New Vikings Stadium in St. Louis Park? It Almost Happened Once

Had things shaken out a bit differently, people might not be shopping at St. Louis Park’s these days, but rather getting ready to tailgate before a Vikings game.

In the late 1940s, serious discussions were had in St. Louis Park about building a new, multi-purpose stadium on 30 acres near Wayzata Boulevard and Zarthan Avenue, according to the St. Louis Park Historical Society.

The plan was to build a stadium modeled after the Polo Grounds in New York City, which at the time was home to the New York Giants football and baseball squads. It was a fitting concept—local officials were actively trying to lure the baseball Giants from New York in the hopes of bringing Major League Baseball to Minnesota for the first time.

That, of course, never happened. The Giants moved to San Francisco, and the St. Louis Park stadium never materialized. There wasn’t enough room for parking near Wayzata and Zarthan, and the Korean War caused a steel shortage and a moratorium on sports facilities. When the war ended, plans for Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington had already begun, pushing the St. Louis Park plan aside. The Met opened in 1956 on a 161-acre site in Bloomington and soon became home to the Minnesota Twins—who had moved here from Washington, D.C.—and the expansion Minnesota Vikings.

Even if the Twins and Vikings had come to St. Louis Park, it would have taken a lot of work to keep them in town. Both teams left the Met in 1981 for the artificially greener pastures of the Metrodome, but that stadium too has become more or less obsolete—the Twins opened the new Target Field in 2010, and the Vikings have spent more than a decade pushing for a new stadium.

City staffers have joked about the site as a possible location of a new Vikings stadium, but the site’s 25 acres are dwarfed by the 200-plus acres the Vikings are now focusing on in Arden Hills.

“Maybe we can throw in free Ovaltine,” said Kevin Locke, St. Louis Park's community development director, a reference to a product once produced at the Nestle plant. 

For now, it seems the closest St. Louis Park will get to having a stadium for either the Twins or Vikings—or both—was the near-miss 60 years ago. A major league sports stadium would have certainly changed the course of St. Louis Park history, Locke said.

“(And) who knows—maybe they would have stayed?” he added. “It’s an interesting question: Which would we rather have had—something like Target Field, or the West End?”