While it is hidden by the retractable roof on the satellite view, the new 45-degree imagery reveals what I personally think is the strangest possible thing to have in a sports stadium – a swimming pool!

Granted it seems to be more like a large hot-tub than a swimming pool, but for $100 per person you and 34 of your friends can splash about (or more accurately, crowd together) in probably the most unusual spectator spot in all of sports. It must be great on hot days, though during the worst of Arizona’s summer weather the retractable roof is closed and the massive air conditioning system is turned on.

While Phoenix’s pool is currently unique in the major leagues, a second stadium pool will be available next year when the Florida Marlins move into the new Miami Ballpark¹, seen under construction in Google’s images.

However, in this new stadium the pool may not be the most bizarre aspect. There are plans to have two massive aquariums, totalling over 17m in length, behind home plate!

This new ballpark will give a total of four stadiums with retractable roofs in the National League. Another is in Houston, where thankfully the roof is shown open and we can see the grounds crew mowing the grass.

The Astros’ ballpark is also built on the site of a former train station and is named for juice manufacturer Minute Maid. Tying these two facts together, a large model train – with a car full of oranges – runs along the stadium wall whenever a home run is scored and whenever the Astros win a game.

The final retractable roof is at Miller Park in Milwaukee.

While Google shows the roof open, we’re unfortunately not able to see the slide used by the team mascot after each home run, so take a look at it in this YouTube video. Sponsored by a local theme park, this new slide is perhaps more friendly than the one at the team’s old stadium where the mascot – who is still named Bernie Brewer – slid into a giant beer mug!

One of the more feature-laden parks in the National League is the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati².

At the entrance to the stadium is a large limestone carving called The Spirit of Baseball.

On the north side of the stands is The Gap – an open section allowing views of the city’s downtown. On the south side a pair of smokestacks commemorate the paddle steamboats which used to ply the Ohio River which runs beside the stadium³. Nearby is a Toyota truck on top of an elevator shaft. This can be won by a fan if a home run ball happens to hit a sign between the smokestacks, though I’ve not been able to discover if that has ever happened yet.

Google’s new 45-degree imagery gives us great views of ballparks in some cities, including San Francisco, where certain rotations show the stands full and a game in progress!

Along the left-field wall we can see the 24m long Coke bottle, giant mitt and miniature ballpark that make up this stadium’s family zone. And we can see kayakers in San Francisco Bay, hoping to be able to scoop up home run balls that occasionally leave the stadium!

Further south in California, the San Diego Padres play at Petco Field, where the notable feature is a century-old warehouse that was originally intended for demolition, but was restored and incorproated into the design. The Western Metal Building now houses team offices and luxury suites and the corner of the building is coloured yellow to act as the left field foul pole.

To the north of the stadium is “The Park at the Park” – accessible to the community for most of the year, and for which very cheap tickets are sold on game days.

Another stadium with a giant Coke bottle is Turner Field in Atlanta. It’s too bad that we can’t see the other huge advertising icon – a robotic cow (YouTube video) which does the ‘tomahawk chop’ motion used by the Braves’ fans.

In Pittsburgh, the Pirates honour some of their most famous players with statues outside the stadium: Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell and Honus Wagner. A fourth, for Bill Mazeroski, has been added near the south-west corner of the stadium but the Street View car visited before it was constructed.

Google’s satellite images caught the buzz of game day at a couple of stadiums:

In Philadelphia, at Citizens Bank Park, we find batting practice underway and the stands filling up while crowds of people head in to the stadium. Meanwhile, others are still in full tailgate mode in the busy parking lots.

Meanwhile in Washington it appears as though the game may be just getting underway with the stands partly full and lines of people still at the gates on the north side of the stadium.

Some notes about the other National League stadiums:

Coors Field in Denver has the highest elevation of any ballpark, with a row of seats near the top of the stands supposedly indicating the ‘mile high’ level – the nickname often used for this city. I think the row of purple seats can just about be made out in this image.

In New York, the Mets play at Citi Field and honour their home town with a ‘Big Apple‘ which lights up for every home run.

The Chicago Cubs play at historic Wrigley field, where we see batting practice in progress.

In St Louis, the 45-degree imagery shows a lot of activity at Busch Stadium. However, the field is not setup for a game, and there are crowds of people around the perimeter and the dugouts, so it may have just been tour groups visiting, or an open house.

While in Los Angeles, we can see Dodger Stadium both with and without grass.

Every stadium can be explored in more detail in the appropriate team’s section on the MLB site, and Wikipedia has good information as well.

Locations: Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin / Categories: Buildings, Crowds, Large Type, Stadiums and Sport, Street Views, Structures

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In an effort to attract families, this park features both a carousel, visible in the north-west corner of the stadium grounds, and a ferris wheel with ball-shaped cars.

Home to the Tigers, there are feline statues and motifs all over the building, including this 4.5m tall figurehead at the entrance to the stadium, flanked by two giant baseball bats. Note that the struts holding up the name sign are also bat-shaped!

The blue tank in centre field is a large fountain which gives elaborate displays between innings and after every Tiger score. Note the vehicles in each corner – the fountain is usually sponsored by one of the car manufacturers for which Detroit is renowned.

Unlike football stadiums and multi-purpose arenas, which tend to be quite generic, baseball stadiums provide architects and teams with much more freedom to add unique features to try to make their buildings attractive to the ticket-buying public.

A construction boom in the last couple of decades saw a trend towards smaller ‘retro’-styled parks topped off with design elements which range from the whimsical to the spectacular. The first of these was Oriole Park in Baltimore.

The stadium was built on former train yards owned by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and is officially called ‘Oriole Park at Camden Yards’. A former B&O building dominates the view from much of the park, and stretches the length of Eutaw Street which is closed on game days, with cheap tickets allowing access to standing areas with a view of the field.

When a home run lands in the street, the spot is marked with a plaque. See if you can also find the two orange seats inside the stadium that mark the locations of famous home runs!

There are two American League stadiums with retractable roofs. In Seattle, the satellite image of Safeco Field¹ shows the 3-section roof open and the infield apparently set up for some kind of corporate function, with tables and chairs and a small stage. When open, the roof is partly cantilevered over the train tracks which run past the stadium. Note that the sponsor’s huge logo is clearly visible whether the roof is open or closed.

Unlike virtually all other domed stadiums, the roof here does not fully enclose the facility to allow heating or cooling, it merely serves to protect it from the frequent rain that occurs in the Pacific Northwest.

Toronto’s variable seasons also make a domed stadium a necessity. With interesting timing, the satellite images caught the Rogers Centre²roof partway through the 20-minute rotational process of opening (or closing), showing the smallest of the segments on the west side of the building.

We also get an unusual perspective on the CN Tower, formerly the world’s tallest building, and one of the earliest sites visited by Google Sightseeing.

In New York, the new Yankee Stadium sits across just to the north of the recently-demolished original 1923 version.

The Street View images in the area allow us to see both stadiums standing side-by-side, and of course you can use Google Earth’s time slider to see how the sites have changed over many years – see prime parkland transformed into sports facility at great expense!

The focus here is on celebrating the game’s traditions, through artwork, monuments and historical items on display. Perhaps these distract game attendees from the exorbitant $2.3billion construction cost and seats which are some of the most expensive in professional sports.

Of particular controversy are those in the ‘Legends Suite’ – several rows behind home plate where seats have ranged in price from $500 to over $2,000! Opening in the midst of an economic crisis, takeup was slow, and the public perception of this zone fenced off from the surrounding fans was quite poor. As a result Yankees games on television often show many of these seats vacant.

Empty seats are also a problem on the other side of the continent where the Oakland Athletics play in a mixed-use stadium that, in 1996, had 10,000 additional seats constructed. This development – nicknamed Mount Davis after the notorious owner of the NFL’s Raiders – is covered during baseball season so that it doesn’t look so bad on television. The huge tarps, with the Athletics’ logo, are visible on Google’s recent 45 degree imagery.

Just to the south-east, in Anaheim, Angel Stadium is also visible in the 45 degree images. It is an older stadium, having opened in 1966. However, since Disney took over the team in 1996 it has been extensively modernised. Many new features have been added, including two large red caps by the main entrance, and an attempt to bring nature to the ballpark, with a rocky waterfall and trees beyond the centre field fence.

The iconic ‘Big A’ is a 70m tall metal structure that used to support the scoreboard inside the stadium. It was moved to the parking lot in the late 1970s. The ‘halo’ lights up whenever the Angels win a game.

To finish, here are a few notes about the other American League Stadiums.

Fenway Park in Boston is the oldest MLB stadium, and is best known for ‘the green monster’ – an 11m high wall in left field, though the satellite image doesn’t do it justice. (We can however see the grounds crew hard at work, and the field being setup for batting practice.) It also has a red seat marking the landing location of the longest home run, though I can’t find it on Google’s images.

In Kansas City, the Royals play in Kauffman Stadium which features a waterfall and acrobatic fountains which play between innings.

Google’s satellite images show players training on the field in Cleveland.

In Texas, Rangers Stadium is the only ballpark that I’ve noticed has its own heliport – just across the road to the west of the building. The exterior wall of the stadium is ringed with beautiful stone carvings, though they’re hard to make out on the first-generation low-res Street View images.

The Tampa Bay Rays play in a domed stadium which is actually in St Petersburg, Florida.

In Minneapolis, the Minnesota Twins play at Target Field, a new stadium not yet shown on the satellite images, though we can see it – and its dedicated transit station – mostly completed on Street View.

Finally, the Chicago White Sox play at US Cellular Field, which has a huge list of attractions – from luxury restaurants to misting rooms to cool off on hot summer days – though none of them are really visible from above.

Every stadium can be explored in more detail in the appropriate team’s section on the MLB site, and Wikipedia has good information as well.

Part two of this series will cover the National League, including a stadium with – would you believe – a swimming pool!

Locations: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Ontario, Texas, Washington / Categories: Buildings, Monuments, Stadiums and Sport, Street Views, Structures

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While the Street View car drove both sides of the Saint John River, it unfortunately did not take the small side road which crosses the 391m Hartland Bridge. It was originally built in 1901, though it has suffered damage from ice and fire at various times. You can learn more at the town’s website.

The longest covered bridge in the United States is the Smolen-Gulf Bridge in Ohio, which measures 187m. While covered bridges are generally perceived as historical icons, this structure was only built in 2008, at a cost of almost $8million.¹

This time we do get a good look at the interior of the bridge.

There are many theories about why covered bridges became popular in North America starting in the 19th century. Some believe that they prevented herds of animals from being disturbed by the sight of rushing water or that they protected travellers during inclement weather (which surely wouldn’t be any worse over a river than the rest of the road?). However, the more likely explanation is that covering a bridge structure quite significantly extended the life of the wooded decking.

Because not every bridge can be the overall longest, tourist officials come up with a variety of other superlatives to try to draw attention to their local landmarks. For example, the 71m long bridge in Blenheim, New York, which is the world’s longest single-span covered bridge. It’s also notable for being one of only a few ‘double-barelled’ bridges – having a separate laneway for each direction of traffic.

Covered bridges are also found in many European countries, and they are often much older than those found in North America. The oldest is claimed to be the Kapellbrücke (Chapel Bridge) in Lucerne, Switzerland, which was first built in 1333. Street View gets a very picturesque look at it from a nearby road bridge.

This isn’t entirely the original structure, much of which – including 17th century paintings which adorned the interior – was destroyed in a fire in 1993. The brick tower at the mid-way point has been used by the city for many purposes – its thick walls and defensible position making it ideal as a treasury and watchtower, though it was also a prison at some point in its history.

Additional entrants for ‘most picturesque’ covered bridge are the town of Bassano Del Grappa in Italy, and Chateau Chenonceau in France, which was one of the chateaux recently visited by the Street View trike.

Not all covered bridges cross waterways. In Oxford the Bridge of Sighs² connects two buildings in the famous university.

Returning to the US, the state of Pennsylvania claims the largest collection of covered bridges, having more than 200! Many of these are found on streets creatively called Covered Bridge Road (or Lane, or Avenue, etc). One example is the Dreibelbis bridge. With such a large number of similar addresses, you have to wonder if people’s mail is prone to going astray.

Many covered bridges around the US are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it is encouraging that efforts are made to preserve them even when they are replaced by more modern road bridges. The McDermott Bridge in New Hampshire is one such example.

Covered bridges enjoyed a period of fame with the success of the book Bridges of Madison County, and the film of the same name. There are six bridges in Madison County, Iowa, though only one of them is visible on (a rather hazy) Street View, the Imes Bridge.

The satellite images allow us to see Cedar Bridge and Holliwell Bridge, both of which were used as filming locations for the movie.

As with so many of these historic wooden bridges, the original 1883 Cedar Bridge was destroyed by fire, though it has been rebuilt to the same design.

There are also many covered bridges in Asia, though we have yet to find any good images on Google maps. Please link to them in the comments if you know of any.

We’d also love to hear of your own personal favourite covered bridge, as there are many hundreds that we weren’t able to include in this post!

Locations: England, France, Iowa, Italy, New Brunswick, New Hampshire, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Switzerland / Categories: Bridges, Movie Locations, Street Views

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Let’s take a look at some of the more unique street circuits around the world…

1. Monte Carlo, Monaco – Since 1929, the streets of Monte Carlo have been home to a motor race each year, and today the principality is home to Formula One’s Monaco Grand Prix. A lap around the 3.34 km (2.075 mi) circuit goes directly underneath the Grand Hotel via a tunnel and ricochets around a swimming pool next to the city’s harbour. The track continues to hold events each year in late May.

2. Norisring, Nuremberg, Germany – Built on top of former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, this track is 2.3 km (1.4 mi) in length and uses the grandstand from Zeppelin Field as it’s centrepiece. The track is host to the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters series and the Formula 3 Euro Series each year.

3. Cleveland, Ohio, USA – The Grand Prix of Cleveland was held from 1982 to 2007 on the fully functioning Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland, Ohio. The airport had to be shut down once a year for a week to get converted into a 10-turn racetrack. Traces of the track are hard to see these days on Google Maps, but if you look closely you can see some tires stacked up near turn 8, various asphalt patches along the racing line on the taxiways (used to try and smooth out the bumpy track for the lightweight race cars), and some tire tracks from the pit stalls. Races are rumoured to return in 2010 but nothing has been announced yet.

Keep an eye out for follow-up posts on more street circuits around the world, including some that you can lap with the Street View car! Stay tuned!

Locations: Germany, Monaco, Ohio / Categories: Stadiums and Sport

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This is no highway-induced hallucination however: it’s the headquarters of the Longaberger Company, famous for its handmade wooden baskets. Its founder, Dave Longaberger, was a man with a dream — and that dream included going to work in a seven-storey basket. When lesser men than Dave told him it couldn’t be done, he said: “If they can send a man to the moon and bring him back home, they can build a building shaped like a basket.” And he was right.

The building cost $300 million $30 million and took more than two years to build; it was completed in December 1997¹. The statistics are impressive: it takes the form of a 160:1 scale model of Longaberger’s top-selling Medium Market Basket, more than 60 m long and 30 m tall. The frame is made of steel, with a stucco finish cunningly designed to create a basket-weave effect (which also seems to confuse Street View’s face-blurring technology!) The handles are 100 metres long and weigh 75 tons each, and are even heated to prevent ice building up in winter and falling through the glass roof. (They also create a neat shadow.) On the side of the building, replicating the brass logos on the normal-sized baskets, are giant name plates weighing 340kg each and covered in gold leaf.

That’s not the only big basket in these parts, however. Over in nearby Dresden², where the Longaberger company was founded, there’s a 14-metre long picnic basket, made of real maple wood. Sadly, the imagery here is not high-enough resolution to see it in all its glory (I think this is it), but you can see pictures here. And at the Longaberger Homestead, a kitsch olde-worlde village/outlet store in Frazeysburg, there’s a giant apple basket. Again, the imagery isn’t very good here, so be sure to check out these ground-level photos (complete with giant apples!)

Read more about the creation of the Longaberger HQ at Elevator World, or visit the company website.

Locations: Ohio / Categories: Buildings, Street Views, Weirdness

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Apollo 11 was launched on a Saturn V rocket at 9:32 AM on July 16, 1969 from Launch Complex 39-A at Cape Canaveral in Florida. The same pad is also used for Space Shuttle launches, including the recent launch of Endeavour. Apparently, when a fully fuelled rocket is on the pad, the minimum safe distance for people is 5km! However, on the day that the Street View car visited it did get close enough to get a distant view of the launch tower rising above the swampland.

At the nearby Kennedy Space Center we can see a replica Space Shuttle, as well as the Rocket Garden (a display of Redstone, Titan and Atlas rockets) and the Space Mirror (or at least its shadow) – a 13-metre high memorial to those who have lost their lives in space.

Over at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Saturn V rocket that we looked at four years ago is now under cover unfortunately. Still, at least we can gaze down on the very building in which the brainy Mission Control folks kept things running smoothly.

Of course Houston wasn’t the only place keeping tabs on the astronauts. As anyone who has seen the movie The Dish will know, at the time Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, it was on the “wrong” side of the Earth; which meant the historic TV signal was actually relayed via Australia.

The best pictures came from the Parkes Observatory in New South Wales, but the signal was also picked up at Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra. Sadly, Parkes is only visible in low-resolution (although you can glimpse the dish through the trees on Street View), and Honeysuckle Creek, while in high-res, was closed in 1981 and subsequently demolished.

And what of the first man on the moon? Neil Armstrong was born in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio, and during his school years his family lived here on West Benton Street. The town is obviously proud of its famous son: in the vicinity we can find roads named Neil Armstrong Drive, Lunar Drive, Gemini Drive, Saturn Drive and Apollo Drive – the latter four located near the Armstrong Air & Space Museum, where exhibits apparently include the Gemini VIII spacecraft, Apollo 11 artefacts, a moon rock, and “multimedia presentations of the sights and sounds of space”².

Finally, let’s have a look at the moon itself! Google Moon has come on a bit since it was unveiled on the landing’s 36th anniversary, meaning you can even look around in Street View-esque panorama mode at the landing sites. And, in case you haven’t heard, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently managed to photograph 5 out of the 6 Apollo landing sites, with sufficient detail that you can make out the lunar module descent stages, and even, in one case, the trails of footprints left by the astronauts! Google has some way to go to match that sort of resolution, but as it happens, they are holding a special Google Earth news conference later today…

There’s more to see on our previous coverage of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, you can watch a real-time recreation of the landing at We Choose The Moon and join in with various celebratory events at NASA’s site.

Locations: Australia, Florida, Ohio, Texas / Categories: Abandoned, Buildings, Spacecraft, Street Views, Structures

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Over here in Ireland and the UK, we have been known to celebrate with vast quantities of Guinness. Over in the US however, they like large scale annual celebrations involving crazy things like temporarily dying the Chicago River green (which sadly hasn’t yet been captured on Google Earth²).

But in today’s post we’ll be looking at some of the places that St. Patrick has found a permanent home in the USA.

This is St Patrick’s park in Indiana, where they have created a 400 metre long homage to their namesake, entirely in the medium of trees. Which is apt, given how much of the colour green gets bandied around on the 17th of March.

We’ve visited the original Dublin already on Google Sightseeing, but there are at least nine cities called Dublin in the USA alone!

See for yourself: Dublin, California; Dublin, Georgia; Dublin, Indiana; Dublin, New Hampshire; Dublin, North Carolina; Dublin, Ohio; Dublin, Pennsylvania; Dublin, Texas; and Dublin, Virginia.

In New York City we find St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a spectacular Neo-Gothic cathedral in midtown Manhattan that has become ingrained in Hollywood movie history, after being featured in several movies including 2002′s Spider-Man.

So, where else has St. Patrick and the influence of Ireland made a lasting impression around the world?

Happy Paddy’s day!

Thanks to Chris R.

Locations: California, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia / Categories: Buildings, Large Type, Movie Locations

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Royse City Fututo, one of three surviving in Texas

Built from fibreglass-reinforced polyester-plastic, Futuros are around 4 metres high by 8 metres across, and have super-cool airplane-style hatch entrances.

Waterside Futuro in Berlin, Germany

Suuronen’s aim was actually to design a ski-cabin¹, one that would be “quick to heat and easy to construct in rough terrain”, and in this respect he succeeded – a Futuro House can be placed on virtually any terrain, requiring only four concrete supports, and thanks to the integrated polyurethane insulation and electric heating system, even in the most extreme conditions it only takes around thirty minutes to achieve a comfortable temperature inside.

Futuro as part of the Canberra Space Dome & Observatory, Australia

Despite the obvious awesomeness of these UFO-shaped homes, by the mid 70s they had been withdrawn from sale – although this was mainly due to the 1973 oil crisis, which had sent the price of plastic skyrocketing.

Front and back of the Pensacola Beach Futuro House, Florida²

Around sixty of the original Futuros have been accounted for over the years, but there are still many that remain undiscovered. The most complete archive is at futuro-house.net (there’s another with an embedded map at archinform.net), but it seems to have been left to stagnate for a number of years – perhaps Google Earth will provide the means for all of the missing Futuros to be rediscovered?

Double Futuro House, Franklin, Ohio

It should also be pointed out that the moulds for making Futuros apparently still exist… about time for a revival don’t you think?

Futuro in Covington, Kentucky

Here’s an article that includes a floor plan, some images of a Futuro being helicoptered into position, as well as some great shots of people inside.

Locations: Australia, Florida, Germany, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas / Categories: Buildings, Street Views, Weirdness

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The Free Stamp – a pop art sculpture created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen quickly became the centre of controversy. It was originally commissioned by Standard Oil of Ohio, but an ownership change and fears of a public backlash in an economically struggling city meant construction was halted. The components were kept in storage for a number of years.

It was finally put on public display in Willard Park in the early 1990s, when BP America agreed to donate it to the city but pay for the maintenance. The stamp is 8m tall and almost 15m long, its bulk clearly apparent on Street View.

Unfortunately, it appears that the current economic climate has also had an impact on the location.

Now if only we can track down the world’s largest inkpad …

Thanks to Rich Holmes and Keith.

Google Sightseeing has previously featured a number of works by the same artist: Saw, Sawing, Dropped Cone, and Spoonbridge and Cherry.

Locations: Ohio / Categories: Large Type, Street Views, Structures

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Take for example this cool customer – he spots the Googlemobile cruising down his street, and decides his patented bicycle ‘skid and turn’ manouvre should be executed, maybe with the objective of sending a small puff of dust into the eyes of the unsuspecting driver.

As our intrepid daredevil starts to make the turn everything seems to be going perfectly – but suddenly the stunt falls apart, and moments later he lies in a bizarre tangle with his two-wheeled friend.

As the camera car moves on – rather heartlessly I might add – we see the boy in further distress as he presumably tries to free himself by way of a reverse roly-poly.

As the Google car continues on down the street the poor lad appears to be lying flat on his back, presumably regaining his composure. I do hope he was alright.

Thanks to Jason O and Streetviewfun.

Locations: Ohio / Categories: Other Vehicles, Street Views

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