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“Welcome to Chase Center,” said Golden State Warriors team president Rick Welts as he stood in front of the team’s new home in San Francisco’s Mission Bay. “I’ve been waiting over seven years to say that.”
Welts was addressing members of the media before a tour of the new facility Monday (see the photos here), not quite six weeks before it will first see its first preseason game on Oct. 5, with Steph Curry and the Warriors taking on LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Steph Curry crashes Oakland block party, plays pick-up game while season ticket holders tour Chase Center
But it won’t be the Warriors who open the 18,000-seat, privately funded sports and entertainment center. That honor goes to mighty Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony, who perform together on Sept. 6, the opening night concert at Chase.
Chase will actually host far more concerts and other non-basketball-related shows than it will Warriors games each year. All told, the building, which will be the centerpiece of an 3.2-acre mixed-use development titled Thrive City, will host 200 events per year.
The calendar is packed with 13 shows in its first month — including a stretch of seven concerts in nine days. Although concert acoustics aren’t always great at sports arenas, Welts contends Chase Center will have an “awesome” sound system for shows.
But the sound system is not the first thing that most people will notice about the new arena. It’s the massive scoreboard — said to be the largest, by a considerable margin, in the NBA. The Chase scoreboard, developed by Samsung, is more than 9,699 square feet of screen space. The Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center is reportedly in second place at 6,100 square feet. The Chase Center has almost 25 million pixels and 75 million LEDs. Those lights were put to good-humored effect on Monday, as the scoreboard showed the Warriors thumping the Lakers by more than 30 points.
Still, the scoreboard is as big as a house and, hanging down from the center of the building, would make it really hard for thousands of music fans to view the action onstage at concerts. Fortunately, the scoreboard is fully retractable. Thus, the scoreboard will be out of sight when Chance the Rapper, Eric Church, Janet Jackson and other superstar acts perform at the venue.
Complementing that scoreboard will be a huge outdoor screen — measuring 74 feet by 42 feet — where Warriors games will be shown for people who might not even be going into the venue. That will be a key attraction for Thrive City, which will boast some 20 bars, restaurants and stores, parks and public plazas, office space and even art exhibits.
As for food and drink, Wariors’ officials say Chase visitors are looking at a major upgrade.
“We loved Oracle Arena for many reasons,” Welts said. “Our ability to create great food was not one of them.”
Chase Center has eight kitchens — as opposed to only one at Oracle — which allows for more and better options for food service. Chase will house such “only in the Bay Area” dining options as Oakland’s Bakesale Betty, San Francisco’s Tacolicious, Sam’s Chowder House of Half Moon Bay and more. There will also be 23 bars in the facility, the Warriors say.
Despite all that, Chase Center is actually bit smaller than Oracle — with seating a capacity of 18,000 as opposed to 19,500. The seating design is meant make fans feel that, even in the upper levels, you’re never too far from the action happening on court.
“That’s by thoughtful design,” Welts says.
The new center marks Warriors’ long journey back to San Francisco, where the team played for nine years after moving west from Philadelphia in 1962. It’s a road that began basically when owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber purchased the team in 2010, soon thereafter making clear their desire to move the team across the Bay from Oracle Arena in Oakland, where it had been for 47 years.
Here’s a look at the opening week’s shows at Chase Center:
Metallica with San Francisco Symphony, Sept. 6 and 8
Dave Matthews Band, Sept. 10
Eric Clapton, Sept. 11
Bon Iver with Sharon Van Etten, Sept. 12
