The Hawks want a new arena. That much was clear two hours after Tony Ressler took ownership. In his meeting with us AJC types, he said: “There’s do-nothing. There’s remodel. Or there’s a new arena. Do-nothing is not an option.”
New owner wants a new building. In other news, the Pope isn’t Presbyterian.
But before we get into another downtown-versus-suburbs debate, let’s be clear: The Hawks aren’t leaving Atlanta, and there’s every chance this new place will stand where Philips Arena is. It could well be a spiffied-up Philips Arena.
On June 24, the Hawks’ sale to Ressler was approved by the NBA’s board of governors. Barely 24 hours later, the man from California was speaking of Atlanta infrastructure. He mentioned the Gulch, that unlovely expanse of railroad tracks and parking lots adjacent to Philips Arena and CNN Center. An owner for all of a day, he’d done his homework.
Twenty-one years ago, another Hawks management team did its homework. On May 13, 1994, Stan Kasten — then president of the Hawks and Braves — stood in a conference room at The Omni hotel and said: “Eighty percent (of Hawks ticket-buyers) come from north of this building … I don’t think (moving to the Perimeter or beyond) would hurt our business.”
Kasten and his associates had made plans to exit downtown. A parcel of land off Georgia 400 was the buzzed-about new destination. But Ted Turner, then the Hawks’ owner, stepped in and said, “We’re staying downtown.” (Legend holds that Ted, who had a penthouse apartment in CNN Center, wanted to walk to games.)
That was 1994. The downtown dynamics have since been rearranged. In 1994, there was no Centennial Olympic Park — for the basic reason that the Olympics hadn’t happened. There was no Georgia Aquarium, no College Football Hall of Fame. There was a two-year-old Georgia Dome, and CNN Center was in place, but that was about it for the area off Marietta Street and what was then known as Techwood Drive.
In 1994, downtown Atlanta wasn’t much of a destination. It is today, and with the arrival of Arthur Blank’s new stadium and soccer team it will become more of one. It’s hard to imagine the Hawks’ new owners wanting to vacate such an area.
Mayor Kasim Reed said Thursday that the Hawks are eyeing locations, including the site off Piedmont where the Civic Center stands. I can’t imagine that being much of a lure. Ressler is from Los Angeles, where both NBA teams play at Staples Center, smack in the heart of downtown L.A. There’s a concert venue across the street and a movie multiplex a block away, and there are restaurants and hotels everywhere you turn. For owners in all sports, that’s the ideal.
The Braves bucked the trend of big-league teams building downtown by bolting for Cobb County, but the Hawks aren’t the Braves. More to the point, Philips Arena isn’t Turner Field. The Braves’ chief complaint was that there was nothing else for their patrons to do near the ballpark. The Hawks have no such gripe. Hawks games are also accessible by MARTA train, something Braves games have never been. (That remains the greatest failure of Atlanta city planning, which is saying something.)
And let’s face it: The Braves’ flight was fueled by anger. They believed, with some justification, that the city picked the local NFL franchise over them. They took the city’s dare and found a locale willing to give them everything they wanted and then some. Atlanta will not make that same dare to the Hawks.
The guess is that the new Hawks will soon have their new arena, though it’s apt to be a remodeled one. (Kasten’s radical design of building all the club suites on one side has never been imitated, which tells us what the rest of NBA thinks of Philips.) Again: Every owner wants a new building, even if only looks new.
Ressler and his bunch will sniff around for a better spot, but I doubt they’ll find one. Location was the issue for the Hawks in 1994, but they wound up staying in place and everything around them changed for the better. In this as in many things, Ted Turner was a man ahead of his time.
