Vision is expansive for Pro Football Hall of Fame
A makeover at CANTON — the Pro Football Hall of Fame is turning an underdeveloped shrine to the heroes of America’s favorite sport into a $750 million mixeduse center of entertainment, residences, offices, research and health care.
“This new project is a lifechanger for this city,” said Fonda Williams, the deputy mayor and director of economic development.
The project is the largest development in Canton’s history, city leaders say. The National Football League started in Canton in 1920 and has grown into a multibillion-dollar sports league, but the Pro Football Hall of Fame lurked at the edge of Canton’s civic attention for most of the 54 years since it was founded.
The museum, with its distinctive football-shaped rotunda, was hemmed in by Interstate 77 on one side and a neighborhood of middle-class homes on the other. The 118,000-square-foot museum has 200,000 to 300,000 visitors annually. But other than the annual August induction ceremony and a nationally televised preseason game at an adjoining field, the Hall of Fame was often overlooked by the elected and civic leaders of this faded Rust Belt city.
“We’ve been a dying community for 20, 30 years,” said Williams, who was raised in the city. “If you look at how our population declined, we’ve been on a slow morphine drip, if you will. We had a great gem, the Hall of Fame, and we were not using it to brand the city in any way.”
Canton’s perspective changed with two developments: a transition in the hall’s presidency in 2014, and an unscheduled visit by a California-based builder who is active in redeveloping Midwest cities. In January 2014, three days after he took office as the Hall of Fame’s president and chief executive, David Baker met Stuart Lichter, the president and founder of the Industrial Realty Group. Among Lichter’s Ohio developments is East End, in nearby Akron, which includes a 639,000-square-foot, seven-story, $160 million headquarters for the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
Lichter pitched Baker on a big idea: an NFL theme park.
“I said, Football is unique,” Lichter recalled. “It is the biggest sport in the country. You have the Hall of Fame here. What would happen if we created a permanent NFL-like experience here?”
Lichter wanted to expand the Hall of Fame with amenities like a youth field complex, a hotel, retail shops, a conference center and entertainment. “Wouldn’t that be a cool thing?” he said. “It would be a place where all the football fans in the country can go 365 days a year.”
Baker, a former mayor of Irvine, California, and a former team owner and commissioner of the Arena Football League, liked what he heard. He is also the managing partner for Union Village, a $1.2 billion, 170-acre integrated senior care community under construction in Henderson, Nevada, so he added the research, education and long-term care elements of Union Village to the project.
The ambitious project is in a new category of sports-focused, mixed-use developments that are appearing around the country. One notable example is the 75-acre Arena District in Columbus, Ohio, constructed around a National Hockey League arena that includes 300,000 square feet of retail space, 1.5 million square feet of commercial space and 800 residential apartments.
The concept has been successful elsewhere, too. The $1 billion mixed-use Downtown Commons in Sacramento, California, includes a National Basketball Association arena that opened last year. The $1.5 billion, 91-acre Ford Center at the Star is a mixed-use development in Frisco, Texas, that incorporates the headquarters and practice facility for the Dallas Cowboys. The City of Champions, a $3.8 billion, 298-acre mixeduse development is under construction in Inglewood, California, includes a new NFL stadium, which will be shared by the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers.
Last year, Baker and his staff persuaded Johnson Controls, the international industrial technology company, to pay more than $100 million for naming rights. With the Johnson Controls Hall of Fame Village, the Hall of Fame’s campus will double to 200 acres and include a number of features that are consistent with other sports-focused mixed-use projects.
The $155 million Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium, completed this month, holds 23,000 people and has an 80,000-square-foot skydeck and suites. Construction started this year on a $115 million, 243-room hotel that encompasses a 25,000-square-foot conference center and 65,600 square feet of retail space. Four of eight state-of-the-art playing fields are finished in the National Youth Football and Sports Complex.
A $58 million Hall of Fame Promenade, a $38 million Center for Excellence and a $77 million Performance Center will start construction soon. The promenade consists of 50,500 square feet of retail space plus 68 residential units. The Performance Center, which will be used for conventions and concerts, converts to a 5,500-seat indoor football arena and has an outdoor practice field.
“This is a campus that has so many different kinds of buildings,” said Kim Metcalf-Kupres, the chief marketing officer at Johnson Controls and a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame board.
Carol Applegeet,
MSN, RN, CNOR, NEA-BC, FAAN, has been named vice president for perioperative services at Kettering Health Network. She is responsible for providing strategic leadership for and oversight of the network’s care for patients before, during and after surgery.
Applegeet joined Kettering Health Network in 2010 as administrative director of perioperative services at Kettering Medical Center. In 2014 she was promoted to vice president of patient care services at Fort Hamilton Hospital.
She served as president of the national Association of periOperative Registered Nurses (AORN) and received the organization’s Award for Excellence in Perioperative Nursing.
For more information, visit www.ketteringhealth.org.
Kelly D. Madzey
has been promoted to the position of criminal trial supervisor in the Criminal Division of the Montgomery County Prosecutor’s Office and the supervising attorney of the Child Abuse Bureau. This position supervises the assistant prosecuting attorneys handling criminal dockets in Common Pleas Court.
Madzey graduated in 2002 from the University of North Dakota, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, majoring in criminal justice. In 2005, she received her law degree from the University of North Dakota School of Law. From October 2005 until she joined the prosecutor’s office,
Madzey was a staff attorney for the 12th District Court of Appeals in Middletown. In May 2008, she joined the Prosecutor’s Office and was assigned to the Appellate Division. She has also been assigned to the Juvenile Division, Intake/Grand Jury Section, and Criminal Division.
She served as the supervising attorney of the Child Abuse Bureau from January 2014 until September 2015 when she was again assigned as a Criminal Docket Attorney. Since August 2016, Kelly has been the supervising attorney of the Intake/ Grand Jury Section.