Gaining a Yard: The Building of Baltimore's Football Stadium
by Jon Morgan, Doug Kapustin (Photographer)
Baltimore Ravens Stadium: From Ground Zero to Opening Day
January 13, 2001
Doug Kapustin is probably the finest photographer the Baltimore Sun has ever had. Jon Morgan, writer, tends to be slotted as "sports" but he knows a whole lot about state and city financing, NFL franchising, comparative stadiums around the country, cost overruns, "Builders pitting game plans against the clock" and so forth and so on.
"Gaining a Yard" is much more than a football story. It is an entire chronicle of a major public works project on the order of the Transcontinental Railroad, the Hoover Dam or the Empire State building. There is also an extensive section on the LED scoreboard and video system -- why the Ravens stadium is much more than state-of-the-art compared to other stadia around the country.
I've had this book mailed to my nephew about to start with a very prestigious college. I packaged it with "Cathedral: The Story of its Construction" by David Macaulay.
"Gaining a Yard" should be required reading for anyone involved in any type of major
building or public works project anywhere on the globe in the future.