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US Arenas Cancel Macklemore Benefit Shows
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
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It's really sad how only one of those arenas is actually named for something other than a sponsor. Madison Square Garden was named after Madison Square, which was named after James Madison, one of the US founding fathers. The original was on Madison avenue. That's a solid name.
The rest of them... who knows where they are. These places change names all the time.
The ridiculously named "Climate Pledge Arena" is in Seattle. It used to be called KeyArena, because a bank named KeyBank bought the naming rights. Before that it was the "Seattle Center Coliseum", before that it was "Washington State Coliseum". It's currently Amazon that owns the naming rights -- you know, one of the many hyperscalers building AI datacenters like crazy. I don't know which part of their climate pledge covers the building of datacenters, but it seems ballsy to make a pledge to destroy the climate and brag about it.
Honestly, these sound like a joke. Intuit Dome? Crypto.com Arena? Macklemore could have slipped a "ChatGPT Forum" or "Yuga Labs Arena" in there and nobody would have noticed. I certainly don't know if the "Kia Forum" is real.
I've lived near Toronto my whole life, and SkyDome was such a great name for the stadium. The roof opens! SkyDome! Then a company bought it, and now it's just "CompanyName Centre". I'm still pissed about it.
Relatedly, there was also a venue called the Air Canada Centre, or ACC. That one was technically named after the airline, Air Canada, but when I was younger I hadn't heard of the airline, and "Air Canada Centre" on its own sounded cool enough it just made sense. Like Air Jordans or Airwalk, it felt like we were putting Air on stuff, and this was in Canada, so Air Canada Centre. It wasn't until they changed it to be named after some other company that I was like "why would they do that, the name was already.... wait what the fuck...? It was always corporate?"
It's still SkyDome to me.
There's an outdoor amphitheater that opened in the 80s outside of Boston that was originally called Great Woods, a pretty good name. Then it became [company name] Center for a few name changes (it's currently xfinity, ugh). I've never heard anyone old enough to remember call it anything but Great Woods.
I think most people do this in general, even when the name was originally corporate to begin with. Tons of people still say Sears Tower, for example.