Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:33:00

Nashville built an arena before it had a team, and won the bet twice. Bridgestone Arena opened on 18 December 1996 as the Nashville Arena at 501 Broadway, a 144-million-dollar downtown wager by mayor Phil Bredesen that Music City could carry major league sports - a building erected, as its operators still say, without any sport in mind. The gamble drew suitors immediately: an NBA application, flirtations with the Minnesota Timberwolves and New Jersey Devils, and finally the 1998 expansion Nashville Predators, whose quarter-century tenancy has turned the corner of Fifth and Broadway into one of the NHL's loudest addresses and produced a 2017 run to the Stanley Cup Final that closed Lower Broadway for street parties. The building cycled through names - Gaylord Entertainment Center in 1999, Sommet Center in 2007, Bridgestone Arena in 2010 when the Nashville-headquartered tire giant took the naming rights - while renovations in 2007, 2011 and 2015 kept the 750,000-square-foot plant current. Capacity runs 17,159 for hockey, about 19,400 for basketball and up to 20,000 for centre-stage concerts; the all-time attendance record belongs not to a game but to comedian Nate Bargatze's 19,365 hometown crowd in April 2023. As a concert building the arena is the city's heavyweight: the country industry's biggest nights - CMA Awards broadcasts, all-star benefits, multi-night residencies by the genre's arena class - share the calendar with every touring pop, rock and hip-hop production, plus NCAA tournaments, SEC basketball championships, figure skating nationals, wrestling and boxing. More than 13 million guests passed through in its first decades. The location remains the trump card: the arena's glass tower rises directly off Lower Broadway's honky-tonk strip, across from the Ryman Auditorium's back door, with the 2019 lease extension binding the Predators - and the building's civic role - through 2049.