DETROIT — The end zone scoreboards at Ford Field were being tested last week.

With less than one minute off the clock in the second quarter, the score read “Lions 45, Steelers 24.”

Wishful thinking.

Then again, for so many years, so was Ford Field.

But the new downtown home of the Detroit Lions is a reality, and will throw open its doors and welcome fans for the first time on Saturday afternoon when Pittsburgh visits for an NFL exhibition game.

William Clay Ford Jr., the vice chairman of the Lions, made one request of the stadium's architects at the groundbreaking ceremonies in November of 1999.

“I want people to be able to stand on the 50-yard line, look around and know they're in Detroit and nowhere else,” he said.

Mission accomplished, presuming there is no indoor stadium in any other city that has a street running through it or was built, in large part, as an extension off an old warehouse.

“We started out with the premise that all domed stadiums were cold, sterile and lacked personality,” said Ford, chairman of Ford Motor Co. “When we decided to make it an indoor stadium, I challenged the architects to make me fall in love with it, and I have. What I see now is beyond my wildest dreams.

“I think Ford Field blends the best of old Detroit and new Detroit.”

While the Lions' former home, the Pontiac Silverdome, was a cookie-cutter domed stadium with lots of seats (80,000) and little personality, Ford Field offers tons of character and is definitely one of a kind.

If it's possible to call a 65,000-seat dome cozy, well, this one is cozy. It has the feel of a basketball arena, with tremendous sightlines and a surprising proximity between even the most remote seats and the field level.

What makes Ford Field truly one of a kind, though, is the historic Hudson's Warehouse that dominates the south side of the stadium.

The top four levels of the brick warehouse, built in 1920, house 119 of the stadium's 132 luxury suites, as well as the press box and electronic media booths. Each suite has windows and doors carved from the warehouse's original windows, with a private seating area outside of the actual suite.

“We set out to create character, and we've blended a lot of elements to make that happen,” said Lions executive vice president Tom Lewand, who has supervised the design and construction, which began in 1999.

On street level — which is about 45 feet above the sunken playing field — the warehouse will contain many of the south side concession stands, restrooms and souvenir shops.

The reference to street level is exactly that. The main concourse on the south side, which is under the club-seating level and opens to the lower bowl seats, once was part of Adams Street, which now dead-ends into Brush Street behind the left-field scoreboard of nearby — as in a matter of feet — Comerica Park, the home of the Tigers baseball team.

The stretch of Adams that is now inside Ford Field has been re-bricked and given concrete sidewalks depicting a 1920s or '30s street scene.

Rear sections of the warehouse — those farthest from the field — are being converted into stores, restaurants and commercial office space. That part of the facility, as well as the former stretch of Adams Street, is designed to be open year-round for dining and shopping.

About 250,000 square feet of the warehouse was demolished early on to accommodate perhaps the most dramatic portion of the new stadium.

The main entrance in the southwest corner of Ford Field features a 40-foot glass wall and an entry atrium of terrazzo flooring feeding into a huge mosaic of the Lions' emblem.

The scoreboards, located near the top of the east and west ends of the field, include video boards that are 27 feet high and 96 feet wide. There are four other score and message boards on the facing of the club-level seats.

The playing field, which is surrounded by a brick wall that matches the warehouse brick, is a synthetic grass called FieldTurf. Part of the manufacturing process includes the use of finely-ground recycled Firestone tires and sand as the infill that supports the synthetic grass fibers.

The application of that infill atop the artificial turf, attaching numbered plates to all of the seats, and giving the facility a general cleaning to remove the remaining dirt and dust from more than two years of construction, are the main projects facing the stadium's crew during this final week leading up to Saturday's exhibition game.

All that will remain is for fans to find places to park and tailgate, something that was never a problem at the expansive Silverdome lot and other parking facilities near the Pontiac stadium, which served as the home of the Lions from 1975-2001.

“There will be an adjustment because, sure, parking at the Silverdome was really easy,” said Lions spokeswoman Risa Balayem. “People will have to learn downtown Detroit, and when they do they'll find the parking won't be as tough as it seems. We've identified more than 30,000 spaces, not including on-street parking, in the central business district within a 10 or 15-minute walk of the stadium. Plus, the People Mover will be operating on game days.”

Before their move to Pontiac, the Lions played in the near-downtown at Briggs/Tiger Stadium for 37 years starting in 1938.

Now they're back in what is certainly the most spectacular and possibly the finest among the slew of new NFL stadiums built since the mid-1990s.

“It creates excitement,” said Lions coach Marty Mornhinweg. “I think it's broken the mold for stadiums. And I think when you combine Ford Field with our new day-to-day home in Allen Park, we have two of the finest facilities in football.”

And football isn't all. In addition to an Oct. 12 Rolling Stones concert and the 2006 Super Bowl, Bill Ford hopes the facility could host events such as the 2004 Democratic National Convention and an NCAA Final Four.

“We should be able to attract those events and many more because there are not many state-of-the-art facilities with 65,000 seats in the middle of an urban setting,” Ford said. “And we have the flexibility to accommodate smaller gatherings.”

Ten-year veteran Robert Porcher and rookie Joey Harrington are the only Lions who have seen Ford Field. The rest of the team will tour the facility two days before the exhibition game against the Steelers.

“The place is magnificent,” Porcher said. “It's awesome to be with this organization when we go back where we should be, in downtown Detroit.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

First Published August 18, 2002, 11:25 a.m.