a hand-out we got at the stadium.  That area has a winding path and has been newly designed and landscaped:

 

Where oaks once stood: newly landscaped path near the Student-Athlete High Performance Center (low building)

And if anyone's tempted:

Awaiting a buyer

 

How About Those BEARS?

 Cal beat UCLA!  It was a miracle!

We hied ourselves up the hill on Saturday night to get a look at the the newly-renovated Memorial Stadium and to watch what we thought was going to be a rout.  (Which it was, but not the way we expected.) 

Claudia was with us--we gave her a ticket for her birthday--and she was optimistic all the way about a Cal win, even though Cal's lost four games this season, and UCLA had lost only one.

So there we were, three semi-ancient alums perched on the new (cold) metal benches in Section K, with a good view of the field.  The scoreboards are fancy video screens, the bathrooms on the west side of the stadium are re-built, and a  new outsized press box/stadium club perches in the west rim.  Very fancy.  Also, there's a new field-level ring of corporate sponsor ads, some of which change color and background.  Distracting, but there you are; it was an expensive renovation ($474 million, including the new Student-Athlete High Performance Center).

View of the new press box/stadium clubs from outside the stadium

...and from the inside.

New 50-yard line seats, most cush-ily upholstered in gold, are available if you buy the seat for 40-50 years, for thousands dollars, through the  new Endowment Seating Program. Very un-Berkeley, in my view, but then my view is that of a 1970's-era alum,  when ROTC and military hotshots would not have a high profile at a football game.  Lots of them were present for "re-dedication" of the Stadium at half-time.   We learned that the stadium was built as a memorial to Californians killed in World War I, so I guess it made sense.

Cal takes to the field

 

 

 

 

The reverse of a card-trick card.  One was taped at  every seat in the stadium; ours were yellow.

 

Cal prevailed, despite Jerry's intermittent doom-ful predictions ("That's it, Cal's lost momentum").  One touchdown: miraculous.  Then two, three, four, all the way to 43-17.  The cold didn't matter.  The blanket I stretched over our laps fell off every time we jumped up to cheer another touchdown. It was a rah-rah,  Bruins-be-damned kind of night.

It was after 10 pm when the Bears nailed it shut, and we walked the length of campus to our car, bouyed and disbelieving.



Lyrics to the Fight Song: "Our Sturdy Golden Bear..." 

Tomorrow: A look at the Endowment Seats, stadium clubs, and High Performance Center during a stadium open house on Sunday. 

Block Party with Skywriters

At 11 am on Saturday, barricades went up at either end of our street,  Jerry carried out our patio chairs, and I moved a bunch of Safeway bakery cookies from a plastic tray to a plate (fake homemade!)

Out in front of our house a block party was getting underway to welcome a young family that just moved in.  Somebody wheeled out a grill, and the block captain, Joan, and her husband brought out bags of hotdog buns and bowls of condiments.  Other people appeared with trays of veggies, fruit salad, and desserts.

It was fun! We've lived here 28 years, but we rarely see most of our neighbors, and I like to keep up with the narrative of their lives (nosy!).  One man is recovering from a head injury, a couple presented a new granddaughter,  kids zoomed down the street on  bikes and skateboards.  The weather cooperated, and the Blue Angels thundered overhead (Fleet Week).

One of the youngest of our new neighbors

Our new neighbors have a 2 year-old and a 4-year old; the parents work at UC Davis and UC Berkeley. 





















Party gets underway

Hotdog accoutrements

 

A cat finishes off a dropped hotdog

 GEICO hired skywriters

At last--stew meat that isn't rubbery!

During my Quest for Simple Recipes, my friend Mabry gave me an easy one for stew.  She said it could be cooked on the stove or  in a crockpot, so I fished mine out of the cupboard.

I love the idea of a crockpot--throw everything in and leave it alone until dinnertime--but I've never had much luck with it or with making stew.   A little dubious,  I threw the few ingredients into the crockpot:

Vina's Stew

Stewing beef cut into 1-1/2" chunks (I used 1-1/2 pounds)
Carrots peeled and cut into 3/4" hunks (Mabry's noun, not mine)
Chopped onion (I used one)
1-2 T quick-cooking tapioca
About 1/3 cup of water.

Mabry said to use twice as many carrots as stew meat, so I did.   I stirred the ingredients  in the crockpot, put the lid on,  and set it on "Low."    It cooked from 2-9 pm.  When I tested the meat at 9 pm (we'd eaten a substitute dinner, see below), it seemed tough and rubbery,  my usual stew product.  I thought, "oh, fine, another rubbery stew," and put it in the fridge. In the meantime, I read online that boiling stew leads to rubbery meat.  I hadn't done that.  Why hadn't it worked?  Boo hoo.
\
The next day I got the stew out of the fridge,  put it in a Le Creuset pot,  added a little more liquid (white wine), stirred it up, and left it, lid on, to simmer for an hour-and-a-half.  Just before dishing it up, I added salt.

Glory be,  it was really good!   Next time, I 'll start earlier in the day and maybe use higher quality meat (less fat), but otherwise, what a good, simple meal.  Thanks, Mabry.

I'd thawed a Costco quiche as a precaution.  We had this the first night while the stew "rested" in the fridge.

Meetings: Not!

The older I get, the crankier--is this standard? 

Cranky as in "less willing to go along with something I don't want to do."  Or to put up with conditions I don't like.

A couple of days ago I went to a supermarket so I pick up a few things for dinner.  As I walked in the door I was assaulted by loud music--it was music of my era, but way LOUD.  I couldn't think, and I nearly bolted.   I asked a woman near me in the produce department if she liked it.   "It's a bit much,"  she said. No luck finding an employee to turn down the volume, but I'm thinking of writing a letter. Or, more likely,  I just won't go back.

I volunteer at two worthy nonprofits, and lately they've summoned me to meetings or workshops. One, as I've written here, was to figure out how to cover for the director of the Berkeley Food Pantry, who was hospitalized.  Made sense. Emergency situation.  I went.  Much accomplished.  But now another program I'm involved in at the Pantry wants volunteers to meet.  And the other place where I volunteer is summoning us all for an evening workshop on "Death and Dying."  Don't wanna! 

Meetings were the bane of my existence when I was employed. I rarely felt that anything got accomplished, and they were an interruption in my very full schedule of deadlines. (This was before e-mail, however. Has that taken the place of meetings? Or does e-mail summon people to more meetings?)

TVs in hospital waiting rooms also drive me nuts.   The night my father died, my sister, Jerry, and I waited at midnight in a large room with one other person and a TV blaring.  Finally, someone stood on a chair and turned it off.  Many times I've canvassed waiting rooms to see if anyone's watching the TV, and then I hunt down the remote to mute the volume, or I ask at the desk if something can be done.

I don't want to hurt people's feelings!  I don't want to trample on their rights!    But I need to stand up for mine.  Or maybe I'm just a curmudgeon.

Debate on Mute

Presidential debates always make me nervous, but I don't like to miss them. What to do? Watch on "mute," which is what I did last night:

6 pm--Settled comfortably in chair. Turned on TV, muted.   Jim Lehrer appeared (paisley tie?), then the candidates, Obama in blue tie, Romney in red.

6:02-6:20 pm--Dozed intermittently. Woke up and blue tie was talking; woke up again and red tie was talking.

6:25 pm--Woke up for good. Romney's American flag lapel pin was bigger than Obama's. What mean?  Romney trying too hard?

6:27 pm--Noticed that Romney gesticulated more, looked more animated than Obama. Bad sign?

6:32 pm--Worried. Called my friend Claudia, who I knew was actually listening. She said Romney was maintaining that he's going to "lift up" the middle class, NOT cut deficit in ways that which might harm them. Confused. Hung up.

6:45 pm--Jerry arrived home, depressed about golf game but gleeful that the A's won three straight against Rangers. Someone was going to have to fly to Texas for one more game, couldn't follow.

6:48 pm--Back to debate, still on mute. Obama looked serious, earnest, but gesticulating more. Wedding band looked wider than Romney's.

6:52 pm--Turned on sound briefly. Romney was talking about Medicare and vouchers. Instantly muted him.

6:58 pm--Jerry commented that Romney has supercilious smile.

7:12 pm--Clicked back to sound and instructed Jerry to pretend he's an Ohioian: would he listen to this and vote for Romney? Jerry said, no, Romney seemed naive.

7:20 pm--Very frustrated with Romney's give-it-back-to-the-states routine. Broken record! Where would the money come from? Jerry commented that Romney seemed very coached, then dozed off.  

7:25 pm--Noticed that Romney's hair was inert.  Didn't move! Looked like Laura Bush's in that way. Wondered if there's a special Republican-formula hair spray?

7:27 pm--Jerry and I yelled in unison at Romney, "*****!" Anxious for it to be over so we could eat dinner.

7:28 pm--Home stretch. On "mute" again. Watched final faux earnestness from Romney,  tipped off by up and down motion of eyebrows. Wondered if he dyed them.

7:30 pm--Over! Michele's mouth tight while greeting Romney Family Group. Shields and Brooks said that Obama's debating skills were "rusty." Romney "comfortable and confident." Panic!

As it turned out:

In Bill's Footsteps...

On Sunday afternoon, a group of Berkeley Food Pantry volunteers met to figure out how the Pantry was going to run while Bill, the director, recovers from a heart attack.

Brian, the minister of the church that donates space for the Pantry, had a chart on the wall showing the tasks Bill does every day of the week except Saturday:




Bill's week at a glance

 

 

I hadn't realized how much errand-running Bill does: loading up his van with food from donor-businesses, buying food from the Alameda County Community Food Bank and Grocery Outlet, being at the Pantry for deliveries.   When we volunteers show up at 1 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, the food is there waiting for us to bag and organize.  It's Bill who gets it there.

Divvying up the tasks didn't take long.  A few angelic senior volunteers stepped up to do the shopping, which I couldn't imagine taking on (the volume!  Plus what to buy?), but I offered to collect Chipotle donations from one restaurant and to open up the Pantry at 12:30 on Monday.   Jerry usually picks up the Starbuck's donations that day and loads them into the my car to take to the Pantry.  The few tasks I took on are but a tiny fraction of what Bill does and what other volunteers offered to do.

 

My first stop on Monday morning

 

 

 

 

Chipotle donation of rice and cooked meat--very popular with clients

 

 

Donations in the back of my car, ready to be delivered to the Pantry

 

 



When I arrived on Monday to open up,  I found the front room chaotic:  donations and purchases collected by other volunteers, including big plastic garbage bags of bread from Semi-Freddis, and many boxes of produce: 

 

Food to be organized: bread in plastic bags,  flats of mac 'n cheese, stacked boxes of produce



 

 

By 2 pm, the rest of the volunteers had arrived, pitched in, and gotten the room shipshape and ready for clients:

 

 



 



On Tuesday, we heard that Bill was going home from the hospital.   Hooray!  We're managing to feed the multitudes, but it's not the same without him.




Bill with Pantry volunteer Sarah a few weeks ago