NFL History | Kezar Stadium, San Francisco — The Arch Is a Copy

Kezar Stadium was a college and schools ground for twenty-one years before professional football arrived, and when it arrived it belonged to a rival league.

The San Francisco 49ers were a charter club of the All-America Football Conference, which began play in 1946 as a direct challenge to the NFL. They opened here on 8 September 1946 against the New York Yankees, two days after Cleveland had opened the conference against Miami. The stadium stood in the south-east corner of Golden Gate Park, seated 59,942 on a single tier of bench seating running the whole way round, and had been built with a $100,000 bequest from the estate of Mary Kezar in memory of her mother and uncles. It opened on 2 May 1925 with a two-mile race.

The AAFC folded after the 1949 season and three of its clubs went into the NFL: Cleveland, Baltimore and San Francisco. The 49ers stayed here through the 1970 season, twenty-five years in all. Their last game was the NFC Championship on 3 January 1971, lost to Dallas, though published accounts disagree on the score. Then they moved to Candlestick Park.

Two things get repeated about the end of the old stadium, and one of them is wrong.

The wrong one is that the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed it. Dismantling began in June 1989. The earthquake struck on 17 October 1989, by which point most of the work had been done. Encyclopaedia entries and stadium-history sites still print the earthquake version, and it is worth checking any account that offers it.

The right one is that it was rebuilt inside the same footprint at roughly a sixth of the size, about ten thousand seats, with a replica of the original entrance arch put up as a tribute to what had been taken down. San Francisco named the playing surface for Bob St. Clair in 2001.

So the arch you photograph is not the arch. It is a copy, standing outside a small stadium, on the ground where a sixty-thousand-seat bowl used to be.

Coordinate: Kezar Stadium, Golden Gate Park. Wikidata's P625 and the OpenStreetMap way for the stadium are separately maintained entities and agree to within about 15 m. The US Census TIGER geocoder for 670 Kezar Drive, the perimeter address, returns 37.767162, -122.458465 — about 220 m north-west, the mailing-address-versus-footprint offset that recurs across this vertical. Three sources, converging at the bowl. Precision ±30 m.

Cover: the replica of the original Kezar Stadium entrance arch, built during the 1989–90 reconstruction. Photo: Darek Truesdale, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Second image: the rebuilt Kezar Stadium and its running track, 2009. Photo: Eric Fischer, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This is the 1990 stadium, not the bowl the 49ers played in.