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Originally Posted by someone123
For what it's worth, I am not sold on the idea of building a stadium downtown, and the reports that have come out recently echo this sentiment.
I've never seen a large stadium that has been well-integrated into fine-grained urban fabric around it. The best stadiums have decent entrances and then large areas that feel more or less like Cogswell. These are the ones served with subways and rapid transit that Halifax probably won't have for a long time. The worst ones have huge areas of surface parking. Either way they're dead most of the time and then kind of annoying when events are on.
Keep in mind that in Halifax there's also a desire to start with a simpler stadium design. There are no major sports teams that can be relied on to draw huge crowds. As a result, the budget will be much lower than with other major stadiums in large cities, and the capacity to deal with an unusual waterfront site will be limited.
Putting a stadium out in the middle of nowhere is also bad, but Shannon Park is a reasonable happy medium. There can be temporary ferry service, decent bus service, and some mixed-use development nearby that can be planned with the stadium in mind.
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I generally agree with you. A Downtown stadium, if designed cheaply, could be awful. My concern about Shannon Park is that same lack of capacity that worries you about Downtown. To accommodate a stadium, the city could end up taking half the site (it's what they wanted before) and the whole area could easily become a sea of surface parking. Building underground or a parking garage is expensive and there would be limited ability to share parking with residential (sharing can work with office but that's not what will be built at Shannon Park). Building a huge swath of surface parking would destroy Shannon Park's redevelopment potential. This is approximately what 3,075 cars on the surface would look like (grey area = 30 acres built to the approximate lip of the slope, yellow is what would be left to develop).
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