Candlestick Park: Where I Grew Up as a Sports Fan, and What an Irvine Developer Is Doing with the Land
My dad took me to my first professional baseball game at Candlestick Park. I was a kid sitting in those wind-whipped seats in the Bayview district of San Francisco watching Will Clark take batting practice and wondering how anyone could throw a slider past him. Chili Davis was in the lineup. Atlee Hammaker was on the mound. I was hooked.
A few years later my uncle took me to a couple of 49ers games at The Stick, as locals called it. We went to see Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott. Watching Montana orchestrate a two-minute drill from those stands was something I have never forgotten. The cold air off the Bay. The fog rolling in. The crowd erupting when he released one of those perfect spirals to Jerry Rice. That was Candlestick Park at its best.
The stadium is gone now. It came down in 2015. What remains is 270 acres of prime San Francisco bayfront land, a lot of broken promises to the surrounding community, and a massive residential and commercial redevelopment project being driven by an Irvine-based developer named FivePoint Holdings. I wanted to dig into all of it.
How Candlestick Got Built (and Why It Was Always Cold)
The story of Candlestick Park begins with the Giants leaving New York. Owner Horace Stoneham moved the franchise west for the 1958 season, and San Francisco promised him a new ballpark. Ground was broken in 1958. The stadium was formally named Candlestick Park on March 3, 1959, taking its name from Candlestick Point, the peninsula of land jutting into San Francisco Bay in the city's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.
The park opened on April 12, 1960. Vice President Richard Nixon threw out the ceremonial first pitch. It was the first modern stadium in America built entirely of reinforced concrete, and it seated 43,765 for baseball. Its position on the bay created a geography that would become both its calling card and its curse.
The wind was legendary. In the 1961 MLB All-Star Game at Candlestick, pitcher Stu Miller was famously called for a balk when a gust actually blew him off the mound mid-delivery. The game became one of the most cited examples of Candlestick's notoriously unpredictable conditions. The cold was real too. Summer in San Francisco's Bayview district is colder than most of the rest of the Bay Area because of marine layer and bay winds, and Candlestick sat directly in the path of that air.
Despite all of that, the Giants faithful came. The stadium hosted Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, and Juan Marichal during the franchise's early glory years. The Giants became a San Francisco institution, and Candlestick was their home for four decades.
The Moments That Made Candlestick Legendary
The Beatles, August 29, 1966
The most famous non-sports event in the stadium's history happened during the Giants' tenure: the Beatles played their final ticketed concert at Candlestick Park on August 29, 1966. About 25,000 fans watched the band perform an 11-song set. They closed with "Long Tall Sally." It was the last paid performance of the Beatles' touring career. Their only subsequent live appearance as a group was the famous rooftop concert in London in 1969. If you went to that show at Candlestick, you witnessed history without knowing it.
The 1989 World Series Earthquake
On October 17, 1989, Candlestick Park was packed with fans for Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics. At 5:04 p.m., about 30 minutes before first pitch, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck. The Loma Prieta quake was captured live on national television and ultimately killed 67 people across the Bay Area. Candlestick Park itself withstood the quake with minimal structural damage, and the crowd inside was protected. The Series was suspended for 10 days, the only non-weather interruption in World Series history. When play resumed, Oakland swept the Giants in four games. But for a terrifying few minutes, the stadium became a shelter in a city that was falling apart around it.
The Name That Kept Changing
By the mid-1990s, naming rights deals had become the norm in professional sports, and Candlestick was not immune. Here is the full list of what the park was officially called at various points in its history:
| Name | Years | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Candlestick Park | 1960 – 1995 | Original name |
| 3Com Park at Candlestick Point | 1995 – 2002 | $900,000/year naming rights deal with tech firm 3Com |
| San Francisco Stadium at Candlestick Point | 2002 – 2004 | Deal expired, no new sponsor |
| Monster Park | 2004 – 2008 | Monster Cable paid for naming rights; San Francisco voters passed a measure in November 2004 requiring the name revert to "Candlestick" permanently when the Monster deal expired |
| Candlestick Park | 2008 – 2014 | Name restored by voter initiative |
Most San Franciscans just called it The Stick throughout all of it.
The 49ers Era: Montana, Lott, Rice, and the Dynasty
The San Francisco 49ers moved into Candlestick Park in 1971 as tenants of the Giants. The 49ers had played at Kezar Stadium across town since 1946 but needed something bigger. Candlestick was configured for football with a capacity that reached 69,732 at its peak, and the 49ers would call it home for more than four decades.
The most storied chapter at Candlestick belongs to the Bill Walsh era. Joe Montana quarterbacked the 49ers to four Super Bowl championships in the 1980s, and The Stick was where he built his legend. Ronnie Lott was one of the most feared safeties in NFL history. Jerry Rice was rewriting the record books. The combination made for one of the greatest dynasties the sport has seen, and Candlestick Park was the stage.
The football crowd was different from the baseball crowd. The stadium felt louder, louder and more chaotic. Winter 49ers games in January playoff football were brutal but electric. The cold that made summer baseball at Candlestick miserable was almost expected in January, and the crowd leaned into it. If you were there for a playoff run in the 1980s, you know what I mean.
The 49ers played their final game at Candlestick Park on December 23, 2013. They beat the Atlanta Falcons 34 to 24. The franchise moved to the newly built Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara for the 2014 season. For the 49ers, the move was long overdue. For the neighborhood and a generation of fans, it was the end of something that felt irreplaceable.
"Right now what we have in the absence of Candlestick stadium, which has been torn down for years, is a big gaping hole in the middle of a community. It is nothing but a pile of dirt."
Supervisor Shamann Walton, San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 2024
The Goodbye: McCartney, Demolition, and a Lot of Dirt
The Giants left Candlestick after the 1999 season, moving to what is now known as Oracle Park (then Pacific Bell Park) for the 2000 season. The park's final event as a music venue came in August 2014 when Paul McCartney played what was billed as a farewell concert. McCartney, who had of course been at the 1966 Beatles finale, played "Live and Let Die" and helped close out the stadium's public life.
Demolition began in 2014 and was substantially complete by September 24, 2015. The implosion of the stadium brought down a structure that had hosted presidents, World Series games, Super Bowl preparations, an earthquake, and the last paid concert the Beatles ever gave. When the dust cleared, 270 acres of San Francisco bayfront sat empty.
What happened next took a long time. Longer than almost anyone expected.
Why It Took Over a Decade: The Full Story
The Original Deal: Lennar Urban, 2010
The redevelopment of Candlestick Point was part of a much larger project that included the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, a Superfund site adjacent to the Candlestick property. In 2010, the City of San Francisco and its redevelopment agency (now the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, or OCII) signed a Disposition and Development Agreement with Lennar Urban, the San Francisco arm of homebuilder Lennar Corporation. The DDA was dated June 3, 2010 and recorded that November.
The original plan was ambitious: combine Phase 2 of the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment with Candlestick Point into a single massive mixed-use project. The combined plan called for approximately 10,500 homes, a 500,000 to 600,000-square-foot retail mall anchored by Macerich (a major mall operator), a 4,400-seat performance venue, and thousands of jobs. Lennar and Macerich formally announced the retail component in November 2014.
Lennar Creates FivePoint (2009) and Takes It Public (2017)
Lennar had created a subsidiary called Five Point Communities (later Five Point Holdings, LLC) in 2009 to manage several large California master-planned community projects, including the Candlestick/Hunters Point work, the Great Park Neighborhoods in Irvine, and Newhall Ranch in Los Angeles County. FivePoint is headquartered in Irvine, which is the connection to Orange County.
Five Point attempted an IPO in 2015 but pulled it due to poor market conditions. The company went public on May 15, 2017, selling 24.15 million Class A shares at $14.00 per share for gross proceeds of approximately $338 million. Lennar retained roughly a 40 percent stake. FivePoint trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FPH.
The Hunters Point Fraud Scandal (2018)
The most significant reason Candlestick Point stalled was not the developer, the city, or the financing. It was a federal environmental fraud scandal at the adjacent Hunters Point Shipyard that froze the entire combined project.
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was used from the 1940s onward as a site for decontaminating Navy ships that had been exposed to radioactivity during Pacific nuclear weapons tests. The site was heavily contaminated as a result and was designated a federal Superfund site. Beginning in 2006, the U.S. Navy contracted with environmental firm Tetra Tech EC to clean up the site, paying the company more than $250 million over several years.
In 2018, two former Tetra Tech supervisors pleaded guilty in federal court to falsifying radiological cleanup data. Rather than collecting actual soil samples from the areas being tested, workers substituted clean dirt from uncontaminated parts of the site, making the contaminated areas appear safe. The Navy later concluded that roughly 48 percent of Tetra Tech's radiological data was either suspect or showed evidence of potential manipulation. In two specific areas, the EPA found that 90 to 97 percent of soil samples had been potentially compromised or deliberately falsified.
The scandal effectively put the Hunters Point Shipyard redevelopment on hold indefinitely. Because the original Candlestick plan was tied together with Hunters Point as a single project, Candlestick was pulled under with it.
The Retail Mall Was Scrapped (2019)
Adding to the delays, the retail market deteriorated significantly in the mid-2010s as e-commerce accelerated. By 2019, FivePoint suspended its plans for the 500,000-plus-square-foot shopping center. The Macerich partnership was dissolved. The decision to walk away from the mall saved the project from an anchor concept that was already obsolete, but it also reset the development plan from scratch and pushed housing construction back by years.
Decoupled from Hunters Point (November 2024)
For years, the city and FivePoint negotiated over how to move forward when Hunters Point remained contaminated and untouched. In November 2024, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved a formal amendment to the project's agreements that officially decoupled Candlestick Point from the Hunters Point Shipyard. Candlestick would move ahead on its own timeline. Hunters Point would remain a separate, unresolved problem.
At the same time, the board approved a new development plan: 7,200 homes at Candlestick Point, with 32 percent designated affordable housing (approximately 2,300 units). The plan also includes roughly 3 million square feet of commercial space, including an innovation district intended to attract office, biotech, and AI tenants, along with retail, restaurants, and a potential hotel. The city's bond financing limit for the project was proposed to increase from $800 million (set in 2010) to $3.3 billion to reflect higher construction costs and the longer development timeline.
What FivePoint Is Building: 7,200 Homes, 100 Acres of Open Space
In June 2026, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a final map for the Candlestick Point project, dividing the 270-acre site into 50 lots, 12 of which will be actively developed. Infrastructure construction started summer 2026. That infrastructure work, estimated at $130 million for Phase 1 with a $20 million federal grant contribution, includes building the roads, sidewalks, utility connections, and stormwater systems that will make the site ready for building construction.
FivePoint Senior Vice President Suheil Totah, who told the San Francisco Chronicle he grew up going to Giants and 49ers games at Candlestick, is leading the development effort. Totah has described the project as "activating a prime piece of San Francisco land that has been underutilized for far too long and putting it to work for the city."
The Development Plan at a Glance
| Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| Total site area | 270 acres |
| Residential units | 7,200 homes (32% affordable) |
| Affordable units | Approximately 2,300 (mix of income levels) |
| Commercial space | 3 million square feet (office, R&D, retail, restaurant, hotel) |
| Open space | 100 acres of parks and public space |
| Infrastructure start | Summer 2026 |
| First homes (est.) | 2030 at the earliest |
| Full buildout | 2040s to 2050s |
| Developer | FivePoint Holdings, LLC (Irvine, CA) |
| Bond financing limit | $3.3 billion (proposed, up from $800M in 2010) |
The Community That Has Been Waiting the Longest
It would be incomplete to write about Candlestick's redevelopment without acknowledging who lives in the neighborhood around it. The Bayview-Hunters Point community is historically one of San Francisco's most significant Black neighborhoods. When the original 2010 development agreement was signed, it included an extensive community benefits agreement with pledges for affordable housing, jobs, parks, infrastructure, and financial support to prevent displacement.
More than fifteen years later, only about 4.5 percent of the planned housing has been completed, mostly in the form of 337 units at the rebuilt Alice Griffith public housing complex adjacent to the old stadium. FivePoint says it has released $136 million in community benefits funds over the life of the project, though disbursements have paused during the extended delays. The Black population in Bayview-Hunters Point decreased by more than six percent between 2010 and 2022, even as the overall neighborhood population grew. The community is watching the next phase of construction with a mix of cautious hope and hard-earned skepticism.
- April 12, 1960 Candlestick Park opens; VP Nixon throws first pitch; Giants vs. Cardinals
- 1971 San Francisco 49ers begin playing at Candlestick as tenants
- August 29, 1966 Beatles play their final ticketed concert at Candlestick (25,000 fans, 11 songs)
- October 17, 1989 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake strikes 30 minutes before World Series Game 3; stadium holds
- September 1995 3Com pays $900K/year for naming rights; park briefly becomes "3Com Park"
- November 2, 2004 San Francisco voters pass measure requiring name revert permanently to "Candlestick" after Monster Cable deal expires in 2008
- After 1999 season Giants leave for Pacific Bell Park (now Oracle Park)
- 2009 Lennar creates Five Point Communities to manage large CA master-plan projects
- June 3, 2010 DDA signed between OCII and Lennar for Candlestick/Hunters Point combined project
- August 2014 Paul McCartney farewell concert; Candlestick's final public event
- December 23, 2013 49ers play final game at Candlestick (beat Atlanta 34-24)
- September 24, 2015 Stadium demolished
- May 15, 2017 FivePoint Holdings goes public on NYSE at $14/share; raises ~$338M; Lennar retains ~40%
- 2018 Tetra Tech supervisors plead guilty to falsifying Hunters Point radioactive cleanup data; project freezes
- 2019 Retail mall scrapped; development plan reset
- November 2024 SF Board of Supervisors formally decouples Candlestick from Hunters Point; approves 7,200-home plan
- June 2026 Board approves final site map; Phase 1 infrastructure construction begins summer 2026
- 2030+ First homes expected to be ready
Thinking About Real Estate in Orange County?
I cover new development stories from across California because understanding what is being built and why matters to buyers and investors at every level. If you are thinking about buying, selling, or investing in Orange County real estate, I would be glad to help.
Get in Touch
