Courtesy of MLS4TheLou, HOK, and Snow Kreilich Architects
An interior view of the soccer stadium
On Saturday, the MLS4TheLou ownership group, comprised largely of members of Enterprise's Taylor family along with World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh, released renderings of the Major League Soccer stadium it's hoping to build near Union Station. A release stated that the ownership group has been working with HOK and Julie Snow, co-founder of Snow Kreilich Architects on the stadium, which will seat 22,500 to 25,500.
On April 18, Major League Soccer announced that the league will expand to 30 teams, virtually guaranteeing St. Louis a team, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch first reported.
The stadium's design allows fans to enter from all sides and is topped with a translucent Ethylene Tetra Fluoro Ethylene canopy, which allows light to pass through the canopy to the field, ensuring both good visibility and that grass will be able to grow. The field's pitch will sit 40 feet below street level. The area surrounding the stadium will be a Downtown West District of "mixed-use retail, restaurants, and gathering spaces that will be open and accessible to City residents and visitors year-round." There are also plans for an alley with pop-up local retail spaces.
In a release, Carolyn Kindle Betz, president of the Enterprise Holdings Foundation, who has spearheaded the soccer bid, stated, "Over the last six months, we’ve visited numerous MLS stadiums to review designs and learn best practices in order to be as thoughtful as possible to our proposed stadium here in St. Louis. While they’re still a work-in-progress, we’re excited to finally give fans a glimpse at our proposed stadium.”
Courtesy of MLS4TheLou
A cross-section of the soccer stadium
Enterprise's Taylor family and Kavanaugh launched a bid for an MLS team in October 2018. Last month, MLS Commissioner Don Garber visited St. Louis to meet with the ownership team and called St. Louis' support for bringing a Major League Soccer team here “fantastic and remarkable.”
Courtesy of MLS4TheLou
One of the entrances to the soccer stadium
Once the bid is secured (which has not officially happened...yet), St. Louis' team will be one of the few professional sports teams to be majority owned by women, many of them members of the Taylor family. In a release, Betz stated that “it has been an amazing 36 hours for our effort to bring an MLS team to St. Louis. With Major League Soccer’s announcement that the league will expand to 30 teams, combined with being able to share our initial stadium design plan, we are inching closer to making this a reality for St. Louis."
The ownership team has received a show of support from the city's aldermen. In November 2018, the board of aldermen passed a tax incentive plan that included an exemption of the sales tax on construction materials for the future stadium and use of its site, a parcel of land west of Union Station. Mayor Lyda Krewson has called the potential stadium an “excellent business deal for our community.” However, earlier this week, city aldermen didn't expand its port authority, which would have provided for construction revenue via a 1 percent sales tax at the stadium site.
