Riverfront Stadium, aka Cynergy Field, sees its last function today. A state-of-the art stadium when it was built, it started falling into disrepair (some estimates for renovation went as high as $100 million) and newer playing fields such as Coors Field and Cleveland's Jacobs Field eclipsed the once-thought-to-be-modern white elephant by the river.

I'd seen it on television before, but that never prepared me for the first game I ever actually attended there. It had breathtakingly ugly astroturf, and even from the best seats in the house you had to take binoculars. The Reds played there, the Bengals played there (well, sorta, inasmuch as they can only slightly said to have been playing football during their last decade there), but it never really was either team's ballpark.

Two new fields now hit the skyline, and Riverfront will go down this winter. Time will tell if either one or both turn into white elephants, themselves. Meanwhile, naturally, the owners played the taxpayer extortion game like a fiddle and squeezed taxpapers like a cheap tube of toothpaste.