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Park space as part of the larger redevelopment district
Photo by: COURTESY OF TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING
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The Tampa Bay Lightning plans an overhaul of Amalie Arena that could reach $150 million to bring the facility up to par with the redevelopment of the city’s southern downtown district.
Sources said the Lightning has selected AECOM, the arena’s original architect, to design significant upgrades over the next five years that dovetail with $3 billion in mixed-use development next to the 20-year-old arena.
When asked about the $150 million figure, Lightning spokesman Bill Wickett said it’s too early to determine a budget for facility improvements.
“This is big picture … for how the arena fits into the district over the next 20 to 30 years,” he said. “A lot of it is fan-facing, but there’s a lot of other things that are structural.”
Lightning CEO Steve Griggs was not made available for comment. Instead, Wickett issued a statement: “We need to make sure Amalie Arena fits seamlessly within SPP’s mixed-use development, offering the same types of amenities and opportunities as the rest of the district for our guests.”
SPP is Strategic Property Partners, a company controlled by team owner Jeff Vinik, which is among the investors in the mixed-use piece. It covers new office and retail space and residential towers and the University of South Florida’s new medical school and heart institute.
The arena renovations are on top of the $70 million Vinik has invested over the past six years to upgrade the facility, most of which has focused on premium seat improvements such as the 34 loge boxes in the arena’s north end that opened last season.
Generator Studio, a small architecture firm in Kansas City, designed the most recent upgrades. The renovations AECOM is working on are in response to the downtown development but are also driven to push the Lightning into the upper regions of the NHL in overall team revenue.
The team wants to be in the middle of the league in revenue if not the top quartile, one source said.
Over the next six years, sources said, Amalie Arena will go through a transformation to update all building spaces to help meet the standards of the mixed-use development.
Vinik and his development partners include Bill Gates’ Cascade Investments and Delos, a real estate developer that focuses on healthy building design through the WELL Building Standard, a next step in sustainability beyond LEED certification.
WELL-designed buildings are intended to promote healthier lifestyles through, for example, cleaner air systems, healthier food options and fitness programs. Tampa is the first city in the world to develop a WELL-certified district through the downtown district redevelopment, and the retrofit of Amalie Arena will conform to those standards, sources said.
HOK, designer of new NHL arenas in Edmonton and Detroit, and Brisbin Brook Beynon, the architect for Madison Square Garden’s $1 billion transformation, also competed for the Amalie Arena job.
Separately, a group within HOK’s global practice is designing the USF hospital complex.
