Jacksonville Coliseum and Veterans Memorial Arena

The Jacksonville Coliseum was the city's first true municipal arena, and for 43 years it was where Jacksonville went for hockey, wrestling, basketball and the big touring shows. According to The Coastal, it opened in November 1960 as the 11,000-seat Jacksonville Coliseum; its construction took two years and cost around $3 million. By the end of that decade the name had changed to Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Coliseum, the name most longtime residents still use for it.

The building was part of a burst of late 1950s civic construction that also produced a new county courthouse and city hall, and it shared their mid-century modern look. Local architects George Ryad Fisher and A. Eugene Cellar designed it. The Loyd Sandgren photo archive at Vintage Jacksonville notes that it sported a 100 foot-tall domed roof, and that the first event held there was the first ever hockey game played in Jacksonville. Its site sat just behind where the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Wall stands today, across the parking lot from the old Gator Bowl, on the eastern edge of downtown Jacksonville.

Before the Coliseum, Jacksonville made do. The Coastal names the Duval County Armory, built in 1916, as an unofficial performance hall with a stage and balcony, and The Arena at the corner of Main and Beaver streets, which held about 1,000 people for weekly boxing and wrestling. Downtown's theaters, including the Florida Theatre, topped out below 2,000 seats.

The Coliseum found a tenant quickly. The Coastal reports that by 1964 it had its first regular tenant, the Rockets of the Eastern Hockey League, and that in 1969 it became home to Jacksonville University basketball, which played there for three decades and brought conference tournaments in 1981, 1999 and 2000. Over four decades the building housed five professional hockey teams, two basketball teams including the ABA Floridians in the 1970s, an indoor soccer team and an arena football team.

Concerts were the other half of the calendar. Vintage Jacksonville lists acts from Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Florida NewsLine historian Scott A. Grant notes that when Elvis returned to Jacksonville in 1972, sixteen years after his famous Florida Theatre dates, he did two shows at the Coliseum.

The building had a flaw everyone heard. Vintage Jacksonville reports that its designer, George Fisher, said the Coliseum was designed with inadequate acoustics due to budget limits. The Coastal adds that by the 1990s the arena had a reputation among performers for subpar acoustics, and that its relatively small capacity limited what promoters, artists and the City of Jacksonville could earn from each show. Those two complaints drove the case for a replacement.

The replacement came out of the Better Jacksonville Plan, the city program that also appears in The Coastal's account of the arena's origins. WJCT described the new building as originally built as part of the Better Jacksonville Plan to replace the old Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Coliseum. According to The Coastal, the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Arena was built between 2001 and 2003 at a cost of $130 million, more than forty times the Coliseum's price, and its architects, HOK Sport, designed it to fit with both the Old St. Andrew's Church building and the new Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville next door.

The Coastal lists the new arena at 16,000 seats; Stadium Journey lists a capacity of 15,000 at 300 A Philip Randolph Blvd., with the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville directly across the street and the Jaguars' stadium in view of the entrance. Neither source explains the 1,000-seat gap, which may reflect event configurations.

The doors opened on November 21, 2003 with Elton John, according to the International Association of Venue Managers. By the building's 15th anniversary in 2018, more than 7.2 million patrons had attended 1,607 events, including 77 sold out concerts. Jacksonville University basketball moved across the parking lot with it and stayed until 2015, and The Coastal lists a Team USA basketball scrimmage in 2004 and NCAA men's tournament games in 2010, 2015 and 2019 among the arena's larger events.

The Coliseum outlived its replacement's construction by only a few months. The Jacksonville Daily Record reported on June 27, 2003 that in just a matter of seconds Thursday morning, the 43-year-old Veterans Memorial Coliseum was reduced to a pile of rubble, and that rooftops on the Northbank and Southbank filled with people watching it fall. A University of North Florida aerial in the Lawrence V. Smith collection records the building shortly before, noting the Coliseum was demolished June 2003.

The demolition contractor, D.H. Griffin, describes an 80,000 square foot structure brought down with a method called single shot, a series of timed explosions designed to drop the building in smaller sections, creating a domino effect and reducing the impact on the surrounding sports complex. The Daily Record reported that the cleared site would become a park for the Veterans Memorial Wall and more parking for Alltel Stadium and the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville.

The Wall is the Coliseum's most visible successor on the site. The City of Jacksonville places the Jacksonville Veterans Memorial Wall at 1145 East Adams Street, next to EverBank Stadium, and describes a 65-foot-long black granite monument honoring over 1,700 Jacksonville-area service members from World War I onward, with new names added at a ceremony each Memorial Day.

For its first 15 years the arena carried no corporate name. WJCT reported that a city sports and entertainment director floated a naming rights deal in 2013 to help pay for upkeep, and that then-Mayor Alvin Brown rejected any corporate name on the building. In February 2019 Mayor Lenny Curry and VyStar Credit Union announced an agreement worth more than $9.76 million, and News4JAX reported on March 13, 2019 that the Jacksonville City Council unanimously approved the deal renaming the building VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena.

The terms tie the money back to the veterans' name on the door. According to the bill described by News4JAX, VyStar pays $525,000 for the first year with a 3 percent annual increase over the 15-year term, and the city puts 10 percent of the license fee into the Veterans Memorial Arena Trust Fund for veterans programs. WJCT added a one-time $50,000 VyStar contribution toward a new veterans memorial element at the arena, and noted that landing an NBA or NHL team would trigger a renegotiation. VyStar itself traces to 1952, when it was chartered at NAS Jacksonville as Jax Navy Federal Credit Union.

The Jacksonville deal also wrote veterans perks into arena operations. News4JAX listed a concessions donation program in which patrons can give to an approved veterans program at the stands, with VyStar matching those donations, plus discounts for veterans on concessions, tickets and parking, veterans access to ticket presales and a quarterly veterans breakfast or lunch hosted by VyStar at the arena. The same report noted that large banners hung on the building three years earlier had been removed for violating the city's sign ordinance, so the VyStar name went up only after the council approved the agreement.

The city has kept investing in the building. A city building permit issued June 3, 2024 and reported by the Jacksonville Daily Record covered two premium seating boxes at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, 300 A Philip Randolph Blvd., for $499,800. The Coastal listed the Sharks, the Giants and the Jacksonville Icemen as arena tenants in 2020, while the Coliseum survives in photographs, in the Sandgren archive and in the memorial park that took its place.