Gazing south from his perch on the outer concourse of Busch Stadium, Mike Buckley drags on a cigarette and watches a 200-foot-tall Alberici crane - fittingly painted white with Cardinal-red trim - pivot and lower a steel beam into place near the top of the new, $398 million ballpark at the south end of downtown.

Two workers nearby dart back and forth hundreds of feet above ground, tethered to the building's frame like life-size marionettes.

"This is a well-orchestrated project," Buckley said. "They don't stop. There's nobody sitting down on the job over there."


Buckley has nothing to do with the project or the Cardinals. In fact, he doesn't follow baseball. But every weekday, he crosses Broadway from St. Louis Community College's Cosand Center, where he's an administrator, to monitor progress on the stadium. He jokingly refers to himself as the "unofficial sidewalk superintendent."

With the Cardinals' home opener still weeks away and the Blues sitting out the season, the humming, buzzing symphony of cranes, dump trucks, cement mixers and tractors on the new stadium's dirt floor have become a de facto spectator sport for dozens of interested passers-by each day.

Whether by car or on foot, a steady flow of people checks the status of the ballpark, one of the highest-profile construction jobs in St. Louis since the Edward Jones Dome was built in the 1990s. Some wear Cardinals caps and jackets; fathers bring their sons. Most don't stay longer than 10 or 15 minutes, but they return regularly.

To be sure, not everyone is eager for a close-up view. At the St. Louis Westin hotel across South Seventh Street, a front desk clerk said guests ask about the project. But that's often to request a room on the other side of the building so as not to be awakened by the din of construction early in the morning.

John Loyd, a consultant hired by the Cardinals to oversee construction, is keenly aware of St. Louis' reputation as a baseball-crazy town. He expects fan interest to build as baseball season nears and the 1.3 million-square-foot structure increasingly resembles a ballpark.

"It was a big dusty hole in the ground last year," Loyd said. "We've made very good progress throughout the winter. We're solidly on schedule, if not ahead."

Architectural drawings and engineers' plans line the wall of a makeshift conference room in a gray shack where he works. It's one of a fleet of construction trailers south of the site, each with the name and logo of the general contractor, Indianapolis-based Hunt Construction Group, or one of the 50-plus subcontractors that have a piece of the work.

Work on the stadium is moving clockwise. Crews are about halfway finished erecting the steel skeleton, which reaches most of the way down the first base side of the park, followed closely by concrete risers that will be the foundation for 46,000 red seats to be installed beginning this summer.

One of two pedestrian ramps, the one along the third-base side of the park, is finished and is being used by contractors to move men and materials to the upper levels. Carpenters are beginning to frame the suites and, in the belly of the stadium, workers are installing boilers, completing electrical work and building loading docks.

Crews benefited from a mild winter and only occasionally had to delay steel erection because of rain, wind or ice, Loyd said.

The project is to be completed by opening day 2006. In reality, contractors face a more pressing deadline. They need to finish much of the work before this season ends so they can immediately begin building the section of the park where the current stadium sits. The longer the Cardinals' season goes, the more challenging it will be.

"We'll have from the end of baseball season to the beginning of '06 to construct the part within the existing footprint of Busch Stadium," Loyd said. "That's why it's so important for this part to be done."

Between 350 and 500 workers are on the job up to 10 hours a day, six days a week, depending on the work to be done, Loyd said. Crews are working "selective overtime" when a specific task must be completed, he said.

Nearer completion, work will go on 24 hours a day, every day. The number of people on the project will reach about 900 for much of the finishing work.

"The project schedule is not particularly challenging until you get to the end of it," Loyd said. "It's quality and cost and time. You don't want to sacrifice quality for either of the other two."

The sheer magnitude of the project - the thousands of pounds of steel and concrete and hundreds of workers needed each day - is rivaled only by the level of detail. In a corner of the conference room are models of three seats to be used at the park. On Thursday, Loyd's group was still working to find a seat cushion that matched the back of the chair.

"You never stop making decisions on things like this," he said. "Not until the day you open. Not even then."

Until the park does open, it will continue to draw curiosity-seekers such as Steve Strohl, 37, who moved to Baltimore from St. Louis in 2002. A lifelong Cardinals fan who works as an accounting manager for a software company, he drops by whenever he returns to town to see what progress has been made.

"It's changed quite a bit," Strohl said, gazing out over the dusty construction pit this week. "The steel superstructure wasn't in place the last time I saw it."

Reporter Jeffrey Tomich
E-mail: jtomich@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 314-340-8320