I’m on broken record supporting the preservation of Qualcomm Stadium as the home of big-time football in San Diego, from the Chargers to the Aztecs to the two bowls, Poinsettia and Holiday.

Now that the Chargers have taken a powder, the forward-leaning talk has turned to a re-imagining of Qualcomm’s 166-acre footprint as a mixed-use project that includes a smaller stadium designed for college football and professional soccer.

The hardest working assumption appears to be that the 50-year-old Q, widely derided by the Chargers and significant others as a “dump,” must be demolished to make way for progress in the form of a sliver of river park and dorms or classrooms or garden-variety mass housing.


Stung by the Bolts’ betrayal, Mayor Kevin Faulconer has announced that he’ll take a leadership role in deciding how this publicly owned land will best serve the city and the region.

What Faulconer and his team come up with will, in large part, determine whether the mayor emerges from the Chargers pox as a political winner or a loser who got played by Dean Spanos.

Two bedrock principles, it seems to me, should guide the Mission Valley search party.

Qualcomm Stadium sits empty on Jan. 12, the day Chargers announced they were leaving for L.A. (AP )


• First, land-locked San Diego State should be offered the first right of refusal on the land. As Union-Tribune columnist Dan McSwain has suggested, more housing, while inherently desirable, would short-change the region in terms of human capital. Higher education is the gold standard of economic development.

On this score, John Moores, former Padres owner, university philanthropist and downtown developer, has been right on the money by advocating a satellite SDSU campus in the event the Chargers abandoned Qualcomm.

Bottom line, SDSU should be at the head of the line, period.

• Second, the resurrection of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium should be a first option that’s fully assessed by a mix of historians, engineers and architects before it’s demolished (at a cost upward of $70 million).


The rise of the Murph, not the Q?

Let me explain.

About a month ago, I referred to Qualcomm as a “mid-century classic,” an honorific that prompted a response from George Mitrovich, a chairman of the Stadium Authority in the 1980s.

“I would gently suggest it was (a classic) but isn’t,” Mitrovich wrote.


“Before its enlargement, San Diego Stadium, as it was known, was open to the east, with unbroken vistas to the Cuyamacas and a lovely double ring of liquid amber trees inside its walls. But, in the interest of ‘progress’ that disappeared, as our lovely oval evolved into a 70,561-seat stadium.”

To connect Mitrovich’s nostalgic dots, remember that San Diego Stadium, as the original 53,000-seat stadium was known, underwent two expansions designed to make the chronically bilious Chargers happy.

The first, in 1984, cost $9.1 million and added 8,000 seats. (By then, the beloved sportswriter, instrumental in bringing the Chargers to San Diego, had died and voters approved the name San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium.)

The second supersizing, in 1997, boosted the seating capacity to 71,500. Qualcomm kicked in $18 million to the $78 million expansion bill and bought itself naming rights that, as fortune would have it, expire on May 14.


San Diego architect Jack Carpenter, an ardent Qualcomm champion, offers this irritating (yet hopeful) pearl of wisdom: “The big (1997) addition … was done on the cheap. A recent study determined that unlike the original stadium, which is on an excellent pile foundation, the addition is on spread footings that are settling. So let’s tear the addition down. That would bring the capacity down to around 60,000 seats.”

One sweet byproduct of the Q’s largest expansion was the catalyst to build Petco Park downtown, a gift that keeps on giving. The Chargers, however, almost immediately started agitating for a new stadium of their own.

Now that the Chargers have gone to the City of Angels (and Lakers and Rams and Clippers and Bruins and Trojans), San Diego is in a position to watch the Q shed its ugly growth spurts and let The Murph re-emerge with one helluva view of the mountains.

Models abound for how the Q can be additionally shrunk to a more comfortable size for the Aztecs and a soccer team. Seating could be reconfigured to improve sight lines and foster a spacious vibe, says David Marshall of Heritage Architecture and Planning in San Diego.


As for the widespread perception that the Q is a dump, Marshall believes people overreact to chipped tile or “Coke stains on concrete,” cosmetic flaws easily fixed. As for dated amenities like the scoreboard, you can always “unplug old stuff and plug in new stuff.”

In L.A., USC is underwriting a Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum renovation that will reduce the number of seats from 93,600 to 77,500. No one would dare say that the Coliseum should be demolished to make way for a new stadium. You’d have Trojans declaring eternal war.

In my view, that’s how San Diegans should view the Murph, a landmark stadium that has all the elements (master architect in Frank Hope Jr., longevity, critical acclaim) to be declared a historic treasure.

Another fair comparison is Anaheim Stadium, a baseball park that opened in 1966, a year before San Diego’s stadium.


In 1980, Anaheim did what it had to do to lure the Rams, changing the baseball park into a multi-purpose stadium. The Rams repaid Anaheim by moving to St. Louis in 1995.

In a relatively expensive but successful renovation that dumped 20,000 seats, Angel Stadium was downsized in 1998 to a popular baseball-only venue.

The same magic could be performed inside the classic shell of the stadium conceived by Hope, architects tell me.

If SDSU drastically reduces the parking spaces, encouraging mass transit, there’d be plenty of room to grow a campus satellite around a restored Murph that comfortably seats, say, 40,000 raving Aztec fans.


As Moores’ design team hypothesized, classes or offices could be dovetailed into the sublime stadium SDSU should work around, not against.

So here I am, going on broken record again.

After a mere half century, the Murph’s bones are too beautiful to be crushed into pieces and thrown into a scrap heap.

If it happens, the reasoning had better be beyond debate.


logan.jenkins@sduniontribune.com