A look at NHL Seattle’s ambitious plans for reimagined Northgate Mall
Feb 26, 2019, 12:27 PM
(NHL Seattle)
Seattle’s soon-to-be-named NHL team is getting ready to play in a renovated KeyArena, but that’s not all the city will have to offer in terms of facilities. Details regarding the team’s practice facility — and accompanying retail and living spaces — were recently released, laying out ambitious plans for what’s currently the home of the country’s first outdoor mall in Northgate.
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According to a report from the Puget Sound Business Journal, the plan for the Northgate facility includes: 400,000 square feet of retail space, 1 million square feet of office space, 953 residential units, 400 hotel rooms, roughly 7.5 acres of open space, and over 5,100 parking stalls. Accompanying all this will be a $75 million, 140,000-square-foot hockey facility built and funded by NHL Seattle.
The site of this massive project is where the current 55-acre Northgate Mall shopping center stands right now. The goal of this reimagined mall and hockey center is to transform the area into a predominantly walkable community.
“As a key component in Northgate’s future, this new practice facility and community hockey center is not just another development project,” said project leader Lance Lopes back in October, when the facility was first announced. “It is the latest cornerstone of the public/private revitalization endeavor to transform Northgate into a thriving pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented urban center.”
The proposed NHL facility — that will be surrounded by the planned residential units, hotel rooms, and parking stalls — will include three regulation NHL ice rinks with seats for 1,000 fans in the main rink, and 400 in the other two rinks.
It will act as an anchor tenant for the reimagined Northgate Mall, nestled next to a park and amphitheater.
The NHL facility is scheduled to be finished in early-2021. It’s unclear how long the larger redevelopment of Northgate Mall will take.