Venue News: Cubs Assemble Renovation Dream Team

For Wrigley Field’s proposed $300 million renovation, the Chicago Cubs are using what team President Crane Kenney describes as a “dream team” of architects with experience designing upgrades to historical buildings inside and outside of sports. The group includes Chuck Izzo, a principal with D’Agostino Izzo Quirk Architects, the Greater Boston-based firm responsible for more than $150 million in improvements to Fenway Park, and T. Gunny Harboe, a local designer and planner of restorations to The Rookery, Chicago’s oldest standing high-rise structure, built in 1888…

…There’s the Senior Bowl. There’s the East-West Shrine Game. And now there’s the Eastham Energy College All Star game to be played at Sun Devil Stadium on Jan. 23, a college all-star football game to be held in Tempe, AZ. The first-annual game was founded by AZ Sports Group LLC and will feature 90 players whose college eligibility has run out. “If you look at the tradition and what you’ve done in the past, it only made sense to bring something that’s never been here before,” said Jerry Ippoliti, founding member of AZ Sports Group…

…Tuesday at high noon, after Comcast Spectacor Chairman Ed Snider, Sixers immortal Julius Erving, and Flyers Stanley Cup champs Bobby Clarke and Bernie Parent say their final farewells to Philadelphia’s 43-year-old Spectrum, the wrecking ball will fall, and the big question is: Now what? A couple of years ago, the original buzz on life after the Spectrum’s final buzzer was a 350,000-sq.-ft. restaurant/entertainment wonderland called “Philly Live!” that looks, in Baltimore-based developer Cordish Co.’s rousing concept video, like the love child of a steamy affair between the Wildwood boardwalk and the King of Prussia Mall…

…Electronics and appliance retailer hhgregg is using the Florida Panthers and BankAtlantic Center to introduce its brand in South Florida. The Indianapolis-based company plans to expand to the region and open as many as 10 stores by mid 2011. Sometime in early January, six months before those rollouts, hhgregg will set up a showroom outside Section 101 at center ice on the arena’s main concourse. The 1,540-sq.-ft. display space is the centerpiece of a new three-year deal the retailer signed with Sunrise Sports and Entertainment, the company that owns the Panthers and operates the arena.