Tampa’s downtown arena has spent three decades collecting moments that ranged from unforgettable to flat-out bizarre.
When the building opened on Oct. 12, 1996, it was known as the Ice Palace. The roughly $160 million project wasn’t an instant no-brainer for everybody.
Local civic leaders saw it as “the linchpin in revitalization efforts for a downtown waterfront,” according to the St. Petersburg Times, while others questioned whether Tampa really needed a 20,000-seat arena at all.
The Tampa Tribune even took a swipe at the idea in November 1996, asking, “Wait a sec. Didn’t we build the ‘premiere’ venue 16 years ago with the Sun Dome?”
and “Didn’t we top it in 1987 with the ultra-premier Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center?”
Whatever the doubts, the place quickly became part of the region’s sports and entertainment fabric. It went on to become home to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who won their first Stanley Cup there in 2004.
The Tampa Bay Storm called it home from 1997 to 2017. When COVID-19 hit, the NBA’s Toronto Raptors played the 2020-21 season there.
The arena also hosted NCAA championships for both men and women, along with the 1999 NHL All-Star Game, the last one for Wayne Gretzky.
It has also been a regular stop for some of music’s biggest names - Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Ariana Grande, Rihanna, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Billy Joel and the Rolling Stones among them. And the building’s pop-culture highlights have gone well beyond standard concert fare.
The opening stretch started with the Royal Hanneford Circus, which launched the Ice Palace’s debut celebrations in October. Then came the first concert: Melissa Etheridge on Nov.
2, 1996. More than 7,300 people showed up for that show, and the Times noted that “All seats were priced at $40.75 - easily a third more than what top acts such as Hootie and the Blowfish and Alanis Morissette pried from Tampa Bay area fans’ wallets this year - and pre-concert scuttle reflected that disappointment,” Etheridge played for close to three hours and took special notice of the crowd’s lighters.
“That’s the first official rock concert thing to be done here,” Etheridge told the audience.
Rush and Neil Diamond would follow in the weeks after.
Then there was the night Paul McCartney turned a stage mishap into one of the arena’s most memorable stories. During his 2005 U.S. tour for “Chaos and Creation in the Backyard,” McCartney was at what had become the St.
Pete Times Forum when a piano rose behind him and he fell backward through a trapdoor, dropping about five feet. He hurt his elbow and back but kept going.
“There’s a big hole in the stage and I just fell into it,” he said. “We’ve been expecting this to happen.
And it happened in Tampa!” Twelve years later, he returned and looked back on the fall, saying, “You know that feeling of slow motion: I’m going down, there’s no going back,” and “I’m lucky to be here tonight.”
The arena’s list of strange and unforgettable moments doesn’t stop there. In May 2011, John Cena won the WWE Championship at the St.
Pete Times Forum. While preparing to speak, he was told that members of the U.S.
Navy’s Seal Team Six had killed Osama Bin Laden. Cena climbed onto a table and relayed the news to the crowd: “We have caught and compromised, to a permanent end, Osama.
Bin. Laden,” he said, as a USA chant rolled through the building.
And in 2012, the Tampa Bay Times Forum became the backdrop for one of the most talked-about scenes from the Republican National Convention, when Clint Eastwood stepped onto the stage and spoke to an empty chair. He had borrowed the chair from one of the arena’s VIP clubs, and the odd, apparently unplanned moment turned into a full-blown pop culture sensation, spawning memes and Tweets. Reince Priebus later took the chair from the arena and brought it to his Washington, D.C. office as a keepsake.
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