SAP Center part of area’s rebirth
Silicon Valley sci-fi fans know all about parallel universes and alternate timelines. So try to imagine downtown San Jose without the arena now known as SAP Center. While it probably wouldn’t be a dystopian nightmare, you can bet it wouldn’t be the downtown many of us know and love.
Without the arena, the Sharks would never have brought the city its signature Chomp. Nightlife centers like San Pedro Square Market would probably not have taken root. It’s doubtful anyone would have begun a push to move San Jose City Hall back downtown, and you can forget about Google coming to the Diridon Station area.
Over the past quarter century, the $157.6 million facility — called San Jose Arena when it opened Sept. 7, 1993 — has turned out to be the major turning point in downtown San Jose’s renaissance. The Fairmont Hotel and San Jose McEnery Convention Center
preceded it and were important, big steps in revitalizing the city’s dilapidated core. But it was the arena that finally gave San Jose residents — and people throughout the Bay Area — a real reason to come downtown.
“It gave us just what we deserved in San Jose, a building for ourselves,” said former Mayor Tom McEnery, who was among the crowd at a 25th anniversary dinner held on the floor of SAP Center Friday. “I said it at the time it opened and it’s still true: This was built for people’s kids and their grandkids.”
It nearly didn’t happen. McEnery remembers that two weeks before the June 1988 vote on the arena polls said the measure was going to lose. Opponents, tired of a string of over-budget construction projects in downtown San Jose and stung by a $60 million bond loss in 1984, were not convinced taxpayers should hand the city the reins to such a big project. (The arena’s final cost, paid for with Redevelopment Agency funds, ballooned to more than 50 percent beyond its announced $100 million price tag).
The measure passed 53 percent to 47 percent, with San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood — councilwoman Nancy Ianni was against the project — the only part of the city where the measure failed to get 50 percent of the vote.
McEnery credits many people for the upset victory, including Dean Munro, his then-chief of staff, David Pandori and the late Pat Dando, who were both later elected to the city council. But the effort also got key support from then-49ers superstar Ronnie Lott and Olympic figure skater Peggy Fleming, who insisted the building wouldn’t be just for
sports fans.
She was right. You may not remember, but the arena’s first event was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. James Taylor played the first concert a week later.
But the building’s biggest moment was when Barbra Streisand chose the arena as one of just five U.S. stops on her concert tour in 1994 (and she returned in 2016). That prompted an article in the New York Times that declared San Jose was stepping out of San Francisco’s shadow “because of the success of a new downtown arena, which in eight months of operation has brought San Jose into the big leagues of sports and entertainment.”
If you walk through the club concourse at SAP Center today, you’ll see framed photographs of the acts that have played its stage: Madonna, Neil Diamond, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Beyonce, Luciano Pavarotti, Los Tigres del Norte, Adele, Bruno Mars. The list goes on and on. Along the way, the arena became a familiar home for the U.S. Olympic trials for figure skating and gymnastics, as well as the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.
It’s served as the starting point for parades and finish line for the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot. And it’s been a place for the community to come together in celebration for a graduation or in grief, as it did in 2015 for a memorial service for fallen San Jose Police officer Michael Johnson.
And then there are the San Jose Sharks, the building’s highest profile tenant. They brought the Stanley Cup finals to downtown San Jose in 2016 and will host the NHL All-Star Game for the second time next January. The Sharks weren’t in existence when the vote took place in 1988, and the team played its first two seasons at the Cow Palace in Daly City while the arena was under
construction.
But the team and building have been intrinsically linked since the 1993-’94 season, highlighted by a first-round playoff knockout of the top-seeded Detroit Red Wings. When the Sharks won a crucial Game 5 at home, thousands of fans streamed out of the arena, walking en masse to nearby downtown bars and restaurants to celebrate.
“SAP Center put San Jose on the map from an international sports perspective,” Sharks President John Tortora said. “I think when the arena was built it was more than just a structure. It created a emotional connection between the residents of the community and the building.”
The arena has hosted more than 4,200 events in those 25 years, with more than 37 million people walking through its doors. Sharks Sports & Entertainment estimates the venue has had an economic impact of $3.9 billion for San Jose over just the past 10 years. But look around downtown San Jose today and look ahead to where it’s going, and it’s easy to see that the impact has been much more than economic.
Former Mercury News sports columnist Mark Purdy remembers writing many, many columns in 1988 telling people they needed to vote for the arena. Was he over the top? Probably. Does he regret it? Not one word.
“I’d seen what arenas had done for so many other cities and particularly downtowns,” he said this week. “I knew in my gut what an arena could do for San Jose. Did it want to be a city or a suburb? I’ve been wrong about many things. Every once in a while, you get something right.”
Happy birthday, SAP Center. Here’s to another 25 years.