Former Site of 'The Hive'

[jwmann2]

Have yet to attend a game at Time Warner Cable but went to numerous games at the Hive when I was a kid. I understand that it has been demolished for quiet a few years now but are there any plans to do something with the former site in the near future? Sorry, I don't read the Observer which I am sure has covered the topic plenty.

[Black]

I have no idea, but I would imagine there aren't any big plans.

[JMo]

It was supposed to be turned into residential and commerical buildings at the height of the real estate boom. Since then it's just been a vacant lot.

[cltblkhscoach]

Yeah, it was going to be called City Park I believe, and it was going to be modeled after Birkdale Village in Huntersville. It would have really been nice for that area of town but yeah, all the financing went away. I'm sure at some point it will be something because the infrastructure is still there from the Coliseum days to host something big.

[Monty]

I work right across the street from the old lot...the City Park signs are still out there, but it's been a whole bunch of nothing since the demolition. I wish they would develop it--maybe they'd put a restaurant or two there?

[Black]

I work right across the street from the old lot...the City Park signs are still out there, but it's been a whole bunch of nothing since the demolition. I wish they would develop it--maybe they'd put a restaurant or two there?

A couple of restaurants won't cut it. Turn it into the world's largest go-kart track.

[ZackTB23]

This is sad. Charlotte has to do something with this area. MLB????? JK LOL! Or am I..... hmmmm

[King Taharqa]

It has no value or meaning to Charlotte anymore. A lot of folks in town know nothing about it. Just an empty vacant lot in the middle of nowhere.

[JGib23]

Haters gonna hate....

Anyone that is a fan of the Panthers or Bobcats should hold some value in that land and the building that once stood there.

Without it, we may not have either the Panthers or the Bobcats. That building put Charlotte on the map from a sports perspective and held a Final 4. unless Jerry decides to have a retractable roof stadium built for the Panthers, we will never see a Final 4 again in Charlotte. The Hive also hosted an NBA All Star game...still waiting on Stern to throw that bone back our way in the new arena ( can't believe the city didn't negotiate at least one all star game fir building the new arena)

In retrospect, it would have been wiser to build it in Uptown from the beginning.


Below is an article on 3 of the big turning points for Charlotte...

We've had three big arenas in our history. The first one - the original Charlotte Coliseum, now Bojangles' Coliseum - is still out on Independence Boulevard. The newest one - Time Warner Cable Arena - was key to landing the Democratic convention. But the one most important to Charlotte's development is now a bare spot on Tyvola Road.

Pro sports wandered in and out of Charlotte for years, but for most of that time the big game in town was wrestling. Ric Flair and Wahoo McDaniel could reliably fill the original 12,000-seat coliseum, built in 1956. But the city wanted more. In particular, it wanted the ACC basketball tournament.

The games had been in Charlotte from 1968 to 1970, but by the early '80s they were played most years at the Greensboro Coliseum. The Greensboro building was nearly twice the size of Charlotte's. If you've read this far, you can imagine what Charlotte thought of that.

So in January 1983, Mayor Eddie Knox created a Committee of 100 to study the need for a new coliseum. Developer Johnny Harris led the committee, which quickly agreed that a new coliseum should be built. The question was where.

The committee ended up with three promising sites - the one on Tyvola and two downtown. (We called it downtown then. It's uptown now. Long story.) But the deals to get the downtown sites were complicated, and in a city-sponsored poll, citizens preferred the suburban site 2 to 1.

In November 1983, the city council voted to spend nearly $60 million to build the new 24,000-seat coliseum on Tyvola. Voters approved the bond referendum in '84.

Remember, this was a building intended for college basketball, plus the occasional concert and monster truck show. But the new building lit a bulb in the head of a businessman named George Shinn.

Shinn, who made a fortune through vocational schools and motivational books, dreamed of owning a Major League Baseball team. But with the new coliseum rising, he switched dreams to the NBA. At first, people laughed. But when the laughing stopped, the Charlotte Hornets were here, and they played their first season the year the Coliseum opened in 1988.

They were a gigantic hit. The Hornets, playing in the league's biggest building, sold out 364 games in a row.

We ended up having a nasty divorce with Shinn and the Hornets - they're down in New Orleans, and we have the Bobcats now. But the Hornets proved that our city had the money and passion to support something big.

The Hornets led to the '91 NBA All-Star Game, and the All-Star Game led to the '94 Final Four. In the middle of all that, in 1993, the NFL picked Charlotte for a new franchise, and since then the Panthers have made it all the way to the Super Bowl.

A city with an NBA team and an NFL team is by default a big-league city. All that, in some way, traces back to that coliseum on Tyvola Road.

It died young, after just 19 years, from a case of bad timing - it was built just before luxury boxes became a big money-maker in sports arenas. So the city (despite a defeated bond referendum) built a new arena uptown, and the Coliseum fell to the wrecking ball.

As longtime sports consultant Max Muhleman put it: "As nice as the building was, it was, as someone said, the last of the propeller airplanes before the jets came."

[Bucko]

I think I read not too long ago that they were going to start moving ahead with a very scaled down version of the original plan for the land sometime by the end of the year.

[cls77]

Looks like the condo idea has been scrapped in favor of apartments. No surprise there. The developers still hope to add offices and a hotel in time.

http://charlotte.news14.com/content/656904/new-apartments-coming-to-site-of-old-charlotte-coliseum
http://www.wsoctv.com/news/news/local/old-coliseum-site-could-see-new-life/nLWH6/