The building: 111 South St. Joseph Street

Opened August 25, 1995

The building stands at 111 South St. Joseph Street, downtown, connected to Century Center and two miles south of the Notre Dame campus. It is 52,000 square feet. The project architects of record in the city's own lease documents are The Troyer Group, Inc., and Mathews-Purucker-Anella, Inc.; the lead architect was Sam Jones of The Troyer Group, a Notre Dame graduate. The cost, as built, is the first of this section's printed conflicts: the winning proposal had slated a $14 million facility, and the Tribune's retrospective accounting puts what the city spent on construction at about $18 million. Both figures are printed at their sources; the record does not reconcile them, and neither do we. The Hall opened on August 25, 1995. Kent Stephens, the Hall's historian and curator, was there from the arrival and remembered the first night seventeen years later: "The gridiron was filled with people. It was beyond my wildest dreams."

Inside, the building was arranged as a stadium in section. Visitors entered across the Gridiron Plaza, a 35-yard field laid out with yard lines and goalposts in front of the building — later surfaced in Sprinturf artificial turf — which doubled as rental ground for private events. The museum occupied two floors beneath and beside the plaza. At the center of the lower level sat a stadium theater running a fourteen-minute film. The Hall of Honor held the enshrined. The exhibits traced the evolution of equipment and of the game's stadiums, ran video kiosks and touch-screen highlights, and opened a practice field where visitors could test football skills and an agility area where they could test themselves. Above, the Press Box gallery hung mixed-media paintings of the Heisman Trophy winners and overlooked the Gridiron and the building's signature work, the 43-foot "Pursuit of a Dream" sculpture, a tapestry of images of young men on the journey to becoming college players. A restaurant and a gift shop completed the plant. The building's spaces were rented for events of ten to four hundred people, with catering, corporate packages and group admission prices — the Hall was built, in other words, not only as a museum but as a working piece of the city's convention plant, and its economics, told in the next entries, have to be read with that second purpose in view.

Sources:

1. City of South Bend, 1993 project lease documents — the project architects, The Troyer Group, Inc., and Mathews-Purucker-Anella, Inc.
2. College Football Hall of Fame, the building's record — Sam Jones of The Troyer Group as lead architect, the 111 South St. Joseph Street address, the 52,000 square feet and the Century Center connection.
3. South Bend Tribune — the approximately $18 million construction figure in the paper's retrospective accounting (via the Gannett account of December 30, 2013), against the $14 million of the winning proposal.
4. The museum's own South Bend-era description, preserved in the city-data.com article on the South Bend Hall — the Gridiron Plaza, the stadium theater and its film, the Hall of Honor, the Press Box and the "Pursuit of a Dream" sculpture, the practice field and agility area, the restaurant and gift shop, and the rental and group terms.
5. Al Lesar, South Bend Tribune, December 30, 2012 — Kent Stephens's recollection of the opening night of August 25, 1995.