urbanSTL

Because we weren't tailgating we parked Sunday for the Rams game at Ballpark Village and paid $10. Then we walked past a number of garages a couple of blocks closer charging $5, $7 and $10. I doubt many local fans will be going back but I noticed a number of Vikings fans there. My guess is BPV will probably catch the out-of-town visitors for Rams games.

I checked out BPV twice when I was home last week. The first time, we had tickets for the game so we just stopped in before to check it out and have dinner at Cardinals Nation. The second time was also during a game, but it was in the middle as we did a bar hop from Joe Buck's, to Flying Saucer, to BPV, before finally end the night at 360 after the game. I thought it was awesome. I was talking to my brother about it and we agreed that this is what you would do if you just visiting St. Louis: Go to a Cards game and check out the Cardinals neighborhood (if you're not particularly an urbanist, anyways). In that sense, I felt like I was seeing and experiencing St. Louis through the eyes of an outsider, and I was very impressed by what I saw.

The crowd for the Blues Ice Breaker is encouraging, both for BPV and for the Blues. I thought it was kind of strange that BPV had a permanent Blues feature in the wall painted with the note across from the majestic store but there was no permanent presence of the Rams, at least from what I saw. I'm a huge Blues fan and generally don't care about the Rams, other than the fact that they're St. Louis's team, or the NFL, so I didn't really care too much and found it kind of cool.

stlien wrote:

dweebe wrote:Because we weren't tailgating we parked Sunday for the Rams game at Ballpark Village and paid $10. Then we walked past a number of garages a couple of blocks closer charging $5, $7 and $10. I doubt many local fans will be going back but I noticed a number of Vikings fans there. My guess is BPV will probably catch the out-of-town visitors for Rams games.

Going back to park at BPV? Or going back to hang at BPV?

My thought was some people would use the BPV lot to tailgate before Rams games and then maybe got back inside to watch the later games.

We'll see.

dweebe wrote:

stlien wrote:

dweebe wrote:Because we weren't tailgating we parked Sunday for the Rams game at Ballpark Village and paid $10. Then we walked past a number of garages a couple of blocks closer charging $5, $7 and $10. I doubt many local fans will be going back but I noticed a number of Vikings fans there. My guess is BPV will probably catch the out-of-town visitors for Rams games.

Going back to park at BPV? Or going back to hang at BPV?

My thought was some people would use the BPV lot to tailgate before Rams games and then maybe got back inside to watch the later games.

We'll see.

That's a negative. No actual tailgating allowed. They have their own 'tailgating experience' that they're marketing but you can't actually tailgate in the parking lot.

^Correct. The Rams logo is directly across from the Blues.

If the Cards can hold on and make a deep playoff run, it may take awhile to gauge, but it will be interesting to see if we get another "woe is us" report come November-December regarding downtown bars and BPV Blues' fans poaching.

Hopefully the Clark/Spruce corridor bars between Scottrade and Busch will benefit from BPV as pedestrian traffic between venues may increase. Washington Avenue seems like the likely loser if there is a change in patrons' imbibing patterns.

I'd also be interested to see reports from the Soulard bars with shuttles to see if their summer pregame/post game numbers were similar this year.

Looks like Detroit even in the face of bankruptcy is poised to pass the bonds for the $400 million and change for its subsidy of Hockey Town. Financing issues aside, it will be interesting to see how this takes shape... Detroit's downtown edge may get large-scale mixed-use infill by time BPV gets to Phase II on a much smaller project.

wabash wrote:I was reading the ESPN Recap of last night's Cards game when I saw this:

BIG CROWD
Paid attendance of 44,529 was the 47th sellout with five home games to go. Although there were hundreds of empty seats, the Cardinals have capitalized on the Ballpark Village development.

I thought it was interesting that a national, non-St. Louis development savvy entity picked up on BPV providing a quantifiable boost to attendance. Although they have perennially been in the top 10 and consistently in the top 5 for attendance since New Busch opened, the Cards have never topped 95% season attendance for home games. So far this year they are tied for first in the MLB with 99.2% home attendance (that number is likely to hold if not increase over the last five home games). Significantly, there were more tickets available this year, because the tickets in/on BPV are included in attendance statistics. So that's 99.2% of a larger base than previous years.

If BPV is having a tangible effect on the Cards ability to sell more tickets (and ultimately to sell tickets for more $$), I have to think that bodes will for future phases. This is exactly the kind of synergy they seemed to be looking for from the outset.

Don't the new rooftop seats count towards attendance?

Look like the Cardinals will hit 3.5 million this year.
http://espn.go.com/mlb/attendance

dweebe wrote:Like I said before: if I was the manager of BPV I'd have a couple of buses running up and down Clark on Blues game nights.

Boom! Shot called. (Walks around office with smug look.)

STL Ballpark Village ‏@BPVSTL
Announcing the Blues Trolley taking @StLouisBlues fans form BPV to Blues home games!

^ where's a proper gif when we need one? I think I just heard that BPV will also have 14 concerts over the winter to help keep the place busy.