Candlestick Park

Built for $15 million in 1958 as the home of the San Francisco Giants, Candlestick Park is an outdoor sports and entertainment stadium in Bayview Heights. The Giants played there for four decades before moving to AT&T Park (then Pacific Bell Park) in 2000.

Candlestick Park is notorious for harsh playing conditions due to its placement on the western shore of the San Francisco Bay, which has a tendency to foster very heavy winds. In an attempt to reduce the amount of dirt particles swirling in the air (as a result of the high winds) the stadium replaced their natural bluegrass with synthetic turf, only to re-plant the natural grass before the 1979 baseball season.

The City of San Francisco informed the Giants that the Stadium would be built upon confirmation of their pending move from New York City. After they moved to San Francisco, the Giants gave the park its unique name by selecting it as the winner for the name-the-park contest in 1959. Former President Richard Nixon threw the first ball on the opening day on April 12, 1960, back when he was Vice President.

Notable sporting events at Candlestick Park have included the MLB All-Star Games (1961 and 1984), two World Series (1962 and 1989), one National League Division Series (1997), three National League Championship Series (1971, 1987, 1989), and eight NFC Championship games. In 1989, the 7.1-Loma Prieta earthquake shook the stadium, just moments before the first pitch of the Game 3 of the World Series. The game between the Giants and Oakland Athletics did not take place for another ten days while engineers evaluated the damage left by the quake.

The last baseball game the stadium ever saw was on September 30, 1999, with the Giants pitted again against the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 9–4. Candlestick Park is currently the only NFL stadium that started as a baseball-only facility and has been transformed into a structure to accommodate football, seating 69,732 fans.

Other Candlestick Park events have included major concerts, most notably The Beatles final show in 1966.