NFL History | Soldier Field, Chicago — The Landmark Renovated Out of Its Own Listing

Soldier Field was a National Historic Landmark and is not one now, and it lost the status because of what was built inside it.

The Bears arrived here for a reason already familiar in this set of memories. The Illinois Sports Facilities Authority's own history of the stadium says it plainly: after the 1970 merger the league required home stadiums to seat more than fifty thousand, and Wrigley Field did not. The rule that emptied Wrigley, and War Memorial in Buffalo, and Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, is the rule that filled this building. The Bears played their first game here on 19 September 1971.

The stadium itself was much older. It opened on 9 October 1924 as Municipal Grant Park Stadium, on lakefront ground the 1909 Burnham and Bennett plan had set aside for athletics, and was renamed Soldier Field on 11 November 1925 as a memorial to the American dead of the First World War. Its distinctive feature was a pair of Doric colonnades. Crowds above a hundred thousand were routine in the 1920s, for the 1926 Army–Navy game and the Dempsey and Tunney rematch of 1927 with its disputed long count. On 27 February 1987 the National Park Service designated it a National Historic Landmark.

Then the interior was removed. Demolition began on 19 January 2002, the Bears spent that season playing at the University of Illinois, and the rebuilt stadium reopened on 29 September 2003. Published costs vary widely, from around $400 million to around $690 million depending on which account and which scope you take, which is itself worth noting before quoting a figure.

What went in was a new asymmetrical seating bowl in steel and glass, cantilevered over the old walls. The Park Service's own assessment describes the result precisely: the sky boxes extend four storeys beyond the original colonnades on the east side, the cantilevered seating eclipses them on the west, and the view of the colonnades is obstructed from all angles. Since the colonnades were the feature the listing rested on, the listing no longer had a subject.

A federal advisory committee recommended removal in September 2004. The designation was withdrawn on 17 February 2006.

This is a rare and honest piece of public record-keeping, and worth sitting with. The listing was not withdrawn because the building was demolished. It stands, it is in constant use, and on the ordinary measure it is the oldest stadium in the league — Sports Illustrated's ranking of the ten oldest puts it first at 1924 and Lambeau Field second at 1957. That measure counts the opening year and not the rebuilding described above, which is the whole tension of this memory: the building is ranked oldest on the strength of a fabric that is now largely gone. It was withdrawn because the thing that made the building worth listing is now behind something else.

Two rules, then, working on the same site from opposite ends. A seating minimum written into a merger agreement brought a football club here in 1971. The seats built to keep that club here in 2003 cost the building its place on the register.

Status, 3 September 2026. The paragraphs above are written in the present tense, and the present tense here is under negotiation. On 13 August 2026 the club's chair, George McCaskey, said the Bears' focus was on Hammond, Indiana, where two sites — Lost Marsh and a Wolf Lake terminal parcel — were under environmental and topographical study, and described the case the club had made for a stadium on its own Arlington Heights property as unsuccessful in Illinois. Indiana had authorised up to a billion dollars in infrastructure support; Illinois had submitted no written counterproposal; no decision deadline had been set. Nothing had been built, the Arlington Heights property had not been formally ruled out, and the Bears were still playing here. (Indiana Capital Chronicle, 13 August 2026.)

Coordinate: Soldier Field. Wikidata's P625 and the OpenStreetMap way for the stadium are separately maintained entities and agree to within about 7 m. The US Census TIGER geocoder for 425 East McFetridge Drive, the north-side perimeter address, returns 41.864920, -87.617747, about 270 m north of the published pin — the mailing-address-versus-footprint offset at the scale of a lakefront stadium; Soldier Field's own 1410 Special Olympics Drive address is not in TIGER. Three sources, at the building. Precision ±80 m.

Cover: the east colonnade in September 2024, with the glass and steel of the 2003 seating bowl rising immediately behind it. Photo: Nairn McWilliams, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. This single frame is what the Park Service's assessment describes.

Second image: the stadium looking west in 2022. Photo: Sea Cow, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.