Reason I ask is that at that time, nobody knew for sure if Modell was able to actually successfully move and the city was suing to make sure they played in 1996. Therefore they would’ve had to fix the damage presumably.
They didn’t begin tearing down the stadium until December 1996. There are a few videos on YouTube of people touring it during 1996 and it looks cleaned up a bit. Did they end up repairing it as a precaution?
Knowing Cleveland, if they hadn’t secured a new stadium deal on that exact spot, that stadium could have gone years abandoned. They let a lot of buildings in the city sit abandoned for decades. Only recently have they started tearing some of them down