Opened on September 21, 2012 and launched with an eight-night sold-out Jay-Z residency the following week, Barclays Center seats 17,732 for Brooklyn Nets basketball games.
The arena sits directly atop the Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center station, Brooklyn's largest transit hub, with ten subway lines plus LIRR service converging underneath.
The arena Brooklyn got is not the one it was promised. Frank Gehry's scheme for the site carried a 620-foot tower called Miss Brooklyn and a park on the roof; the recession killed it, and SHoP Architects with Ellerbe Becket produced the building that stands. Its skin is some 12,000 panels of pre-weathered steel, rust-brown and latticed, drawn down over the entrance into an oculus about 117 feet by 56 that shelters the plaza at the fork of Flatbush and Atlantic. A green roof was laid over the top some years after opening, partly to keep concert noise off the surrounding blocks.
It sits over the Long Island Rail Road's Vanderbilt Yard, the first piece of the Atlantic Yards development since renamed Pacific Park. The land was assembled partly by eminent domain, which produced years of litigation and organized neighborhood opposition before the courts cleared the project in 2009. Title rests with the state through Empire State Development; the operating interests belong to Joe Tsai's companies.
The bowl holds 17,732 for basketball and is tight and steeply raked, which flatters the sport it was designed for. Hockey was not that sport. When the Islanders moved in for five seasons from 2015 the rink never fit the geometry: several hundred seats had an obstructed view of the ice, the scoreboard hung off-center, and one end of the building was shunned by ticket buyers. They left for a purpose-built arena at Elmont. The Liberty arrived in 2021 and the basketball sightlines have never been the complaint.
Above ground the arena is a plaza as much as a building — a hard-surfaced public square over the borough's largest transit interchange, used for markets, gatherings and protests on days when nothing is playing. It lands hard against the brownstone blocks of Prospect Heights, and that collision, more than anything inside, is what people in the neighborhood argued about for a decade.
620 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217 · Official site ↗
Barclays Center is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Brooklyn in the United States. The arena is home to the New York Liberty of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) and the Brooklyn Nets of the National Basketball Association (NBA). The arena also hosts concerts, conventions and other sporting and entertainment events. It is part of the Pacific Park complex at Atlantic Avenue, next to the Atlantic Avenue–Barclays Center subway station and directly above the LIRR's Atlantic Terminal.
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