Concert History | The Police at Wrigley Field — A Final Ticket Block Met a Five-Minute Bus Plan

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On Thursday, 5 July 2007, The Police opened a two-night engagement at Wrigley Field in Chicago, with Fiction Plane as the support act. The session matters because capacity was not fixed when tickets first went on sale. An [official tour notice dated 2 April](https://sting.com/blogs/news/the-police-friday-july-6-2007-sold-out) said the completed production design revealed better sightlines than promoters had anticipated, so they released a final block specifically for the 5 July performance. The same notice said those tickets were unavailable at the Wrigley Field box office and limited buyers to six.

Opening seats inside the ballpark also increased the burden outside it. On 2 July, the [Chicago Transit Authority announced additional and later service](https://www.transitchicago.com/cta-to-provide-additional-service-to-the-police-wrigley-field-concerts/) for both Wrigley concerts. After each show, route #152 was scheduled about every five minutes for one hour and route #154 about every eight minutes. The Yellow Line would run until 12:05 a.m.; longer Red Line trains and pre-concert express buses supplemented the plan.

The venue's operating footprint extended into the residential streets. In its contemporaneous [July 2007 newsletter](https://southportneighbors.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/SNA-Newsletter-2007.07.pdf), Southport Neighbors Association president Jill Peters recorded that The Police played from 7:00 to 10:30 p.m. on 5 and 6 July. After neighborhood concerns, the Cubs hired 30 private security officers and, at the association's request, placed portable toilets in every alley within its boundaries. City police also patrolled the concerts, with some officers remaining after the performance.

The post-event report did not describe a frictionless operation. It noted heavy Clark Street congestion, some noise and parking complaints, and that no noise-level report was yet available. That qualification is important: the measures demonstrate planning, not proof that every impact disappeared.

Together, the records show two linked kinds of concert capacity. Better production sightlines made additional seats saleable for the exact 5 July session; transit, security and sanitation planning tried to make the added movement tolerable around a ballpark embedded in a neighborhood. The ticket block and the five-minute bus interval were parts of the same live-music system.

**Coordinate method.** The pin marks Wrigley Field's stadium center, not an undocumented 2007 stage position. [Wikidata](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1052807) gives `41.948056, -87.655556`. Exile on Ontario St's independently geotagged [15 June 2005 exterior photograph](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2005_Wrigley_Field_Marquee.jpg) gives `41.947974, -87.656135`, about 49 metres away. The stated precision radius is ±180 metres, wide enough to cover the ballpark footprint and immediate gate frontage.

**Image credit and caption.** Exile on Ontario St, *2005 Wrigley Field Marquee*, photographed 15 June 2005; originally posted to Flickr and license-reviewed on Wikimedia Commons, [CC BY-SA 2.0](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2005_Wrigley_Field_Marquee.jpg). The visually inspected photograph shows Wrigley Field's exterior, marquee and ticket windows during a baseball event. It does not depict The Police, the 2007 concert stage, or that concert's audience.

**Status note (September 2026).** Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers are living artists. This memory is limited to the documented 2007 concert operation and makes no claim about their current activity.