(credit: Madison Square Garden)
The first stage of a $850 million renovation of Madison Square Garden
is complete, Crain’s reported. On the event level, there are 20 new
luxury suites, with 10 to 12 seats so that fans can sit rather than stand, as they were doing previously. There’s also a 10,000-square-foot Delta Sky360 Club in what was
formerly an underused storage area.
“A project like this has never
been done before, an active arena being transformed,” Hank Ratner, CEO
of Madison Square Garden, said. The first phase of the renovation also
includes an expanded sixth-floor concourse — three times as wide as
the previous one, and expanded locker rooms for home sports teams the Knicks and the
Rangers.
New concourses with expanded food options are also available on two
levels higher up in the arena. More construction is planned for the
next two summers, providing new seating in the upper bowl and
two bridges that will be suspended over the playing surface to give
fans a unique view of the action.
But the fans will also carry the cost of improvements, as the Knicks
recently raised their ticket prices by an average of 49 percent from last
year, and the Rangers raised theirs by 23 percent. [Crain’s]