Chase Center

• 1. Introduction

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  Chase Center opened its doors on the 6th of September 2019 with a concert by Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony, a pairing that set the tone for what this arena would become. Before a single basketball game was played, before a regular season tip-off, the Golden State Warriors’ new home announced itself with two of the most distinctive voices in American music sharing a stage in Mission Bay. The arena had arrived.

  What does it take to build a sports palace from scratch in one of the most contested urban landscapes in the country? How do you plant an 18,000-seat arena in a neighborhood where a children’s hospital sits nearby, where ferry landings and light rail lines are the connective tissue, where the land itself was once owned by Salesforce? And what happens when a franchise that had called Oakland home for nearly half a century packs up and crosses the Bay? Those are the questions Chase Center was built on.

• 2. Roots in the Bay Area

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  The Golden State Warriors have been part of the San Francisco Bay Area since 1962, which means the franchise’s relationship with this geography runs deep. For most of the modern era, their home was Oakland Arena, where they played from 1971 to 2019. The one notable interruption came in the 1996-97 season, when a renovation at the Oakland facility pushed the team to the SAP Center in San Jose for a year.

  Fifty-eight years is a long time to build loyalty, and many longtime Oakland residents found it difficult to watch a team that had become genuinely great choose to leave. When the Warriors began winning championships in the 2010s, the bond between the franchise and its East Bay fanbase had never felt stronger. The announcement that they were moving across the water landed hard on that community. Some felt the move embodied gentrification at a city-level scale, a wealthy franchise pulling its resources and identity out of Oakland in favor of a wealthier zip code.

• 3. From Pier to Mission Bay

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  The plan to build a new arena was announced on the 22nd of May 2012, at a press conference on the proposed site. The gathering included then-San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, then-NBA Commissioner David Stern, then-California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, and Warriors owners Joe Lacob and Peter Guber. The original vision placed the arena on Pier 30-32 along the San Francisco Bay waterfront, between the Ferry Building and Oracle Park, with a privately financed budget of $500 million and a capacity range of 17,000 to 19,000 seats.

  Opposition surfaced quickly. The South Beach-Rincon-Mission Bay Neighborhood Association warned the site would no longer feel family friendly with a second major league sports venue nearby. Former San Francisco mayor Art Agnos spoke at dozens of community gatherings, arguing the project was driven by two out-of-town billionaires and would damage traffic patterns and city sightlines. On the 30th of December 2013, a ballot proposition titled the Waterfront Height Limit Right to Vote Act was submitted, and it made the June 2014 ballot as Proposition B.

  On the 19th of April 2014, the Warriors abandoned the pier plan entirely and purchased a 12-acre site in Mission Bay that had been owned by Salesforce.com. The price was not disclosed. On the 28th of January 2016, JPMorgan Chase purchased the naming rights, and the arena was formally named Chase Center. The groundbreaking ceremony took place on the 17th of January 2017, with construction beginning in earnest that same month.

• 4. Building at Scale

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  MANICA Architecture designed the arena, with Kendall Heaton Associates serving as architect of record and Gensler handling interior design. Magnusson Klemencic Associates served as structural engineer. Construction management was a joint venture between Clark Construction Group and Mortenson Construction, with Jim McLamb as project director and Trevor DeLong as senior superintendent overseeing field operations.

  The finished structure spans a remarkable footprint. Beyond the 18,064 seats for basketball, the complex holds 580,000 square feet of office and laboratory space, 100,000 square feet of retail space, a 35,000-square-foot public plaza designed by landscape architecture firm SWA Group, and a parking facility of roughly 950 spaces. The $1 billion investment anchors an 11-acre site that also includes cafes, public plazas, and a five-and-a-half-acre public waterfront park. In 2023, the Central Subway opened, linking the UCSF/Chase Center station on the T Third Street light rail line to downtown hotels, the Chinatown residential neighborhood, and regional transit connections across the Bay Area.

  The Mission Bay Alliance raised objections in April 2015, pointing to the arena’s proximity to UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and concerns about traffic, insufficient parking, and land that could otherwise serve the hospital’s expansion. Project representatives worked to address those objections in order to keep the development on track.

• 5. Controversy and Community

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  Proposition I appeared on the 2018 San Francisco ballot specifically to discourage the Warriors’ relocation from Oakland. Though framed as an initiative against moving established sports teams, its terms were non-binding. On the 5th of June 2018, voters rejected it: 130,916 votes against the measure to 97,863 in favor.

  On the 11th of March 2020, the City of San Francisco announced a temporary ban on public gatherings of more than 1,000 people in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Warriors said their home games would begin without fans, starting with the scheduled March 12 contest against the Brooklyn Nets. The NBA stepped in that same day and indefinitely suspended the remainder of the 2019-20 season after Rudy Gobert tested positive for the virus.

  A different kind of crisis arrived on the 17th of October 2021, when a fan fell from an upper level during a Phish concert and died. Two other fans were also injured in fall incidents at the same event, though both survived with injuries described as non-life-threatening. Phish attendees told local media they had concerns about the design of barriers and railings separating the arena’s levels. An anonymous complaint about the balcony guardrails and staircases prompted the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection to conduct an inspection. On the 21st of October, inspectors deemed Chase Center compliant with city building codes.

• 6. A Stage for Many Sports

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  Chase Center is the home arena for two professional teams: the Golden State Warriors of the NBA and the Golden State Valkyries of the WNBA. During Valkyries games, the venue is nicknamed Ballhalla, a reference to Valhalla in Norse mythology, where Valkyries were said to bring fallen warriors selected from battle. The arena also houses the Warriors’ practice facility, the Oracle Performance Center.

  The University of San Francisco men’s and women’s basketball teams play one game there annually. The NCAA selected Chase Center to host the West Regional semifinals and finals of the 2022 Division I men’s basketball tournament on the 24th and the 26th of March 2022, drawing crowds above 17,000. The arena is also scheduled to host the same regional rounds in 2025 and 2028. The Santa Cruz Warriors of the NBA G League play one home game per season at Chase Center.

  The arena hosted the 2025 NBA All-Star Game on the 16th of February 2025, and the 2025 Laver Cup tennis event ran from the 19th to the 21st of September 2025. The League of Legends World Championship final was held there on the 5th of November 2022. Championship Sunday for the 2026 Pokemon World Championships is scheduled for the 30th of August 2026, after the event’s first two days at the Moscone Center.

• 7. The Concert Record

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  The inauguration of Chase Center as a concert venue was, by any measure, exceptional. In the two weeks after the Metallica and San Francisco Symphony opening on the 6th of September 2019, the arena hosted Dave Matthews Band, Eric Clapton, Bon Iver, Elton John, John Mayer, Mumford and Sons, and Janet Jackson, among others. The Elton John show drew 28,380 people. By the last day of 2019, Dead and Company had played two nights with a combined attendance of 30,244.

  Ariana Grande brought 22,990 fans across two December nights in 2019. Carlos Santana made a surprise appearance during the Eric Clapton show. Warriors star Stephen Curry appeared during Paramore’s August 2023 performance. The venue has hosted everyone from Bad Bunny, whose November 2019 show sold out at 16,387, to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, whose 2024 dates were originally scheduled for December 2023 before Springsteen needed time to recover from health issues.

  Metallica returned in December 2021 for two more nights, with a combined attendance of 32,514 and revenue of $4,147,430. The inaugural run of concerts in fall 2019 established that Chase Center was not just a sports arena that occasionally hosted music acts; it was entering the top tier of concert venues on the West Coast from its very first weekend.