At long last, the Islanders are home.
Though they’ve spent the last few decades looking for a final landing spot, Saturday night’s game against the Calgary Flames – being held in the new UBS Arena – marks the culmination of a long struggle that began with the failed Lighthouse Project and other false starts meant to give this team an adequate hockey arena on Long Island.
And, by all accounts, it’s been built to be far more than adequate.
The sprawling, 700,000 square-foot arena, which seats 17,250 for hockey, cost $1.1 billion – the result of a partnership between New York Arena Partners, Sterling Project Development and Oak View Group – and is part of greater development in the Elmont area. Capacity for basketball will be 18,000, while it can hold between 15,000 to 19,000 for concerts.
Puck drop is 7 p.m., and the first public concert there will be Harry Styles on Nov. 28.
Construction of the venue started in 2019, but the story of the Islanders’ search for home goes back far longer, to the early 2000s, when then-owner Charles Wang championed the Lighthouse Project, which was meant to build them an arena suitable for an NHL team. That project was approved by the county in 2006 but met its bureaucratic end in 2010.
The team continued to play at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, but the venue’s lack of amenities, long bathroom lines, and, pivotally, limited seating, meant their days there were numbered. They moved to Barclays Center in 2015, but that, too, proved to be a wrong fit: The arena was too far for many of the team’s Long Island-based fans, and sightlines were poor, as the venue was built for basketball and concerts. Eventually, the team split time between Barclays and the Coliseum before moving to the Coliseum full time – an allowance only made by the NHL because a new home was coming.
But the difference between that home and this one will be stark. For one thing, there should be enough bathrooms. The arena will boast 68 restrooms, including the most women’s restrooms in the NHL. There will be 12 family bathrooms and an additional three sensory rooms for those with sensory-processing issues, like PTSD, epilepsy or autism.
There will be a number of private suites and clubs, along with two outdoor terraces and eight bars facing the bowl. Additionally, there will be 13 food markets and six concession stands. For those taking the train in, there will be shuttles from the new Elmont-UBS Arena LIRR station; there will be shuttles, too, from the Emerald parking lot, which is further from the event site.
Transition, though, may not be seamless. As of this week, there was still work being done on site, and that continued into Thursday, when the Islanders held their first practice on the new ice.
“It’s going to be bumpy in the beginning,” Islanders co-owner Jon Ledecky said earlier this week. “We’re going to learn lessons in the beginning. But over time, it’s going to be fantastic.”
