Bleacher Collapses and Other Stadium Tragedies

Wisconsin’s Camp Randall in 1915.

College football fans entering stadiums today worry about many things. They fret about the game's outcome and whether the alcohol they consumed before entering the stadium will see them through the contest. Surely, the least of their worries is the structural integrity of the stadium in which they will spend the next several hours. However, there was a time when poor design, lax maintenance, low-quality materials, and other factors made the stadiums and surrounding structures a threat to fans' life and limb.

Early football games were played on open fields and college greens. As teams increasingly looked for fans to subsidize their equipment and travel expenses, the playing fields were roped off or moved to polo grounds, baseball stadiums, and other enclosed spaces, almost all built of wood. The wooden structures were often built of untreated lumber, making their maintenance expensive and easily skipped in years ticket sales tailed off. Even more problematic, college football's increased popularity meant that many stadiums lacked the capacity to handle the crowds seeking access to the biggest games on the schedule. For big games, the permanent stands were supplemented by temporary bleachers that brought any number of problems.

The earliest bleacher collapse of note occurred at the 1890 Yale-Princeton game at Eastern Park in Brooklyn. The Thanksgiving Day game was a top contest that year, featuring six All America players, including Yale's Pudge Heffelfinger. Pudge became football's first professional player two years later when he accepted $500 to play a game with the Allegheny Athletic Club.

Eastern Park was home to the Brooklyn Wonders of the professional baseball Players League, but expectations for a large crowd led to the building of 4,000-seat temporary bleachers standing twenty feet tall. As the public filed into the stadium during the pre-game festivities, the temporary bleachers collapsed, throwing an estimated 2,000 fans to the ground. The fifty injuries included broken bones, crushed limbs, and concussions, with all the victims surviving their injuries.

Yale scores one a touchdown at Eastern Park. The stands that collapsed stood behind the official in the foreground. (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, December 13, 1890)