OAKLAND, Calif. — Every day at work begins the same way for Henry Dawson. He takes the elevator to the sixth floor of the Oakland Coliseum, then strides the dozen yards to section 345. He steps out onto the most coveted, most controversial real estate here, and he gazes at the field, at the players and at the 129 sections of seats not covered by tarps.
“Just remembering how it was,” he says. “Remembering when the park was full. Remembering that the park’s not gonna be a park anymore—but remembering when it was still a park.”
Dawson, 71, has manned Mount Davis for the Oakland A’s for two years, barring curious fans from the towering seating block in center field because the team has refused to open it. He used to work this area alone; for the final week before the A’s decamp first to Sacramento, then to Las Vegas, the team has increased its security guards to three and then to six.
In Wednesday’s first few innings, a dozen people tried to sneak up, their strategies varying from claiming that their tickets are up here to offering bribes to begging. Dawson and his colleagues want to let them up—“I kind of feel for them,” he says—but their orders are strict.
Mount Davis, named for the late Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis, has drawn gawkers since it went up in 1996 to lure the football team back from Los Angeles with more capacity. The steeply pitched seats, rising well over 100 feet above the playing surface at what feels like a 75-degree angle, cause vertigo nearly as stomach-turning as the A’s treatment of their fans. From the very top, it’s impossible to see most of the outfield. But the views of the Bay Area, all the way to San Francisco, are extraordinary, as is the view of the crowd.
There haven’t been too many people permitted to enjoy those views in recent years. As attendance fell, both teams stretched tarpaulins across the top section, eliminating some 8,100 seats. Mount Davis was last open to fans regularly in 2012 and at all for the A’s ’19 wild-card game loss to the Tampa Bay Rays.
All this means that a generation of Oaklanders have never stood atop the skyscraper taxpayers spent $500 million to build. For the most part, the A’s have not needed the capacity, but after the final game sold out in early August, a group of fans asked the team to reopen the section, even offering to help clean the concourse. The A’s declined, citing the mess.
It is indeed a mess. The A’s have spent the last five years storing all manner of junk in the concourse up there; the Raiders left for Las Vegas in 2023 and did not bother to take their logo-branded Bud Light signs with them. Plastic concessions cups roll across the concourse like tumbleweeds. Flocks of birds have nested, pooped and died here. Piles of pallets and dozens of boxes labeled NACHO BAG CHEESE DISPENSER lean against every column. Stacks of metal chairs line the entrance to sections 345 and 346; a single desk chair perches just behind the railing overlooking the field in section 337. Behind section 341, in front of a giant metal cart holding sheets of glass, sits a wooden crate of scrap metal with OAKLAND spray-painted on the front—just in case, perhaps, the movers thought the trash should accompany the team to its new home.
Dawson’s favorite piece of garbage was an old sign listing concessions prices—$6 for a beer!—but someone appears to have taken it as a souvenir. No matter. He has his memories.
Dawson has been here longer than the Coliseum has, since back when he and his friends used to bring their mutts, King, Chief and Duke, to the scrubgrass that preceded it and watch them chase jackrabbits.
He was in middle school when the Coliseum opened in 1966, and he and his friends quickly began testing gates on the stadium to find the weakest one, then jumping it. (The mezzanine level was especially fruitful.) Then his mom’s boss gave her a pair of $4.50 tickets to a Raiders game, and someone outside offered him $5 for them.
“The hopping the fence days was over!” he says with a laugh. “We started scalping tickets.”
He estimates that he’s made it to hundreds of games here over the years—he paid for A’s tickets because you could get in the door for $2.50—usually sitting in the third deck above home plate, sometimes sneaking into the box seats. He spent many Raiders games on Mount Davis, watching the throngs of people push up the ramps to get in. He feels deeply the irony that it is now his job to keep them out.
Those ramps are now blocked by chain-link fences on both sides, but a few enterprising people have snuck around them, including, Dawson recalls incredulously, a fan in a wheelchair. Another time, a young couple and their grade-school-aged son got up there; when Dawson asked them to leave, the mother instead sprinted to the top to take photos. “I’m yelling to come down!” he says with a laugh. “I’m not going up there!”
But for the most part, he’s by himself up there, perched at the edge of the concourse so he can see the ramp out of his right eye and the jumbotron out of his left. He watches the hills turn golden, then red, then blue as the sun sets. He notes cars in the parking lot—empty for so many years, but full this week. Every so often, he ducks out into the stands to glimpse the action in person. He doesn’t get lonely, he says: He has the birds and the two stray cats who sometimes visit him.
On this night, Dawson scans the concourse as darkness falls. There are lights up there, but the team doesn’t turn them on just for one person. At the edges of the concourse, light spills in from the field, but behind the center sections, you can’t see your hand six inches from your face. Some guards carry flashlights, but not Dawson. Doesn’t he get scared?
Dawson laughs. “No,” he says. “I’m from Oakland.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Oakland Coliseum’s Restricted Section Is a Gold Mine of Gorgeous Views, Old Junk and Rich Stories.
