Devils New Home, PRUDENTIAL CENTER, opens up in 58 Days

The Devils new home looks really nice . . . Those FIRE & ICE CLUB LOUNGES look tight (I like the Ice side myself !!!!!!!!!!). Finally, the Devils will have a real home town (Newark) vs. an sparsely populated town off a turnpike exit (East Rutherford) for a population base !!!!!!!!





PRUDENTIAL CENTER FACTS:

The Prudential Center will host approximately 200 events a year, including NHL New Jersey Devils hockey, Seton Hall basketball, MISL indoor soccer, concerts, family shows, special events as well as other professional, collegiate and amateur sporting events


Located in downtown Newark, just a couple of blocks from Newark Penn Station. The arena is accessible via New Jersey Transit, PATH and Amtrak. Bounded by Edison Place to the north, Lafayette Street to the south, Mulberry Street to the east and Broad Street and City Hall to the west


Total Project Cost - $375 million


Operator - Devils Arena Entertainment and AEG


Naming Rights Sponsor - Prudential Financial


Concessionaire - Centerplate


Designed by architects Morris Adjmi and facility specialists HOK


Capacity - 17,625 for hockey, 18,500 for basketball, 19,500+ for concerts


Two club lounges, a goal bar, terrace area and a 350 seat gourmet restaurant


A 4,800 sq. ft. big screen LED television facing Newark Penn Station


Adjacent full size practice facility for hockey with 800 seat capacity


4,000 public parking spaces, including VIP garage


A total of 76 Luxury Suites, 2 Event Suites


Home to the NHL New Jersey Devils, MISL Ironmen, and Seton Hall Basketball


Prudential Center Website

 

Did you read the fine print?

* Artist's rendition based upon the number of fans that have showed for home games in the recent past.

 

Playa: Like I said, the Devils will finally have a real home town to pull fans from !!!!!!!!!!!! With all the mass-transit access (NJ TRANSIT, PATH, etc.) leading right to the arena's front door, its a 100 times easier now to actually get to their games.

 

Does anyone know why it is that the Nets aren't gonna play there, choosing to play in Brooklyn instead? The main problem with the Meadowlands was, as stated before, it was a pain to get to... When I lived in NY, the only times the Nets would sell out was when the Lakers or Bulls would come to town, and also when they played the Knicks, in which case half the building was pro-Knicks. I don't see people who are Knicks fans in Brooklyn suddenly becoming Nets fans because they moved to Atlantic and Flatbush.

 

SHORT VERSION OF LONG STORY: When the Nets were spun off from YankeeNets a few years ago, they got a new owner (Bruce Ratner). I think between them and the Devils, they couldn't reach an arena deal with the City of Newark/State of NJ for awhile so he started striking out for a new arena on his own. The new owners of the Devils finally (who might've been part of YankeesNets for a short period of time between change in ownership between John McMullen and the current owner) cemented an arena deal with City of Newark. I think the Nets are finally starting work on their new arena in Brooklyn (BARCLAYS CENTER), which is on the site (Atlantic Yards) the Dodgers were wanting to build a new domed stadium 50+ years ago (the city of New York said nyet) before the ended up in Los Angeles.

 

It'd be a great thing for Brooklyn, but I can't see anything but traffic headaches in that area.... Atlantic and Flatbush, is the intersection of arguably the two most traveled avenues in Brooklyn. I went to school not far from there, and if you factor in the traffic that invariably comes over off of DeKalb Ave., it's gonna be a mess. It'll be an interesting situation to monitor.

 

From the Newark e-fishwrap . . A cool Interactive look at the PRUDENTIAL CENTER. 9 loading docks at the back of the building, why did they put that many in an arena? You only need 1-2 at the most!!!!!!!!!!

Interactive Tour of the PRUDENTIAL CENTER

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An arena for TV fans

by Dan Bischoff
Monday October 22, 2007, 7:59 AM

The brand-new Prudential Center, the hockey/soccer/college basketball/rock concert arena on Lafayette and Mulberry in downtown Newark, is many things. It's a food court, a sports bar, an art gallery ("seven figures" worth of paintings of mostly hockey players, some posing without their two front teeth), and a glass-fronted vantage point overlooking the huddled hectares of parking lots behind City Hall.

But mostly what it is is marketing. And in honor of that purpose, the dominant architectural motif is television.

Like NJPAC (though the performing arts center is dwarfed by the Pru Center's scale), the arena offers a panoramic picture window as its facade, this one flanked on either side by 72-foot-diameter glass cylinders "based on a building in Greece," according to tour guides. But the effect of the huge (three stories tall) arched window is somewhat offset by the 4,800-square-foot LED monitor hung in front of it, conveniently sliced into thin columns so folks inside aren't entirely reduced to looking at the back of a TV set.

And inside, as you walk through wide and often low-ceilinged spaces divvied up into "sales points" (like restaurants, a City Grill, the NJ Devils Team Store, bars -- including a Belvedere Vodka Ice Lounge equipped with a bar made of real ice -- and many other concessions, up to 150 in all), you see plasma flat-screen TVs everywhere. There are plasma flat screen TVs in the 76 luxury suites, not just to help visitors watch the action but to let them order food and drinks from touch screens that instantly communicate with the "concierge staff."

One of the building's true marketing innovations is its 64 "terrace tables," narrow tables built right into the third-level seating rim overlooking the hockey rink, each equipped with four orange-cushioned high chairs and, of course, a pop-up flat-screen TV, where you can watch the game and order food and drink as rapidly as you can get up and walk into your kitchen during commercials back home. Premium tickets for the terrace tables are selling like, well, cold beer at a sporting event.

Altogether there are 733 plasma flat-screen TVs scattered about the place, but they aren't the only reminders that you are visiting what is in essence a soundstage. In the two cylinders, intended to be the main vomitoria of the building (that is, the chief exits -- we take our word for throwing up from the famously efficient exit ramps built for Rome's Colosseum), the primary items of visual interest are the theatrical lights suspended from the brushed gray steel-and-aluminum frame. The eight-sided, 65,000-pound center scoreboard is a riot of TV screens, one of the world's largest home entertainment centers. The bars and restaurants often take on the look of network anchor sets, with inset neon lighting and sand-blasted glass panels floating among shiny but telegenically muted color schemes. There's a lotta blue-edged glass here.

The seating in the arena itself is remarkably steep, bringing ticketholders as close as possible to the stage floor (they all seemed to be pretty good seats to this reporter, but the tour didn't go up into the nosebleed sections because workmen were still frantically finishing everywhere). The seats themselves are cushiony ergonomic things roomy enough for increasingly double-wide Americans and woven from car-seat-tough synthetic fabrics.

With each reincarnation these sports arenas get both more comfy and more pricey for visitors. Philadelphia built one just 11 years ago for roughly the same amount, $206 million (in 1996 dollars that probably means 5 percent to 7 percent more than the Pru Center). Formerly called the First Union Center (or "F.U. Center," as local wags called it), and now known as the Wachovia Center, it could seat 19,519 hockey fans, with 1,880 premium club seats. The Pru will seat 17,625 Devils fans, and has 2,330 premium club seats.

All in all, it's an upholstered cup-holder of a building, a smoked-glass-windowed SUV parked right in the middle of downtown. While there are plans to take a row of mostly empty buildings facing directly onto Broad Street and turn them into an annex of commercial and community spaces, right now the arena turns the road between these structures and itself into an alley facing a long, blank metal wall topped by a vast brick curtain wall. Community space originally planned for the southwest corner (near the practice hockey rink facing Mulberry) was scrapped in favor of an indoor employee parking garage.

Which is not to say the Prudential Center will not be a success, and even popular, with its target audience. A paying audience, of course -- one that longs to experience the feel of being inside the Box. The whole structure is rather like a cathode ray tube: A big, heavy, technical, and kinda dull back section fronted by a shiny screen bristling with dots. So much of its architectural impact on the city depends on that huge window being unscrolled between the four-story-tall cylinders that you feel the need to think about what they would look like at night, a warm and welcoming living room window for the city.

So I did -- but I got distracted by what was on TV.

Dan Bischoff writes about art for The Star-Ledger. He may be reached at [email protected].

 

I haven't checked lately, but I heard the second home game there was about 300 seats available the morning of the game.