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 going to 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.
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