When Bridgestone Arena opened in 1996, Broadway, a spiritual home for country music and culture in Nashville, was at rock bottom. The four-block strip leading to the Cumberland River was dotted with pawn shops and boarded-up storefronts. The honky-tonks open then were a little too authentic for tourists.
Accordingly, the arena — which opened without a primary sports tenant; the Predators came two years later — bore some resemblance to a fortress. Bridgestone included an appended two-story concrete building fronting Broadway that bore all the charm of a parking deck and later housed the Predators’ team office, alongside a police station and a register of deeds office. Mixed-use development indeed.
Nearly 30 years later, Broadway is unrecognizable. It gradually, then rapidly in the last decade, transformed from dark to neon-lit and desolate to bustling; from panhandling and transients to consumerism and bachelorette parties. Eighteen bars have opened off Broadway in the last five years, according to The Tennesseean newspaper. Nashville’s downtown saw $10.4 billion in public and private investments come to fruition between 2014 and 2024, with another $13.5 billion either planned or under construction, according to Nashville Downtown, a private nonprofit corporation serving the city’s urban core.
To be decided
The hotel is one of a handful of key decisions that the Predators want to make before the end of the year. Others include:
- How many parcels to put at ground level of the Broadway-facing building.
- Whether to partner with a developer on the new real estate.
- Who will operate the street-level commercial real estate that’s open daily.
- Who will operate the street-level commercial real estate that’s open daily.
- What the project’s total budget will be.
- The percentage of premium seating in the post-renovation building.
The arena police station eventually closed and the register of deeds office relocated in late May 2024, giving the Predators an opening. They’re proposing a significant reimagining of the arena’s one-city-block footprint, a renovation that could cost anywhere from $650 million to $750 million and take an inward facing arena and make it extroverted, just as the people riding mechanical bulls at bars down the street.
“It’s probably the last undeveloped area on Broadway,” said Predators Chief Strategy Officer Kyle Clayton. “We don’t want to be seen as an island. We want to be part of the fun of Broadway; take these concrete walls and open them up and connect all the energy inside the building with what’s going on outside on Broadway.”
As the Predators work with Populous, CAA Icon and Turner (the latter for pre-construction project pricing work) to adapt the arena to the modern state of its surroundings, the two-story concrete building fell into the team’s crosshairs. It will be demolished and replaced with a glassy six-story structure directly connecting the arena and Broadway, with restaurants, retail and arena entrances right off the street. Another five-story building, the future home of the Predators’ business operations, will stretch upward above it. The team hopes to begin that work, which will minimally affect the arena’s interior, by next summer.
“We want that energy; we want people to be able to see inside the building, really see down to the ice as much as possible, engage with a retail store,” Populous Senior Principal Adam Stover said. “When [the arena was] built, it was solid walls, and now our goal is to truly open that up and let it be porous at every corner of the building.”
Excavating two levels down between the ice sheet and Broadway will allow the team to add roughly 50,000 square feet to the arena’s event level, rare new space that will be used to improve nearly every aspect of its operations.
“From the edge of the [seating] bowl to Broadway is really an untapped resource right now,” Clayton said.
The arena is home to the Predators, the Country Music Awards and (regularly) the SEC basketball conference tournaments, and habitually is a top-10 arena nationally for gross concert ticket sales. It sits diagonally within its city block, pointing toward hallowed country music ground, the Ryman Auditorium. A rehearsal space for performers spins off the southern side of Bridgestone Arena, another quirky result of its music-focused original design that could prove useful to the Predators’ plans. They’re weighing whether to build a high-rise hotel atop it.
“A lot of arenas are getting built today and real estate is a big part of that,” Clayton said. “We love where we’re at, but we’re landlocked, so what can we do with the space that we have? And we’re very lucky to have this space on the block to take advantage of.”
Unfound space
The modernization of Bridgestone Arena lurched into motion in 2019, when the Predators extended their lease with the city through 2049. That deal included commitment to a renovation, which will be funded in part through sales tax and a ticket surcharge collected at the building, plus financing based off future revenue. The Predators will cover any project overruns (based on a final, still undecided project budget), and no Davidson County general funds will be used on the project, Clayton said. The hotel, if built, would be privately financed by Predators owner Bill Haslam, with his ownership partners potentially investing, too.
The renovation will address all the basics: enhanced restrooms and concessions; bigger star compounds and locker rooms; easier ingress and egress; greater points-of-sale deployment and sponsorship activation opportunities; a more diversified seating bowl; and upgraded game presentation capabilities. The project also will create more potential event-level space for a second tenant team, perhaps from the WNBA or PWHL.
Premium will be a focus of the project, too. The Predators are working with Populous, CAA Icon and their internal business analytics team to determine premium capacity port-renovation. Roughly 13% of the arena’s current 17,159 capacity is premium seating.
“That’s obviously a big question in the industry right now,” Clayton said. “What percentage of your building needs to be premium?”
The core arena renovation work will take place during the summers of 2027, 2028 and 2029, barring Stanley Cup playoff runs. The new Broadway structure is scheduled to open in 2029. It’ll be appended to the arena and form part of the new main plaza and entrance at the corner of Broadway and 5th Avenue, and will include a slimmer take on the arena’s signature radio tower.
“It’s all about that unfound space,” Stover said. “We’ve got to unlock a key, that one piece, so we can start shifting things around that’s going to give us that real estate.”
That was the event level. By digging down and creating more space, the Predators will improve food and beverage service, loading dock access and other back-of-house aspects critical to operating a venue that will be used every day. Excavating enabled the six-story building that will feature four levels above grade and 60,000 square feet of restaurants, bars and retail right on Broadway, including what the Predators expect to be the largest rooftop bar on the strip. The five-story office tower will then sit above the new building.
Some parts of the new building will be open daily, while others will specifically be arena assets. Seven or eight parcels (the exact number hasn’t been decided) will sit at sidewalk level, while new entrances off Broadway will connect to the arena’s main concourse and suite level. Owing to the slope of the street and site, another entrance to the club level (the arena’s third level) will sit off 6th Avenue. The arena’s upper concourse won’t connect to Broadway, but will spill out onto the fourth level of the new building and the rooftop bar.
“We’ve known we were sitting on a gold mine with the offices being where they were,” Stover said. “It’s just been a matter of time while leases transitioned to where we were really able to grab the space and maximize its full potential.”
Energy magnet
On the side of the arena facing the guitar-shaped Nashville Convention Center, it’s less clear what the Predators will do. The arena’s Demonbreun Street entrance will receive a similar treatment as the Broadway side (more LED and glass), but the biggest question is whether to move forward with a potential hotel on that side of the building. The auxiliary rehearsal space, which is used for the CMAs and the SEC Tournament especially, would be preserved with the hotel built on top.
“Some of the things done in the early ’90s on this building were unique to Nashville, and we’re blessed that those things took place when they did,” said Stover, “because we’re able to now reset and rethink the facility, how it operates and its components, to move it forward for another 25 to 40 years.”
Whether the hotel and its operations can efficiently and effectively fit into Bridgestone Arena’s back-of-house setup remains uncertain. The hotel would add at least a year or two of construction to the overall project, but the larger effort isn’t contingent on the hotel. The downtown Nashville hotel market is booming — 13,348 rooms exist, with another 1,020 under construction — and sitting across the street from the convention center doesn’t hurt.
After a decade of watching the Broadway boom, the Predators are getting in on the action.
“That energy, now we can pull that across the street onto our site,” said Stover, “which is going to be really impactful as we think about this being a 365-day-a-year amenity, not just when a concert or hockey game is taking place.”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.sportsbusinessjournal.com ’
