In the early 1970s came new urban, spare-tire-shaped, Brutalist concrete stadiums like Riverfront in Cincinnati and Three Rivers in Pittsburgh. (Both have since been razed.) Mayor Daley floated schemes to construct a new stadium for the Bears — some with a dome or partial dome — but insisted that Soldier Field could be retooled far more cheaply.

Eager to prod Daley into building a new stadium, Halas warned that if the mayor dragged his feet, the Bears might be forced to relocate in the suburbs, as the former Boston Patriots had done. Arlington Heights, Ill., was one locale mentioned. Daley threatened back that if Halas dislodged the Bears, he would sue to prevent the team from using his city’s name. According to the Ford book, Daley was said to have told Halas, tauntingly, that in that case, “I wonder how many people will come out to see the Arlington Heights Bears, George.”

The Bears stayed, but help was still badly required for what a 1975 Chicago Tribune editorial called “the great white elephant by the lake.” In 1995, after years of bargaining, the team’s president, Michael McCaskey — Halas’s grandson — raised the possibility of moving the Bears to Gary, Ind. Mayor Richard M. Daley — son of Halas’s old sparring partner — suggested at one point that the team try Alaska.

Finally the firm of Wood + Zapata and the architect Dirk Lohan — grandson of the renowned modernist Mies van der Rohe — designed a postmodern structure to be built within and above Soldier Field’s old neoclassical shell, and the project was completed in 2003. The new design added luxury seating and updated facilities but reduced capacity to 61,500 seats, which makes it too small, for example, to meet an N.F.L. requirement to host a Super Bowl. The Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin, wrote, “With its spaceship-like seating bowl crammed between the stadium’s legendary rows of Doric columns, the stadium is Klingon meets Parthenon, an architectural close encounter of the worst kind.”

Kamin was far from alone in his criticism. Others thought the new stadium looked like “a giant egg in a giant egg cup” or “a fat man trying to wedge himself into a skinny man’s shorts.”

But The New York Times’s architecture critic at the time, Herbert Muschamp, called the newly remade Soldier Field a “dynamic remodeling,” adding that “clients need to be less fearful of provoking criticism.” Using what might be construed as a football metaphor, Muschamp went on to write: “It is inherently aggressive to move things forward. Those with the courage to do so should not be surprised if they become targets of others’ aggression in return.”