Excerpt from Crain’s Detroit Business:
DETRIOT, MI – Detroit Tigers fans wandering Comerica Park for Friday's Opening Day game against the New York Yankees got their first taste of the elegant new concession stands along the concourse that encircles the field.
The team and its concessionaire, Buffalo-based Sportservice, spent several million dollars replacing the 55 portable concession stands with 19 large quartz-topped permanent brick stands to sell beer, hot dogs and other game-day fare.
The brick in the stands matches the brick through the ballpark, and each stand is adorned with several stone-carved Old English letter Ds within the brick work.
While there are fewer stands, they're larger than the portable units they replace and add a net of a dozen additional point-of-sale spots, the team said. The new stands also hide the sea of electrical wires and pipes used by the old wheeled stands.
Replacing the portable stands opens additional views of the field, and the team believes it now will be able to sell additional standing-room-only tickets for high-demand games because of the new concourse arrangement.
A specific cost for the work, which was split between the team and Sportservice, wasn't disclosed, but the total price for ballpark improvements this year was in the millions, said Michael Healy, the Tigers' vice president of ballpark operations since 2005. He said it was the most significant renovation to the stadium since the $10 million digital scoreboard and additional electronic signs and TVs were installed in 2012.
The general contractor for this year's improvements was Boston-based Shawmut Design and Construction, which handles renovation and construction work for most Major League Baseball teams, Healy said.