Buckeye Stroll

Howard Dwight Smith, a civil engineer and Ohio State alumnus known for designing Long Island and Fifth Avenue mansions in New York, was tapped to design the Ohio Stadium. He drew a U-form design, combining attributes of the two largest football stadiums of the day: those of Harvard and Yale.

Completed in 1922, at a cost of a little more than $1 million, the Stadium was the first horseshoe-shaped double-deck stadium in the United States, and the largest stadium west of the Appalachian Mountains. In anticipation of an unprecedented crowd, bleachers at the Stadium’s south end were constructed for Ohio Stadium’s formal dedication at the OSU-Michigan contest of Oct. 21, 1922. The 71,385 fans in attendance saw Michigan win, 19-0.

Since it opened, the Stadium has undergone many renovations and repairs over the years – including a student dorm, a student theater, three generations of artificial grass, and five press boxes. During its most recent renovation – a two-year, $187 million project that finished in 2001 – the playing field was sunk to create a new seating deck replacing the track surrounding the field, the ‘Shoe was permanently enclosed at the south end, and seating above C deck was added, as was a 30-by-90-foot scoreboard. Today, Ohio Stadium’s official seating capacity is 102,329.