Kingdome Stories -- Screaming Fans, Praying Christians, Home Show Shoppers, Heros, Vendors And An Engineer Who Know The Roof Design Would Work. All Have Something To Say About This Landmark We Love To Hate.

"Will I shed a tear? Probably. We live in a very disposable society. We throw things away awfully fast. It was built with all the best advice available. I don't know if that sense has gone away, but times have changed. The facility is still what it was in the beginning. It has not deteriorated; it's not dilapidated. Nothing's wrong with the Kingdome." - John Spellman

THE KINGDOME IS BEST regarded at night, which can be said of humans, even the most beautiful among us.

In the darkness, the Kingdome preens confidently. The roof, at night, looks like a paper lantern, an illusion of translucence created by floodlights. Shadows hide the building's sullied, drab skin. Driving north on the interstate, the appearance of the Kingdome has always signified home for returning travelers. Coy, it hides momentarily behind the blank walls of the Rainier Brewery.

The Kingdome seems to understand its place in an environment whose most majestic structures were created by volcanoes and glaciers. It fits because it is Seattle, gray like the place, resigned to the rain like the place, redolent of sea like the place. Built of sand and gravel instead of glass and steel, it is modest and practical, a characterization often made of the citizens who bought and built the place.

It may be said that the Kingdome never had time to become venerable. The decade has seen many old stadiums and arenas replaced by new buildings. But unlike Comiskey Park or Boston Garden, the Kingdome may live and die within the lifetime of a young person. It may be said that Paul Allen brought it down. It can just as easily be said that the modern athlete brought it down. Or that the modern fan brought it down with his weakness for dumb hats, for deep-fried tortillas smothered in synthetic cheese, his nostalgic lust for real grass, and his willingness to fund player salaries all the while complaining the world is going to hell because of them.

And perhaps that's fine with you.

You should not cry for the Kingdome, because every grain of it is inert and unfeeling. Conversely, you should not hate it because it simply granted our wish to be a big-league city. It is sturdy enough to stand 1,000 more years, because unlike people, concrete is extremely patient. Be indifferent, but please understand the Kingdome.

Perhaps all you need to know is that the building is ugly to most, and that people say it has outlived its usefulness. Perhaps you know a little more. That its $125-million mortgage is twice its initial construction cost. That its annual debt payment of $11.4 million is about equal to paying $2,500 a month for a two-bedroom house - cheap, if you live in Monte Carlo.

Maybe you know a lot less, only that as long as the Kingdome stands, you will not get your Seahawk season tickets on the 50-yard line.

Perhaps that was you in Olympia last March, wearing the Seahawk hat, sitting in the front row of Hearing Room B among the state representatives from King County, among Bob Whitsitt, Bert Kohlde, Damon Huard, New York Vinnie, the lawyer Nike hired, and the woman who owns Mrs. Pizza Express on Cherry Street. They gathered to discuss the governor's bill to build a new outdoor football stadium.

You heard about the Lakeside Rummage Sale (how it bought Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's first computer), the World Trade Center bombing (its connection to T-shirt counterfeiters, who would only be encouraged by a sports memorabilia tax), about arms dealers (those same counterfeiters again), food stamps (another social program put in front of a stadium), multiculturalism (professional sports, the great unifier of races) and even a challenge to the existence of Paul Allen, our unseen wizard behind the curtain.

Only once was the Kingdome and its presumed demolition mentioned, a cry that heard only its echo in a room pressed to the walls and bleeding out the doors with people. Not one was there on behalf of the Kingdome, not even its owners. On second thought, especially its owners.

It is a dangerous cause and therefore no one's cause. Politicians from the governor down are beholden to Allen's millions, which will likely keep them from being the bungling politician who lost the Seahawks. The Kingdome's own architects declined even to talk about the old building because their interests lie with the design of a new one.

But if you live within sight of Mount Rainier, your life probably has been at least indirectly impacted by the 52,800 cubic feet of concrete poured to build the Kingdome, barely 21 years old, its best years already spent.

SEALED IN ITS weathered, mildew-streaked skin are stories that no one really hears in a discussion about car-rental taxes or ticket surcharges.

Stories about all the athletes and coaches who celebrated and suffered there. About all the childhoods spent there. About the pancake-size crater in the drywall behind the broadcast booth, left unrepaired in memorial of a foul ball hit by Pete O'Brien on June 14, 1993.

About the plaque near the security guard's booth that remembers that on Aug. 17, 1994, two sandblasters - Billy Louth, the drifter who had only a girlfriend in Portland, and Jorge Turincio, a former schoolteacher and father of three from Mexico - died when they fell 250 feet to the Kingdome floor in a crane basket while trying to repair the ceiling.

About the years Bertha Wright, a single mother, moonlighted as an usher to pay for her daughter's cleats, licorice and prom dresses so she could have the semblance of a privileged life.

About Danny Thurston's 84-yard, game-winning touchdown catch in the 1987 Kingbowl, and the Saturday morning he spent dressing in the same locker room Steve Largent dressed in, wearing the same number 80 that Largent wore, feeling just as important. Now 27, Thurston works for the city of Tukwila organizing recreational activities for senior citizens. But in his hometown of Puyallup, he always will be the football hero who, on third and long, turned a quick out into Puyallup High School's only football state championship.

Or about Cynthia Prentiss, a sunflower-seed spitting, tobacco-chewing, softball playing high-school freshman, tomboy sister to three older brothers, who as a Mariner ballgirl saw too many grown men act like vulgar boys to ever want to watch a baseball game again.

"My image was totally shattered," said Prentiss, 31, who works for a television station in Spokane. "How they talked, how they acted. It was gross. It was a loss of innocence."

And you cannot know that Jack Christiansen, who on the day the Kingdome roof went up, stood on top of the first of its 40 sections as a rebuttal to a contractor's claim the structure Christiansen had designed was sinking.

Engineers love their buildings in a way architects do not perhaps because engineers know a building from skin to core, understand what makes it breathe and bleed. What architects draw, engineers bring to life.

"It's sad, just very sad," said Christiansen, 69. "It's a superior structure. It's maddening to think they could spend millions of dollars to tear it down. They're not going to get one bit of help from me. I feel terrible. Sick. Mad as hell actually."

Christiansen is a sports fan in the way that most are. He grew up in Chicago and memorized the batting averages of every Cub. He played center for his high-school basketball team and end for his football team but rightly or wrongly has come to view most athletes and owners with disdain and suspicion.

"It is not sports anymore," he said. "I don't know what to call it. Greed. Power."

Christiansen is semi-retired from a career that included work on the convention centers of Baltimore, Sacramento and Columbus, Ohio, and stadiums in Yakima and Saudi Arabia. He lives on Bainbridge Island in what looks from the driveway like an unremarkable house until you look more closely at its roof, made of concrete, and shaped like an inverted umbrella. It is a hyperbolic parabaloid, supported in the center by a single column. In concept, his thin-shell, concrete roof is identical to the Kingdome's.

In part, Christiansen left the Midwest to climb mountains. He has climbed all the major peaks in the Olympics and Cascades. His right pinkie is permanently bent 45 degrees, 25 years after a fall in the Cowlitz Chimneys, a series of rock towers east of Mount Rainier. He spent the night on a ledge at 7,600 feet with a broken leg and cracked pelvis. An expert at staying warm, the climatic condition he fears most is 35 degrees and raining, which aptly describes Seattle in December. Better to be 20 degrees and snowing, he said, because it's dry. This, he said, is why an outdoor football stadium is illogical.

"I think Paul Allen is absolutely nuts," Christiansen said. "He may think it adds to the game, but Paul will be sitting in his warm cubicle the entire game."

THE KINGDOME, FOR everything it is not, is warm and dry, making a home show possible in February and an RV show possible in March. Like a giant river delta, the Kingdome is a great confluence of life: Jehovah's Witnesses meetings, an Alcoholics Anonymous convention, rodeos, Boeing Christmas parties, Peter Frampton, the New Kids on The Block, monster trucks, Evel Knievel, and three Final Fours, which could not be held in Seattle without the Kingdome.

Dave Helgeson, director of the RV Show, seems to have spent all of his life selling recreational vehicles. As a child, Helgeson's family made summer vacations out of driving to the Airstream factory in California to pick up each year's new model. (His father once rented one to Paul McCartney, who used it as a dressing room during a Kingdome concert.) Interstate 5 and fast-food chains did not yet exist. So they followed Highway 99 and ate in bowling alleys because food was cheap and fast there. Because he was the youngest, Helgeson slept in the bathtub.

The only thing Helgeson knows better than RVs is the floor of the Kingdome. He paces off, crawls on, duct-tapes and maps the floor once a year, when it is covered by a maze of trailers and campers, some costing as much as a waterfront home.

"The Kingdome isn't the most beautiful building," Helgeson said. "But it does what it's supposed to do."

As a rule, RV dealers and left-handed batters don't complain about the Kingdome, the former because the building has no posts and the latter because of the short porch in right field. Mindful of the temptation this created, pitcher Chris Bosio pitched low and away to lefties when he was ahead in the count.

"That's knowing your park," Bosio said.

Baseball players, more than football players, have a special relationship with their stadiums, as every piece of it is part of the playing field. Every football field is 100 yards long; still, every ballpark is different. Ken Griffey Jr. knows exactly how many strides he can take after a fly ball before he will hit the center-field wall. Jay Buhner knows how a grounder hit down the right-field line will carom out of a corner.

"It's like a home because we spent so much time there," said Bosio, now retired. "You're there at 12:30 for a 7 p.m. game. A lot of guys sleep there after night games if there's a day game the next day. That place becomes so familiar to you. We know every inch and corner."

If the Kingdome's artificial surface can be counted on for anything, it is a true bounce. Omar Vizquel got exactly that as he barehanded a skipping grounder for the final out of Bosio's no-hitter, a feat even the greatest pitchers may never achieve. The no-hitter, on April 22, 1993, was his first career victory for the Mariners.

That it happened weeks after a neighbor died in a murder-suicide, after his home in California had been burglarized and after his grandfather died reminded him that life's superior moments are often the exceptions.

In Bosio's next start, while pitching a shutout in the fifth inning, he collided with a base runner trying to make an out. He broke his collarbone so severely, he was bandaged to a wheelchair. He was never the same pitcher again.

"They can bury the park but they can't take away those memories," Bosio said. "I'll always have thoughts of the Kingdome and what it's meant to me."

The Kingdome is not among structures known for their beauty, though it won a architectural design award.

Dave Hoedemaker can't help chuckling at this even though it was his architectural firm, NBBJ, that won the award. He was in charge of a different project at the time, but the Kingdome was conspicuously the biggest thing happening in his office. He described it as a time of all-nighters and a crowd of heads and elbows over a drawing table.

The years since the Kingdome opened have passed quickly, as Hoedemaker became a partner in the firm. And if the Kingdome were to close today, he would say it was used well.

"Twenty years," said Hoedemaker, "that's about how long sports stadiums are supposed to last."

Engineers are beholden to function, architects more to fashion. The Kingdome, in Hoedemaker's book, is a success, having lived a few years beyond its cultural shelf life.

Mick McHugh opened a coffee shop in Pioneer Square in 1963, which he still might have if not for the Kingdome. Instead he bought and restored a five-story building, sandblasting its interiors until the bricks turned bright red again. He turned what was a pharmaceutical warehouse into an office building and opened a bar and restaurant on the ground floor. He called it F.X. McRory's.

He supported the new baseball stadium and supports the new football stadium. They are as much buildings as they are two figurative neon signs that say "Eat at Mick's." He loves the Kingdome in a way that is business, not personal. When the Seahawks win people drink; When they lose, people drink more. When Billy Graham is in the Kingdome, people still drink. Coffee anyway.

"We have to bite the bullet now or later," said McHugh."The economy dictates it."

BILL SEARS, THE Kingdome's first director of public relations, has been in Seattle so long, he remembers when artificial turf and a stadium with a roof seemed ingenious. Almost all his adult life has been spent either wishing for, campaigning for, or working for the Kingdome, which makes it difficult for him to talk about tearing it down.

"When you got 60,000 fans going crazy, it's hard for me to understand," he said.

Sears even ran for city council in 1967, not so much because he wanted to be a politician but because he wanted to keep the issue of building a stadium in front of voters. Although he lost to Sam Smith, he was dubbed the "dome stadium candidate" by the media.

The Kingdome was the issue of its time, an idea uttered as early as 1957 by Dewey Soriano, manager of the Seattle Rainiers. Eleven years passed, two bond proposals voted down before the third, which asked for $40 million in bonds to fund an indoor stadium, was passed in 1968. Its success was largely credited to Mickey Mantle. One of baseball's greatest players, he was the personification of a muscular, American heartland. As the nation was building superhighways and suburbs, he was hitting home runs so far they became legend. To Seattle, he represented the possibility that it too could be part of sports immortality.

County Commissioner Johnny O'Brien, a former Major League baseball player and Seattle University basketball star, picked up Mantle at Sea-Tac airport, bringing his excited young son with him. Mantle charmed Johnny Jr. and the rest of the city as well, helping generate the enthusiasm needed to approve the bonds.

"The town was growing, flexing its muscles," O'Brien said. "It was thinking big league. There was no one out there yelling it, but it was an attitude: What do we need to have here that identifies us with other top-notch cities? The one thing lacking was major league sports and that was only because of the facilities.

"It's not the building, but our needs that have changed. I hope everybody keeps that in mind."

Choosing a site took three years. Hundreds were considered and denied. One had the stadium built on pontoons, floated in Elliott Bay. Another proposal required that Green Lake be drained and filled and topped with a stadium. Lawsuits attempting to block construction were filed as the engineers, architects and contractors were selected. Ground was finally broken on Nov. 2, 1972.

The eventual structure was built "with the best advice available," former governor John Spellman said. How it should die of obsolescence in far less time than it takes to pay off a typical home mortgage is a function of the rapidly changing scale of professional sports. The trend in sports is spectacle; the trend in stadiums is theme park. Stadiums with stores, restaurants, hotels, luxury boxes, sound tracks, light shows, acrobatic mascots. There seems to be little faith left in the game itself. Or some would say in the audience.

Selling tickets goes only a short way to pay athletes, whose salaries make up the bulk of team budgets. Television and stadium revenue have become critically important. As much as Mantle made the Kingdome seem indispensable, Ken Griffey Jr. rendered it useless.

The Kingdome was built with only the basics in mind, because only the basics were needed in 1976. About $40 million was spent later to install luxury boxes, one of which Allen leases. But because they were afterthoughts, they are not ideally located.

Compromises were made to finish the building under budget, such as the many mechanical boxes barnacled to the exterior walls (less expensive than installing a central system). Because it was plainly constructed, the dome was left vulnerable to criticism that it was built on the cheap, and that now we're paying for decades-old thrift.

The dome is a marvel nonetheless. Only five inches thick, the roof covers nine acres, making it the largest of its kind in the world. The curvature, like the thin shell of an egg, gives the roof its strength. It cannot rust, rot or burn. More than 62 million visitors have passed through its gates. It has been far more useful than the Space Needle, yet the revolving restaurant shaped like a rocket is in no danger of demolition.

Seattle's skyline, before the Kingdome, was missing the Columbia Center, Key Tower, the Washington Mutual Tower, Two Union Square, and City Centre. The post-Kingdome Seattle is full of giant retailers, more California money than locals like to admit, and another area code.

It may be a stretch to say the Kingdome gave us a new art museum and symphony hall. But if you believe that, then maybe the Kingdome - beautiful at night, its concourses a good place to kiss on a dreamy summer evening, a warm and dry home for evangelists and free safeties - was a good idea after all. And maybe it is actually the Kingdome that has no use for us.

Hugo Kugiya is a writer for Pacific Magazine. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer.