The building where Charlotte finally felt major league
Before uptown had a skyline full of banks and a Spectrum Center, Charlotte proved it belonged out on Tyvola Road, near the airport, in a giant white building nobody could stop talking about. The Charlotte Coliseum. The Hive. If you screamed yourself hoarse in there on a Tuesday night for a team that was going nowhere in the playoffs, this one is for you.
How it started
Charlotte spent a long time as the city that almost counted. Then George Shinn landed an NBA expansion team, the Hornets, and the city built them the biggest arena in the league to prove a point. Fifty-two million dollars. Room for 24,042 people. It opened on August 11, 1988, and Billy Graham himself showed up to dedicate it. Everyone called it "the new Coliseum" for years, mostly to keep from confusing it with the old one on Independence. Locals just sorted it by where it was: the one by the airport.
The teal, the noise, and 371 straight sellouts
Here is the part that still does not make sense. The team was fine. Not great. They never got past the second round. And the whole city lost its entire mind anyway. A designer named Alexander Julian took the colors off the arena walls, teal being one of them, and turned them into those pinstriped teal-and-purple uniforms. By the mid-90s Charlotte was outselling every other jersey in the NBA. You saw Hornets Starter jackets in Japan.
Inside the building it was louder than the record suggests. Muggsy Bogues at five-foot-three throwing lobs. Larry Johnson turning into Grandmama. Dell Curry from way out, Alonzo Mourning, Rex Chapman going airborne. From December 1988 to November 1997 the Hive sold out 371 games in a row. Nearly nine straight seasons of a packed house for a team that mostly broke your heart. The place also grabbed the 1991 All-Star Game, the 1994 men's Final Four with Bill Clinton sitting courtside while Arkansas beat Duke, and the 1996 women's Final Four. For a few years, if something big was happening in basketball, it was happening on Tyvola Road.
The stuff regulars still argue about
Ask around and somebody will swear the teal thing started with the team. It did not. That was the arena's paint scheme first, and the uniforms followed. Somebody else will tell you the building was already "outdated" by the late 90s, which was true and also insane, because it was not even ten years old. That argument, more than anything, is what killed it.
The end, and what's out there now
The magic ran out fast. Shinn's off-court mess and a nasty fight over a new downtown arena turned the city cold. Attendance fell to dead last in the league, and in 2002 the Hornets packed up for New Orleans and took the name with them. The expansion Bobcats used the old barn as a placeholder, playing the final NBA game there on October 26, 2005, before moving uptown. Then on June 3, 2007, they wired it up and dropped it. Nineteen years old. Gone in about fifteen seconds.
Today the site is "City Park," which is apartments, townhomes, a hotel or two, and some restaurants, with a little plaque standing in for the 24,000 people who used to be losing their voices right about there.
Where were you when they dropped it?
Charlotte became a real city inside that building and then imploded it before it could turn twenty. That is about as Charlotte as it gets. The teal survived. The noise did not.
Wear the one they knocked down. Get the Charlotte Coliseum "Buzzed to Death" tee.