One era ends Saturday afternoon at Freedom Hall. Another will start this fall, when the University of Louisville basketball teams move to a new downtown arena.
Construction of the $238 million,22,000-seat building at Second and Main streets is “on or a little bit ahead of schedule” of a Nov. 1 opening, said Bill Hedge, an executive with arena construction manager M.A. Mortenson Co.More than 90 percent of the suites
have been leased, and Louisville Arena Authority Chairman Jim Host said smaller sponsorships have been rolling in so well that officials can wait patiently for the bestbig-ticket sponsor for the building’s naming rights.
The arena “has to be the right name. It has to be something that everybody will immediately get and understand,”Host said. “And so, in the meantime, we’ll call it the Louisville arena, because we’re doing just fine.”Hedge said work adding glass panels
along Second Street is almost finished, and the building’s first elevator was placed in service Monday. On Wednesday, workers installed the first toilet and the last part of the arena’s roof trusses.
“This is going to be a traffic plan that morphs. It’s probably going to morph from the first game to the second game,” Poynter said. U of L coach Rick Pitino said Thursday that the arena will be the “finest in the nation”because of all the amenities, but he also expects fans will change their game routines because of parking and traffic issues. So rather than be stuck in traffic, “They’ll head to 4th Street Live or go to Champions
for a beer,” Pitino said. U of L has announced that the women’s team will host the University of Tennessee in its first game in the arena. No date has been set.
The men’s team expects to set its opening game by the summer and is currently searching for an opponent, said Kenny Klein, a U of L spokesman. In January, Pitino said talks were in the early stages for a series with Duke, possibly involving the Blue Devils playing in the downtown arena’s opener, followed by a return game in Durham,N.C., and a neutral-site
game. “They called us; we said we’d do it,” Pitino said then
about a potential three-year
deal.
