Penn State Sports Magazine
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J U N E / J U L Y 2 0 2 3 5 5 W W W . B L U E W H I T E O N L I N E . C O M But in the places where the TV cameras don't venture, especially the underpinnings that support the west grand- stand, the stadium's age is showing. It's a creaky hodgepodge of girders, pipes and wires, topped by a press box that is far more spartan than its counterparts at other high-level Power Five programs. The university has long known that renovations were nec- essary. As athletics director Patrick Kraft noted in December, Penn State commissioned 19 studies over the previous decade to assess the stadium's needs. Kraft pointed out that the stud- ies hadn't led to any action, but that is about to change. In early May, the board of trustees approved the first round of funding for Penn State's next big stadium renovation project. There are no renderings or blue- prints yet, but the broad outlines of the plan have begun to take shape. PSU will tear down and rebuild the west side of the stadium, adding more luxury suites, concessions areas and restrooms, among other upgrades. The athletics department is prepared to spend as much as $700 million to modernize a facility that has now been in use for more than six decades. The proposed timeline for the project has construction starting in early 2025 and wrapping up prior to the start of the 2027 season. The Time Was Right The upcoming stadium renovation project will likely turn out to be the most ambitious that Penn State has undertaken since the one that started it all. As is the case with Beaver Stadium today, the decision to re- vamp Penn State's home field in time for the 1960 season was the culmination of a process that began with extensive feasibility studies dating back many years. Since the 1930s, Penn State's Office of Physical Plant had been eyeing the pastures east of campus as the potential site of an ath- letics complex. Historian Lou Prato noted in a 2010 story for BWI that when Penn State replaced Beaver Field's decaying wooden grandstands with steel bleachers in the mid-1930s, the new seat- ing sections were designed with portability in mind. At the time, Penn State's enrollment was about 4,500 students. School officials expected that number to grow, and indeed it did. The G.I. Bill brought a wave of students during the postwar boom, and that influx coincided with an effort by university president Eric Walker to remake PSU into a dynamo in the sci- ence and engineering fields after having previously been known primarily as an agricultural school. By the early 1950s, Penn State's enrollment had more than doubled to 11,500. University officials expected it to continue growing — to 20,000 by 1960 and 25,000 by 1970. With more students came a need for more classrooms. Because PSU administrators didn't want students spending more than 10 minutes walking from class to class, the university needed to use the land where New Beaver Field stood — just north of West Halls, next to the Nittany Lion Inn — for academic buildings. By the late 1950s, Walker felt the time was right for Penn State to act on its long-gestating plan to move its athletics facilities eastward. In early 1959, the board of trustees approved $1.8 mil- lion for the disassembly of Beaver Field and the reassembly and expansion of the stadium at its new site. While the Nittany Lions were playing their season that fall — they finished 9-2 with a Liberty Bowl win over Alabama — a 10-man crew was bulldozing the pasture at the end of Curtin Road, erecting new seating sections and putting in place the sup- ports that would hold the bleachers from the old stadium. After the Lions concluded their home schedule on Nov. 14 with a 46-0 shutout of Holy Cross, a second work crew began dismantling the grand- stands into sections measuring 20 feet by 18 feet and putting them onto flat- bed trailers. More than 700 pieces of various sizes were moved and reassembled at the Curtin Road site. The rebuilt facility featured 80 rows of seats on the west side, 70 rows on the east and 30 rows in the north end zone. It held 46,284 fans, about 16,000 more than New Beaver Field and enough to accommodate a program whose ambitions were ex- panding under the leadership of Engle and the promising young assistant he had brought with him from Brown a decade earlier. A Farsighted Decision Penn State opened Beaver Stadium on Sept. 17, 1960. Halfback Eddie Caye scored the facility's first touchdown a little over four minutes into the first quarter, and the Nittany Lions coasted to a 20-0 victory over Boston University. PSU didn't come close to filling the place, drawing only 22,559 fans on a rainy afternoon. Nor did the Lions fill it for any of their three remaining home games that year, coming closest on Oct. 29 when they welcomed 37,715 fans for a 34-13 win over West Virginia. Those numbers might have seemed at the time to lend cre- dence to Paterno's fears that the program would suffer now that fans couldn't amble over to the field in a matter of minutes from downtown or from the leafy streets of College Heights. But as the university's enrollment continued to grow, so too did its football attendance. Then, in 1966, Paterno took over the program and within three years had transformed the Nittany Li- ons into a top-five team, one that lots of people wanted to watch. By the late 1960s, the university was making preparations for its next expansion project — an affirmation that its leaders had been right all along. "Dr. Walker had more foresight than any of us," Paterno con- ceded years later. "He moved the place, and I think it all turned out for the better." ■ Beaver Stadium has been a work in progress ever since it opened at its pres- ent location in 1960. There have been eight major renovation projects, most of which have been aimed at accommodat- ing ever-larger throngs of spectators.