The Capitals and the Wizards may not win another championship anytime soon, but they will continue playing their home games where they should: in the downtown arena they’ve called home since 1997 as first the MCI Center, then the Verizon Center, followed by the resulting nickname of the Phone Booth, and now Capital One Arena.

That’s the best possible resolution of an interlude in which Monumental Sports and Entertainment had committed to relocating both teams to a new arena to be built in Alexandria’s Potomac Yard neighborhood. The Dec. 13 news of that move seemed driven from the start not by fundamental flaws with the teams’ Gallery Place venue, placed atop three Metro lines, but by Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R.) wanting to secure a political legacy.

Having failed to capitalize on his election in 2021 with durable policy achievements–and having just seen Republicans lose a narrow majority in the state senate and return the General Assembly to Democratic control–Youngkin jumped at the chance to invite Monumental owner Ted Leonsis to bring the Caps and the Wizards across the Potomac.

Leonsis saw the chance to stop worrying about crime and noise outside Capital One Arena and build a sports and entertainment district from scratch with the help of $1.35 billion in subsidies, so of course he accepted that handshake deal.

Alexandrians I know were not nearly as enthusiastic about the prospect of a 20,000-seat venue being plunked down in their midst and what that might mean for traffic and Metro. Democratic leaders in Richmond, meanwhile, revealed themselves comparably skeptical of a financing plan that advertised no downside for Virginia taxpayers but which banked on assumptions that included moving Georgetown basketball games and dozens of concerts to the new arena and having people pay as much as $75 for parking and $731 a night for nearby luxury hotel rooms to generate the taxes to cover those subsidies.

Weeks of Youngkin treating the General Assembly as if it were a lower-level occupant on the org chart at the Carlyle Group, the private-equity firm that made him exceptionally rich, did not advance his arena ambitions. And now with Monumental signing a “strategic partnership” Wednesday with the District to upgrade Capital One Arena and its surroundings–backed by $515 million in public funds–they’re officially defunct.

Which is good, because I didn’t like the thought of redoing the experiment of having our NBA and NHL franchises playing outside of the city center. The Alexandria arena would have at least been next to a Metro stop and next to a walkable neighborhood, unlike the Capital Centre in Landover that introduced me to Georgetown hoops without ever earning any nostalgia from me. But when it had been such an unambiguously good idea to move the D.C. area’s biggest arena to the heart of the District–and when so many other places have seen good things happen when they moved their arenas to their city centers–why would you want to go back on that even a little bit?

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/29/city-sized-arenas-belong-in-city-centers/

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