Say what you will about Cinergy Field today: It's ugly. It's sterile. It's isolated. You can't see in. You can't see out. It's downtown, but not part of downtown. Much of that criticism, however, ignores the history of the 32-year-old stadium, and burdens it with failures for things it wasn't built to do.

        Tracing the stadium's history from its conception in the late 1940s reveals it was only marginally considered an economic-development project. Riverfront Stadium, as it was known when it opened in 1970, achieved its initial goals, replacing a blighted neighborhood of crumbling tenements and warehouses and bringing NFL football to the city.

SPECIAL COVERAGE

This week the Enquirer looks ahead to next Sunday's final Reds game at Cinergy Field with special stories and coverage. Then, next Sunday and Monday, you can celebrate the stadium's past through our special commemorative sections.

        Through the 1970s and 1980s, the Reds and Bengals drew 2.5 million fans a year to a place people had avoided for decades. Those numbers started the wheels turning for much of what followed on the river, from Bicentennial Commons at Sawyer Point to development in Covington and Newport.

        The stadium, built for $44 million, hosts its last event Sept. 23. It is being replaced by two stadiums with a combined cost of $750 million.

        Riverfront Stadium, joined in 1975 by the Riverfront Coliseum indoor arena, “was an important traffic generator,” said Rick Greiwe, who headed the Bicentennial Commission and, later, Downtown Cincinnati Inc.

        “The major effect was that it established downtown as the place where the region comes for major-league sports and world-class arts,” he said.

        “I don't think economic development occurred around it like you see with some of the modern-day ballparks. But it continued to establish the fact that downtown was the center of the region, by locating all the major cultural and sports facilities in the center city.”

        Serving as a magnet for economic development wasn't part of the plan.

        A riverfront stadium first showed up on drawings in the 1948 Cincinnati Metropolitan Master Plan, developed by the city's planning commission and dozens of planners, politicians and business people from both sides of the river.

        That plan “called for the cleanup of the riverfront, which was a mess of slum housing and warehouses and factories,” said Zane Miller, professor emeritus of history at the University of Cincinnati.

        Planners believed the crumbling conditions in “The Bottoms” was a drag on property values in the central business district. Even then, The Bottoms was considered so decrepit the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded it wasn't worth the $6.5 million cost of a floodwall to save it from annual flooding.

        “It was a terrible place,” said Eugene Ruehlmann, who was a Cincinnati councilman and mayor during the construction and opening of Riverfront Stadium. “It was place of buildings that were nothing but empty shells. It was dragging the whole city down with it. It had to go.”

        The master plan proposed replacing The Bottoms with highways, a convention center, a helicopter terminal, a city administration building and a new ballpark.

        “It seemed not to bother people then that that part of the expressway system we now call Fort Washington Way would cut off the riverfront from the downtown,” Mr. Miller said. “But that's exactly what it was designed to do. It was part of that larger process of cleaning up the riverfront.”

        The plans collected dust for nearly two decades. In December 1965, football pioneer Paul Brown - fired three years earlier as coach-general manager of the Cleveland Browns - was invited by Ohio Gov. James Rhodes to speak to the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Brown's speech planted the seed for what eventually would become a National Football League expansion franchise in Cincinnati.

        “I remember Jim Rhodes getting a bunch of us together in the Gibson Hotel in 1966,” said Robert A. Wood, who was then president of the Hamilton County commission. “He said, "I've got an NFL franchise in my pocket. Now you have to build a place for them to play.' ”

        A feasibility study gave county and city officials four alternative sites for a new home for the Reds and a football franchise - the riverfront, Blue Ash, the Maketewah Country Club property in Bond Hill and a site in the West End. Cincinnati City Council unanimously chose the riverfront. “It was no contest,” Mr. Ruehlmann said.

        But even as the new stadium was being planned, no one saw Riverfront Stadium as the anchor for further development on Cincinnati's riverfront.

        “Basically, it was a matter of finding a place for the Bengals to play,” Mr. Wood said. “It was the logical place.”

        Riverfront Stadium was an almost immediate success. The Reds at Crosley Field, in their best years, drew barely 1.1 million fans. In 1971, the team's first full year in Riverfront, 1.5 million came to see them play. From 1973 to 1980, the heart of the Big Red Machine era, attendance never fell below 2 million, and has averaged 1.9 million since. The Bengals in most years drew 400,000-plus.

        Slowly, that throng became a market.

        Restaurateur Ben Bernstein bought the Captain Hook, a failing Covington riverboat restaurant, and reopened it in 1977 as the Mike Fink. He took the restaurant upscale, improving its dicor and menu.

        Jim Bernstein, Ben's son, who now heads the family's restaurant business, said the stadium had everything to do with his father's decision. The river was a huge barrier then.

        “People in Cincinnati wouldn't cross it, and vice versa,” he said.

        The stadium exposed people from throughout the region to the river.

        “I think that (Ben) foresaw the activity that was to be developed,” Jim Bernstein said. “With the success of the Mike Fink, that started bringing people across the Suspension Bridge.”

        The flying-saucer-shaped stadium became a symbol for the city.

        “Any postcard I've ever seen of downtown Cincinnati in the last 30 years has focused people's attention on Riverfront in the foreground and downtown in the background,” said John Schneider, who led recent efforts to reconstruct downtown's highways and locate a new ballpark on the riverfront.

        “It was identified with our city and our region,” he said. “It had a tremendous effect on bringing people's attention back on downtown.”

        The prominence of the modern ballpark in the skyline helped the city's image because “it was a sign of progressiveness,” said Bill Butler, chairman of Corporex Cos. Inc., which developed the Rivercenter office complex on Covington's riverfront.

        But by the mid-1980s, Riverfront Stadium's imperfections began to stand out. A three-level parking garage meant fans had to navigate stairways and ramps to get to the main plaza and concourse level. From downtown, fans crossed long, covered bridges - Mr. Schneider calls them “hamster tubes” - to get to the stadium.

        “There were all kinds of barriers to anything ever happening around Cinergy. You went there, and you left,” Mr. Schneider said.

        Michael Schuster, an architect who was the Reds' design consultant on the new Great American Ball Park, echoed those feelings.

        “From a development standpoint, it was a suburban model, placed on a riverfront site, totally enclosed,” he said.

        Michael Romanos, a professor of economic development at UC, said public spending on projects like stadiums should eventually lead to private investment, but there's little of that downtown that can be associated with Riverfront Stadium.

        “It's a very isolated area, and there are no facilities around it. It's like living in a traffic island,” he said.

        Through the 1980s, land use along the central riverfront amounted to the stadium, parking lots and produce warehouses. Sawyer Point, which opened on the east riverfront in 1988, changed all that.

        Conceived decades ago, the park idea was taken up by the Bicentennial Commission. As a result, a scrap yard was replaced with playgrounds, walking paths and a broad green lawn with a concert stage.

        “When that opened, that provided a whole new way of experiencing the riverfront,” said Mr. Greiwe, who headed the Bicentennial Commission.

        Former City Councilman and Mayor Arn Bortz said during his years in City Hall, from 1979 to 1988, there was little discussion about developing the central riverfront.

        “I think people had just become resigned to the fact that it was the stadium and parking lots,” he said. “That thinking didn't begin to develop until the teams began to whine about needing new stadiums.”

        Sawyer Point “made people think in terms of a green riverfront, and something that could be more than what it had been,” Mr. Schneider said.

        The riverfront debate lit up as the evolving economics of football and baseball made Riverfront Stadium obsolete. The Reds cried for a modern ballpark, and the Bengals threatened to leave town.

        Both wanted new stadiums, and both demanded they be on the river. Hamilton County voters approved a half-cent sales tax in 1996, setting off a billion-dollar building boom.

        The highways that intersect at Fort Washington Way were rebuilt to open up more land on the riverfront. Paul Brown Stadium opened for the Bengals in 2000. The Reds' new home, Great American Ball Park, will open next spring.

        Riverfront Stadium's demolition will begin soon after an old timers' softball game, Sept. 23. It will be replaced by a Reds Hall of Fame and “The Banks,” a matrix of parks, offices and housing.

        John Williams, the former president of the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce who led the fight for the sales tax, said Riverfront Stadium was key to what is happening on the riverfront today.

        For two generations, sports on Cincinnati's riverfront became as natural as cheese on chili.

        “I don't think we'd have had the fighting for the stadiums on the riverfront and the Banks had you not had Riverfront there,” he said. “I think it was critical to the mix.”

        Councilman Jim Tarbell, who opposed putting a new ballpark on the riverfront, said he would have made the same argument in 1966.

        “There's always something you can do with a riverfront instead of a partially used sports monstrosity,” Mr. Tarbell said.

        The riverfront land where Cinergy Field now stands was not a complete wasteland, Mr. Tarbell said. Nearly 200 businesses were still operating in the riverfront area before stadium construction began; all of them had to be relocated.

        “Some people thought there were a lot of things worth saving down there,” Mr. Tarbell said.

        The leveling of The Bottoms was part of nationwide trend: Slums were being bulldozed rather than improved, displacing thousands of people who were overwhelmingly poor and black.

        In Cincinnati, “they uprooted large numbers of African-Americans who lived in those neighborhoods, especially the West End, at the same time that African-Americans were moving into the city in large numbers from the South,” said Mr. Miller, the UC historian.

        Whether the stadium succeeded or failed depends on what question you ask, Mr. Miller said.

        “If you're asking did it do any good for health, education, welfare, poor people - the answer's no. It's sometimes touted that way, but it didn't,” he said. “It did a little bit of good for downtown business. It did a lot of good for the reputation of the city, the status of the city.”

        Cinergy Field linked downtown Cincinnati with baseball, football and the mainstream of American popular culture. Every resident, even marginal sports fans, has opinions on Ken Griffey Jr., Pete Rose and Mike Brown, and it's something that binds the community.

        A pro stadium, Mr. Miller said, “does have this effect of bolstering American popular culture, and of helping to keep the social and civic peace. It's not perfect, as we know, but I think we're better off with it than without it.”

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