For more than 30 years, Giants Stadium in northern New Jersey was the butt of jokes both in sports circles and otherwise. (Jimmy Hoffa, anyone?) But that monstrous, post-modern hunk of concrete, which played host to NFL football, professional soccer, college football, and thousands of top-draw concerts and events, is no more.

Enter New Meadowlands Stadium, which cost more than one and a half billion dollars and took nearly three years to construct. Now, one of the crown jewels of sports venue architecture, NMS boasts some of