NFL History | Metropolitan Stadium, Bloomington — The Marker That Counts Coin Tosses

There is a bronze disc set into the floor of a shopping mall in Bloomington that counts coin tosses.

It names Metropolitan Stadium and the 50-yard line, records that 174 coin tosses happened on that spot at the start of each Minnesota Vikings game, and gives the span: 10 September 1961 to 20 December 1981.

The stadium was built on farmland in 1956, for a minor league baseball club and in the hope of attracting a major league one. It got the Twins and the Vikings in 1961 and a soccer club in 1976. Its final capacity was 45,919.

That number is the whole story. The league's expectations for what a stadium should seat moved past what the Met could hold, the building was in disrepair by the late 1970s, and both clubs moved indoors to the Metrodome for 1982. The Twins played their last game here on 30 September 1981. The Vikings played theirs on 20 December, losing 10–6 to Kansas City, the club that had beaten them in the last AFL–NFL World Championship Game at Tulane Stadium eleven years earlier.

The crowd took the building apart that afternoon. Seats, sod, sections of the goalposts. The stadium then stood empty and vandalised for three years until wrecking crews arrived on 28 January 1985.

The Mall of America opened on the site on 11 August 1992. Inside its amusement park a plate marks the position of home plate, and a single seat fixed some distance away marks where one of Harmon Killebrew's home runs came down; accounts of exactly where that seat now sits differ.

The football marker is the strange one, because it commemorates nothing that happened in a game. It marks the spot where 174 games began.

Coordinate: the Mall of America, on the stadium site. The Wikidata point for the stadium and the mall's OpenStreetMap node agree to within about 70 m. Precision ±80 m.

Cover: the Metropolitan Stadium 50-yard-line marker in the floor of the Mall of America. Photo: Runner1928, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Second image: Metropolitan Stadium during a Twins game, from a Kodachrome slide. The Commons file is titled 1965 while its own description and date field give 30 July 1964; it shows the stadium configured for baseball, not football. Photo: Martin J. Walsh Jr., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.