Dunn Tire Park
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275 Washington Street Buffalo, NY


Built: 1988

Dunn Tire Park is a baseball-only facility in Buffalo, New York. It is home to the Buffalo Bisons Triple-A baseball team.

The stadium opened on April 14, 1988 as Pilot Field, with a sell-out crowd of 19,500 on hand. Oriole Park at Camden Yards often is cited as the vanguard for the trend in American cities towards "retro"-styled, baseball-only stadiums located in downtown cores. The firm that designed Camden Yards, architects Ben Barnert and Joe Spear of the Kansas City-based firm HOK Sport, Inc., actually cut its teeth on the design of Dunn Tire Park, which opened nearly four years prior to Camden Yards.

At the time of the stadium's construction, Buffalo was hoping to secure either an expansion major-league baseball team or a relocated team. The Montreal Expos and Pittsburgh Pirates were often mentioned as a leading contender in the latter category and Buffalo was one of the four finalists in the 1993 National League expansion derby, which brought the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins to major-league baseball.

When completed, however, the stadium seated fewer than 20,000 people. While this was a large number of seats for a minor-league facility, it was dwarfed by many major-league parks. Thus, the design made provisions for future expansion that would have allowed the seating capacity to grow to nearly 40,000 by adding an upper deck above the existing mezzanine should a major-league team decide to relocate to Buffalo.

Prior to the start of the 1999 season, Dunn Tire, a local chain of retail tire outlets, became the naming rights holder for the stadium.

Website:
http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/app/ballpark
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